Veterans Turning PTSD into Posttraumatic Growth with Boulder Crest’s Ken Falke 

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. Today I am so honored to bring you this conversation with Ken Falke. Ken is a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Navy Special Operations Explosive Ordnance Disposal Community. He's also a serial entrepreneur who has founded two for profit and two non-profit companies, including Boulder Crest Foundation.

Ken and his wife Julia founded Boulder Crest in 2010 in Bluemont, Virginia with a mission to facilitate post traumatic growth in the military, veteran, and first responder communities. And just real quick, the science of post traumatic growth essentially says that good can come from trauma, and that mental health struggles can actually help us grow and change for the better.

To help our nation's protectors thrive in the aftermath of trauma, Boulder Crest is using, among many many things, innovative research backed programs, and one of those programs is called Warrior PATHH. That's path with two H's, and it stands for Progressive and Alternative Training for Helping Heroes.

It's the first initiative of its kind to teach America's combat veterans and first responders to experience lifelong post traumatic growth. The program lasts 90 days and it kicks off with a week-long in-person session at one of their three spots in Virginia, Arizona, and Texas. There are zero meds involved. Instead, Warrior Path uses classroom and experiential activities like archery and working with horses to teach life skills, increase community involvement, and promote the physical, emotional, relational, financial, and spiritual health of every participant. The program is delivered by other combat veterans, and it's free.

To date, Boulder Crest has served over 100,000 people. Now, I found Ken in a deep dive on Google. I was looking up PTSD recovery, and I was so grateful when he agreed to talk with me. As you'll hear, Boulder Crest and its mission comes from a series of very powerful events in Ken's life. And today, Boulder Crest Foundation has become a beacon of real hope for so many, as Ken likes to say, making the past a place for reference, not residence. 

Kate Tucker: Hello, Ken. Welcome to the podcast.

Ken Falke: Hey, Kate. Thank you very much.

Kate Tucker: Are you in Virginia?

Ken Falke: Yes.

Kate Tucker: Well, listen, I'd love for you to just kind of take me right there with you. And could you just describe a bit, you know, if I were to go on a walk with you at Boulder Crest this morning, what would we see and hear and what would we experience?

Ken Falke: Well, you know, Kate, September is the start of a beautiful fall that happens here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Bluemont is at the foothill of the first Blue Ridge chain, and it's just a beautiful place, and as you walk around Boulder Crest, especially now, our garden is in full bloom. We have a beautiful walled English garden, and probably today you'd see a couple families walking around and playing on the playgrounds.

Kate Tucker: Do you get out there in the garden yourself?

Ken Falke: I do. My wife is English, and my wife told everybody, I spent 21 years in the Navy, 14 of the 21 years deployed, and my wife tells everybody that gardening was her therapy. So when we started the idea for Boulder Crest, the whole idea of this garden was central to what we wanted to do.

The first two thirds of the garden are just beautiful places for meditation. We do yoga classes out there. And the last third of the garden is all raised beds with fresh fruit and vegetables that we grow there and serve in our kitchen during the summer months.

Kate Tucker: Oh, that sounds like a dream. Wow. Well, I want to get into all of the reasons behind this, but I'd love to start with you. Let's go back to the beginning. Could you describe a bit, you know, where you grew up and what your childhood was like?

Ken Falke: You know, my family's from Chicago and Pittsburgh. My dad's family's from Chicago, my mom from Pittsburgh, and my dad was in the army and met my mom when he got discharged in 1960, I think, and they got married in Pittsburgh, and my dad became a Washington, D.C. policeman, and my mom and I moved down about, I think, a year after he graduated from the Academy during that time. My mom died early in my childhood. I was seven years old, she was 29, of a very rare form of cancer, and I ended up getting kind of raised in the summer by my grandparents and I would tell everybody my grandparents didn't like me much so they sent me to hockey camps to get me out of the house. And I became a pretty good hockey player and when I turned 18 I had these dreams of playing professional hockey and I took off I packed up my truck and drove to Texas and spent a year with a team down in Texas called the Fort Worth Texans who at the time were the farm team for the Colorado Rockies and when I knew I was never going to make the team and make the NHL, my life started going downhill.

I was probably drinking too much and fighting too much and the things that young and dumb 18 year olds do whose lives aren't going well. And when I started to think back about how I was going to get my life in order and what I was going to do to be a good person like I had been raised to be, everybody I started thinking about in my life, there was some tie to the military. My dad, my grandfathers, all my bosses as a child, all my scout masters and the Boy Scouts, my hockey coach was a retired Air Force colonel. I mean, so it didn't take long to realize that the military had had a big influence on my life. And I was in Texas and I walked into a recruiting station and I went in to join the Army because that's where most of my family had served and the Army recruiter was out to lunch and the Navy recruiter grabbed me on the way out and said, Hey, Don't join the Army, join the Navy, and the rest is history.

Kate Tucker: What a twist of fate, wow. So, do you remember any moments where you really started to think about service and what it would actually mean to dedicate your life and your time in that way?

