Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 737: When The Trauma Comes Knocking with Dean Yates

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Episode 737: When The Trauma Comes Knocking with Dean Yates · The Trauma Therapist

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Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
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My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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authenticity, genuineness and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more about
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my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's
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the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. So five four three
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two and one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast. Very excited
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to have as my guest ate Dean Yates. Dean, Welcome by God,
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thanks so much for being here. So Dean lad the Reiters team that covered
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the two thousand and two Bali bombings and the two thousand and four Boxing Day
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tsunami in Indonesia's Province. He was Deputy Bureau chief for Israel and Palestine in
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two thousand and six. During the eleven In War, he was Reuters Bureau
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Chief in Iraq, responsible for one hundred people from two thousand and seven two
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thousand and eight. It was during this time that a US Apache gunship killed
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two Wards journalists in Baghdad on July twelfth, two thousand and seven. He's
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got a new book coming out mid twenty twenty three, okay, and he
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says while he focuses on those occupations, the book contains messages for anyone living
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with trauma mental illness and their loved ones. He says he believes the story
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is a powerful testament to having a strong support network. Might be tough to
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read, it's also uplifting, and he says he hopes it will inspire and
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bring about changed Dean. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you God. So
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all right, before we go in here, share with the listeners were from
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originally and where you are currently. Yes, I'm from Australia. I'm from
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a little country town in New South Wales, tiny little town, cement making
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town. No one would even know where it is on the map, probably
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a bit like an American small town that no one would even notice if they
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pass through it. But now I live in Tasmania, which is maybe I
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don't know, more familiar to Americans because that cartoon character Tasmanian Tiger is very
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familiar to you folks. And anyway, I live in this beautiful island state,
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which is just a gorgeous place to live, right at the bottom of
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the Australian Conner, and it is a paradise awesome. So let's dive in
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here. How is it that we are here talking today? Look in some
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respects, guy, it's amazing that I'm alive. Big course of the trauma
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that I experienced as a journalist working overseas, I witnessed went through some of
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the biggest news events of the last twenty years. You just mentioned them then,
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and I actually thought I thought I was really tough, you know.
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I thought I was the quintessential detached journalist who could just switch off these things
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and get through it and move on to the next story. And what I
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didn't realize, and what I think a lot of journalists of my generation didn't
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realize, was that that sort of trauma eventually catches up with people. It
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caught up with me, and in twenty sixteen I became suicidal. All of
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this trauma had accumulated over time, but it was in particular the deaths of
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my staff in Iraq, those those two journalist who were killed by that the
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Apache gunship in two thousands seven that really affected me a decade later, the
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guilt and shame of that event, that the fact that I had not protected
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my staff. I was the bureau chief of wood Is at the time.
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I had not protected my staff. And there was a lot of other stuff
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going on around that event as well, the release of the Collateral murder tape
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in two thousand and ten by Julian Assange, the fact that I never spoke
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publicly about that tape when it came out because I was just so shocked.
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I was so I just wanted to isolate myself and not have anything to do
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with it. All of that came together in twenty sixteen and I became suicidal
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and it was only the intervention of my wife that I ended up in a
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psych ward in Melbourne in Australia, where I got amazing treatment from amazing professionals.
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That was the first of three admissions I had. All Right, first
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of all, let me stop you there. Thank you so much for First
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of all, thank you so much for coming on here and being willing to
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share this. I mean, this is this is intense stuff. So if
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we if we can jump back a little bit, how do you get into
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journalism in the first place? I climbed the Berlin Wall in nineteen ninety and
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it was an event, a moment that I realized I just wanted to I
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was a backpacker in Europe and the wall had come down six months earlier,
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Communism had collapsed across Eastern Europe. It was going to happen not long.
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It was gonna happen soon after in USSR itself. And I just thought,
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I want to be there when history unfolds. I want to be there to
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witness history when it occurs. I want to be there when war breaks out.
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And at the time, I'd done an economics degree and I was working
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as an accountant, and I just thought to tell with that I am going
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to become a journalist. That to me was just my heart one said,
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And so I ended up. I found myself in Indonesia. A few years
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later. I've got a job, I learned the language, learned how to
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speak Indonesian, got a job with Reuters a few years later, and that
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just began a career of working in foreign countries, working as a foreign correspondent,
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covering covering international events. It was just an amazing privilege and I loved
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it. So this was n eighteen ninety with it twenty thirty years ago.
