Operator Syndrome Explained | Dr. Chris Frueh on Elite Performance & Veteran Health

Clinical psychologist Dr. Chris Frueh explains Operator Syndrome and the hidden physical and psychological costs of elite military performance in this honest conversation that impacts veteran stories.

In this episode of Not Special, Herb and Corrie Thompson sit down with clinical psychologist, professor, and researcher Chris Frueh, author of Operator Syndrome.  

Dr. Frueh has spent decades studying combat veterans, special operations forces, and high-performance military communities. His work explores the complex mix of physical strain, neurological stress, hormonal changes, and psychological pressure that can accumulate after years of elite operational tempo.

The conversation begins with Frueh’s early life growing up with a Vietnam War veteran father, which shaped his interest in psychology and trauma research. From there, the discussion dives into how long-term exposure to high-intensity environments can affect the body and mind in ways that traditional PTSD models often fail to explain.

Herb, Corrie, and Dr. Frueh discuss:

• The origins of Operator Syndrome
• Why many high-performing warriors struggle after their careers
• The long-term physical toll of combat deployments
• Why traditional PTSD narratives don’t explain everything
• Identity, purpose, and life after the mission
• What leaders, families, and veterans need to understand

This episode offers a deeper look at the human side of elite performance and why understanding the full picture is critical to supporting those who serve.

Transcript

Why Chris is Special

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Chris, why are you special? I'm not special. I'm Herb Thompson, a Green Beret and resolutionist.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

And I'm Corey Thompson, Herb's Les Harry Half and branding expert.

Meet Dr. Chris Frueh

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Our guests come from various backgrounds, but one thing is true. They are special. I had a feeling you would say that. I also know our audience will think you're special. I mean, you're a clinical psychologist. You are a professor, author of operator syndrome, you know, just a champion for warriors and soft and beyond, a speaker with us at Liberty Speaks and much more.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

So And you're my big light bulb.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

I think you got to explain big light bulb because now I'm like who is that?

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Because when I heard you speak and talk about operator syndrome, it was enlightening and it was the completion in totality of what I had been trying to understand and looking for that I had not yet come across.

Growing Up With a Vietnam Veteran Father

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Take it back. How'd you get down this road to be, you know, into psychology? I mean, where did that all start?