Ken Falke: When I think back, my grandmother, my mom's mom, and my mom were very involved in the church, the Catholic Church, to the point where they used to do the laundry for the priest and the dry cleaning and the ironing. And I think that starts you off in a good way when it comes to service and it shows you the importance of it. And I kind of continued that through my childhood. We always did something, whether it was a Boy Scout project or a school project to kind of serve our community. And I'm sure that came from my mom.

Kate Tucker: So you find yourself in this Navy recruitment office because it's lunchtime and what happens next? That's a major diversion.

Ken Falke: Back in the old days, we had, there was literally a page for every job in the Navy, a sonar man, a quartermaster, whatever it was. And the guy heard me talking to this secretary in the office and he came out and he had the book opened up.There were three pages of Navy divers. There were SEALs, there were EOD, which is what I did, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, bomb disposal, and then what we used to refer to as Fleet Divers, divers that worked on ships and worked on salvage projects and those types of things. And I had learned how to dive in the Boy Scouts as a young kid and I knew I didn't want to just dive for a job because it would probably take the fun away.

So I thought, well, I'll be a SEAL. I mean, I'm very fit. I'll go and do that. So I joined the Navy to be a SEAL and I got to boot camp, took the physical and found out that I needed to wear glasses. I'd never worn glasses in my life. I think I was 20-60 in one eye and 20-70 in another. And then to be a SEAL at the time, you had to have 20-20 vision.

So they put in a waiver. They thought they'd get an eye waiver for me, but it never went through. And I was working for a SEAL chief, an old Vietnam-era SEAL chief. And I said to him, you know, What do I do now, chief? And he said, Why don't you go EOD? And I said, what's that? And he said, it's bomb disposal. And I said, Wow, bomb disposal, that sounds kind of dangerous. He goes, Yeah, I wouldn't do it either, but it is an option. So, um, so anyway I was you know, super confused and I ended up leaving boot camp and spending the first 18 months of my career back in Washington, D.C. in the ceremonial guard, the unit that does all the White House ceremonies and does all the funerals in Arlington Cemetery. And that's kind of how my career got started and just happened to be about 18 months into my Navy career, I met an EOD guy. And he recruited me into the program. I wish I'd have done it 18 months before I did, but that first 18 months of my life in the ceremonial guard was pretty special too.

Kate Tucker: Well, talk to me about that. What do you think you took from that that maybe informed who you are today or how you approach your career?

Ken Falke: I was never a huge fan of the Navy. I just loved what I did in the Navy. I, you know, I'm, they call me the contrarian. I'm an anti-bureaucracy kind of guy. I didn't really like that part of it, but I love diving and jumping at airplanes and blowing things up and shooting guns. I mean, all the things that you, you know, you dream of as a young kid. And I was getting paid to do this and it was amazing. But that first 18 months in the ceremonial guard, I think if it did anything for me, in hindsight, was probably to elevate my emotional intelligence, my empathy. We did 1400 funerals in 18 months. So you see this and you see the sadness around a gravesite and then the celebrations of life. 

And right before I went to EOD school, I was on duty one night when Air Florida Flight 90 took off from National Airport and hit the 14th Street Bridge and almost everybody on the plane died On one of the coldest nights in history in Washington, D.C., there was a foot of ice on the Potomac River. And I was on duty that night and we had two tugboats behind the ship and we ended up going out and pulling dead bodies and wreckage out of the water. And it was a super sad event. But it also was a good exposure to the trauma that I've witnessed through the rest of my career and that we help people with now kind of learn how to live with.

Kate Tucker: And so that experience, I would imagine, kind of impacted you and the decision you made to join EOD. I mean, what, what was it about that night?

Ken Falke: So that night, this little dive boat came chugging up the Potomac River. And back in the day, the EOD school was down in a place called Indian Head, Maryland. And they took all the students and staff who were dive-qualified and brought him up to do the initial diving on the aircraft to see if anybody was maybe still alive in the fuselage, and I ended up getting on that dive boat at some point in time, and I wasn't diving. I was just making coffee for the divers. The regulators kept freezing up because it was so cold and we'd pour hot coffee down the regulators and try to get them back in the water. And I was just doing what I could to help. 

One of the guys on the boat said, man, you're a good worker. You ought to join EOD. And we started talking. I told him what had happened with the SEAL team and next thing I know I was kind of getting recruited into the program, so I don't know what I would have done. I probably would have got out of the Navy, I think, if I wouldn't have gone EOD. And there was nothing that was, like, grabbing me in the Navy until I saw these guys, like, literally rolling off the back of the boats and into the water and doing some cool stuff. That's what inspired me to do it. And then once I got in, there was no way I was going to get out. It was as fun a job as you could have in the world, I would say.

Kate Tucker: Really?

Ken Falke: Yeah, yeah.

Kate Tucker: Well, explain to me exactly what the job is because I've never thought of it as fun.

Ken Falke: The training side of it specifically is fun, jumping out of airplanes and hanging off the bottom of helicopters and sliding down ropes out of helicopters and diving in deep waters, blowing things up and playing with explosives and all the things that, you know, shooting guns on ranges and a variety of different types of guns.

