Security Halt!
Welcome to Security Halt! Podcast, the show dedicated to Veterans, Active Duty Service Members, and First Responders. Hosted by retired Green Beret Deny Caballero, this podcast dives deep into the stories of resilience, triumph, and the unique challenges faced by those who serve.
Through powerful interviews and candid discussions, Security Halt! Podcast highlights vital resources, celebrates success stories, and offers actionable tools to navigate mental health, career transitions, and personal growth.
Join us as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, proving that even after the mission changes, the call to serve and thrive never ends.
Security Halt!
Tyler Grey (Delta Force): Redefining PTSD, Identity & Healing
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In this powerful episode of Security Halt!, host Deny Caballero sits down with Tyler Grey, a former U.S. Army Ranger and Delta Force operator, to dive deep into the complex landscape of mental health for veterans. Tyler opens up about his own personal battles with PTSD, revealing how childhood trauma, identity crises, and low self-worth shaped his internal struggle long before combat ever began.
They unpack the often misunderstood realities of trauma, the myths surrounding PTSD, and how emotional awareness and community connection are key to healing. Tyler introduces a compelling new concept—LTSD (Lack of Traumatic Stress Disorder)—challenging how society defines and responds to mental health issues.
From chaos to clarity, Tyler shares how gratitude, holistic wellness, and authentic conversations are reshaping how veterans find peace and purpose beyond the battlefield.
🎧 Don’t miss this unfiltered and emotional conversation that breaks stigmas and inspires action.
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Tyler Gray and His Journey
01:58 Misconceptions About PTSD and Mental Health
05:47 The Chaotic Childhood and Its Impact
11:57 The War Within: Warrior vs. Destroyer
18:11 Identity Crisis After Service
23:54 Finding True Self and Healing
27:43 The Quest for Identity and Self-Worth
30:24 The Impact of Military Identity on Self-Perception
31:46 Understanding Trauma: PTSD vs. LTSD
35:59 The Role of Chaos in Emotional Regulation
38:27 The Physical vs. Mental Health Paradigm
40:47 The Importance of Gratitude and Positive Focus
42:23 Self-Destruction and the Fear of Good
46:32 Reframing Self-Worth and Acceptance
50:39 Forged in Chaos: A Path to Healing
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LinkedIn: Deny Caballero
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tyleragrey/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyleragrey/
Book: https://a.co/d/d98amlI
Produced by Security Halt Media
Security Odd Podcast. Let's go the only podcast that's purpose-built from the ground up to support you Not just you, but the wider audience, everybody. Authentic, impactful and insightful conversations that serve a purpose to help you. And the quality has gone up. It's decent and it's hosted by me.
Speaker 2:Danny, you're not 15 text messages in like 40 seconds or 30 seconds. When I was doing this interview, it was like bing bing. I was like fuck yeah it was crazy.
Speaker 1:I fucking get it, man. It's the life of doing a podcast, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm doing all this PR for the book right now. Yeah, I'm doing all this PR for the book right now. So it's uh, I mean I've done, I'm doing five today and I did five yesterday, so it's uh, it's, it's just a man, it's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, yeah, excited to be on this. So, dude, thank you so much for joining me. Ty Great Uh everybody usually absolutely, man. Everybody usually fucks it up and they're like, yeah, he's a former Navy SEAL and I'm like that's like, that's like insult to injury.
Speaker 2:I mean it's funny because I've said it so many times and I shit. You know, I still get messages like in Instagram where kids are like hey, I'm going to buds, can you help me? And I'm like fuck, you know, it is what it is, you know.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I can, young man yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, learn to swim.
Speaker 1:Dude, you have a remarkable career, um ranger, going to the top of the top, the cream of the crop, um, and then you get injured, come out of that, you survive, you make it through it and, on the surface level, we focus on this linear path of like, oh my god, tier one operator. Now he's a movie star, tv star, everything's freaking great. But I figured out in this journey of podcasting, talking to our demographica guys, it is not a linear path of success or happy good times. It's a lot of peaks, it's a lot of valleys. So today, man, I want to dive into your background because it ties into the book and it right now more than ever, we're seeing it.
Speaker 1:We just had another loss of suicide. This life, this chaos that we get tied into, that we romanticize, we fall in love with, oftentimes when we don't transition properly, when we don't leave the career the right way, when things are left open to interpretation or we didn't fulfill a need, this idea that we have to do this career, this exact same way, it can lead us down a slippery slope. So I want to dive into your journey and, of course, dive into your book, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's uh, there's a lot of misconceptions and I think, um, you know, the reason I wrote this book was because I was told a lot of things you know by you know mental health community and and again, people trying to help. But a lot of the things they said just didn't fit for me and they just didn't make sense. And you know, I remember it kind of all started with a meeting I had with a therapist and you know she was talking about hey, you have PTSD. And I was like, obviously I heard I knew some degree. One of my favorite movies as a kid was First Blood, so I had a level of awareness.