Early Exposure to War & Its Psychological Impact

Why Chris Frueh Studied Psychology

SPEAKER_01 1:09

My father was a Vietnam veteran, and uh he was a physician in the Air Force, not a combatant. And when he was in Vietnam, I think I was about four years old when he when he was deployed. As I got a little older, and it was we got into the 1970s, that was probably about 68, 1968, I'm gonna say. Um, in the 1970s, as I was getting older, I hadn't I had an awareness of the of the war. We, you know, it was on the TV every night. Um, we lived in Columbia, Missouri, college town, and my father, probably trying to work off some karma, I'm not sure, was very got very involved in the Vietnamese group there. You know, they were a tight-knit community. And so he was involved with them. He was helping, you know, he got he basically volunteered to help tutor and mentor, guy named we called Mr. Long, I guess that was his name, Mr. Long, who was work working on a PhD, and my father was helping him with the writing of it, the English part of it. And Mr. Long in return babysat for my parents. So Mr. Long was our favorite babysitter. And in 1975, he went back to find his wife and his kids and bring them to the U.S. Um, however, he was he was picked up and summarily executed by the North Vietnamese. And so that was a, you know, that was a powerful emotional, you know, jolt to to me and my brothers. And my father also often talked about war and what it did to men, how it changed them, how it affected them. Now we didn't have the we didn't have the term PTSD at that time. It wasn't that wasn't added to the psychiatric lexicon until 1980. But I also had another hero role model, and that was my great-grandfather. And so I was 14 when he died. I knew him quite well. And his early life at age 16, he had um, he was an orphan, so there was nobody to stop him. He lied about his age, joined the mission, Michigan militia, and shipped out to Cuba for the Spanish-American War. When those soldiers came back from Cuba, they were dumped on Long Island, tipped Long Island, a very hastily built camp. Thousands of soldiers. They all had malaria and dysentery. And here they are dumped at this camp that was literally just a muddy field with tents. And it was a national scandal. President Harrison went up to see what was going on. I don't know how big of a movement it was, but there was at least one person, probably many, uh, a woman, Mrs. Jack R. Bean, that's her name that was her name, took her, uh, she was a wealthy woman living in New York City. She took her butler and her care horse-drawn carriage and went up there to this to this camp. And she took my great-grandfather and who was a 16-year-old kid. So he's really, in our view of today, he's a child. Um although he was already an experienced combatant by that time. She she took him and five or six other guys and took them home. And she nursed them back to health in her home for uh four to six weeks, a significant risk to herself and her family, because you know, with these, you know, with they were all sick. Uh, and then she gave them fare, she gave them cash and money to get ticket train tickets home. Yeah, I got goosebumps. Yeah, yeah, I do too. Actually, and I've told this story many times. My great-grandfather talked about her and credited her with saving his life. And so what I was, what I grew up with, you know, by the time I was uh, you know, starting college and and beyond, was an understanding that war affects people powerfully and their psyche. And I didn't have a clear idea of what that was. And I had an idea, a belief, that soldiers returning home from overseas needed more than just what the government gave them. They needed a welcome reception. And the civilian civilians in the in America, we owe them a debt to help them return and welcome them and help them get reestablished and a sense of belonging. I started graduate school um in clinical psychology in 1987, and that was my goal. That was my why. I wanted to work with veterans. I did my dissertation with Vietnam veterans. I spent 16 years working at the VA, um, if we include my last year of training, so that would have been 1991 to 2006. And so I got the chance to work with veterans from World War II, Korea. Most of our patients were Vietnam veterans. Uh, Persian, the first Persian Gulf War had just happened. So we had a few of those soldiers trickling in. So VAs are almost always affiliated with medical schools. So I had a faculty appointment at the Medical University of South Carolina. And after seven years as a full-time clinician therapist, I I applied for and received federal research, a large federal research grant. And that kind of changed the trajectory of what I was doing. I left in 2006, kind of thinking my work with veterans was going to be was maybe over, but I was able to continued to work as a consultant on several projects.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Little did you know you were just getting started.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Little did I know. I I mean, it's true. I really thought I was kind of burned out from the VA. I loved my work, but it it just like it wasn't as rewarding anymore. And so we moved to the University of Hawaii uh for a job, was here for a couple of years, and then Baylor College of Medicine in Houston recruited me to come be the director of research programs at their at the at Menninger Clinic, an affiliated hospital.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

How do you do that commute?

The Moment Everything Clicked

SPEAKER_01 7:09

I mean, other than I guess a long plane flight. A long plane flight, yep. So three weeks in Hawaii, one week in Houston. That was my cadence. And then when that when Menninger kind of shut down their research programs, the University of Texas recruited me right away. They had money, they needed to start a cent to set uh legislative money to start a center for veterans treatment and research. But I also specified I'd only do it for two years. And in the process, I would hire my a replacement, which I was able to do, hired actually a good friend and colleague I'd known for over 20 years. So that that program is still thriving and doing really well. So I'm in Houston once a month for about a week, and I met some guys who were special, former special operators. They'd formed a foundation for themselves called the Quick Reaction Foundation. It essentially did two things. One was it gave them a chance to come together in fellowship and networking once a week, like a happy hour kind of thing, or a lunch, or a breakfast. And it also they provided, they raised just enough money to be able to provide up to$5,000 for an operator or a family member really fast. So you needed, you needed uh to buy an airplane ticket to get a medical opinion somewhere else or something like that, where you needed to come to Houston for a medical opinion. They could pay for the flight and uh some other things, and they could do it very quickly without any uh bureaucracy.

What Is Operator Syndrome?