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Yeah, so that that's thirty three years ago, ninety ninety. Wow.
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So you you begin to experience so these events that happened, and you said
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you started up by saying you thought you were this tough guy, and which
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isn't to say, Look, let's be clearly to see united tough guy,
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but traumas trauma. How when you experienced some of the first experiences, or
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maybe even the first thing, the traumatic event, how did you deal with
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it? How did you manage it? How did you react? You know,
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the culture of journalism back then, guy, was you just drank.
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You just went to the bar, You went to the pub. My generation,
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the generation before me, we just went to the pub and drink.
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We didn't talk, we didn't share our feelings. It was a mucho culture,
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and there was no such thing as counselors for journalists. There was no
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psychologists for journalists. Journalism has been one of the last professions to actually embrace
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the need for trauma counseling. And we thought we had to be detached.
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We thought that there was important not to show our feelings because we thought we
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wouldn't be able to do our job. If we did, and so we
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bottled it up. Basically that was that was what we thought and were.
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It wasn't so much we were trained to do it because there was no training.
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We got all the physical safety training in the world. We were taught
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how to negotiate fake checkpoints. We were taught how to do first aid.
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We were taught how to dress a bullet wound, we were taught how to
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deal with hostage takers. Never taught how to deal with psychological stress. And
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so when that when those when the trauma came knocking, none of us were
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prepared for it, myself included, and so it was just like and then
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so for me, I covered all these events and then I moved to Tasmania.
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After twenty years of working for Reuters on the road covering these sorts of
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stories, I moved to Tasmania in twenty thirteen because my wife's Tasmanian. We
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moved down here, this beautiful, peaceful island, beautiful place, and you
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can just you can feel the freshness, you can sense the freshness. That's
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when a lot of these memories started to emerge because my brain slowed down.
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Okay, I was in this place of safe do you understand what I'm talking
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about, but I couldn't understand why this was happening, because I'm thinking to
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myself, I am in this safe place, I'm so far away from places
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like Iraq, why is this happening? But because my rain was slowing down
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and I wasn't so busy, there was now room in my brain, in
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my mind that this sort of stuff to emerge. So, in actual fact,
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coming to Tasmania gave room for those memories to start to appear. So
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when you had moved to Tasmania, were you still working were here? Yes?
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I was still working for Ruters. I was working as an editor then,
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so I wasn't actually working in the field anymore. But I was still
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editing stories like I was. I was working on the China defense story.
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I was. I was working on the planes crashing here and there and MH,
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the MS seventeen and any natural disaster. So I was still getting exposed
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to a lot of trauma vicariously. So when things started to come up for
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you, and obviously not expecting you to talk about what you don't want to
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talk about, but when things began to come up for you, how did
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you experience that? How did you react. Classic PTSD symptoms, anger,
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anxiety, flashbacks, lots of flashbacks, lots of flashbacks of me being in
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the middle, list bombs going off when I got really stressed, If I
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was getting stressed working, I was actually transported back to our office in back
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then. It was like I was there. That's sort of sensation, emotional
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numbness, the typical sort of emotional numbness that one gets an isolation, a
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lot of isolation to my family, to my loved ones, and a lot
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of depression. There were some days I just couldn't get out of bed.
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So the real full catalog of emotion of PTSD symptoms had them all And did
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you know what was going on? Did you say, okay? So how
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did things unfold from there? Yes? I was. I was in complete
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denial that anything was wrong. My wife knew, Mary, she knew what
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was going on. She was completely understood what was happening. She'd worked as
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a journalist in Asia as well. She'd worked with a lot of cameraman who
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had PTSD. She knew it. But I wouldn't listen to her. It
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was like there was a couple of things going on. I had sort of
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convinced myself that after surviving all these events, there's no way that mental illnessness
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wasn't part of my identity. It was just not possible. There was a
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I think there was a there was also a sort of a masculinity thing attached
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to this as well, that the mental illnessess wasn't part of my identity,
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and you know, seriously it was. It was sort of like and also
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the sense that, you know, I loved my wife and I adored her,
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and she was right about so many things, but I couldn't can't.
