Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Shelman Spencer | Bob Delaney, a motivational speaker on Post Traumatic Stress and Resiliency speaks to...... read more read more
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FORT SAM HOUSTON, TEXAS - Service members who return from deployment step off the plane with additional stressors picked up from being in combat. They struggle with feelings of guilt, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and many other emotional and internal conflicts not seen by the naked eye.
Soldiers and civilians assigned to Joint Base San Antonio had the opportunity to listen to Post-traumatic stress expert and motivational speaker, Bob Delaney on December 2, 2016, at the Fort Sam Houston Theater.
Delaney joined the New Jersey State Police and was recruited to go undercover with the FBI where he infiltrated and took down 30 members of the mob. After completing his undercover work he went through the effects of post-traumatic stress. He then sat down with another officer who knew what he was dealing with.
“One of the things we really stress is that peer-to-peer conversations are the first line of defense to post-traumatic stress growing to be post-traumatic stress disorder, is talk about it,” said Delaney. “But what happens more often than not, we make believe it doesn’t bother us, we minimize it and those are the kind of conversation we hope to have today, to create that grassroots movement of peer-to-peer conversation.”
Delaney says it’s okay to have emotion. Service members are warriors, doing what they’re trained to do when the bell rings. Yet when they’re in a safe environment speaking about your true emotions is healthier.
“Don’t think of it as a mental illness, it’s a human condition. Sophocles wrote two plays about the warrior not knowing how to act when he came home from battle and look at how many years ago that was,” Delaney says. “After World War I we called it shell shock, we called it battle fatigue after World War II, we’ve had a term for this.”
Delaney speaks that post-traumatic stress isn’t exclusive to service members. Many people sustain post-traumatic stress. It can come from being in a car accident, home fire, natural disaster, or being a victim of assault.
“There’s a stigma that takes place, we don’t understand it, and because it’s something that is fearful and anytime something is fearful to us we push it away rather than embrace it,” said Delaney. “There are so many stories that are rich within the military that would help all of us its getting those soldiers to talk about their experiences.”
In my mind, Delaney says, I think we’ve over medicalized it. That’s not to say we don’t need the medical side, what he means is that we scare people away when we speak about it in these terms. His belief is - if we keep post-traumatic stress at post-traumatic stress and not develop to become a disorder to the point to where there is a movement towards mental illness and then and also the reality that suicides come as a result – we have a job to figure out ways to put roadblocks up at the early stages and have these kinds of intervention programs.
Although not being a service member himself, Delaney finds that by him sharing his story of being law enforcement and working with the National Basketball Association, those are organizations that service members are able to relate to. His battlefield was the streets of New Jersey or Philadelphia or New York. Service members on a battlefield are on foreign soil. But that all go through similar experiences, just on different stages.
”I liked this a lot better than the standard PowerPoint presentations, said Spc. Benton G. Cosper, a geospatial engineer with Army North. “His story was compelling and good to connect on a personal level. I liked the message he was sending. Talking to battle buddies is important.”
The drive that Delaney sends to his listeners is to release a little bit of stress at a time instead of holding it deep inside until it explodes.
“The big thing for future soldiers to know is to make sure you have someone that you can talk to that is going through the experience with you or has already been through that experience someone that knows what you are talking about,” said Sgt. 1st Class Donna M. Hunter, who works in the surgeon’s cell for Army North. “It helps to just talk about it and let it out instead of bottling it up and having it cause issues at home with your spouse or kids.”
Delaney credits the exercise he got running up and down the court as a high school referee in New Jersey as helping him start to recover from his undercover work. He parleyed that into a successful career in the NBA.
Delaney has spent the last 30 years speaking before federal, state, county and local law enforcement officers and agents throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. He has also talked to service members throughout the United States and overseas in combat environments. He has helped many to understand and identify symptoms of post-traumatic stress and the impact it has on the individual and the ripple effect to family and friends.
| Date Taken: | 12.02.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 12.05.2016 14:39 |
| Story ID: | 216466 |
| Location: | FORT SAM HOUSTON, TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 2,141 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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