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Still back to blown away that like you almost got away from doing veterans' work and you've been instrumental in so many ways and so many veterans' lives that don't even know it, you know, in pushing change. And we're gonna we're gonna get to that. I do want to say this episode is sponsored by our company, Liberty Speaks. So if you're interested in a speaker for your event organization, someone like Doc Free here, hey, please, please reach out uh to Corey and I. Is that where operator syndrome you started seeing when you started hanging out with those you know, SEALs, special operations syndrome?

SPEAKER_00 9:18

I'm assuming you don't turn it off, right? You can't like stop observing.

The Hidden Toll of Elite Performance

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Well, that's right. And but let me let me like I'm just gonna be you know frank here. My early experience with these guys was you know a little bit of you know a little bit of awe because I never worked with operators at the VA. I never had had a lot of guys come in and say they were SEALs or Green Berets in Vietnam, but they weren't. Here I was meeting these guys who I had never worked with before, but I knew of. And, you know, I've worked with Vietnam POWs, I've worked with World War II POWs, I've worked with a wide spectrum of veterans, both clinically and in research. And so, but this was a very different group for me. And one of the guys who was not an operator, but he was a, he was an all, he had been an officer embedded with them, kind of pulled me aside early on early on and said, listen, just pay attention. A lot of these guys are struggling. And if there's anything you can do to help them, and I think that's why he had in he kind of brought me in. So I started hearing, I'll tell you what I heard, and this probably lines up, Corey, with what, with what you were saying, is just not understanding, because how could you? I sure didn't. So here's what I here was the typical presentation of of concern. And it was usually uh a guy would kind of sidle up to me, and maybe we'd go off to the side, and he'd say, you know, I just wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit. I'm struggling a little bit. It's not too bad. I'm really okay, but what do you think about this? And and then, well, what's tell me what's going on? Doc, something's wrong with me, but I don't know what it is. I don't feel like I used to feel. I don't function like I used to function. I can't concentrate, I can't sleep so great. I mean, I'm really doing okay, but something's a little off, even to the point I look in the mirror and I don't look quite look the same. Of course, what did I do? Just spent 15 years working at the VA in a PTSD clinic. I did what every other psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, or therapist would have done, and still does to this day, probably. I assumed it was PTSD. I assumed all these all these guys had PTSD. That's that was my starting assumption, which quickly got pushed aside because what they didn't have, what I didn't see, were some of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD. I didn't see the fear, the fear reactivity, I didn't see the avoidance. There was no avoidance. These guys could talk about everything they they had seen and done. Many of them were still working uh with a gun on their hip in some capacity. They liked shooting, some of them were skydiving as hobbies. Quickly I realized this is not a PTSD issue. Now, in my research that we were doing at Menninger, it was very much about biomarkers. So we were collecting, so on every patient that came into the hospital, we, of course, we had psychiatric interviews, we had psychological questionnaires and self-reports, and we we we had our patients for about five weeks at a time, which gives you a lot of time to actually get to know somebody. I'm not a clinician there, but collecting the data. So we would collect the self-report data at multiple time points, like every two weeks. But the biomarkers, we were doing a brain scan. So we had a protocol, an fMRI protocol. We were drawing blood for genetic purpose to look at genetics. And later we started collecting fecal samples to look at the gut microbiome. And and we've published on all of that. Now, I tell you all that to tell you this part. So I had a ticket, a free ticket to all I could scan at the Baylor College of Medicine's neuroimaging center, brain and imaging center. So I just brought a bunch of guys in there with me just for just for kicks. Let's get some brain scans. Let's see what's going on in these brains. And so I got I got about four or five of these guys, and you know, you walk you lure them there with some prize. Well, you walk over you what you get actually is a disc, like a like a CD-rom kind of thing. So I took that back to the hospital, and I'm not a neurologist, but uh, but my friend Ben Weinstein is. So he sat down with me. And at first I didn't really tell him what he was looking at. What do you, Ben? What do you think of these brains? So we went through them together. And essentially what he said is, well, these look like reasonably healthy brains. There's no lesions, there's no tumors, there's no big glaring white spots. But the ventricles are atrophied quite a bit. And so these look like the brains of 80-year-old men. Yeah, that was my reaction. And they were probably in their 40s. 30. One of them was 37. They were mostly late, late 30s, a few were early 40s. So now I'm going, well, that's weird. Let's see what else we find here. So then we got uh blood tests for hormones, you know, and uh, and they all came back, every single one of them came back with low testosterone. So now we've got a brain of an 80-year-old, and we've got the testosterone of an 80-year-old. It was a holy shit moment. And um, and then I started, and then it was like, well, let's get sleep studies, and they all had sleep apnea. Every one of them has sleep apnea. Now I'm going, what?