Speaker 2:But I wanted their definition. I said, well, what does that exactly mean? What is that? What is sign, symptoms, et cetera. And she explained it and I went, yeah, that doesn't fit how I feel. And she's like, well, you know, and it sounds like you're in denial on that.
Speaker 2:And then I just kind of stopped and I and look, to be honest, I can be an asshole. And I just said, you know, have you had PTSD? And she said, well, no, and I go, well, then, what the fuck do you know about it? Honestly, not, I wasn't trying to be an asshole, but I was just going. If you have no personal experience in this, then what do you really know? You know what you've learned, but if you don't, if you haven't personally gone through it, if you don't have personal experience, then you're missing in. I'm telling you what it is and you're telling me what you think it should be Exactly. So that led me on a, you know, a 15 year journey, uh, to really come up with what, uh, what I thought fit me. And it turns out what fit me seems to fit a lot of others.
Speaker 1:It's so true. I want to pause and reflect on that and kind of dive into it. Um, like many of our veterans that have struggled and gone through something, it immediately pushes us towards advocacy and awareness and education. That's where my path went. Like I do this podcast, but my nine to five is peer support going to school for this stuff. And one thing that I focused in specifically in psychology is that exact mindset that that provider had. They have no tie to the community. They don't understand the problem except from having lived experience. And we hear this term of being culturally aware and culturally sensitive when it comes to a myriad of every other issue out there, whether it's like purple hair people and all this stuff. You got to be culturally sensitive and spun up on that culture. But we don't have the same focus when it comes to our veterans. What they're fighting it's all through dsm-5, it's all through analytical research. Well, it's, it's worked through this and it's always the lens of a pharmaceutical intervention brother, you're preaching to the choir, I look it's it's.
Speaker 2:It's hard for me where I'm at now because, on one hand I I don't feel like a lot of people are, I don't feel like that industry as a whole has negative let me rephrase the pharmaceutical industry absolutely negative intent. I think that's definitively obvious. Most of the people going through school to be therapists, etc. I don't think the vast, vast majority of them have any negative intent. I think they by and fundamentally designed not to help. It is designed to treat symptoms and never cure the disease and what we've been told is the disease.
Speaker 2:I'll say a simple I can absolutely destroy PTSD on multiple levels through their own diagnosis. And, quite frankly, the things that the mental health community has come up with is, in my opinion, is embarrassing. It's really embarrassing. And I believe either they're completely incompetent, which is possible, or they know what the actual problem is and they're not putting treatments towards that for a specific reason. I'm assuming that reason is profit. So it's hard for me to not be somewhat frustrated with that system.
Speaker 2:And I'll just say this about PTSD If sorry, ptsd awareness and PTSD treatments are at an all-time high, yep, and yet the problem is getting worse. So the only logical conclusion that any reasonable person I think could come to is if treatments and awareness was at an all-time high and it's getting worse, then what they're saying is the problem can't be the problem. So I think they've misdiagnosed the disease. I'm not saying PTSD doesn't exist, but I think it's a symptom. The other reality is who can have PTSD? Is it veteran specific? No, who can have it? Anyone? For what? Almost what? Almost anything, you know, anything that is traumatic. If anyone can have it for anything, then by that sheer logic it cannot be veterans specific problem. It's not logical, and yet we're being told it is, and that's just goes against, uh, obvious logic in my opinion no, it's, it's true.
Speaker 1:And and what we're seeing is not a true diagnosis. For a vast majority of our veterans, what we're seeing is a blanket discharge of coming through the the qtc pipeline, like here's your ptsd, ready to move. Yeah, how many breaching charges did you eat as a ranger, as a tier one operator? How many AT4s? How many times are you exposed to blast? And when you look and again, this is my favorite thing, I'll throw it up there one more time because I'm not editing this video, sorry, my editor If you look at the Venn diagram of PTSD and traumatic brain injury, how many of those symptoms overlap.
Speaker 1:If we're looking at our veterans from GWAT, we have to understand a vast majority of our guys, even the guys that weren't directly in combat, because we have artillerymen, we have mortarmen that were exposed to so much blast. And then we look at endocrine issues it's a whole body issue and we're not treating it that way issues it's a whole body issue and we're not treating it that way. And it's only when individuals such as yourself and myself and everybody else in the fight that's actively talking about it step up to the plate and say hey, look, it's not about just focusing on PTSD, it's about addressing the entire individual and their lived experience. Everything because, come to find out, the guys that go into this line of work come from dark childhoods, come from bad not not always, but for a majority of guys they come from a really bad upbringing or they had these experiences that rocked them and were able to give them that post-traumatic arc. And that's something that we yet to focus on when it comes to like looking at the entirety of our GWAT veteran history.
Speaker 2:Okay, first of all, I just want to make it clear to anyone listening you and I have never spoken Well.
