(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Bob Nevins of Alliance 180 gives a presentation to the Veterans Business Network of the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce.
When a circuit breaker in a house trips, it is a different problem than a lightbulb blowing, and changing the lightbulb does little to help restore power, Bob Nevins told a handful of people at the Veterans Business Network meeting, Wednesday May 4.
The circuit breaker is his metaphor for the effects of trauma on the brain.
“It’s like an emotional circuit breaker pops,” Nevins said of trauma. It can cut off emotion instantly and keep a person in a "fight-or-flight" mentality for a very long time, sometimes decades.
It is an effect of post-traumatic stress disorder, he said, and he argues that drugs and therapy that are meant to repair that damage do little until the breaker is reset.
His program with the group Alliance 180 in Saratoga County resets that breaker with the aim of preventing veteran suicide. The three-day program is free for veterans. The organization covers airfare, lodging, and meals for veterans from around the state and country.
“You have to remove any excuse not to come,” if you want to get people the help, Nevins said.
The group holds programs a couple times a month and often has multiple veterans on a single weekend. The veterans arrive in Saratoga in the evening, have a meal and go to bed on the first day. They chat and meet, but the aim is not camaraderie or a weekend getaway, Nevins said.
The second day, they are paired with a horse and with trainer Melody Squier who helps them “speak” the body language that a horse understands. As part of that training in a large round pen, the veteran startles the horse on purpose and takes instruction from Squier that will calm the horse back down.
When the veteran calms the horse, and the horse feels secure with the veteran, the circuit breaker resets — suddenly — and emotion floods in like light in a dark room.
On the third day, they leave. They go back quickly because it is not a resort or a vacation, Nevins said. But they are emotionally reconnected, and this opens them to possibility and hope.
Nevins said he started working on this and other programs when he saw too many veterans committing suicide. He was a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam in 1970 and 1971.
Jason Collins, a Navy veteran and Alliance 180 board member went through the program.
“I still can’t explain what happened to me in the pen,” he said.
“We’re going through the training with Melody. We’re going through all this process. It’s nothing profound, and all of a sudden that happens.
“And your buddy who you were just chatting with — you know, shooting-the-shit — is bawling his eyes out,” Collins said. “It’s very intense. It really is.”
Nevins said his group has brought through almost a thousand participants — veterans, first responders and front-line healthcare workers — and he estimated that only five did not have this experience.
Continuing the electricity metaphor, he said he sees the lights turn back on behind their eyes.
He has gotten some scientific support from the psychiatric community in the form of Stephen Porges, PhD., a psychiatrist and professor who has been a chief proponent of the Polyvagal Theory of psychiatry, which studies, among other elements, the relationship between trauma and the autonomic nervous system.
“Post-Traumatic stress is not a mental health issue alone. It’s physiological,” Nevins said. It is a shift in the nervous system. A veteran’s mind stays in that “fight of flight” threat state, and they do not know they are in it, Nevins said. The work with the horses resets the autonomic nervous system and turns off the fight-or-flight response, Nevins said.
Hicksstrong co-founders Michael and Jolee Hicks said they liked what they heard, but they still see a need for therapy and talking through the pain. Their group was founded after their active-duty son took his life in 2019, and their nonprofit works to “save military lives.” They offer a number of services, but a primary one is financial support for therapy.
“What Bob does is great,” in the way that it reconnects a veteran to their emotional state, Michael Hicks said after the presentation, but he believes there will be greater growth with therapy after.
The Veterans Business Network is a part of the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce. Alliance 180 is actively searching for funding and donors.