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Like, where like this didn't make any sense to me. And these are fit people, because that's uh my misnomer before of a sleep apnea that everyone was heavy, set, obese, they had it, and it's operators who are in very good physical health sleep apnea.

Why Traditional PTSD Narratives Miss the Mark

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Right. I that was my thought too. It's uh it's older men who are overweight. You don't you're not gonna see that in a 37-year-old fit warrior. And and of course, their fitness level wasn't what it would have been in service, probably because of their low testosterone. That was a big and lack of sleep, and lack of sleep, and and and a whole bunch of other stuff. So at that point, I didn't know what to make of this, but I had five guys, four or five guys who all had the same pattern of unusual difficulties. A common thing was to have a business. And then sometimes I realized the business wasn't actually bringing in any money or actually even functioning very well. And some of the things some of the guys had kind of they came into town for these things, but they lived in kind of isolated places off the beaten path a little bit. When I worked at the VA, never ever once did I refer somebody for a hormone panel or a sleep study in the 1990s. And I'm not aware that our psychiatrist or anybody in our clinic did. And even to this day, it's very rare for mental health professionals to request a sleep study or a hormone panel or a cardiometabolic panel. So now I'm hearing this pattern in these five guys, and and of course, I'm and I'm not treating their testosterone. That's not, I don't have that skill set, but now it's identified, they're getting their testosterone treated, they're getting their hormones or becoming more healthy, and they're seeing the difference. I can see the difference. They're saying, wow, this is amazing. I'm now I'm feeling good. So I probably got you know some credit for that. But I also was having lengthy conversations. I mean, I was even when I was in Hawaii, I was talking to these guys, you know, once or twice a week via phone or Zoom. And then as they started to feel better, more guys in the group started to kind of hear, oh, you should talk to Chris. So now more guys are talking to me. Um, there was a group of guys in Austin, uh, operators in Austin. I wasn't billing, I wasn't keeping medical records. These are conversations that are happening over coffee or pizza, or just some of them would come to my office at the at the clinic and just sit and we would just hang out. So as they started to get better and feel better, and it wasn't just the testosterone, it was it was other things. So I'm I'm functioning, let's call it more like a coach by this time. And as they got better, more guys started coming to talk to me. And then I started, you know, I hit a point where I started writing down things I was learning. Like, wow, these guys, and and and oh, and another thing was was blast repetitive blast exposures. I didn't know anything about repetitive blast exposures then. Nobody did. There was really almost no research. So as I'm learning things, I'm writing it down, I'm putting it into a document, partly for myself, but also every time I met a somebody new, I would give it to them. Hey, read this. There's some information in here that may relate to you, and we can we can give us something to talk about. I met a group of psychologists out at uh Damneck and um and the the the East Coast, yeah, where the SEALs are. And then they invited me to come out at some point. So I went out and and met with them on, you know, and saw what they were doing and kind of met the whole team out there. Um, and then they started, you know. Well, I I'll be careful what I say here, but I started getting referrals from military mental health workers with them saying, We don't think this guy will talk to us, but we think he'll talk to somebody else. Maybe you can reach him. You have a bad day. I mean, you could get fired any day. One mistake, and you're gone.