Speaker 2:We, you know we coordinated this, you know, through some messages but yeah, through LinkedIn, but you and I have never spoken about this and, dude, you couldn't be more preaching to the choir. So what my book is about, you know, the term Forged in Chaos is kind of a double entendre. When people initially see the title, it's intentional that I want them, to a certain degree, think that I'm saying Forged in Chaos from combat. The title of Forged in Chaos is not about combat. My book is about the fundamental pattern, the mold that we are all forged in, which is, as you just said, a chaotic childhood, and the reason I'm using chaotic and not traumatic you said the vast majority of members have traumatic childhoods.
Speaker 2:The reason I'm saying chaotic is I've talked to many veterans who I'm like yeah, I think you had a chaotic childhood, and they associate that with traumatic. And they go, oh no, my childhood wasn't traumatic, my parents didn't beat me or you know whatever, I lived in a good home. And then I go, oh, okay, but then I dig deeper and I start asking certain questions and 100% of the time, what I found with those people is that they chaotic childhoods, you know, like one was like no, I had a great family. And I'm like did you move a lot as a child. Oh yeah, we moved every six months and I'm like see, that's chaotic for a child. That is absolutely chaotic. A child's system is not designed to move that much. Their entire world is changing every six months and for a child that is traumatic.
Speaker 1:It's not traumatic for an adult, no-transcript because, uh, there's so much truth to that. It doesn't have to be like, look, you don't have to be trafficked from Panama and and come to the United States and live a chaotic life. Doesn't happen for everybody.
Speaker 1:Just saying it's a very unique subset of situations for people, but you can absolutely go through life where things happen. You loss of a parent, loss of a sibling, these things change you. And there's this great mechanism that for some reason I don't know how it started, I don't know what psychology program came into fruition that they developed it. They figured out a way to tap into exactly what makes a really good soft professional and some of those things overlap and we're pulling these guys into these careers and they're crushing it. But on the backside, when the career is over, when the carousel stops and that record scratches and it's done. You have to come to this place where you have to understand. Okay, I owe it to myself to heal.
Speaker 1:That's become this difficult conversation to have with our type of guys. We're still very hesitant to admit that. Hey, there's something wrong and it's normal. It's normal to go through this, your career's ending, take a knee, go get help. How did that manifest in your life? How were you able? Because, like I said, we see Tyler crushing it on screen, we see a little bit of ourself and we're like, fuck, yeah, one of us is making it, one of us is out there succeeding in life, but we don't see the behind the scenes buildup. We don't see what it took to get there and oftentimes the struggle that still goes on.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely so. Uh for me. So I'll kind of go back to the basis of all this. So what I think? As you said earlier, I went to Warrior's Farts detailed in the book and the one thing that I saw that was common among every single person, I saw there was a chaotic childhood. And I looked at it and I went why are we talking about this? Every single one of us has a variation of the same childhood story and yet we're really not focusing on that. And Warriors Farts is an amazing organization. Tom Spooner is a freaking amazing guy. But that was just something I saw that I'm like well, that's important. If we all have that, then there's gotta be some connection here.
Speaker 2:And I really, through my journey there was multiple't know why I was doing what I was doing, and PTSD didn't explain it, and so for me it was figuring out. Each time I figured out a piece of the puzzle. It wasn't until maybe three-ish years ago that the puzzle was complete enough to where I started to see the full picture of what the fundamental overall issue was. And once I realized that, then I was like okay, now I need to explain this, come up with an overall way to make people understand, give solutions and then put this out to others to help. But it was a really long process in order to do that and, as you said, everyone was, you know, looking at me at different points and going, oh, he's doing great, when in reality I wasn't. I was a mess, an absolute mess, and my book really chronicles that. You know that I was, even when people thought I was doing great, I was doing bad, and the process by which I figured out each of those pieces of the puzzle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a difficult life when it's just normal, everyday stressors, but I have to imagine it's amplified when you're out in the limelight, out in the forefront. And a lot of us, like I said earlier, we look at our veterans who are out there leading from the front doing great things and it's almost like we again we put people on the pillar and we don't give them the ability to be human. Did you ever find that in your journey as, like fuck, I can't really take a knee or can't really or, or hold yourself back from trying to go to warrior's heart, uh, to finally get that healing you deserve?
Speaker 2:So so for me, um, one of the things I talk about in the book is, uh and I'm going to start with this because this will kind of lead to to what you just asked me but you know, as a child, you have a chaotic childhood. Okay, a child that has a chaotic childhood. Children are very aware in in in certain ways, and a child is aware that that chaotic environment is not a good environment. And so what happens is children are egocentric, so they think that they are responsible for the environment, for the world. They, whatever they think. They think it's reflective of them, not the other way around. And so a child sees a chaotic environment and experiences it, and it goes.