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I couldn't bring myself to except that she was right about my mental state until
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it got to the point where things were getting so bad and it became so
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obvious that I needed help. Things became so bad, such as what flashbacks
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and all to the point where she she basically just said, you know you,
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She broke down one day and said, you need help. We can't
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go on like this. Even by that stage, even I knew that I
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was I was a mess, but I was still working, you know,
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I was still able to function, but I could I could see the impact
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I was having on our kids, who were young teenagers at the time.
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But this was before I This was before I became suicidal. And what was
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interesting to me when I looked back on it, you know, seven years
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later, was that so I took time off. My comboy just gave me
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plenty of time off, heaps of time off. But it was taking that
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time off that I really plummeted. Because I took I took what it was
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initially going to be three months. But what happened I got I was diagnosed,
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but I just got more isolated because I had all of a sudden I
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wasn't working and I wasn't getting any actual treatment. I was sitting at home
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alone, no support around me, no not talking to colleagues anymore because I
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was off. I was on sick leave, but I was still in this
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sort of emotional denial about my diagnosis. So I wasn't actually doing any research
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into the PTSD, and I just kept going further and further, and then
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at the same time, then the nightmare started. As soon as I went
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on sick leave, the nightmares started, and I just had this recurring nightmare
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of being chased through the streets of Baghdad buying surgeons, which had always been
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our greatest sphere in Iraq, right that we'd get kidnapped. That was always
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the biggest threat for any in Iraq was being kidnapped. And then this guilt
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and shame started to started to sort of seep through the pause of my skin
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over the deaths of my staff. And I couldn't work this out. Where
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was this coming from? And why was I feeling this way? Because I'd
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locked that event so far into the depths of my consciousness. It was the
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last thing I wanted to think about, so I'd locked it down. You
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know, what was my responsibility to them? And that was so that was
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the last thing to really rise up. And then four or five months after
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going on sick leave, it just all came together. I wasn't getting any
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therapy i'd been on, I'd been away at home alone, isolated, and
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I just I just saught no reason to go on living, really the war
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inside my head. I just wanted peace. I just wanted to weigh out.
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Suicide seemed like the only option. And that's where my wife intervened and
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said, you need an intensive treatment, and she got me into this cycle.
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Did you tell her you were thinking about committing suicide? I did,
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and it was and I think that was key because I'm not I'm not sure
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why I did, but it was just I mean it, I think it's
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it's It was obviously very important that I did because it allowed that communication.
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So then go from me being suicidal to then coming up with okay, well
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what are the options now? And as soon as as soon as we had
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in place a plan for me going to this psych ward which is called Ward
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seventeen and they treat veterans and first responders. As soon as that plan was
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in place, I just felt this sort of foundation under me. It was
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like I might get some answers. I had no idea what it would be
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like. I had no idea what the experience would be like. But I
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thought I just might get some answers. And I just felt like a little
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bit of It's just like a bit of something underneath me, and it and
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the psych ward was the turning point in my life. Wow. All right,
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let's just pause here for a second to thank our sponsors. All right,
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we are back. So you get into this this is in patient facility.
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Okay, should go into this impatient facility and what do you experience?
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Who did you experience? Would talk about share with us any kind of therapist
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or even here who it was. It was tough to walk in there.