The Physical Effects of Years in Combat

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Yeah, I mean, I kicked a guy off my team and he had some problems, but a lot of it was live fire and just didn't perform. See, like it you're gonna cost people lives. So it's it's not even the command, but that stigma definitely is like, I'm sure it's still present to some extent just because of that culture of I I will tune everything out to accomplish the mission. So it's just yeah, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

I probably worked individually with about 600 people who are operators or operator adjacents. Uh I did extensive evaluations and coaching with probably about 50 different Iraqi and Afghani um interpreters who embedded with us, many of whom were still overseas. The two months prior to when we pulled out of Afghanistan, I had um I'd been working with uh four um Afghanis and and and he'd even kind of met their families via Zoom. Some of my work has been with private defense contractors. So about six within six months, I probably had work, had probably done evaluations and coaching with four or five guys that had been on the on the inside of the perimeter of the air of the airport that on those days when we left. So I feel like I got, I don't want to call it a 360 view, but I got a lot of different perspectives. And they all lined up really, really easily with with guys, including um two two former SEALs who who became who were working as contractors, described a a firefight at the end of the airfield there. So they were in a gunfight with with the Taliban coming in. And then as those planes are taking off, and remember the the young people, the the Afghanis that were right rushing onto the airfield and grabbing the wheels.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Wheels falling off, yeah.

Why High Performers Struggle After Their Career Ends

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Those bodies, their bodies were landing right next to the right around the position where we had contractors uh in a gunfight. And they were just like, you know, holy moly, they'd nobody ever seen anything like that. Um the Abbey Gate explosion that killed 13 Marines. Yeah, uh, everybody talked about that. Um one thing they did at the ramp ceremony that day was they kept they wouldn't let the State Department guys in. Uh so it was Marines, it was contractors, it was soldiers. They wouldn't let the State Department guys anywhere near to that because they blamed, put a lot of the blame on them. And that's what the Afghanis I was I was working with prior to that, prior to the pullout, were saying to me. They were like, listen, your State Department is denying that the Taliban are here, but they are here. One guy took me over to a window and turned his phone around to show me, and he's like, that is a Taliban checkpoint, two blocks from my home. They're right there. Why does your State Department not recognize and see them?

SPEAKER_02 21:31

What is operator syndrome? Because I think it's gonna tie back to what you were just talking about. Yeah. How does a normal person like myself who doesn't have a PhD understand it?

Identity, Purpose, and the Loss of the Mission

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Well, it's a it's a constellation of interrelated injuries. They all go together. If you hurt your brain, that's gonna have effects on your metabolism and your hormones and your sleep and every other physiological system in your body. Modern medicine seems to have forgotten that all our Physiological systems are connected to each other. And so the perspective of operator syndrome is to think about the ways in which the injuries and the impairments all clut are all interrelated and influencing each other. The driving uh causative factor here is what I call what we call, we're calling allostatic load, which is a cumulative issue. So the longer you serve, especially if you don't get healing and breaks and pot and you know appropriate recovery, these things accumulate. So what is allostatic load? Allostatic load is a hypothetical construct that takes into account all the burden on your body. It's everything. It's the it's the sleep deprivation, it's the running and rucking and the physicality of the work. I mean, think about a deployment. You eat when you can. There may be times where you don't have time. You may have a one or two day or more mission where you're go, where it's go, go, go, go, go. Maybe you have time to eat a, you know, a quick something quick on the fly, but you're not, you may not have time to eat real meals. And you have, depending on where you're at, you might be at a very austere Ford operating base where your only food is MREs and bottled water. Maybe the occasional goat that may be wandering by. And so that's gonna ja that process ultra-processed, talk about ultra-processed food. That that's gonna jack up your gastrointestinal system and your gut microbiome. This is inevitable. This is not a weakness, this is not a sign of weakness. This is this is just the law of physics. Get yourself a nice um red Ferrari and put it up on blocks and keep that engine in red line for a year, in five years, in ten years, and and don't don't bother changing the oil. Maybe rotate the tires if, you know, once in a while, if a tire pops. But I think there are some things we could do, including tracking hormones over the course of a career, including doing some things to normalize from an SOP perspective that sleep is not optional. I've been out in the field, I've done a little training, you know, been part of some training exercises with with teams. So I've seen what they do, and I have a little tiny, tiny flavor of what that feels like and means. And um, I think most psychologists, most professional, medical professionals have no clue, no understanding. And and I don't think they understand the difference between what a conventional soldier in the combat arms experiences compared to a conventional soldier who's not in the combat arms. I mean, there's a difference there that we don't recognize or talk about enough. Certainly from the VA perspective, there's nothing, they don't make any effort to provide services based on the kinds of experiences that that soldiers would have had normally in the course of their MOS work, their occupational specialty work. From medicine's perspective, we owe it to every single patient to give them the treatment that they need, not a boilerplate. Everybody who served in war, we hit the red easy button of PTSD and then we're done. And that seems to be what happens all too often, and not just for soldiers and veterans, but also for first responders.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Like how much emphasis do you think needs to be considered on the policy side? Because sometimes what happens when you get further removed, like down to the VA, is you get the results of the policy. And these are the things that are specified that will be treated and the way they'll be treated. So I guess my question is how much do you think policy impacts that outcome?

