Healing from Trauma Through Meditation
One of the most encouraging stories about the power of mindfulness that I've come across
ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!
Anxious people who like to google their anxieties will often come across a particularly noxious type of clickbait: This Simple Trick Works Better Than Klonopin for Anxiety, the headline will promise. Click on the link and … surprise! It’s meditation. It’s always meditation.
The problem is, I have never really liked meditation, and I’ve learned that this is a common sentiment among people like me. (Strivers, honor-roll kids, Washingtonians, etc.) For my book, I searched the world for cures for anxiety that didn’t involve meditation. But every time I thought I found something that wasn’t meditation, it turned out to be meditation, or some other form of mindfulness. Even the personality-change study that guided much of my experiment recommends meditation as a way to reduce neuroticism, the personality trait associated with anxiety.
But once I started to look closer into meditation, I found a lot of people for whom meditation worked better than I (or they) expected it would. And once I signed up for an intensive meditation class, it also worked for me better than I expected it would.
So I thought I would share the below story, one of the most striking meditation stories I encountered, which involved a veteran whom I’ll call Gabriel. I interviewed Gabriel while reporting my book, and I think his story serves as a powerful example of what meditation can do, even if you don’t “believe” in it, and even if you don’t know if you’re doing it “right.” It shows how mindfulness of any kind can halt the dark, intrusive thoughts that plague the anxious mind.
Gabriel had joined the military for “no noble reason,” he told me. In the late 90s, he was a young man living on the West Coast and working three jobs just to pay $1,000 a month for a shabby apartment. One day, Gabriel was smoking pot with a friend’s roommate and complaining that he couldn’t afford college. The friend suggested joining the Army in order to collect GI benefits. Gabriel wandered into the recruiter’s office, and a month later, he was on a plane to basic training. (Because of the sensitive nature of his current job, Gabriel would only allow me to write about him pseudonymously, and to say that he now lives in the Midwest.)
The Army provided Gabriel with the stability and belonging he had always craved during his chaotic youth. Suddenly, he had friends and a mission. After 9/11, the country rallied behind the military. He was in his early 20s, and everyone around him felt what they were doing was incredibly important. “When you're in an environment where everybody’s doing it, it's really easy to just do the job and not really question it,” he told me.
Gabriel did human intelligence, a euphemistic-sounding assignment that meant gathering information from sources on the ground. This included conducting interrogations, which often entailed a purposeful twisting of one’s moral compass. The interrogations required “treating the detainee the inverse of what you think of them,” Gabriel told me.
If you thought the detainee might be an insurgent, you treated him pretty well: You built rapport and tried to make him like you. But if he was just a nobody, a “Joe Iraqi,” and you thought he knew who the insurgents were, you had to do something else entirely.
Joe Iraqi might hesitate to expose the local insurgents because the militants might later try to harm his own family. So, “the way that you get him to tell you who they are is by making him more afraid of you than he is of them,” Gabriel says. This process, of scaring detainees into talking, was called “fear up.”
That doesn’t mean actual torture; Gabriel had to get permission to even yell at a detainee. But you can make someone very afraid without ever laying a finger on them. Some of what Gabriel described were just standard tough-interview techniques, like being quiet and letting a detainee squirm. But at times, Gabriel would lie to detainees, threatening to send them to a long-term holding facility. He would prod them to feel afraid for their families, or ashamed of themselves, and then release them back to their cells for a long night.
On the other side of his job, Gabriel was developing sources among everyday people in the community. This, too, felt morally questionable. The sources who had the best intelligence were “dirtbags,” as Gabriel calls them—the ones closest to the insurgents and criminals. On one hand, he didn’t really like these people. On the other, he got to know and care about them, in a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome. (The Army did not reply to a request for comment about these techniques.)
Over time, Gabriel felt a growing disconnect between what he had to do for work and what he felt inside was right. Once, he told me, a detainee was so rattled by an interrogation that he had a seizure, and all the other soldiers high-fived Gabriel. At the time, it felt good.
It didn’t really hit him how horrible that was until he got out. “Everybody wants to believe they're a good person,” he told me. But was he?
Like so many other veterans, Gabriel was diagnosed with PTSD. Back in the U.S., he would see someone that reminded him of one of the detainees, and he would wonder how the detainee was doing now, or about how the interrogation had affected his life. He would lose entire afternoons to intrusive thoughts. He at times had trouble being around his kids. When people called veterans “heroes,” he bristled a little.
He tried talk therapy and medication, but they weren’t really helping. “I had a lot of internal crises, morally speaking, about who I was, who I thought I was, who I wanted to be,” he told me.
When we talked, I was struck by how unusual his story seemed—of depression and anxiety brought on not by things that happened to him, but by his own actions. Sometimes, the worst form of agony is the kind we had a hand in.
Around 2010, Gabriel had enrolled in college, and, seeking relief, signed up for a meditation study conducted by a researcher named Emma Seppälä. Seppälä, now a lecturer in the Yale School of Management, was studying a form of meditation called SKY, or Sudarshan Kriya Yoga, in which practitioners perform specific patterns of breathing for about 30 minutes.
Gabriel had always thought meditation was hokey, but he went along with it anyway. As part of the study, he learned the SKY breathing techniques and bonded with the other participants, who were veterans just like him.
In her studies, Seppälä has found that Gabriel and the other veterans showed reductions in PTSD and anxiety scores after learning the SKY breathing techniques, but that a control group did not. And indeed, within a few weeks, Gabriel was feeling less tense. Though meditation didn’t erase his misgivings about his time in the Army, it helped attenuate his emotional responses to his thoughts. Instead of pushing down his negative feelings, he would let the feelings happen—he’d feel them rather than fight them. He decided to just try to be as good of a person as he could be, now. Not long after, with the help of another mindfulness program, he quit smoking. He’s been meditating ever since.
The thing is, the SKY technique Gabriel learned is more complicated than other forms of meditation. The breath work—a distinct pattern of fast, slow, and sharp breaths—has to be learned through a teacher, and it can be hard to remember.
Which helps explain why, when I pressed Gabriel on what kind of meditation he does today, it sounded like he doesn’t do SKY. When he meditates, Gabriel often only goes for about 15 minutes, which is well short of the full SKY sequence.
Instead, Gabriel sometimes uses the VA’s meditation app, and sometimes he just sits quietly and pays attention to his breath. In fact, he didn’t seem very familiar with SKY when we spoke. “SKY is a term that I heard, but it wasn’t what they said all the time,” he told me.
When I ran this by Leslye Moore, head of an organization that runs the SKY veteran programs, she acknowledged that sometimes people who get the SKY training stop practicing or even forget how to do it. But “anytime someone is doing any kind of breath work or sitting with their eyes closed in a mindful way, there's some benefit to it,” she said.
Today, Gabriel still feels less neurotic than he was 10 years ago. He barely drinks, and he doesn’t yell at his kids like he used to. Sometimes he’ll fall off the meditation wagon for a few months, then come back to it during a stressful time. Meditation made him more self-aware, more sure of what he wants in life. Sometimes he still thinks it’s hokey. But it works, so he keeps doing it. If PTSD is an ocean, he says, the waves still crash over him, but they’re not as frequent. “And,” he told me, “you see a lot more of the beach now.”