Meet Taryn Greene, Director of Research, Boulder Crest Institude

Transcript:

I’m Dr Taryn Greene, and I’m the Director of Research at the Boulder Crest Institute. My family has a long history of military service. I always kind of knew that I would join the military. I deployed twice, I was the chief of intelligence for this 240 man task force of Army Green Berets. I was really on the front lines of support for those special operations guys, and they would come back from their missions, and you could just see how much they were struggling. But it wasn’t just them, it was also all this introspection that I wasn’t expecting as a young person, and thinking about the effects that we were really having on the people who were living through this war too, on the other side, the civilians.

The experience of going to war really shattered my idea that the world was a safe and reliable place. I don’t think I necessarily could take inventory of everything that had been changed in me. It felt like a really confusing dark time, and it really really shook me. I was having horrible night sweats, staying up all night, nightmares, hyper vigilance. I just I felt like everything was really blank – that’s the only way I can describe it – and I didn’t know where to go from there.

In the aftermath of that is the story of how I started to rebuild things. I was really searching for some answers on how I could possibly move forward, and it became pretty clear to me that I really wanted to be a psychologist. I had this newfound sense of personal strength. I could do it. Why not me? Why can’t I be a psychologist? In the midst of that I stumbled onto the Posttraumatic Growth work by Dr Tedeschi in his lab. I identified so deeply with the concept of Posttraumatic Growth. I could see that it was happening within me as a military member. PTSD was the only thing you heard about, and you basically didn’t want to be flagged with it. Nobody knew what Posttraumatic Growth was – I didn’t know what it was – and when I would talk about it people would be like “Wow, tell me more”.

I rebuilt the ideas that I had about what was important, and realizing I had this deep desire to help people, and contribute to people healing really led me to apply to work with Dr Tedeschi. If you have an opportunity to be involved in Posttraumatic Growth, you should do it. If you have an opportunity to do it through one of the Boulder Crest programs, even better. Going to a place like Warrior PATHH can be really scary because you have to get vulnerable on a level with people that you’re not going to be comfortable with, but what you should know is that THAT’S what’s healing about it. The ability to go through a program where you have other people who are set up to literally support you in all those areas of Posttraumatic Growth development – it’s such a gift, and it can literally change the course of your life.