A Green Beret's Advice on Hardship
Have you ever been to anger management? I have.
I had to go see an anger management counselor once. We’ll, not once, for four months I had to see him.
Anger was how I processed my sadness and pain. For years I bottled up my emotions and it got to a point where anger was a cry for help. I was mean to strangers, a complete dick to friends and distant to my family.
I was (and I’d like to think I still am) a person who could handle difficult situations better than most people. You only get that through experience, which I had a ton of by the time I was 23 because I was simply a person who happened to land in situations where the only way to get out was through.
Men experience depression in a way which sadly, we’re only recently beginning to understand. According to a study from the College of Family Physicians of Canada:
Depression in men, at least in the early stages, often does not fit the aforementioned textbook description. It often manifests as irritability; anger; hostile, aggressive, abusive behaviour; risk taking; substance abuse; and escaping behaviour (eg, overinvolvement at work).5 Another escaping behaviour that has been noted concerns some men’s tendency to become overly sexually active, usually in the form of extramarital affairs or a series of brief, emotionless sexual encounters.6 It is thought that such behaviour might reflect a man’s effort to demonstrate his sexual prowess in order to counter feelings of inadequacy and to avoid intimacy in relationships that could potentially expose his vulnerability.7 These signs and symptoms can mask the more typical symptoms of depression (eg, sadness, crying, feelings of guilt, changes in appetite).
This suggests that the acting-out symptoms seen in men might serve as a cover-up mechanism to hide the internal turmoil that these men are experiencing. But at some point this compensation fails and exposes the men’s distress and depression as immense hopelessness, withdrawal, and a complete shutdown of normal activity.
Luckily for me, my therapist wasn’t just someone who read a bunch of things in a textbook, he was Army Reservist and Green Beret. The conversations I had with him were some of the most impactful conversations I ever had. the real stories he told me to put my own experiences into context are ones not for the faint of heart. I won’t go into them, but if anyone understands hardship, it is the men and women at the tip of the spear.
Lucky again, I’ve had the honor of serving with and befriending other members of the US military’s special operations community during my time as an Army National Guard officer and in civilian life. One of those folks and someone I consider a close friend is Nick Freitas, a former Green Beret who served in Iraq.
During the height of the pandemic, I asked Nick to join me to discuss why men choose to do difficult things and how to handle the pressures of life, combat, and situations that sometimes feel outside your control.
You can listen to our full conversation by clicking the button below.
Courage isn’t something that just happens, it is choosing to do something despite your fears, not because fear is absent.
What separates a hero from other people is not that the hero wins or loses, it is that the hero goes forward when others step back.
-RWM
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