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Guy, I gotta say, I mean, you know, I had some
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frightening moments in my career right in Iraq and those sorts of places, but
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walking into that psych ward was one of the most frightening experiences for me because
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it's crossing a line. You know, you go into a psych ward and
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you think, will anyone ever hire me again? Will anyone? What does
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this mean for your career? Right? Psych wood, damage goods, that's
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the things you're you're thinking. But from the moment I walked in there,
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it was just the whole place was quiet, peaceful. Everyone's got PTSD in
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there, so that was a great that's a great start, coppers, veteran's,
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veterans, ambulance officers, and it was have your own room, and
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um it just had a real sort of peaceful feel to it. And I
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met my psychiatrist on the second day and she she was born in Iran and
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had studied in Australia, and her name was Mariam, And it just so
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happened that she at one point had wanted to be a journalist. She had
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as a as a doctor in Iran. She had helped with eight efforts in
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earthquakes in Iran. We actually before we even started talking about me, we
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talked a little bit about the Iranian Revolution, and so before we even started
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talking about me, We've just established this rapport in those first five minutes,
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and I just felt really comfortable with her. She was probably about five six
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years younger than me. And we then spoke for two hours and I started
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talking. I spoke for the first twenty minutes, and I was just sort
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of, you know, going and going and going. And by this time
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I'd spoken to, you know, a few therapists, but I was typical
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journalist, you know, rattling off dates and before this death toll was this,
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this happened, this pit period whatever. She just let you know,
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she's right taking down notes. And then she when I when I finally finished
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and think, okay, it's time to let her go. She she looks
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at me and she said, Dean, it seems like I've been listening to
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someone tell tell me a story about someone else. It feels like I've been
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She said, you're in your journalist skin. You are telling me a story,
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but you're not telling me your story. And I sat back and I
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thought, oh wow, she gets me, and it was just it was
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just like this light bulb moment going off, and you know, she says,
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she said, look, it's easier that way, right, you know,
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it's more comfortable than having to actually feel your story if you tell it
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like it's someone else's story. And that was the start of an amazing relationship
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because she got me. She was so curious about me, but she also
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understood my world because she had come from that world. And we talked and
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talk and it was only at the end that we talked about medication. So
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for her, she wanted to hear my story and understand me. And then
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it was just at the end of that very first session that we went through
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what I was on and then she changed some of the med's eyes on.
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But we She recommended that I buy Victor Frankel's book Man Search for Meaning,
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because she could sense that I was really directionalist, and she thought, you
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know, have you She said, have you ever read Man Search for Meaning?
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I said, never heard of it? She said Victor Frankel. I
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said, no, really, And so I went out and bought it the
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next day, and that book became a real guiding light for me. But
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they were they were the sorts of conversations that we had throughout my entire five
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weeks there, and she was just she challenged me, you know, she
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she was amazing guy as well as being very experienced around trauma and so on.
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Wow, that's that sounds incredible. I mean, it sounds so inspiring
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too. Let's jump to this, this situation where you say to yourself,
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you know what, I want to help other people. I mean, I
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want to write this book, I want to start this podcast, I'm creating
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this website. How did all this come about for you? But that was
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that first admission towards seventeen, right, I had knowing. I don't think
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I had absolutely no this. I never even thought of doing. This hadn't
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occurred to me. But that I'm sitting inwards seventeen and I saw all these
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men and women in these coppers, these these first responders, these veterans,
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broken, absolutely broken, and it who had been broken by a system,
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broken by betrayal, by a system that had absolutely let them down. I'm
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sure it's the same in the States, it's the same in many parts of
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the world. These these guys that they get sick, they get PTSD me
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enviornments and then they're just they're just thrown on the scrapping no longer needed damage
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goods. And I saw this loss of identity in them, and and I
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thought, maybe if I tell my story, I can help tell their story,
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and that in some way can not just not just raise awareness, but
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it can bring about some change. It can help just help this understanding of
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of not just PTSD, but help employers and organizations understand what they are doing
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to people when they don't treat people as as human beings and when they don't
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recognize that. Because this is one of the things I've learned, this is
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why I write about in the book that the trauma is bad enough for people
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that they experience on the job right in certain professions. What makes it worse
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is the way these people are treated afterwards, the way the system treats them.
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So for in certain professions, and I found that of all the people
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that I met in the in the psycho watermissions I've had, the way they
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were treated afterwards is actually worse than the original trauma that they experienced on the
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job. So the occupational trauma, the fighting fires, the fighting wars,
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going to crime scenes, going to accidents, it's the way these people are
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being treated by their organizations or insurance systems or workers' compensation has been more detrimental
24:41
to their mental health than the occupational trauma itself, because there's been so much
24:47
betrayal in that in that sense, in that in those circumstances, a lot
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of these men and women that I have met reckon they could actually heal from
24:57
the occupational trauma. What they haven't been able to heal from is the betrayal
25:03
of the way the system has destroyed their lives. And so I encountered this
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on about the second or third day in wards seventeen because these people started telling
25:15
me their stories. And it wasn't necessarily because I was a journalist. It
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was just that no one had listened to them before, and I started I
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would just say, you know what, I'm curious, what are you here
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for? And they just started telling me their stories, and so I thought,
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well, if I can tell my story, then I can help tell
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their stories. So in my book are some of their stories, and they're
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just little little vignettes if you like that, just illustrate the sort of the
25:48
consequences of organizations not looking after their own people. And so for me,
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that was just it was just a motivation and inspiration to do this. I
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didn't think it would take this long to get it done, you know,
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honestly thought i'd be done years ago. But these things take time, and
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that's just been the inspiration for a lot of the other work I've done.
