Bounce Back

PRINCIPLE #1

That Dog Don’t Hunt

Stop Torturing Yourself and Stop Asking “Why”

In the late summer of 2020, I visited my buddy David Vobora to get a personal training session at his Adaptive Training Foundation (ATF) in Dallas, Texas. I had met David, a former NFL linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, at a birthday party in Dallas in early 2014 when, over some whiskey, he charmed me into becoming a guinea pig for him and created a unique workout to align with my injuries. We developed a friendship, and more important, he enjoyed helping me so much that he eventually started a foundation that adapted workouts to the challenges posed by injured vets and athletes.

One of the last nights I was there, I crashed a barbecue for the twenty or so men who were attending a weeklong workshop. As the sun went down, the guys started to gather around a bonfire, enjoying burgers and beers. Someone suggested that they assess the week. One thing led to another, and the conversation got a bit heavy. Now, anyone who knows me knows I shy away from that sort of touchy-feely stuff. Not that I don’t believe in it—talking about feelings in front of a bunch of strangers is just not my cup of tea. So, I made my way to the back of the group, expecting to sit out on the kumbaya moment, when one guy named Bruce, who had been injured in a car accident and paralyzed from the waist down, spoke up.

“I just have to keep going. Because if I slow down, I’ll just end up crying. The worst part of it all is that I don’t understand why. Why it happened, why it happened to me.…”

Joe, the head counselor, replied, “Let’s dig into that.…”

Oh no, we won’t, I thought.

“No. No, you don’t,” I said, this time aloud, my outburst surprising the group. I surprised myself too. I meant to be lying back, just enjoying the bonfire.

The counselor shot me a look and asked, “What are you talking about?”

“There is no digging into why because you’re never gonna get the answer you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“I get it—Bruce wants to understand why this was meant for him. At first, I did too. But the truth is ‘that dog don’t hunt.’ What I mean by that is, you’re never going to get that answer. So, why harp on it? You are only slowing yourself down from accepting something you can’t change and moving on. As I live and breathe, I will never know the answer to why I stood in the exact spot where there was an IED buried into the ground, waiting for me. It’s a fight you are not going to win. Ever. So, why not make peace with it?”

There was a long silence, except for some loud cicadas beckoning from the woods behind us. I worried I spoke too much, too harshly. Some people aren’t ready for the hard truth. But after a minute or so, I saw many heads nodding in quiet agreement.

Believe me, it took me a while to get to that understanding. When I first got hurt, I had a nasty case of the “whys” while lying in that hospital bed, not knowing what my future looked like. My wife can tell you, I tried to give her many opportunities to walk away—why would she want to hang around someone who couldn’t wrap his arms around her? Hold his baby daughter? If you believe in the man upstairs, why was he playing such a bad joke on me? I felt like Lieutenant Dan, who lamented to Forrest Gump in the famous movie: “I should have died out there with my men. But now, I’m nothing but a goddamn cripple, a legless freak! Look. Look at me. Do you know what it’s like not being able to use your legs?… This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to me.” But nobody had that answer—not the doctors, not my family, not my buddies. None of us will get the answer to why bad things happen to us, until we enter those pearly white gates.

After a few months of the inner demons hashing it out in my head, I came to a new understanding of the old southern saying “that dog don’t hunt,” meaning an idea or thought that doesn’t work, much like a dog that isn’t very good at hunting. All the what-ifs and “Why did this happen?” only delay the ability to accept things that have happened. I decided that I had to be okay with not getting an answer. I was alive, after all—a lot of my buddies on the front lines didn’t have that luxury.

This nagging feeling can drag on for many who have loss in their lives. Take Mitch, a buddy of mine whom I met through T.A.P.S., the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, an organization that supports the families of fallen soldiers who died serving our country. He lost his father at a very young age, a twin sister at the age of twenty-nine, and then six months later, his nine-year-old child was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It took him a while to circle around the abyss, but he came out the other side about a year after his son’s death, and now he often speaks to people around the country about grief. He uses another metaphor that works just as well: He compares asking “why?” to trying to get mercury off a table. Not only is it dangerous, but it is also so slippery that you can’t possibly contain it. It is a great image that speaks to the futility of trying.

DON’T RELIVE THE PAIN

I always start my speaking engagements with a joke. It is just my nature to go for humor to break the ice. After all, there is always a bit of unease when I first come out onstage, walking on two metal legs and waving an artificial arm. There is usually a pause in the room, a collective break in the breath that always seems to take a minute to return. (I always put them at ease with a line like, “I hope this one goes well, I really bombed at my last event.…” Corny right? But it works in lifting the mood.)

My body is something that people always struggle with at first meeting me, because it’s a physical manifestation that says I went through something. I had something bad happen to me.

But that is it. Something bad happened to me.

Past tense.

Behind me.

I moved on.

It is that simple. One night in 2014, after my documentary premiered in Colorado, a vet came up to me, and I could tell from his eyes that he was still hurting inside. He asked me, “Tell me something… do you keep asking why this happened to you? You must think about it all the time.”

I responded, “No, I really don’t. I’ve accepted what happened and had to move on. It was hard, but I am very happy with my life and my family—life goes on.”

“You’re lying to me. There is no way.”