Speaker 2:I am in this bad environment and therefore the only reason that the environment could be bad is because I must be bad and what that creates. So the innate you, the real you and the real me and the real vast majority of us in this community, the real us inherently, is a born warrior and a born good person. That's who we are. But then you have a bad environment, you feel responsible for it and therefore you feel that you're innately bad, which is why the environment's bad. That leads to a lack of self-worth. In my personal opinion, lack of self-worth is the core disease in the veteran community that no one talks about. I can give hundreds of examples of this. But I feel and in the book I talk greatly about how self-worth is a core issue, and I can show how it manifests in multiple ways. But let me just say this there's no possible way somebody is committing suicide that has a self-worth. There's no way. There's no way somebody is committing suicide that has any real self worth. Does that make sense? You can't value yourself and take your own life. It just doesn't work like that. And so again, when we just go, oh, guys are killing themselves for PTSD, no, no, no. It makes a lot more sense that it's a self worth issue. But let me give you an example. So you have a lack of self-worth, how do you, when you're younger, try? And if you have no internal self-worth?
Speaker 2:We all know that we need self-worth in life. So what we do to get it is we look for external ways to give ourselves self-worth. I call it trophies. The trophies are I'm gonna do, and this creates what I call hero syndrome. On the warrior side, I am going to gain self-worth by doing good, heroic deeds, in my opinion. That is, I think, why we joined. We are looking to create worth and value through our deeds. It's also the exact same pattern in first responders and you see it over and over again. Here's the other interesting side effect of the chaotic childhood the chaotic childhood innate you is a warrior and that creates the hero syndrome that the warrior is trying to achieve. But the other thing that is created, I'm calling, is the destroyer. The destroyer is the you that you create, it's the mask, it's the character that the child you or the young adolescent you creates to protect yourself from a dangerous and difficult and hurtful environment.
Speaker 1:Now we all talk about the war within Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Sorry, no, you brought up two great things right there. I've met so many of my friends, myself included. We don't see ourselves as the person that's doing great and you give away all that power, all those attributes to something else of who you are to succeed. It's never the true version of, and I never saw myself as the guy that earned a Green Beret, the guy that walked across stage. Never saw that as another version of me, like oh no, that's a dude that he shows up, he can get it done. Never attributed and always gave away that power to something else the things I endured as a child and that's so true to so many people.
Speaker 1:But one thing that I realized after going through and diving into the books was the absence of self-compassion in my life and the amount of pride and self-esteem that I had from doing sports and doing great things. It's like you anchor everything on the achievements. You anchor everything on, like fuck yeah, the external motivator, but you never develop self-compassion. And that's reading Kristen Neff's book. Shout out to her an amazing doctor that studied this and its component into mindfulness. It's like, holy shit, we never had, we always have.
Speaker 1:If you're lucky, you had a positive male role model that said hey, son, take a knee, you failed, you'll succeed again. But by and large, for a lot of us, we didn't have that. Anytime we failed or missed a school or didn't do something, you were, ah, fucking, you're a piece of shit. It was that negative motivator Don, you're a piece of shit. It was that negative motivator Don't be a piece of shit. Never. Hey, tomorrow's going to be a better day, you'll go back, you'll crush it. It's always that negative connotation of like you're a piece of shit, do better. And it continues to go on that way and nobody's self, no one's talking about this, no one's talking about having self-worth.
Speaker 2:Dude, I couldn't agree more and again, you've discovered it, I've discovered it and I think it needs to be talked about Because, again, I truly believe that is the core, the core issue. And, as you said too, I, you know, I didn't really have my father around as a child. I never really had a. I absolutely did not have a male role model other than Han Solo.
Speaker 2:quite frankly, you know, watching Star, Wars, you know that's where I learned, you know I'm like that's what a man is right, like that's what a man is, and so that lack of self-worth it leads us to. So you create the destroyer. The destroyer is created as a better version of you. It's a character that's created that can do the things that you can't. It's the confident version of yourself that creates. The problem is it's not real. But the bigger problem is the destroyer that is created to protect yourself isn't really a good person. It was created out of survival. The innate you is the warrior. The destroyer is a bad person who does bad things. The destroyer manipulates the destroyer. Every bad thing that you're able to justify is that other character doing it, but the reason it did that was because it needed to do that to survive. That creates a huge problem later in life and, by the way, that destroyer that's created works to get you through that difficult time.
Speaker 2:The problem is everyone talks about the war within, and the thing that I realized when I was writing the book is we all talk about it, but what does it mean? And with my background in entertainment, I realized okay, I need to explain this and I'm gonna make it two different because I think that's the best way to explain it. So the warrior is innately good, the destroyer is innately bad is between we don't know which one of those two we are. We have all of this evidence that we can point to from the innate real us the warrior and go I'm a good person. And yet we can also point to all the things that the destroyer has done and go I'm a piece of shit. And so the war within is between two opposing views of ourselves and the absolute confusion on which one we really are, and that, over time, leads to the guys need to understand, take it off the mask, be able to finally see who they are.