But you know, one of the things about the military in any profession, not just EOD, but we train a lot and you train so that when, excuse my language, but when shit hits the fan that you're, you're ready for it. And you know, you train on landmines and booby traps and those types of things. And then when the real ones come in front of you, you've done so much training that it, you know, you don't even think about the fact that it's going to kill you.

There's a lot of challenges too. You spend a lot of time away from your family and sometimes six, seven, eight, and I think my longest appointment was nine months away from my family. It's a long time, you know, and, uh, they used to say in our profession that EOD stood for everyone's divorced. And, you know, Drew and I celebrated our 41st anniversary. So we're a little bit unusual when it comes to the community and marriages. We're not the only ones by any means. We have a lot of friends whose marriages survived a lot of deployments and a lot of military time, but it's definitely unusual.

Kate Tucker: Hmm, you're doing this work and then In March of 1989, you suffer a major injury. Can you tell me what happened then?

Ken Falke: Yeah, so in 1989, I went to what we refer to as basic airborne training, how to jump out of airplanes. And the last jump, the fifth jump, you have to make five jumps to graduate and get your parachute wings. And on the fifth jump, the winds gusted up to about, I think the investigation said 39 knots give or take, 40 some miles an hour, and these round parachutes that you start jumping with when you're in training, uh, you're not supposed to jump them in any winds over eight knots. So at the speed I'm falling from the sky under a parachute, I'm also going that fast backwards because the winds blow in the parachute. These round parachutes aren't as controllable as rectangular parachutes. So, I hit my feet and I hit my ass. I hit my shoulder and dislocated that when I hit my ass. I broke my lower two vertebrae and then I hit my head and was knocked unconscious. And then my parachute reinflated and it drug me about 100 yards down the runway.

And a friend of mine, who I'm still very close to, came to me and I don't remember any of this, but he's told me the story over and over. He asked me, you know, who I was, what day it was, what jump I was on, was I married, did I have children, and I didn't know the answer to any of the questions.

And that was kind of the start of a long healing process, but it was not a great day that I remember, but I think again, doing the work we're doing now with post traumatic growth, I think it was the start of my transformation, my personal transformation. 

Kate Tucker: How so? 

Ken Falke:  Well, I think you get these challenges. The doctor comes into the room and says, Oh, I'm not sure you're going to walk again, or I'm not sure you're going to be able to stay on active duty. Or, and then you start to think to yourself, well, I could take the easy way out, which is, Okay, doc, if I can’t stay on active duty, then start my medical review board and discharge me. But then I started thinking, well, I was married. I had one child at the time. I have two daughters now, but I kept thinking to myself, what am I going to do for a job if I get out and I'm disabled or whatever it might be?

So I kind of took that as a challenge. We say, you know, the difference between trauma survivors is this mentality of victim or victor. And I wanted to take this kind of victorious kind of role and trying to make sure that I didn't become a victim. That was March of 89. In December of 1989, I ran my best PT test I think I ran in my entire military career. Nine months later.

Kate Tucker: Wow. What do you think it was about you that allowed you or helped you to make the choice to be victor instead of victim?

Ken Falke: I just, I just didn't know what I would do. And I thought, you know, we got this house in Virginia Beach. We got bills to pay. We got food to put on the table. I love what I'm doing. I love my job. Yeah, it hurt. My back hurts. But if I can get over this, I will. And I started thinking about the positive. things. And then, you know, in the science of post traumatic growth, one of the phases of it is creating a new story for your life.

So if you believe, as I do, that today is the first day of the rest of your life, then I don't have to live in the past. I don't have to have that burden of the past holding me back from being what I want to be in the future. And that's, I think that's what I kept thinking was, I can do this job. And as I laid in a hospital bed, as I laid in my own bed at home and started creating the story about who and what I wanted to be and it all surrounded this wonderful community that I was raised in.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. So it sounds like you had an experience to look back on or to draw strength from. You also had accountability and responsibility with your family and you had purpose in your work. What was the military story? Like what did they offer you, you know, recovery-wise and what ways did you maybe change that or go your own way to really find healing and recovery?

Ken Falke: You know, I'm going back and forth to two different back doctors and one saying you had to do surgery. The other one saying You're crazy. Don't do surgery. And finally, I actually said to my dad, I said, Man, I need to go see a civilian doctor. And these military doctors just don't seem like they know what they're talking about. They're not even on the same sheet of music. 

And the one doctor who made the most sense to me, who said, don't get surgery, said that at my age, how old was I in 89? I was 27 years old. When you fuse vertebrae, and you change the fulcrum point in your back, and as you bend over, then your other discs start to separate, and then you start to get degeneration in these other discs, and you have long term life back problems.

So anyway, I went to a civilian doctor and the civilian doctor was on the side of the don't get surgery and said, here's what you need to do. You know, the strength of your back is directly proportional to the strength of your core. And he said, but do me a favor and go see this lady.

She was a chiropractor and this is 1989. I tell everybody, you know, chiropractors were looked at as witch doctors back then. It was a lady named Dr. Linda Foster, who I credit for a lot of my, you know, not only my physical healing, but my mental healing. And she practiced a technique called DNFT, which is Directional Non-Force Technique. So this is, call it three months after my injury, and my left shoulder, which had been dislocated on that jump, I couldn't lift my hand above my shoulder.

