preventing veteran suicide: some interfaith reflections
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TC Davis
Oct 4, 2019, 10:29:04 AM10/4/19
to Light, Many Candles One, Leslye Moore, Shilpa Garg, Sandeep Karode, Jerry Feist, Keith Walton, Davis, Adam, Mui, Jennifer, Jerry Lucas, Woody Trent, Brother Lamotte
Dear interfaith friends,
First of all, if you have received this message via another local group to which I belong, please excuse the redundancy.
A friend of mine in Florida, a Ph.D. psychologist working on treatments for moral injury, is planning a workshop for next summer. She is an advisory member of the Interfaith Veterans Workgroup. For workshop material she asked me to give a brief history of IVW, what kinds of trauma informed care for veterans have worked well for us. And finally, do I think that working in an interfaith way is important in our efforts. I replied to her with the following thoughts, which I hope you may find useful:
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Thanks for asking about how IVW got started and what's working best for us.
We formed in 2015 when I read an article in the August issue of Quaker Journal about the 22 per day suicide rate among veterans. I knew some Vietnam veterans in town, so I contacted them, and asked some Quaker friends to join us to see what we might do to help prevent veteran suicide in our small state.
At our first meeting we decided to call ourselves the Interfaith Veterans' Workgroup because: a) We felt that spiritual resources were important for veterans' resiliency after trauma 2) servicemen and women are from many faiths, so we should be similarly inclusive in order to enlist all our gifts. We felt that working together on community improvement projects would promote an esprit de corps (which many returning veterans feel the lack of in civilian life), and would also give members a strong sense of purpose; and purpose boosts morale.
We had no idea what would help veterans with PTSD, but we felt that among our members we didn't have credentials to do clinical interventions, so we began to research what non-clinical methods of treatment were working elsewhere in the U.S. Anecdotal evidence suggested many, many activities were helping veterans cope, such as writing groups, music groups, art groups, meditation, tai chi, hiking groups, scuba diving groups, equine therapy groups, bicycling groups, beekeeping, service dogs, etc., etc. A common denominator was doing things together, avidly! Camaraderie seemed to be healing in itself.
We had some members with skills and connections to try out some of these activities, so we did: We helped paint a mural on the side of a home for veterans. We started a writers' group and a hiking group. Some members had already benefited from Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction at the V.A. They continued, enthusiastically. Another few members took a different form of meditation training called Power Breath, offered free to veterans through the Welcome Home Troops Project. A little later Bayada Health Care's Hospice program recruited several of our members to be Veteran to Veteran Hospice visitors. Three of us are doing that currently. Just today I joined in efforts to begin art instruction for veterans at a local community center.
Our program development has been driven by two considerations: 1) Is there evidence that a certain activity has worked well for veterans elsewhere? And 2) Do we have adequate resources to get into that activity? (People resources are the most important, not money. We have found that if we have strongly committed people, necessary funding eventually follows.)
The activity that seems most helpful to veterans with a heavy load of PTSD and moral injury is meditation. I have come to believe that meditation in large part trains the unconscious mind. A nervous system ramped up by living for an extended period under stress does not respond well to conscious mind treatments. The automatic pilot keeps right on doing its thing and can't be talked down. It has to be brought down through bodily activity which induces relaxation. The connections between body and mind don't need to be understood for this approach to succeed. I've seen this several times during training. Veterans will start crying after a deep breathing session, and they can't figure out what just happened. It was like something was lifted off them, they say, but this release is not tied to any conscious memory. It seems like a kind of magic. That's the importance of the unconscious mind!
There are creative activities which involve both the conscious and unconscious mind, such as drawing and painting and music making and dancing. These whole brain activities involving the body are wonderful for healing troubled minds. It seems to me, though, that deep breathing meditation has not been sufficiently appreciated in the west, I think because the west has mostly been concerned with thinking all along, an activity of the conscious mind. Resiliency requires training oneself to think better and not think. Both are needed. And that's why meditation is the most important of the activities we have discovered in our efforts to prevent veteran suicide.