Why Many Operators Avoid Mental Health Treatment

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Aaron Powell A lot. And in med in healthcare across the board today, it's not just it's not just VA. Doctors are part of a corporate business model. Um they have six minutes per patient on average in primary care. We heard this from the doc at at USASOC. Um he was a colonel, and he talked about this in the in the meeting that day. And that's that's part of my point with operator syndrome, is we have to consider it and treat it all together simultaneously. But modern medicine rarely works that way. What I often tell people, what I often tell folks is take the operator syndrome medical paper in with you, print it off, go through it with a highlighter, take it in with you to your appointment, and show it to your doctor. Educate them. And then your one complaint is operator syndrome. I think of operator syndrome as as a framework. It isn't a specific diagnosis, and it is relevant not only to operators, it is relevant to many other warrior protectors, including police, including firefighters, um, including many who are in the combat arms. Well, so the book is, you can see it's a fairly thin book, and it was written to be a it was written to be a practical guide to give operators themselves and their spouses and families uh something to read, to learn from. Part of what happened for me was I got pretty sick in 2021. And in 2022, I decided I have this book inside of me and I need to get it out. Uh, I need to write it while I'm still here. And so that became for me, was my my focus for about a year was really trying to get this book out while I had the, you know, while I was able to.

SPEAKER_02 27:54

So your sickness actually triggered you, okay, go go do the book.

The Science Behind Resilience in Warriors

SPEAKER_01 27:58

It kind of functioned as lighting a fire under me. I I had been thinking about writing a book at some point and maybe delayed it. But that so that was the idea of the book was to put something that would have a practical use out there. There is research going on right now. Stanford, a group at Stanford, have two papers under review right now that are really, really good, solid research with active duty operators. I think the sample size is over 200. I've worked with them, so I'll be a co-author in the paper. But essentially, it's an empirical validation in guys uh in active duty operators. Um so that research needs to happen. It is happening. Um, and of course, there's research happening all over the world on all kinds of things related to traumatic brain injuries and chronic pain, et cetera. Yeah, less than two weeks ago, a woman reached out to me. Uh, she is a Ukrainian woman who's lived who lived, born and raised in Ukraine, first 20 years of her life, relocated to the US 25 years ago. She's now uh sounds like she's a successful entrepreneur business person. And she started a foundation for an aid foundation for Ukrainian soldiers and their families and veterans. And she she reached out to me and she said, you know, I just finished reading your operator syndrome book. And wow, it would be a great thing for us to have in Ukraine because we don't have any treatments there. We don't have much in the way of care for our soldiers. People are just really grappling with, families are grappling with what they see when they're when they're when the soldiers come home from the front lines. And she also shared um that you know she was born and raised in the Soviet Union and what she saw and knew of soldiers uh post-World War II, what she saw in Russian soldiers coming back from Afghanistan in the 1980s. She talked about how the whole really everybody managed these difficulties with vodka, vodka's treatment. So she reached out to me and we're we're talking about doing a Ukrainian translation and publishing the book in Ukraine. Just like we're physiological units, we're also social units. So everything that an operator is struggling with internally is going to have a bleed over effect on family, marriage, and parenting. And you know, and we haven't even gotten to talking about the existential issues, the transition issues. A lot of guys get lonely and kind of go off and disappear into a space of despair.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