And I was doing all this physical therapy with the Navy and I'd walk out of therapy and they'd give me a bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength or Motrin 800s and, you know, something to kind of alleviate pain. But then I felt my stomach was rotting away and I just, it just was the wrong kind of path. So I sought out this Dr. Foster and I walked out of the first appointment with her and I could raise my hand over my head. And, you know, she said to me, if you ever go see a chiropractor and they tell you, you have to come back every week, don't believe them, don't fall for that trick. And like I said, by December, I felt a hundred percent and I went and ran my PT test against the recommendations, by the way, of a Navy doctor. And I scored the best score of my career.

Kate Tucker: What an accomplishment. And I mean, it's so interesting that you had to go out into the civilian world to find the support at that time. So when and why then did you retire from the Navy?

Ken Falke: So I, um, so I had this great career. We went, spent time in the States, spent time overseas, about 50 percent of our career overseas and 50 percent here in the States and met a lot of people and I started to have a pretty good reputation in the community and I'd done just about everything. I'd been on missions with SEAL teams and Army Special Forces teams and cleared landmines and booby traps around the world. And then my last semi-operational job in the Navy, I got recruited to a program that we used to call the PEP program, the Personnel Exchange Program. And they sent me to England to basically work for the British EOD forces.

And I did that for two years. And we had a couple of American EOD guys visiting the British EOD facility where I worked. And they were from the West Coast of the States and they said, Oh, you got to come to the West Coast. And here's what we're trying to do. And all your experience would be really valid. And by then I'd made the senior enlisted rank in the Navy. I joined as an E1 right into boot camp and I retired as an E9, which is the highest enlisted rank in the Navy. And I got my orders from England to go to San Diego. And they had me go to the headquarters element, what we call the group level headquarters, and I was really disappointed because I thought I was going to go to an operational unit, and I saw behind the wizard's curtain and some of the really bad leadership and policy decisions that were being made, and I remember 9/11 happened, there were people making decisions that had never even been in combat before, and it got to me. Once I saw that bureaucracy in action, I just, it just wasn't for me.

And I just came in one day and I said, I'm going to get out, I'm going to retire. And I thought, well, I'm going to get out and start my own business. Cause if, if I'm going to get out of the Navy, I'm going to go work for myself because I definitely don't want to work for, you know, some of the idiots that I'd been working for, for that last year.

Now, I think I was a little naive in the sense that even if you run your own business, you're always working for somebody, you know, you know, it's not about you by any means. And at the time there was a, you know, 9/11 that happened. There was a huge need for security companies. And I started the security company and we put about 40 or 50 employees together and had some really cool contracts with the government, doing some interesting work at the state department, at the intelligence communities and the department of defense, and then a bomb went off in Iraq in 2004. And that changed everything because when it came to these, we call IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The lack of expertise in the Department of Defense was, was crazy. And our company grew from 50 to 500 employees in the next couple of years. 

And our primary mission, you know, what we were doing early on in the company's history changed completely. And we became a training company and every soldier that would go into Iraq or Afghanistan would go through one of our training courses. And we supported people all over the world in that mission. So, you know, a lot of veterans that transition, really struggle because they get stuck in the past that, you know, I had this mission, I had a fun job and now there's nothing out here like it. I got hired by so and so and they stuck me in a cubicle and, you know, whatever the stories might be. I never had that problem.

And that's what I tell people. I say, I never had any transition problems because what I realized was it was all down to me now. All the, I couldn't complain and bitch and moan about what leaders because I was that guy. So I had to do something good. And that's kind of what motivated me, I think, to really kind of grow a company and build a great partnership with our customers.

Kate Tucker: So I feel like we could have a whole conversation about your entrepreneurial life, but I want to make sure we get to Boulder Crest. So you start a couple successful nonprofit businesses, and then you found a nonprofit called EOD Warrior Foundation. And then in 2013, you opened the Boulder Crest Retreat in Virginia. What was it that drove you to create Boulder Crest. I mean, what was your initial vision for it? How did it come to you?

Ken Falke: My first company was called AT Solutions, and we started in 2002 and we sold it in 2008, so we only ran that company for six years. I ran it for two more years after I sold it, stayed on as the CEO, but then I left, so it was an eight year successful startup, and financially it put us in a place where we never in our lives thought we would be. But early in the war, a friend of mine was deployed in Iraq and one of his soldiers had been hit by an IED and lost his legs. And he called me and asked me if I would meet the family at the hospital. And when I got to the hospital, there was no family there. Just this young guy with no legs. And my wife and I ended up paying for his mom to fly up and be with him. 

And being a veteran of the first Gulf War, I kept thinking, well, this will all be over in two or three months. Hopefully it's the last amputee I see. And it wasn't. I saw many, many more. And because we were funding most of this, and not just out of my pocket, but out of the company's pocket, which I guess was my pocket too, we ended up standing up this non-profit. Started off as the Wounded EOD Warrior Foundation. Today it's known as the EOD Warrior Foundation. 