Regarding your question about whether it is beneficial in this work to be intentionally interfaith. I answer: Yes, yes, yes! Not only for the practical reason you suggest: that this increases the number of laborers in the vineyard. There is a deeper rationale in my opinion. The U.S. has been fighting counter insurgency wars for almost two decades, wars which have become holy wars, fomented by religious hatred. To sever the ideological roots of that hatred we must collaborate across faith lines. We must live an alternative vision. Being interfaith is not merely an instrumental strategy to address the pandemic of increasing suicide in our society, (and not just among veterans). Being interfaith is a taste of the kind of world for which we yearn.
Peace,
Tom
We formed in 2015 when I read an article in the August issue of Quaker Journal about the 22 per day suicide rate among veterans. I knew some Vietnam veterans in town, so I contacted them, and asked some Quaker friends to join us to see what we might do to help prevent veteran suicide in our small state.
At our first meeting we decided to call ourselves the Interfaith Veterans' Workgroup because: a) We felt that spiritual resources were important for veterans' resiliency after trauma 2) servicemen and women are from many faiths, so we should be similarly inclusive in order to enlist all our gifts. We felt that working together on community improvement projects would promote an esprit de corps (which many returning veterans feel the lack of in civilian life), and would also give members a strong sense of purpose; and purpose boosts morale.
We had no idea what would help veterans with PTSD, but we felt that among our members we didn't have credentials to do clinical interventions, so we began to research what non-clinical methods of treatment were working elsewhere in the U.S. Anecdotal evidence suggested many, many activities were helping veterans cope, such as writing groups, music groups, art groups, meditation, tai chi, hiking groups, scuba diving groups, equine therapy groups, bicycling groups, beekeeping, service dogs, etc., etc. A common denominator was doing things together, avidly! Camaraderie seemed to be healing in itself.
We had some members with skills and connections to try out some of these activities, so we did: We helped paint a mural on the side of a home for veterans. We started a writers' group and a hiking group. Some members had already benefited from Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction at the V.A. They continued, enthusiastically. Another few members took a different form of meditation training called Power Breath, offered free to veterans through the Welcome Home Troops Project. A little later Bayada Health Care's Hospice program recruited several of our members to be Veteran to Veteran Hospice visitors. Three of us are doing that currently. Just today I joined in efforts to begin art instruction for veterans at a local community center.
Our program development has been driven by two considerations: 1) Is there evidence that a certain activity has worked well for veterans elsewhere? And 2) Do we have adequate resources to get into that activity? (People resources are the most important, not money. We have found that if we have strongly committed people, necessary funding eventually follows.)
The activity that seems most helpful to veterans with a heavy load of PTSD and moral injury is meditation. I have come to believe that meditation in large part trains the unconscious mind. A nervous system ramped up by living for an extended period under stress does not respond well to conscious mind treatments. The automatic pilot keeps right on doing its thing and can't be talked down. It has to be brought down through bodily activity which induces relaxation. The connections between body and mind don't need to be understood for this approach to succeed. I've seen this several times during training. Veterans will start crying after a deep breathing session, and they can't figure out what just happened. It was like something was lifted off them, they say, but this release is not tied to any conscious memory. It seems like a kind of magic. That's the importance of the unconscious mind!
There are creative activities which involve both the conscious and unconscious mind, such as drawing and painting and music making and dancing. These whole brain activities involving the body are wonderful for healing troubled minds. It seems to me, though, that deep breathing meditation has not been sufficiently appreciated in the west, I think because the west has mostly been concerned with thinking all along, an activity of the conscious mind. Resiliency requires training oneself to think better and not think. Both are needed. And that's why meditation is the most important of the activities we have discovered in our efforts to prevent veteran suicide.
Regarding your question about whether it is beneficial in this work to be intentionally interfaith. I answer: Yes, yes, yes! Not only for the practical reason you suggest: that this increases the number of laborers in the vineyard. There is a deeper rationale in my opinion. The U.S. has been fighting counter insurgency wars for almost two decades, wars which have become holy wars, fomented by religious hatred. To sever the ideological roots of that hatred we must collaborate across faith lines. We must live an alternative vision. Being interfaith is not merely an instrumental strategy to address the pandemic of increasing suicide in our society, (and not just among veterans). Being interfaith is a taste of the kind of world for which we yearn.
Peace,
Tom
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