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And it was the same with journalists. There's so many journalists out there suffering
26:15
as well, and so I wanted to do this book for them as well.
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You know, I wanted to ask you about your identity, how this
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impacted your experiences, the trauma has impacted your identity and your subsequent healing journey,
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how things have changed for you in that respect. Yes, it's a
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great question, guy, and it was something I really struggled with. And
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you're the first person to ask me this in a So let's see if I
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can answer that. I write about it in the book, and I've been
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able to write about it because I've had time to think about it. So
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I'm not sure if I'm going to answer this in any way that makes sense.
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But my identity, I think, you know, I described what happened
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to me as an identity wound, right, I lost my identity through the
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trauma that I experienced because I identified as a journalist, I identified as a
27:22
foreign correspondent, and the trauma that I experienced stripped that away and it made
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me into the PTSD turned me into a horrible person at home, into a
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horrible person to be around, and that that that person inflicted damage on his
27:55
on my wife and my kids and um. And so you know, for
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me, it's been about my recovery has a lot of my recovery has been
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about building a new identity in which family has been take takes center stage.
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And I didn't realize that actually having an identity where family comes first and where
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family is central to my life could actually be the most important thing for me.
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I was just such a driven journalist that I thought, yeah, that's
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that has to be first and foremost. But getting to the point where realizing
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that I can do all these other things but haves for me have my family
28:56
that the key focus in my life gives me a calmness and a sense of
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I think this is where post traumatic growth comes into it right as well,
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because I sort of feel I feel really comfortable with who I am as as
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a person now because I know where I know where my place is in the
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world, and it's sort of like the last few years has been writing a
29:22
new narrative and with my family at the top of the page, not trying
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to find that old journalist that I used to be, but where my family
29:33
gets the best of me in every way possible. And then there's the book,
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and then there's the other work I can do in the podcast and so
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that they get the best of me. And I've been lucky enough to be
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able to get to that point. I don't think a lot of people who've
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suffered the sort of trauma that I went through. Can you know people in
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these sorts of professions journalism, emergency services, because their identity have been destroyed
30:00
not just by the trauma they suffered, but by their organizations, and they
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are so burdened by this betrayal it was very hard for them to regain that
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identity. I've just been lucky to be able to get back to where I
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am too, very fortunate to a degree. Did um or were you impacted
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by Reuters? Their their response to this, Yeah, look it's um You
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still with them? No, I left about three years ago, so you
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know, it's it's sort of uh, it's it's a bit odd when I
30:42
was working in Baghdad and those sorts of places, I had amazing support even
30:47
before we knew anything about you know, PTSD and so on. I had
30:53
incredible support from from my bosses at the time that they really looked after me
31:00
all the way throughout my career. But what really troubled me was that towards
31:06
the end of my career I got Royers to create a mental health role.
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So when I when I got PTSD, I couldn't work as a journalist anymore.
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I couldn't do news. It was just too stressful. I got Royers
31:18
to create a mental health role for the news organization, so two and an
31:21
half thousand journalists. It was a unique role for any media organization. And
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my job was to create a mental health strategy to for the for the company.
31:36
And I got so much resistance from management to that, and it just
31:42
it nearly destroyed me because I could I could see how much journalists Royers journals
31:49
around the world were suffering. I could see how much that it was affecting
31:56
their work. And and I I used evidence based research in the proposals I
32:05
was putting forward. I used the experts I tried. I tried to persuade
32:09
up. It forward good arguments, but there was just so much resistance from
32:15
management to put in place major changes. And it was all because they just
32:24
didn't want things to really change. They didn't want that cultural change, they
32:29
didn't want that institutional change to the way things were run. And in the
32:34
end, it just caused me so much stress and so much distress that I
32:40
resigned. I left about three years ago, and I just thought we could
32:50
have done something really wonderful at Ruyters and made Ruyters a benchmark for not just
32:54
global media organizations but the media organization organizations elsewhere. And so it was just
33:01
sad to leave like that. So I want to remind everyone I'm speaking with
33:06
Dan Yates. He's got a book coming out. Do we know when this
33:12
book is coming out? We don't have a title yet. Yeah, I
33:15
look, I know exactly when it's coming out. But Pam McMillan won't let
33:17
me. I'm not glad to say yet. Okay, well let me repse
33:22
twenty twenty three. We can say that mid twenty twenty three. Okay,
33:25
this will probably go up before that, but we can talk about you getting
33:32
me the link and I can help you promote that on my Facebook page and
33:36
everything else. But I want to mention before we get going here and as
33:39
we wind down, you have a podcast and tell us about the podcast.