From my perspective, understanding to level set my expectations and where I as a spouse could meet you because I can't just expect your brain to suddenly just completely change back or change to what I want it to now be. It's like I have to accept some of the realities of this existence and figure out how to manage, you know, appropriately.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

There's a fine line there. We don't want to allow, you know, traumatic brain injury to be an excuse to behave badly in a relation. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

There still has to be boundaries and accountability.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Right. And so to have an understanding, okay, to be able to say, okay, a little forgiveness, a little grace, these behaviors, these the the anger or the avoid lack of connection sometimes, the the emotional lack of emotional intimacy is a challenge.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

We've all kind of found a humor in it now because we're like, all right, team, let's go execute the mission.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

As a spouse, and I'm actually thinking, and by the way, for your audience uh to know, both Herb and Corey contributed to the operator syndrome book. You're both in there with quote. And that's part of what I wanted to do with the book, was not just my voice, but the voice of many operators and spouses. And I think one of the things that you you talked about in the quote that I that I have from you was um, which I see all the time, is the husband, the uh the the retired operator, or maybe the current operator, everything is mission. And every mission is life or death. And every detail on that mission is critical.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Critical.

How Leadership Can Help Prevent Long-Term Damage

SPEAKER_01 32:21

And that makes sense if you're you're going over to you know uh to a dangerous spot. Most of the opposition comes in the form of ignoring and dismissing a closed-door meeting in DC that included neurologists and psychiatrists, but also military folks. I did have, I did give a short presentation. I was asked to present, and then there was a Q ⁇ A afterwards, and the first question uh came from a retired admiral who stood up and raged at me. He raged at me that my ideas don't make any sense, they're outside of modern medicine, and he basically said, Look around the room, all the all the scientists in the room, they're not they're not taking your perspective here. And so he he he basically told me, You're not a real scientist, you haven't followed the real scientific method. And he was angry, he was very angry. It was there was I mean it was rage, his fists were clenched, he was sweating, his face was red, he was sweating, uh, he was he was tense. And he so not only am I not a scientist, I never served in the military, so what do I know? But mostly he said my ideas are dangerous, they're gonna hurt national security, they're gonna hurt recruitment, and who do I think I am? And I should leave it up to those guys. I don't hear that a lot, but I think that's there a lot. I was invited to present at Soft Week uh two years ago as part of a panel, and I did that. The panel moderator was pretty hostile and pretty dismissive.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

Why do you think that is, Chris? Why do you think I mean just you you know I'm asking to speculate, but why do you think some people are opposed to this?