But there's bomb disposal personnel in every service. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. And that's what we were really there to do was to raise money to help keep the families by the injured side. During this long healing process, because the average amputee would inpatient in the hospital for anywhere from 3 to 12 months and then outpatient for an additional 12 to 36 months. So you imagine, you know, a family from Iowa who's back in Washington, D.C. at the hospital and have lost their jobs. They don't have enough money to pay for hotels and rental cars and meals and all the things that come with that lifestyle. So we would raise money as an organization to help offset that.

Well, I took a year off after I sold my company and I went to school at Georgetown University to do a master's degree. And during that year just happened to be the worst year in Afghanistan for amputees in the EOD community. And I invited, I remember the first family, I said, why don’t you guys come out this weekend and get away from the hospital and just come out and have a barbecue with Julie and I?

And that's kind of what started it all. And then the next weekend, a bunch of the amputees themselves came out and we had a huge barbecue and, and that went on for, I don't know, give or take a year. And we loved doing it, but we also knew that that wasn't what we wanted to do for a retirement job, was run a bed and breakfast.

And we had this big estate. We had 200 acres of land, and I came home one night from school at Georgetown and my wife and a couple of her friends were sitting at our dining room table with some empty bottles of wine and I walked in to say good night and they said, Oh, no, no, you got to sit down. We got a great idea for you. And the great idea was what today is Boulder Crest. We donated 37 acres of this 200 acre estate and built the nation's first privately-funded wellness center for combat veterans.

Kate Tucker: You developed Boulder Crest from a very specific experiential response, which is so powerful. But I mean, more broadly speaking, in the military in general, set the context for, you know, the state of mental health and why Boulder Crest is so important.

Ken Falke: We thought of mental health early on as this idea that stress has a massive toll on our bodies and that when you can take breaks from that stress, it gives you time and space to make better decisions. And that was kind of how Boulder Crest started off as this idea that families needed to get away from the hospital. We're only an hour west. They can come stay for a couple days and get that space that they need to do better. The other thing we thought, you know, because we had sold this company and people knew we had some money, we got hit up by a lot of veteran non-profits for financial donations. And we had just put millions of dollars of our own money and 37 acres of land into this project.

And I thought, well, we just can't keep giving all our money away. Why don't we do this? If there's small, innovative non-profits who are doing interesting work for veterans, let's let them use the facility free of charge. And we had all these non-profits who were doing interesting work, acupuncture, acupressure, meditation, EMDR, all these different types of therapies that weren't at the time being done at the VA. You know, this reminded me of the chiropractic days. If we can make that free to people who want to explore alternative methods of healing, what a great thing.

And that's what we did in the first year. But man, I'll tell you, we met some, uh, some characters in that first year too. And some people that just weren't healthy themselves that we didn't feel should be teaching things to people who were struggling.

The other thing that we really noticed, and not that every non-profit needs to scale and grow, but there was no strategy in most non-profits for what the future would look like. And this problem, by the way, that we're still trying to solve is huge. I mean, one of three people in the United States has mental health issues and in the military, 30 to 35 percent of people that deploy in combat come back with post traumatic stress. So these things were like big numbers. 

And I kept thinking, okay, well, this music therapy thing is really cool. But how in the hell are we going to serve 10,000 people or a hundred thousand people? You know, we're serving 200 or 300 people at the most in a year. That's not enough. So this idea came to me that, okay, let's put a business model around this. Let's figure out a strategic vision of what we want to do. And the first thing was we had to build our own programs. 

So I traveled all around the United States. I bought a plane ticket and met all these people and psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers and almost to a person, every one of them told me what we do for veterans doesn't work. And I remember I was having dinner in San Francisco with a very prominent couple, two psychiatrists out of the University of San Francisco, husband and wife, and they said that to me at dinner, It's a shame, you know, we're not doing the right thing. And I finally said, If we're not doing the right thing, why are we doing it?

And I remember the wife of this couple looked me right in the eyes and she said, Well, it's the only thing the insurance companies will reimburse us for. And that's when I thought, okay, now I got it. This mental health world is really driven by associations and insurance reimbursements. And I started really digging into it and met with some really impressive people in Chicago and San Francisco and UCLA.

Finally met this doctor in North Carolina, Tedeschi, who was a clinical psychologist and a professor at UNC and he had coined this term in 1995, post traumatic growth, and I was really intrigued by it. And most of Tedeschi's research was focused around families who had lost children to cancer. I remember I grew up in a family like that, but I said to Tedeschi, I said, listen, I really love your research and I love the outcomes and what's happening here with the treatments you're doing.

But I said, have you ever done anything with military? Cause I, although we're not that different, we are a little bit different. And I just wanted to see if there was any research around it.

And he said, well, actually I studied prisoners of war from the Vietnam war. And then he had my interest because, you know, I'm a combat veteran. I've been to Sere School. Sere School is a school that teaches you how to behave or escape if you're potentially a prisoner of war. And it was scary. I mean, there was some nasty days in Sere School, but I knew that I was going to get through it because the Navy wanted me to, whereas these men and women, specifically men, 591 of them that ended up in prison camps in Vietnam, they didn't have that choice. They didn't know if they were going to wake up or die or whatever from the torture and treatment that they were getting. And I just kept thinking to myself, as I thought about the trauma that occurs on a battlefield, what could be worse than being captured and tortured? Vietnam, they were in prison camps for six, seven, eight years. And I just thought there can't be anything worse on the battlefield than that. 