Speaker 1:And oftentimes you don't get that unless you have a complete breakdown. I mean, that's that's where I was able to meet myself and finally say like, okay, you don't have the beret, you don't have the long tab, you don't have this career to fall back on. Who the fuck are you? And it can be shocking, it can be jarring, it can lead you down a dark spiral, or you can settle in and say, hey, alright, I'm starting on a clean slate. I'm starting from the very bottom. Who the fuck am I? I get to build it back up, I get to truly identify what's important because, at the end of the day, your service is a small footnote, small chapter of your life. It should be the stepping stone, the launching platform to the greatest journey of your life, which is the rest of your life. Life which is the rest of your life, whether it's 10 years, 20 years, 15 years, however long you serve, it shouldn't be the entirety of your identity. It's a great aspect of who you are. You're still going to be a warrior.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you brought that up because that was something I wanted to mention. So the identity piece so many people and, by the way, I said this about myself for years when I got out, I lost my identity. So the explosion that I went through for lack of a better term it broke my false identity. It destroyed the character that I had created because I couldn't be that person anymore. You talked about sports. I didn't realize until years later, in hindsight, that my identity was based on what I could physically do. It was based on the job, it was based on being good shape, it was based on all these different things that were temporary.
Speaker 2:And when people say, oh, when I got out of the military, I lost my identity, I don't think that's true, and the reason I say that is because I don't think that you lost your identity when you got out of the military. I think that's true, and the reason I say that is because I don't think that you lost your identity when you got out of the military. I think that you never had one to begin with. And the reason I'm saying that is because if the job became your identity, then there's no possible way that you had a strong enough identity prior to the job. And the reason you didn't have a strong enough identity was because, as a child growing up in chaos, you learned that being your innate, authentic, real self was not okay. Doing that got you hurt, so you had to create an alternate identity the destroyer to get you through that, and that's fine. And the destroyer to get you through that, and that's fine. And the destroyer goes to the military and does great things. But then when you get out, the reality is you never really, in my opinion, knew who you were to begin with, because you had a childhood that didn't. It wasn't safe to be you. And the last thing I'll say about that is the again with the identity piece as children, the reason you don't have.
Speaker 2:Lack of self-worth and identity go hand in hand. You can't have, you can't be comfortable with who you are if you have no internal self-worth. So, again, we go seeking it through a job. And, by the way, let's be clear, think of what I just said when you're in doing the job, you have worth. Because you're doing that job, you're doing what the hero part of you wanted to do and you feel you have value.
Speaker 2:When you're doing that job, you feel like you have identity when you're doing that job. You feel like you have identity when you're doing that job. You feel like you have purpose when you're doing that job. Then the reality that I'm pushing now is when you get out, it's not that you necessarily lost it. It's that you took the identity, value and purpose someone else gave you and it was theirs, and you took it upon your own when in reality, it was never actually yours to begin with. And that's why the fall is so hard is because we didn't realize most of us are not realizing that we never really had innate identity, authenticity, value and purpose to begin with.
Speaker 1:So true, so frigging true, and I think that that doesn't get talked about enough. That doesn't get it gets mentioned a little bit, but it never put it, never framed in the way you just did, to look back and explore like, hey, your identity isn't forged in this, you know short amount of span and if you come from a chaotic background you probably didn't have a chance to settle in and figure out who the hell you are as a kid, 18, 19 years old, and you get thrust into military and that becomes your identity, that becomes who you are. You get all this achievement rewards and you don't have to be a soft professional to find great success in the military and make that who you are. Anybody can do that in any field but we have to do the deep work.
Speaker 1:We have to do the deep work on the backside and not enough people are talking about that and it sadly that goes right in with self-worth. You take away all the medals, you take away your NCOER, your OER. That's always going to be given to you and shown how amazing you are. And how do you move forward?
Speaker 2:Dude, think about that. I'm glad you brought that up. Think about this. We literally did a job where we literally, literally wore our value on our chest and our sleeves. Yeah, literally wore it on our chest and sleeves, and to the point where everyone around you could see, you know, there was a level of understanding, everyone's value and then you get out and there is no external value and then you don't have any internal value, and so it's very, very, very difficult for people to adjust to that. The other thing that I wanted to mention that comes with a chaotic childhood is and this is probably the most important thing that I've come up with Well, let me also say this is we're being told that it's PTSD.
