Meet Jim…

Hi, my name is Jim. I am an Army veteran who battled PTSD and chronic pain. I’m also a husband and father of two children, although I came very close to losing those relationships altogether.

Back in 2008, the recession hit hard in our small town and I found myself out of work for a year and a half. Eventually, I made the choice to join the military where I would be paid to go to school and learn a different trade. I knew the military life would be hard, but I didn’t have many other choices. After two years of active duty, I was pulled to be a part of team that would deploy to Afghanistan to provide security during the Afghan elections, and to clear convoy routes of IED’s as our forces moved across the country. I was very naive – never did I think that my deployment would change me.

Whilst I was away, I had experiences worse than I could have imagined. I began to JIM shut down my emotions as I also found my body shutting down from the trauma that I was experiencing. I suffered severe pain in my neck, shoulders, knees and lower back which resulted in lack of sleep, problems focusing, and I struggled being around other people. I was given the option to get out or sign another contract while in Afghanistan. I made the decision to leave the military, so I could be present while my kids were growing up.

After getting out, we moved back to our small town where I found a good paying job. This was not enough and I continued to retreat from the world. My relationship with my wife started to fall apart. I was losing myself in thought, so badly that I would find myself places not knowing how I got there. That year, after returning, I collapsed to a low I had never been in my life. I was told by doctors there was nothing wrong with me even though I suffered from extreme pain and couldn’t cope with daily life. I started to formulate a plan to either leave my wife and kids and disappear off the grid, or commit suicide. That’s when my wife recommended I meet with Dr. Peter Holmes. I reluctantly went to the meeting and he began to explain what was happening inside of me. He explained it as a volcano of issues that had begun to pressurize and I was about to lose it.

I asked him one question at the end of the session, “Can you fix me?”. His response shocked me. He said my situation was not that different from the thousands of people he had seen over the last 30 years and asked me to start this process called a Rapha journey. I began to meet with him regularly and connect with some of the men from the Rapha community who offered to walk with me as I began to uncover and dismantle the issues that had brought me to this point.

Over the last couple years, I have realized the issues I had coming out of the military were all warning signs of things gone wrong and the damage I had not dealt with from my childhood. The military, like a magnifying glass, caused the problems to be compounded.

I have since found healing from some of the most painful parts of my history by using a cathartic process of letting go of the damage in my feelings. I have gone back into the pain of a previous failed marriage that changed me into someone I didn’t even know. I’ve experienced the healing that came as a result of letting go of the anger against my ex-wife that I had allowed to consume me for 15 years. My relationship with my present wife has started to heal and we have begun to communicate in a way that we have never done before. We are now part of a community of men and women offering support to others in their own journeys. I now see how my past, and all the things I began to believe about myself, were affecting my future. I have the tools to move forward in this journey and have freedom to be who I was created to be.