So Tedeschi had my interest and we went on to talk about what he learned with these prisoners of war. And what we learned was that the Vietnam era of soldiers, the general population, about 30 percent of them came home from war with PTSD, which is about the same for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. But in the prisoner of war community, the percentage was down to 4%. And then the most interesting thing he said to me when we talked about that was the 4% were the ones who were in captivity for the least amount of time. 

I said, well, listen, I, I understand, Rich, that you've studied the outcomes of post traumatic growth, but do you think we could teach people how to achieve post traumatic growth, overcome trauma and achieve post traumatic growth in their lives without the natural 20 year timelines that your research provides? And he said, you know, nobody's ever asked me that before, but I'd be willing to try. 

I brought in all these interesting people I'd met that I liked from around the country, including Tedeschi and said, what do you guys think about that? And they said, move this exercise to here, move this to there, move that. So we said, okay, we've got a plan. Let's go deliver a program. We delivered a program. We came back around the table. We were very hard on ourselves, making sure that we were really satisfied with what we had. And although the program has changed since version one, we're on version six right now, for the most part is what we started to do and the results we’re getting blow away anything that traditional mental health care can provide, just really changing lives and we're super excited about it.

Kate Tucker: I want to talk about the program Warrior PATHH, but before we do that, could you explain the difference between post-traumatic growth and post traumatic stress disorder?

Ken Falke: PTSD is a diagnosis that's identified in the DSM, which is the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, the Bible for psychologists and psychiatrists. If you have PTSD, you've experienced a life threatening event and that life threatening event stays with you, meaning that you're having nightmares and struggling with the stress of it for 90 days or more.

That's the semi-literal definition. So I started thinking when I read that definition, I started thinking, well, what happens if you have it for 89 days or 91 days or, you know, by the way, I'd witnessed this already a thousand times by the time we had done this with soldiers and their families who had come here to Boulder Crest. And the realization I'd come to is that PTSD is not a great diagnostic. And then, by the way, why would we even label somebody with it? You got a disorder because you saw your buddy get killed? I mean, that's going to stay with you. You know, I watched my mom die for two years. I mean, that stuff stays with you. Doesn't have to hold you back.I tell people all the time that the past is a place for reference, not residence. You will not be successful in life if you live in the past.

That's what I think I started to understand was that this DSM was really put together to create these insurance labels that could be reimbursed and identified through insurance codes. I ended up meeting the guy who, in 1980, put the PTSD diagnosis in the DSM. And I was having a conversation with him and I said, is there anything else you would want to tell me? And he said, Ken, I'll tell you this, putting that diagnosis in the DSM was the biggest mistake of my professional career. And I said, why? And he said, Because labels are very heavy to carry. 

So what we did at Boulder Crest was we redefined the definition of trauma, we redefined the definition of stress and teach people that no matter who you are in life, you're going to live this series of ups and downs and not every day of your life is going to be good, and we're going to teach you how to live a great life through that.

When you think of post-traumatic growth, it's not a diagnosis, it's an outcome. It's this idea that you've experienced a traumatic event and that you have learned from that traumatic event. i. e. a prisoner of war and a Holocaust survivor, a guy on the battlefield who lost his best friend. You've learned from that event and that you have, in fact, become a better version of yourself. And then we put the science around that. What does that mean? And how do we measure that? That's the stuff that we're super interested in.

Kate Tucker: Oh, let's talk about that. So how does the program work? You know, if I were a veteran or first responder coming to Boulder Crest, what would I do? What would I experience?

Ken Falke: The program is a 90 day program. It starts with a seven day residential setting, so at one of our facilities, and it's very intense, and I've had friends of mine who are the toughest men in the world come through this program, and they've said it's changed their lives, and I've watched them heal through this process and cry through the process and all the things that big strong men normally don't do, and it's not just for men. We have a women's program as well. 

The curriculum is focused on this framework of post traumatic growth. The idea that we have to educate, that we have to teach people how to disclose and talk about these bad times. And all of those things are both taught in the classroom. And then we have some sort of an experiential activity, whether it's a hike or archery or kayaking trip, where all of that stuff comes together and those conversations continue to happen, but in a much more peaceful setting than, you know, what you might get in a traditional setting. And it's delivered by peers.

So everybody who's teaching the course has been to combat or we have first responders who come to our programs now too, or, you know, served in the police and fire departments and have seen the worst kind of trauma that humanity has to offer and have overcome it and are teaching other people how to do that in the journey.

They say the epitome of post traumatic growth, when you look at somebody who's achieved it, is this whole idea of becoming an expert guide. You've made it through your journey and now you can turn around with the strength and the determination and help others through theirs. And that's, that's kind of what, you know, really got me excited is creating this in a non-medical and non-pharmacological kind of way.

Kate Tucker: Hmm. In that first seven days, I mean, for those of us who have never been to boot camp or to anything like Warrior PATTH, what are the actual activities? Are you talking about physically difficult? Mentally? I mean, what are they?