Speaker 2:Right, it's PTSD and TBI, and I wanted to mention you mentioned TBI earlier and I want to mention on this One of the biggest problems with TBI is that, as you know, tbi has to be calculated off of a pre-exposure baseline, yep, which they're not doing. I think. Recently certain units started doing it, but definitely not when I was in, I'm sure when you're in. So there really is no way for them to truly understand how those blast wave propagations have actually affected the brain, also TBI and even trauma to the brain from events looks very similar under different scans. So it's almost impossible for them to separate what caused what. Going back to what I was saying is the term that I came up with, again PTSD is what I was being told. Ptsd stands, we all know, for post-traumatic stress disorder. There's an inherent flaw in that that they haven't really realized and that is PTSD assumes post-traumatic stress disorder, assumes a pre-traumatic stress baseline. But if you were born in a chaotic environment, you never had a pre-traumatic stress baseline. So in my opinion, we're not even capable of having what they would call traditional PTSD. So what I learned and I detail how I came up with this in the book in detail but I came up with a theory that I believe is accurate in the book in detail. But I came up with a theory that I believe is accurate. And when I tell people it takes about 30 seconds and I've never had anyone not say yes, that's it. That fits me and I think you'll be the same way. I came up with a term called LTSD. I don't have PTSD, I have LTSD lack of traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 2:I am comfortable in chaos. When the environment is chaotic, my brain is calm. When the environment is calm, my brain is chaotic. And how do I calm myself? Simple, I create chaos in the environment to calm myself. Again. Where does this come from myself again, where does this come from? It comes from a chaotic childhood. That basically makes the brain has to adapt. So when you grow up in a chaotic environment, your brain rewires itself in certain ways that we can now prove with science, to make you common. Chaos, so chaos, chaos so chaos becomes your default state or your homeostasis and yes, yep, right, that's why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's why stellate ganglion blocks anybody that's ever had a stellar ganglion block? Uh, for, for vast majority of us, it's not just one, you need several, unless you go to the stellate center, uh, lincoln bio, for that place, amazing. But the first thing guys say when they reach back out after they've done it's like I've never felt this Is this normal? Is is this normal life? I'm like, yeah, brother, that's true, zero level, like baseline, you're just steady state. And it blew my frigging mind. The and I had to go through five, five of those fucking things to feel like, oh shit, the world's not falling apart. This is, this is normal, this is what everybody else is feeling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so here's a critical point. Dr Eugene Lipoff is actually one of my partners in one of the business that we're doing for health care, but he's a great guy. I'm sure you know him from Stellan Gangly Center. But it's absolutely think of it this way. We don't have that pre-traumatic stress baseline. We create chaos in the environment to calm ourselves because that is our default state. And when I realized that and understood it and I tell people, everyone goes yes. So then you got to go back to all the people that don't have that baseline and the reality is we are talking.
Speaker 2:When everyone was telling me about PTSD and all these different things, I kept saying this to them. I'm like you don't understand. What you're telling me is a mental thing and you think I can talk therapy out of this. What I'm trying to make you understand is there is something. I can feel, something different in my brain and body. It doesn't work the way you're saying it should work. And I felt you know, quite frankly, I felt crazy after a certain amount of time because they kept telling me things and I'm like that's just, that's not how I feel, that's not the way my body works, that's not the way my brain works. My brain loves chaos. It loves it. Put me into the worst environment imaginable and I'll be chill as a cucumber, and that's not me being. I want to be very clear. That's not me being tough or fearless. It's just the way my brain considers normal.
Speaker 2:And the other critical point that I want to say about the chaotic childhood is it also leads to us completely shutting off any and all emotion, Because feeling emotion when we were children was not conducive, it wasn't a good thing, and so we shut it off off. And while you're doing the job that's awesome, it actually is a superpower. It helps Can't really do that job if you feel a certain level of emotion. The problem is is, once we're stopped doing that job, as you talked about earlier, emotion will be present in the body until it's felt, and felt adequately. That's the phrase I came up with. And so the biggest thing that I think people need to understand and you started talking about earlier, but I can't stress enough how important the VA is doing the things it's doing, because it's a part of an overall bigger broken system, and actually I shouldn't call it a broken system. It's not broken. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is treat symptoms and never cure diseases.
Speaker 2:What people have to understand veterans watching this, first responders, anyone suffering through this stuff what you have to understand is you do not have a problem mentally. You do not have a problem mentally, you have a problem physically, Absolutely critical. And the insane part of the mental health care system is that for some reason, they're treating the brain as if it doesn't reside in the body and that is just, quite frankly, it's ludicrous, it's laughable and it's again I, I'm sorry but I gotta to say it it's pathetic. It's pathetic that we're in 2025 and that hasn't been realized and changed and fixed. And again, just look at it this way we know for a fact, it's not debatable. We know for a fact that even PTSD PTSD itself the actual diagnosis is a fundamental nervous system injury.
Speaker 2:Fundamentally it's a nervous system injury, part of your anatomic nervous system. And yet we're told that the treatment is drugs and talk therapy. The drugs aren't treating the nervous system and the talk therapy is not in any way essentially affecting the physical body. Maybe it is slightly, but look, we all know. Anyone who's been through talk therapy knows it in itself is not enough to fix the problem and we need to start looking at it as a combination physical and mental problem, not just a mental one.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's an all-h deck approach and it's I say this all the time. You want to go to combat with one weapon system. You I never went into a firefight with just me, myself and my m4. No, you went on with a fucking patrol, with a team, with a platoon, with a fucking company of hitters, with, you know, with organic weapon systems and additional weapon systems, to take the fight to the enemy. You took everything you could.
