Hi, I’m Dr. Molly Marty with Resiliency Matters and today we are speaking with Dylan Tett, a graduate of west point and founding executive director of Bastion Community of Resilience. I’m thrilled to say Dylan is also World Makers 2021 Trailblazer Honoree. So much to talk about, Welcome Dylan!
— Thank you; good to be with you Molly.
Can we start by you sharing some of the things that you experienced or observed after returning from serving in Iraq?
— My life is a bit unique in that regard I redeployed in ’04 and moved to New Orleans three months before Hurricane Katrina. In some respects, I was at the right place at the right time, but I really never had a shot at a normal life. You know the the things that I was grappling with at the time were things like hyper-vigilance and depression and suicide ideation. I felt completely alone and disconnected. I felt completely out of place. I felt my best when I was working, since we work ourselves as a coping mechanism to cover up or hide a lot of the pain and loss that we’re experiencing. That’s just a little taste of what I was going through at the time.
My life after Hurricane Katrina completely changed again, and a lot of the things that the army trained me to do actually melded very well in the greatest rebuilding effort since the Marshall plan. At my worst, I did want to end my life, but, luckily I did get the help I needed and started volunteering at a summer adventure camp for gold star kids. Those kids taught me a new expression of courage, which is the courage to live on, and that was really the beginning of about a 10-year journey to come all the way home.
We are so very very very grateful you are here with us. You know you hold a very special place in my heart. I mean you and your comment about you know you had no shot at a normal life, I would say is there such a thing or if there is I think it’s overrated.
— Amen
Deployment and military-related movement can result in concern, panic, and loneliness for family members. (Image created by Brett Sayles)
You started looking for solutions and you came across the work of Dr Brenda Hart, a friend in common (I encourage our viewers to watch Brenda’s show). She wrote a brilliant book called Neighbors, it’s at worldmakerinternational.org. What really resonated with you about Brenda’s model of intentional neighboring?
— Fast forward a few years, and my buddies were coming home with this thing called traumatic brain injury (TBI). I had no idea what it was, and I got very curious about it. I went to the pentagon. I went to Walter Reed and the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio. I went to the hub of the VA’s Polytrauma Network and what everyone described to me — the doctors, the warriors themselves, their caregivers, and loved ones — was that there wasn’t just a gap in the continuum of care, there was a cliff.
Once these warriors were discharged from the hospital, the communities they were moving back to were not equipped to sustain them, to make them viable, to keep them moving forward. I went to a group home that the VA was funding; I thought maybe this could be a solution. It actually made me angry when I walked inside. It’s not a place I wanted to live. I met a young warrior in his 20s who was so over medicated that he was drooling out the side of his mouth on a couch with no one around him. I thought we could do better than this.
I stumbled on this blueprint that Brenda pioneered for foster youth and adoptive families, and we began to adapt it for military demographic. I have to say it has worked very very well. It took me a little while to convince enough people that this idea could work, but we purchased five acres started building homes. Today there are 58 households who call bastion home. We have a clubhouse, and we’re doing lots of wonderful programming and we are now on the threshold to build 14,000 square foot commercial wellness center that will open to the public and share with them what we’re learning about trauma and resilience. Community is central; it is pivotal; it is the linchpin and the ongoing recovery and reintegration for warriors. I would say anyone who who has experienced trauma needs a community to keep them grounded and to keep them moving forward.
So talk a little bit about the service component. You have this intentional neighboring — really a mandatory service — as part of that community. Help our viewers understand more of the context.
— Service has evolved. That idea of it has evolved since we started. There is a an ethos; it is it is partly the warriors ethos of not leaving anyone behind. So beginning with this sort of expectation of service, we began to uncover a lot of the complexity of our warriors and their families. Some of it was not military connected; it was linked to poverty, adverse childhood experiences, such as growing up Black in the south. The idea of service began to evolve.
Our professional staff, which is composed of occupational therapists, social workers, and certified brain injury specialists, has many functions, and one of their primary functions is integrating neighbors into the care plan. It’s a process of customizing each household’s approach to their own health and healing, but it’s done in partnership with their next-door neighbors. We have retired elders, who, in fact, have even sold their homes to live at bastion and give that kind of instrumental support and peer support that some of our warriors need. If you think about TBI, in the most severe cases these are folks who need skilled care; these are folks who need help with their activities of daily living that you and I take for granted.