What Families Need to Understand

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Well, it is outside of the mainstream thinking. It is a contrarian perspective. So it's a disruptive idea. Uh I'm disrupting the people in the VA and the DoD who are PTSD experts who have spent their entire careers studying and treating PTSD. And I think part of the problem is, and you asked about friends. So I've worked with probably over 600 operators. I work with a number, found a good handful of foundations. So I think I am a little bit of a unicorn in the sense that I have both the clinical and the scientific experience, but I'm also I also actually know operators and I know veterans. Um I've been over, I've been to the Middle East. I've lived and traveled and worked with guys in the U.S. Um, and like I go to if I go to DC, for example, there's a handful of guys I could stay at their house. I go to San Diego, there's a handful of people I'll I'll stay with. So I've got like little families, adoptive families all over the country. And I think the problem is talk to somebody who has a high position in the in the VA as a decision maker, as a researcher. Ask them, how many veterans do you even know? And I bet it's not very many. Everywhere I present, everywhere. And it might be a fire chief conference in Wisconsin last year, it might be presenting to the DEA in San Diego last year, it might be 19th group, it's the EOD. Everywhere I go, everywhere I present, people come up to me afterwards and say, How did you read my mind? How did you know, how do you know so much about me and my life? I get that everywhere. I did a like a three-hour presentation up in Canada last last year. And afterwards they had donuts and coffee, and people just kind of hung around. Um, and it wasn't like in the US where that would be a 20-minute mingle thing. People hung around for hours. And so I hung around for hours. And after about two hours of just kind of mingling and having conversations, I realized there was one guy who I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye. He wasn't really joining the conversation. He was kind of floating around the edge of the room, looking at the things on the wall. Um, and he waited till everybody else had left to approach me, or maybe I even approached him because it was clear he was waiting for a time. And we sat down and we ended up talking for an hour. And he's this just almost scary-looking, tough, one of the toughest guy-looking guys I've ever known, I've ever met. And he told me he was 50, he had just retired a few years ago, he had never heard of operator syndrome, and I had just changed his life, or his life had just changed with what he was hearing. And we spent an hour, uh, maybe an hour talking. And afterwards, like he gave me, he was crying, he was not crying, but tears in his eyes, gave me the biggest hug. Like you would have thought I had just like handed him a check from the lottery or something. He said he didn't even wasn't even gonna come to the event. Some of his friends said he should, he didn't know what it was about, why would he be there? He wasn't expecting anything. Um, and I get that all that kind of response all the time. It really the framework really resonates. If you put if I said to you or put your hand on this tree stump, and I've got a great big hammer, and I'm just gonna whack away at your hand for several minutes, and afterwards your hand is a bloody mangled mess. We're not gonna call you weak for that. We're not gonna say you failed in some way. We're gonna say that's the normal consequence of having your hand hammered by a heavy hammer. That's that's how I view operator syndrome. It's the natural consequence of a career, of this type of career.

SPEAKER_02 37:59

I do want to come back to you. You talked about your health.

The Future of Treating Operator Syndrome

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Are are you doing okay? I have a chronic health problem that that may take me someday. Um, right now it's managed. I've accommodated to it. I have to, you know, it's something that I've had to accommodate. Uh what I don't have is the number of hours I used to have. Um, so fatigue is probably my my my primary challenge. Um, but I haven't pulled away from any of my activities. Um, I just don't put it, I just don't have as many hours. So I'm still teaching at the university, I'm still traveling and presenting and and consulting.

SPEAKER_02 38:34

I mean, what's ahead for you in 2026? What do you look forward to this year? Any big things?

SPEAKER_01 38:40

A week or two up in Canada working with their military. I'm hoping to get a week or two in Ukraine working with their medical military um soldiers, probably a wide range of different folks. Might get over to Israel to do some work over there. I'm not planning to write any more books. Uh I want to see this, I want to see if we can get the operator syndrome book translated and published in Ukraine and and if that works well, maybe some other countries.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

Any talk you could give, who would be the audience and what would be the topic?

Final Thoughts: Warriors Are Human Too

SPEAKER_01 39:15

Well, I give a lot of talks on operator syndrome to military uh communities and now police and firefighter communities. I actually do a little just a tiny, tiny, like any given time, I might have one or two clients who are not soldiers that I that I get paid for. I could give talks on on human performance and fitness that have nothing to do with operators per se, but could be relevant for high performers in other in other areas. And that would be discussion about brain health, not from a brain injury perspective, but how to take better care of your brain, sleep, hormonal health, cardiometabolic health, uh, and those those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 39:59

What do you value most in life?

SPEAKER_01 40:02

Um, my family, my country, my faith, and the meaning and purpose I get out of my work. And in no particular order there. But I think one thing Americans have, I think one thing that's slipping away from us, and I definitely see this in my undergraduate students, is the understanding that we are supposed to serve others, including our families, but also our communities, and that mission and purpose in life, whatever it is, is critically important for the well-being of each of us. I think we we're we're that's slipping away.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Subscribe, like, and comment, and don't forget to set those notifications. We'll see you next week with another special guest.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

Until then, on your journey.