33:45
Yes, so the podcast is it's for a mental health organ outfit called mind
33:51
Armor, and they are supported by the black Dog Institute, which is Australia's
33:57
it's actually one of the premier search mental health research institutes in the world.
34:04
And mind Armor he's a little outfit that does amazing work with a lot of
34:10
first respond to organizations in Australia, a lot of health groups, a lot
34:16
of community groups. And so this podcast is really about telling stories with people
34:25
who have done ordinary or extraordinary things in their life, have had mental health
34:31
journeys, or are doing extraordinary things in a mental health way in their in
34:38
their organization. So, for example, I did a podcast a couple of
34:42
years ago with a friend of mine who survived a like plane crash in country
34:46
New South Wales but killed his parents and in which he was he miraculously survived
34:55
later went on to have twenty five operations and he spoke for the first time
35:00
about that that you know, that survival sort of story. Or last year
35:08
I did one with a fellow who's an experiment burnout, and he spoke about
35:14
the research that they've done on the medical professional, the profession and the consequences
35:21
of burnout on these folks during COVID. So sort of looking at the various
35:25
ways I bring my journalistic experience into these people's lives, tease out some stories,
35:31
try and tell it in a way that is going to be of interest
35:35
to sort of an audience that is interested in in these these subjects. Awesome,
35:42
and that's it's called mind armor. Mind armor. Yeah, exactly as
35:45
you said. We'll have that linked up at the show notes page at the
35:49
Trauma Divers podcast dot com. Dean dude, and I gotta have you back.
35:53
I love how I'm back. Yeah. Just I mean to say you're
36:00
incredible is an utter statement and your story is incredible. Just finally hear.
36:08
How how are you doing now? Yeah, they've gotten great. I mean,
36:13
as you can tell, I'm really good. It's it's actually today,
36:19
would you believe? I'm sure it's today or yesterday is the seventh anniversary of
36:22
my PTSD diagnosis. And I was thinking about this yesterday. I thought,
36:28
gee, I'm doing well, I'm really doing well, and I was talking
36:34
to someone about yes the other other day. And because people will say to
36:37
me all the time writing this book, how good has that been for you?
36:40
What have you gotten from it? And I say, I have gotten
36:45
an incredible amount of knowledge about myself by writing this book. I know myself
36:50
so well. And by that I mean I know my trauma, I know
36:54
my mental health. Back to front, I know if if I'm getting a
37:00
little bit wobbly, I mean I almost know it before it's about to happen,
37:04
and so I can take I can take a course of action if I
37:08
have to. If I feel myself getting a bit stressed, I can take
37:13
corrective action, I can do something about it. And I think, so
37:16
I've got this sort of sense, I've got this awareness of my own state
37:21
of mind that is so fine tune. Now that means, you know,
37:27
I just feel so a sense of empowerment that I find very comforting to have.
37:36
And a lot of that is because when you when you spent seven years
37:39
writing a book, you get to know yourself pretty well. You get to
37:42
know the science. I mean, I've I've even gone and looked into things
37:45
like the polyvagal theory and so on, which which I wouldn't have done otherwise.
37:50
So I think that that says a lot for but that sort of exploration
37:57
and how empowering that can be. So I'm really great guy. Well,
38:00
I appreciate that. Well, look, I'm looking forward to getting this out
38:04
there and like I said, have you back at a later date. Thank
38:07
you again so much for being here. I appreciate it, yea, and
38:10
thank you for doing what you do. Gud's appreciate about a lot of people.
38:14
I appreciate that. We'll be in touch. Jeez. Good