It really does take a village, not to be cliche, but when you have that kind of support built in next door it makes all the difference. We’re not tracking everyone’s service hours anymore because the expectation of service was so well ingrained in the beginning and through the orientation and indoctrination of residents as they flowed in. We are all growing together, and it’s amazing to watch how even when our elders need support, our warriors are there to help them. Let’s not forget, we have between 30 and 40 children who live at bastion as well — playing pivotal roles in the recovery reintegration of our warriors and in the quality of life of our elders. Everyone’s benefiting; it’s just beautiful.
It’s it is beautiful and brilliant. It’s true culture change is what you’re describing.
–Yes, yes
You gifted me this way back when when we first met, but it’s your user guide to Bastion, and I want to read a bit from it as we move into the mind/body discussion. It says “military instruction is reinforced with the type of physicality that can sometimes border the psychotic. We are trained to ignore our bodies for survival; we embody [this] long into our post-military lives. It’s no wonder that so many veterans find it difficult to speak about painful emotions. We have effectively disconnected ourselves from the true pain we feel in our bodies due to trauma, loss, broken relationships, or moral injury, and the same is true for feeling joy, peace, or love. Let us also remember that veterans do not own the monopoly on pain and epic struggle. Everyone experiences trauma at some point in life. “There’s a lot to unpack there; where do you want to take this?
— Well, on my journey to wholeness, I again stumbled on a model for healing in community. This is a model that the center for mind-body medicine has used all over the world for the last 30 years. We’re using it at Bastion. I’ve taken it to Ukraine to heal veterans from the war, but what I have seen in every location I’ve gone to where I’ve used this model is very personal transformations occurring in real time. I mean, you can see it happening before your very eyes.
I’ve experienced this type of healing coming back from Iraq. I think there was some type of spiritual death. It has taken the better of 10 years to effectively turn this body back on that I had effectively turned off. It took time to connect my mind with my body and with my spirit once again. Recruiting the whole body to heal is something that, as I said before, it’s transformative. So when you do it in a community, the effects and the benefits of that transformation tend to persist a lot longer than they would in a one-on-one type of professional client relationship.
I think you’ll appreciate this, Dylan, I was listening to an Arabic scholar over the weekend, and he was pointing out in various languages they don’t have when you talk about as the mind-body connection. They don’t have a word for body; their only word for body is “corpse,” like the body is simply a container. Then we, in western civilization, can track it back to certain philosophers and and philosophies. We’ve created this distinction. We act like we need to put this mind and body and spirit and emotions back together when it was whole all along, and we’ve created these constructs that create separations. Have you ever heard that?
— No, that’s fascinating.
It was really profound. I’ll share the source with you. All right viewers more on post-traumatic growth and resilience stay tuned… welcome back to Resiliency Matters today we’re speaking with Dylan Tett. Dylan, I was thinking, as I was thinking about you and prepping the show, that I have filmed over 50 episodes, and I’ve never talked to a guest about Joseph Camel’s The Hero’s Journey. Although, I know many of them are well-versed in it. So I’ve been saving this for you because I know that this is part of your structure. Share with viewers a bit about “The Hero’s Journey”.
— Yeah, well Joseph Campbell, as you know, really kind of framed this notion that our our lives follow these stories, and these stories have been told throughout civilization. The story of the one who feels a tug calling and separates themselves conducts a test, an initiation, and then comes home.
Oftentimes, that is the story that is not told but not so much is told about the return. That knight who goes on his quest to slay the dragon finally confronts the dragon, and as he is plunging his sword into the dragon’s chest, he looks one last time into his eyes and sees only the reflection of himself.
This idea that the enemy is not some external threat but it’s actually something in us all.
What do you gain from that kind of awareness with you getting from that kind of insight? I mean I think it could be different for each person but there is a promise. With that knowledge comes wisdom, and that wisdom is not to be bottled up. It is to be shared for the good of humanity. I think for many warriors who are returning home, they are discovering a potential answer for themselves. They are recognizing that they are not alone; actually we are all connected — all of us all around the world. I felt that connection on the front line in the Ukraine, standing in a mortar crater where you could still smell the gun powder because the impact was so fresh. I immediately knew these men and women who were serving on the front line. I recognized them. They were me, and if I could see in the binoculars the insurgents, the Russian insurgents and soldiers on the other side of that line, I think I would recognize them too.
