WTF!?

We’ve all said it once in our lives, right?  Maybe not publicly, but we’ve certainly thought this to ourselves at some point in our adult life.  When we do verbalize it, we say this when we encounter something that is blatantly wrong.  It’s when something grabs your attention that is so poorly thought out, yet it still exists, it cocks your head to the side.  We’re not so shocked at how perverse the act is, but more so that we didn’t really focus enough to see it before, as “a WTF” has probably been around for a while…we just never noticed it before.  Even if we saw it, we didn’t let it sin

Olympic Observation

Were you watching?

Apparently, you were.  According to the BBC, it was the “most watched sporting event for their country on record.”  The U.S. reports that it was the “second most watched event in American TV history”, trailing only the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.  With viewership like this, chances are pretty good you watched at least 1 Olympic competitive event.

Which moment was your favorite?

Was it Usain Bolt’s flashing speed in the 100 and 200 meters?

Are you a Chicken or a Pig?

“Leadership.”

 “Setting the example.”

 “If you’re gonna talk the talk, you better walk the walk.”

 You’ve heard them all!

If you’ve spent more than a day on this earth reading about or helping our wounded warriors, you’ve heard these phrases and words when it comes to the subject of integrity.  

Yeah, integrity!

 Integrity comes from the Latin word, integritas meaning the state of being whole, entire, or undiminished.

Your Last Best Question

We all talk to ourselves.  

We do it continuously throughout the day.

You may not even notice you’re doing it, but you do.

I promise.

Now I’m not talking about signs of mental illness where people have conversations with themselves. What I’m focusing on today is how we talk to ourselves, either out loud or to ourselves in our minds, about the situations we find ourselves in. I point this out because it was the subject of a recent discussion I had with a group of veterans. It went like this:

A New Direction

A wise man once said, “There is never a wrong time to begin moving in the right direction.” When it comes to the mental health care we provide to our returning combat vets, I believe we are reaching a point where that “time to change direction” will be lost forever.

A Flawed Approach - Going Deeper

As we ended last week’s blog, I was suggesting that the solution in changing the behavior in our wounded warriors would be found in addressing the emotional states caused by combat. Unfortunately, this is not what we do. As most of you know, when our warriors become combat ineffective from the “unseen wounds” of war, their first-line choices for healing are medication and/or exposure therapy.

A Flawed Approach

We've all heard this analogy when describing a flawed approach..."trying to put a square peg into a round hole", right?  It couldn't be more true when we refer to our current mental health approach with combat veterans.  As recent as yesterday, we read that combat troop ailments are creating a medical backlog in the already strained system.

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