Speaker 1:It shouldn't be a fair fucking fight. The other thing is we we focus on everything that's going wrong and we don't fucking highlight the goodness in your life, and then that person leaves the office, goes to their home and all they're focused on is trying to fix all these things that they're saying that is wrong with their life. What fucking hope do you have when you're only focusing on the shit that's wrong? You got to highlight the good. You got to highlight the positive in your life. I get it when you're in a dark place. You don't want to focus on that, but I am telling you, one of the first things you should do every single fucking day is look at your life and be grateful Gratitude list. That saved more lives than you will ever imagine.
Speaker 1:It's not easy, trust me. It's hard at first, but you have something to be grateful for. You have something in your life that's good. If you can only focus on three things, focus on those three things and they will expand into five and a 10. I'm telling you, it's like an OER NCOER. It was never just a bunch of fucking shit that you fucked up right. There's always things that were good. There's always things that you can improve on. Focus on that, man. I know people are talking about that. Do whatever you're doing right now.
Speaker 1:I'm never going to tell you to stop going to therapy, stop doing something, but if you're not highlighting the wins you have in your life, you need to, because, trust me, if you just focus on the failures, brother, you're never going to get out of it. There's good. There's good in your life. You just got to start focusing on it. Slide in the comments, be willing to debate me. Even right now, I'm on Spotify. Right now, I'm on spotify. You can stop. Right now you can send me a text. It's a great new feature. But I am telling you and I'm sure you can say, because it's echo the same thing tyler there's good in your life. Focus on the good. Um, it's hard some days, but you got to start focusing on the positive, or just focusing on the positive, trying to at least focus on the positive, yes absolutely so.
Speaker 2:So a major uh point of that is, you know it goes back to focusing on the positive. That lack of self-worth leads to negative self-talk, but it also leads to and I should have said this earlier with the warrior and the destroyer. This is a very critical point and that is why do we do so many self-destructive things. Why do we do so many self-destructive things? Why do we, when everything is going good? Why do we destroy it? Two reasons One, creating chaos when the environment is good, you need to create chaos in order to calm yourself, because there's a fear that started in childhood that when things are good, the other shoe's to drop and things are going to go bad. So it's less scary to just create the chaos and be back into it rather than living in that fear of it happening. The other part of it is from childhood, of that chaos, and you talked about the stone ganglion. Your nervous system and your brain, therefore, are in survival mode over and, over and over again, and so it's very difficult. If people are having problems trying to be positive because I was at certain times it was because my nervous system was in such hyper drug. It was in fight or flight mode every second, and I really it was almost impossible for me to get out of that mode. And that's also when you know, try and do what you can by being more positive, be aware of how much you're negative, not just to yourself but your perception of the world. But if you're really, really, really struggling with that, you can't seem to take control. It's not your fault, it's your body, it's your nervous system. There's a physical problem and you need to seek some kind of physical treatment for that. But if you're having trouble getting into that or really having trouble changing your mind state, I highly recommend, you know, the Stellan Gaglian block. It's it, it, it's amazing and it really is a physical reset for your nervous system. The the. The last thing I wanted to say on that is you know all these things about PTSD and and uh.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of talk on on. It's being promoted now as if it's the one issue we have and uh, and and I personally think that is doing irreparable harm, because it's not one thing If you look at all the things you and I have talked about on this podcast that I'm just going to throw out a number, but I want to make clear to people you don't have one problem. You have 10 problems, and the one problem that they're telling you that you have and that's the problem needs what A forever diagnosis drugs and forever talk therapy, diagnosis drugs and forever talk therapy. And the reality is you have 10 problems that you can be aware of, that are actionable and you can take steps to actually fix them.
Speaker 2:And, for me, what helped me more than anything, quite frankly, was simply the awareness of why I was feeling what I was feeling, um, why I was feeling what I was feeling, understanding why I was feeling what I was feeling, understanding that it was both physical and mental, that I wasn't crazy, that there was a physical change in my body that wasn't like normal people for lack of a better term. And then, once I understood the why, once I understood the mechanism of creating chaos, it gave me some level of agency, of choice to where, when I was about to do something self-destructive and create chaos, I suddenly went oh man, I know what I'm doing, I know why I'm doing this, and it gave me the ability to step back and go. Do I want to do that? No, I don't want to do that. And the last point I want to make is why do we do self-destructive things? Why are things going good and we destroy it?