I think a lot of the what we learned in that trip was that the many soldiers in Russia, who were called and activated to fight were completely lied to. They were given misinformation and told that this was their great cause. They had to save these Ukrainians for some made-up reasons. I’m going on a tangent, but what I want to say is that we’re all connected; that’s the bottom line. I think that is probably the the one thing that I have received the most in in my own hero’s journey because it’s allowed me to work with other vulnerable groups — with people who don’t look like me, talk like me, who don’t share the same values as me. I’m talking about people we call Americans, and I serve them too.
That’s a beautiful emphasis on the ‘coming home’ part of that journey. Something else I’ve never done is called a fire round. I’m going to give you a few statements, and you can agree/disagree and tell a bit of a story. So number one, when you recognize a problem become part of the solution.
— Am I saying true or false?
Does that bring up anything? Or you can just say ‘yes’ and move on because it’s such a part of who you are.
— Then, yes. I’ve learned that my good ideas and my own sense of duty have gotten in the way of things. I am becoming more collaborative. I’m asking a lot more questions. I am not going in with any preconceived notions, and I’m maintaining my humility. I think the answers are already out there, and they’re staring us at the face, but we don’t give people a chance to see or share the solution.
When you recognize a problem listen and keep an open mind.
— Yes
Okay, our bodies are naturally equipped for self-healing.
— Oh yes, absolutely 100 agree!
It is possible to come back from devastating experiences stronger than ever.
— Yes, but to a point. We’re experiencing it down here in south Louisiana, where we’re just getting battered storm after storm after storm. In some cases, I think you can resilience yourself to death. There are a lot of people down here, for example, who are really questioning whether they want to be here anymore.
I personally would say you could grit yourself to death but you can’t resilience yourself to death because resilience includes that community around you in a world maker world.
— Yes, the military model does not include community, so, yes, if that were included.
I want to bring this forth, before our time runs out, you played a pivotal role in our name, World Maker. We were at an international resilience and research symposium, and you were talking about the term ‘world making’ in the context of military transitioning back to civilian life (how they need to deal with the impacts of trauma and create a new these lights of meaning and purpose similar to your journey). The room just lit up, not only about how we’re tasked as individuals to create these lives but the broader question of what are we being called collectively to do emerged. We focused on how to create a world worthy of our children. There are a lot of people in transition right now through a global pandemic. What have you learned about the process of world making that might help them along their process?
— COVID has taught me a lot. At the very onset of it, we did a hard pivot operationally. We turned all of our staff outward facing and began to help our neighborhood across the street, our friends in the city. In fact, we helped over 200 people across four countries in the six months. We implemented a telehealth program. COVID in New Orleans has revealed a lot of disparities, in particular around health. It has hit the African-American community very hard here. Why is that? You begin to peel back this is a journey I did not expect when I started Bastion, but I’m happy to be walking this path with my friends in that community.
We’re definitely learning how food insecure people are and not only that but the food they’re eating is killing them. We started a pilot food program with the support of the Bob Witcher foundation. We are making meals together, we are delivering meals, and we are educating people on nutrition. It’s not just warriors and families, we’re doing this with our friends and neighbors in the immediate neighborhood. That is a small contribution that we’re making. I hope to make this program sustainable. I want to create a food revolution. I am walking in this new understanding that food is medicine. The gut is the second brain. That is possibly an answer your question; it’s one example of how we’re making a world that is more inclusive and more equitable for the black and brown communities.
Well, I think that’s the perfect segue Dylan into why you are the honoree for our inaugural Trailblazer Award. I want to read that the Trailblazer Award is presented to a World Maker partner for their innovation and outstanding service to the Human Resilience Field resulting in new pathways for many. You broke ground in Bastion what 2017,
— 2016.
Dylan Tete, founder of Bastion Community (Photo by Nora Daniels)
2016. Okay, so five years in and you know you’ve achieved a structure that is so much greater than the sum of its parts. You are a trailblazer. You are committed to service. What’s next? Just a snippet of what you know, even if it’s just a curiosity or a question of what might be.
— Yes, thank you for asking that question. I will take a sabbatical and rest my brain. I want to be able to imagine what is possible if it’s scaling more Bastions, if it’s moving beyond the veterans space and co-creating a world that we can all share and prosper in. That sounds like a good use of my time and I’m very honored to receive this award, Molly, thank you.
You’re very welcome. Everything with you leads back to community and that’s what I want to leave our viewers with today.
— Yes yes, let us restore the role of community in our frontal lobes. Let’s get that entrenched in our brain again.
Well thank you for your help doing so and thank you viewers for joining us on Resiliency Matters on Media Condensate.