Ken Falke: I think it's a combination of the two. We start every morning off at 6:30 in the morning with some sort of PT, yoga classes or Pilates moves, or we have a partnership with TRX. We use a lot of body weight strength exercises. We have three meals together every day. We talk about the importance of nutrition and food. There's a lot of veterans and cops who stress eat and they get super fat. So we talk about the importance of nutrition and then we go into classroom settings and we have them roleplay with each other, you know, like as an example with, you know, disclosure, super important is talking about what happened. Why are you struggling? What do you think it is that’s holding you back? And a lot of people don't want to share that. 

But to tell that story in front of others, because once that's off your back, and that's kind of an analogy we use at Boulder Crest. It's this idea that in life you get this rucksack when you're born. And every time a traumatic event happens, another rock goes in your rucksack. And at Boulder Crest, we give you this ability, this time and space to come and dump your rucksack out and just put the rocks back in that are important.

You know, at some point in time, no matter how strong you are, you're not gonna be able to carry that rucksack. And that's what we've seen, you know, especially with, you know, combat veterans, especially with some of the special ops combat veterans who have made 13, 14, 15 deployments in their career, and they come here and they're, they're broken. They're really, really struggling and we just tell them, dump your rucksack out and let's figure out what's important and go back and work on that.

Kate Tucker: Are there any stories or people who come to mind, you know, who show the transformative effects of this program that you could share here anonymously?

Ken Falke: We think, you know, although not all scientists agree with this, we think personally that the anecdotal data is super important, not just the scientific measurable data, but these stories.

Last week we had a program here and it was six combat veterans and a cop. And they had just come out of their horse session, and I went up and was talking to them, and to a man, every one of them said, Man, you saved my life, and I'm like, I didn't do anything, I haven't even been here, I just met you, you know, it's, it's these instructors that are teaching you, and a lady who just spent three and a half hours with you with these horses, and those horses, by the way, you know…

One of the reasons I love the name of your podcast is, I tell people all the time, you know, the suicide rate in this country is crazy. In the veteran community, it's off the charts. And I tell people all the time, suicide's a disease of hopelessness. If you can't create hope in your life or have somebody teach you how to create that hope in your life, you can see why people kill themselves. I can. We've lost more EOD guys, remember, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were about bombs, improvised explosive devices. The number of people injured or killed by them was huge factor higher than people who were shot by bullets. And when I tell you that we've lost more E. O. D. men and women to suicide since 9 11 than we did on the battlefield,you gotta stop and think about that for a minute, right?

 And then you start looking at these charts and the amount of money that's being spent on suicide prevention and the numbers are going up. The fact that the suicide rate's the highest in the United States since it's been since 1938, and the correlation between these two lines is parallel. More money we spend, the more suicides we have. 

I had a buddy of mine I was with on a Saturday, and the first phone call I got three days later on a Wednesday morning was he had shot himself the night before. And the last picture I have with this guy, we've got our arms around each other and smiles from ear to ear. None of the signs and symptoms they said about suicide were relevant. 

So how do we create hope? Yes, we're going to spend a week. We're going to kick your butt for a week here and for 90 more days, you're going to do some online stuff. But at the end of the day, if you want to be healthy, it's the person in the mirror, the man in the mirror, the woman in the mirror, that's got to do the hard work. That's the other thing that I've seen in the mental health world is, everybody's selling a silver bullet, you know, psychedelics, dogs, whatever the story might be, but the truth is that there's no silver bullet for life.

The fact is that every day you have to get up, even when the times are hard, and look in the mirror and try to muscle through the day in a way that you can look back on at the end of the day, and at least be grateful for something, and to know that hope's there and that the future, And tomorrow could be better than today. That's what keeps people alive.

Kate Tucker: Do you remember a moment, maybe early on, maybe, maybe not, maybe something someone said to you, or a story that was relayed to you, where you realized, like, this is really gonna work, this is really working?

Ken Falke: So the guy that ran our programs here at Boulder Crest, Virginia, for the first five or six years, this guy's name that worked for us, his name was Dusty and some people said he was Spartan like. I mean, he was a big, muscular, 82nd Airborne guy, tattooed all up and down and lots and lots of respect given by the students for his kindness and his empathy. 

We have a labyrinth on all of our facilities. A labyrinth is a form of mobile meditation. We give people things to think about during these walks, and we do two labyrinth walks. The first one is designed to get people to leave a burden in the center of the labyrinth before they walk back out. The second labyrinth walk is designed to create a new story. This whole idea of today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm going to be a better version of myself, and this is how I'm going to do it. What's that story look like?

 And on that walk, the end of it, our staff lines this curvy sidewalk that comes outside of the labyrinth, and they're separated, let's say, by 20 or 30 feet each, and each person comes off the labyrinth and handshake, or a hug, or whatever it might be. And I saw Dusty and this guy, like, embracing in this really manly hug and handshake and it was the last guy to come out of the labyrinth. And when Dusty turned around the tears were just running down his face and I went over to him to see if he was okay and he opened up his hand and inside of his hand was a bullet 45 caliber bullet this guy had given to him in the handshake and he said, Dusty he said this was my next step if this program didn't work.