Speaker 2:A major reason is, consciously you're the warrior. You're a good person, but subconsciously the destroyer is there, and the destroyer feels that it is a bad person and doesn't deserve shit, doesn't deserve anything good. So the reason you're destroying good things in your life is because there are few things that will cause a brain more stress than it realizing that its entire paradigm or the way it looks at the world is fundamentally incorrect. And I'm going to tell you right now if anything that we have said has resonated with you. It's a fact. Your childhood perception of who you are and the way the world operates is wrong, but it came through the eyes of the child, not the eyes of a mature adult. So what you got to realize is that you are the warrior, you are not the destroyer. You do deserve good things and you have to every day accept that you deserve good things, work towards them, and one of the ways to do that that helped me was not only realizing it, but doing good things for myself.
Speaker 2:Treating myself well led me to value myself internally, and you cannot associate any of your value with anything external. You have to accept yourself for who you are internally, with nothing, no trophies, doesn't matter what you did, doesn't matter what you have, doesn't matter if you're in good shape, bad shape, old, young, all those things that I used to value myself based on. You really have to find your worth internally, based on just who you innately are, and the key to doing that, in my opinion that I'll end with, is be you Whoever the authentic version of you are. The way to be happy is to be the unfiltered, unapologetic, intrinsic version of yourself. You will never be happy trying to be another character. It won't work and you cannot value yourself for, not for who you, uh, are not, and that's worked for me dramatically.
Speaker 1:Man Tyler. So many frigging moments in this podcast are amazing, but that right there, um, just to summarize that with the final thing, is no trophies, man, so many of us get out of this life and we just try to continue that idea of like the next thing, the next thing, this scholarship, this fellowship, this will give me worth. Fuck that If you don't get the call back. It doesn't take away from who you are. If you don't get that next thing, you don't need that. To find your worth, you got to look inside man.
Speaker 2:Brother, you said it to me earlier on this podcast oh you've done this, you've done this, you did this Exactly. I did all those things that people look at and go, oh, you're a success. Things that people look at and go, oh, you're a success.
Speaker 2:I never felt anything more than a worthless person who didn't deserve any of what I had, because of that internal self-worth issue, and it took me obviously years to realize that. But I can tell you, having money, having, you know, being on a TV show, being in a cool unit, as you know, none of it made me feel good, none of it made me feel worthy, none of it made me feel happy or I never valued myself for those external things. And it wasn't until I realized that that entire pursuit and I'm not saying it's not good to pursue great things A hundred percent, it absolutely is. And I'm not saying it's not good to pursue, you know great things A hundred percent, it absolutely is. And I still am going to pursue uh, you know things, but at the same time, you cannot base your value off those things and once you accept your value for who you intrinsically are, then good things will come to you. You will feel, you will allow good things to come to you, because you will feel that you deserve them.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, brother. The name of the book. One more time Forged in Chaos.
Speaker 2:And it comes out when, literally three weeks from today. It's up on Amazon pre-order right now, but it comes out three weeks from today. Please, when we get off here, send me your address, I'll send you a copy. Actually, I have a copy right here. This will be your copy. I'll send this one to you right here. So it looks like this. And I want to also be clear, you know it's yeah, there's some war stories in the book that are important, but what I would say the book is really about it's not just for veterans, it's not just for first responders. Truly it is for anyone who has that chaotic childhood, that that fundamental baseline that sets that pattern that affects us for the rest of our lives, until we recognize it and change it. And it's my hope that this book will provide a light for others that are currently in the dark, like I was and I'm sure you were, for a long time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, brother. I can't thank you enough for being here, for writing this book and for being another shining example of what we can all achieve as far as enlightenment, understanding and an advocacy, because it's not just, like I say all the time, it's not about just getting out of the void yourself. When you get on the other side of your journey, when you're back on the right road and you're healthy, you're crushing it again. Look behind you, reach back into that dark pit and help pull somebody else out. Look, qrf is not coming. There is no speedball coming, it's just you and what you got organically in this firefight. You got to face out and put all the guns out there and start talking guns, man, your buddy might need you.
Speaker 1:Today. It's summertime. This will still air in a couple of weeks. I need you to understand. In the last few days, we've lost three or four individuals and we will continue to lose more through the summertime peak. I don't know why, and there's a lot of theories. Afghan fighting season took a lot of our friends, so we're wallowing in this. Check on your friends, check on each other. Stay connected. If you've ever served in the 82nd, you remember this phrase LGOPS, little Groups of Paratroopers Keep each other in the fight. Thank you all for tuning in. Tyler, thank you so much for the book and what you're doing.
Speaker 2:My pleasure If you're listening please, please, stay connected.
Speaker 1:Stay in touch and we'll see you all next time. Until then, take care. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to like, follow, share, subscribe and review us on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to support us, head on over to buymeacoffeecom, forward slash SecHawk podcast and buy us a coffee. Connect with us on Instagram X or TikTok and share your thoughts or questions about today's episode. You can also visit securityhawkcom for exclusive content, resources and updates. And remember we get through this together. If you're still listening, the episode's over. Yeah, there's no more Tune in tomorrow or next week. Thank you.
