Military & VeteransVeteran Jonathan Warren knew something had changed when I returned home from the military. His relationship with his family became strained and many of his friends from the service committed suicide. Jonathan wanted to change things for himself so he dove in to finding treatments that could help him. Not all of them worked but he never gave up. As he found his own success, he wanted to help others as well. Not every treatment works for every person, but Jonathan guides and encourages veterans like himself in their journey to recovery.
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For me I’ve always had a very close bonded relationship with my brothers and my family. And it broke my heart to see what I was doing to them. Really. So that took me into a place of being outside of myself. On top of that I had eight friends that killed themselves. And it was also a driving factor to think well, maybe I can find a way to help my buddies too. So between wanting to have my family and then also may be have an opportunity to save some lives there was just no way you could quit. So it was a lot of faith, a lot of hard work, a lot of trial and error. You know, for me there was a lot of disappointment in having found hope in some of these therapies and then feeling like you got let down. So it kind of was a roller coaster ride. And for me went to school for psychology after I got out of the military trying to figure out what was going on with me. And I think that gave me a platform for understanding what therapies were doing, like what the point of them were. So I tried to get different modalities under my belt just to kind of give me tools that I could use in my day to day life. And even though not one of them was necessarily the end-all, be-all kind of a thing, they did give me valuable resources so that when my anxiety was spiking I could center myself or focus or apply different techniques. And I took breaks. You know, after a therapy I would just see how it worked and applied what I had learned from that and things would get bad again and then I would try to find another therapy. And a lot of it came down to luck. And with finding modalities that were actually effective and being able to relay to my friends this worked for me, this can work for you. And it’s kind of another interesting thing with the space is there’s not really one pill or there’s not one treatment that’s going to work for everybody. What works for me might not work for you and vice versa. So perseverance and hope I think are what you really have to hold onto in that journey. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to a generous donation from the Infinite Hero Foundation.
This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.
About the author: Jonathan Warren
Jonathan Warren is a veteran and Military Director of The Brain Injury Center in Newport Beach, CA.