And Dusty had a jar before he left us and retired, he had a jar on his desk and I think he had like 11 or 12 bullets in there from people who had done that. So those are the stories that, you know, you'll never forget.

Kate Tucker: With the platform you have, And the opportunities that you get to speak with the civilian world, with Americans, what is it that you would want them to know about veterans and first responders, and particularly the work that you're doing at Boulder Crest? What is the message you want to communicate?

Ken Falke: There's been lots of stories about this whole idea since 9/11 of, you know, thank you for your service, these kind of hollow comments. I tell people all the time, you know, thanking me for my service, I'm grateful for. I'm not an angry veteran that would yell at you and tell you not to thank me for my service. But if that's something that you're thinking about and if you're meeting veterans, really sit down and have real talks with them and understand what can they do to help.

This is a nation that's built on communities and the most successful communities have people who get along with each other and we just don't know people in this country like we used to. Having these interesting conversations and having group,  I mean, we have a group here where I live that get together like I think it's Tuesday nights at Starbucks for an hour and it's just a group of veterans that get together and sit around and talk about life and what they can do to make their lives better and make the community better. And I think that's super important.

I think really what I want to do with the rest of my life is to figure out how can we change mental health for all. This isn't just about veterans and first responders. Yes, for the most part, veterans and first responders see the worst trauma that humanity has to offer, but we're not the only ones to see that. And the way the system's going, and the fact that we rely on these medications, and we look for silver bullets, and that we're, you Insurance companies are driving the diagnostics and treatments, it doesn't work. And the answer at the association level is we need more mental health professionals. And that's not the case. We need better programs is what we need.

Kate Tucker: I have one more question, but I'd imagine just, you know, long, long term, because I know you have Arizona as well, and you're also working with other non-profits, training them in this programming and methodology that the big, big picture could include where that is something that insurance companies cover and where that is part of what the VA might offer. I mean, is that something you are thinking about?

Ken Falke: Yeah, it's exactly what we're thinking about it because I've told everybody here, this ain't about us, ain't about the money. We got to teach people how to do this. We embedded in the Tucson Police Department three and a half years ago, and every recruit who joins the Tucson Police Department goes through one of our programs. And it's not taught by us, and we're not charging the Tucson Police Department anything, it's we train the trainers, and that's what I hope that we can do. That's the way this thing's gonna scale and solve the problems, because the problems are huge, you know, if you think – one in every three Americans are suffering with anxiety and depression, I mean, you're talking about a hundred million people.

One of our scientists on our wellness advisory committee is a community psychologist and I said to him, I said, You know, one of the things I'd really love to understand is, so say somebody graduates warrior path. Okay. They're good. They feel good about themselves. They're going to go out and change the world, but how many people in their lives will they affect? That's where the numbers start to make sense.

I said to the chiefs of police, you know, policemen who aren't well, don't police well, how do we get your police departments well? And if they're well, and they're policing well, then this community starts to thrive and become a better place. And when you think about all of that, and then how do you measure this impact of how do you get to 100 million people?

That's how you do it, because the scientist came back to me and said, Ken, I think a healthy person probably positively affects 500 people in their lifetime.

Kate Tucker: Oh, my gosh.

Ken Falke: So now you start to say, OK, well, I trained a million people last year. They've gone out and impacted 500. Now I'm at the point of 50 million or whatever the story might be. Yeah, so it's exciting. I think we love to be looked at as a veteran and first responder facility. That's what most of our funds come from. But yes, we think that the VA should pay for some of this. We think we should train people at the VA. We think that the law enforcement community should. Organizations should train people in this and should fund some of this. So we're working all those angles.

And, I tell everybody I was a bomb disposal guy for 21 years of my life. The hardest thing I've ever done in my life is raise money. Raising private money to run organizations like this is super hard. And that's why I'm so grateful for the people that follow us, the people that invest in us and believe in us and allow us to do this great work.

Kate Tucker: Ken, this has been so incredible to get to talk with you. And I got to ask you. What's giving you reasons to hope these days?

Ken Falke: What's given me hope every day is when I walk into this organization or when I talk to Josh or our staff, and I hear these stories over and over again and realize that we're doing exactly what we said we were going to do. And I'm just so hopeful that we can continue to grow this and scale it around the world.

Kate Tucker: Thank you so much, Ken. This has been such an inspiring conversation. I just so appreciate you taking the time.

Ken Falke: I'm super grateful, and thank you, and I hope in some way this helps somebody.

Kate Tucker: Thank you so much to Ken Falke for the essential transformative work he's doing to help veterans and first responders and their families turn trauma into lifelong growth and strength. We've got links and more about Boulder Crest Foundation in the show notes at HopeIsMyMiddleName.com 

Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening. It would mean so much to us if you would follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. We love hearing from you. And if you're still listening, please copy the link to this episode and text it to a friend. That actually makes a huge difference in helping us reach more people with more hope.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media, produced in association with Reasonable Volume. This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Sound design and engineering by Mark Bush. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media. And thank you so, so much for listening. We'll see you next time!