“Really, no, I am not lying. I had to make a choice to move on or stay stuck. If I kept thinking of that day, I’d be reliving the trauma over and over again. I’d be retraumatizing myself. There is no way you will be able to move on if you keep reliving such trauma. I had to think of my wife and my kids, and I made that choice to move forward. It took discipline not to go there, but I knew I had to do it for myself and my family. I chose not to stay wounded.”

He told me I was a liar a second time, then a third. He insisted that I was putting up a facade. I didn’t like being called a liar, but I felt bad for him—his pain felt so raw. Knowing he was a vet—he may have been struggling with PTSD—I couldn’t get him to believe me. Unfortunately, I have crossed paths with other people who concluded the same thing. How could I be so well adapted? I may be a bit too sunny and high-energy, but I am also proud of what I went through to get where I am today. So, it hurt to be called a liar. I hope that, in time, he found a good way to heal and come to terms with his past.

BE OKAY WITH UNCERTAINTY

Your struggle may not stem from a physical injury or illness—it could be a relationship that has ended, a death of a beloved parent, or getting let go from a job you loved. Whatever the hardship is, part of it is a loss of control over your life. It is a loss of a routine, of a life you knew and loved. You may get sad, anxious, and even angry, and it is only human to ask why, as it is in our nature to seek understanding, certainty, and closure. The human brain is not designed to handle a lot of psychological uncertainty. It can cause a lot of anxiety because, to the brain, uncertainty means danger.¹ So, it is only natural to want to have an answer. Without knowing why something happened, it may feel like a vast wasteland of unknowns stretches before you.

STOP ALL THE RUMINATION

Harping on the whys and looking for certainty is where you get into a cycle of overthinking. Without stopping that loop of questions cold in its tracks, you will remain stuck, and you will stay mad or sad—why would you want to live like that?

It will take resolve and a bit of will at first, but you need to push beyond the why. And once you do that, you can start to realize the opportunity you have before you—acceptance. That doesn’t have to mean you are over it, but it does mean you can move on from it. I am not sure who said, “Use the past, don’t let the past use you,” but wow, truer words have never been spoken.

It isn’t easy, especially for those with PTSD, which is known to bring on excessive rumination.² But it is necessary. I can’t make yesterday not happen, just as I can’t make ten years ago not happen, just like you can’t make a divorce or a job loss not happen. That is part of life—but you know what? We can’t always change the situation, but we can change our attitude. It sounds easier than it is, I know. But I look at it this way: No amount of ruminating will magically grow my arms and legs back (although that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?). So, I like to say, “Don’t deliberate, recalibrate.” Take, for instance, the term “wounded soldier.” I don’t call myself that. I instead call myself a recalibrated soldier because the word “wounded” feels powerless. Like a victim of a crime or other trauma, you’re a victim one time, but you don’t have to be a victim for life. I was wounded once (badly), but I am not wounded for the rest of my life. So, don’t become a victim of uncertainty. You cannot give it power like that, or it will power over you.

I also don’t like to hand power over to fate, either. Some people have told me, “Maybe this was God’s plan for you the whole time.” They mean well, and if I were a more religious man, maybe I would believe it. Instead, I think, Well, did those plans include my being blown up? Really? Instead, I like to think that what doesn’t kill me has made me stronger. This is a concept of post-traumatic growth we’ll get into later in the book, but it is a powerful belief that everything we live through makes us who we are today. I am different from the day before my accident. I am stronger for it.

When people go to that place of darkness, they don’t see. They can’t see the future. They can’t see that things are going to get better. Don’t get me wrong. It is completely natural to wonder why something happened to you. It is natural to want to have an answer—good or bad, we search for the logical. We need closure; we think it will allow us to move on. We try to think through a problem to better understand it, but sometimes that brain of ours goes into overdrive and becomes an endless loop of doom. And if we have experienced some sort of major trauma, your endless loop of doom may turn into catastrophic thinking. We may feel like that event is proof that anything and everything bad can happen to us, and we develop catastrophizing as a coping mechanism, and feel in a constant state of alert.³

Rumination is like getting your tire stuck in the mud—you are pressing on the gas, but you aren’t moving. You get frustrated and mad, but that mud is back splashing all over the truck. To get out of it, you need to think differently. For me, I figured, well, my limbs are not growing back, so I can mope about it or change my thinking. It was an active choice—and one that I continue to work on to this day—but it was a no-brainer. The alternative would not only keep me stuck, but could also become debilitating in time, causing anxiety, depression, and sleep and eating issues.⁴ It can also threaten your relationships. In time, no matter how supportive your loved ones have been, they may grow tired of the negative thoughts, and they may start to distance themselves from you.

This kind of thinking can’t be turned on and off like a faucet, though. We need to work at it as we retrain our mind to stop that feedback loop. Here are a few tips that help me when thoughts fill my head:

FLIP THE SCRIPT

It is easier to see a path if you see this as a choice. Stay stuck or go forward. When you do that, then you can make a commitment to challenge that part of yourself and be intentional about doing the opposite. Flip the script. You’ll need to accept that there are two things in life that we can truly control—our attitude and our effort; everything else is out of our control. No matter how bad the cards you get dealt, you get to choose how to play them. You choose how you are going to respond and how your experiences are going to shape you.