From Wounded Combat Vet to EMDR Therapist with Christopher Brown

Christopher Brown (00:00):

I was on a rotation where I was actually asleep when it started. I was in my underwear downstairs and I woke up to gunfire and then while crawling to my gear, a huge blast went off and it turns out that it was a suicide bomber driving a dump truck full of explosives.

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Michael Fulwiler (00:26):

This is Heard Business School where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulwiler. This week I'm joined by Christopher Brown, a wounded marine combat veteran who now helps other veterans and first responders as an EMDR certified therapist. In our conversation, we dive deep into his journey of healing and transformation post-military service, including why he started Growing Veterans, a nonprofit with a mission to empower veterans to cultivate purpose and belonging by growing food. We also discussed his vision for his new venture Helicon to streamline the certification, skill development and marketing of EMDR therapists. As a heads up, this episode contains themes of combat violence that may be triggering for some listeners. Here's my conversation with Christopher. Enjoy. Christopher Brown, welcome to the show.

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Christopher Brown (01:26):

Thank you. Glad to be here.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:27):

Thank you so much for being here. Really excited. Looking forward to this conversation. Before we dive in, I just wanted to thank you for your service and your sacrifice, and I also wanted to ask you, how does that make you feel when people say that?

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Christopher Brown (01:44):

Early on, I got out in 2008. Early on it made me feel weird. I appreciate that you added your sacrifice because I think that speaks to your understanding of what actually military service entails. It is quite a sacrifice not just for the service member but their families and everybody that they're close to. So I've come to appreciate it and it's not weird for me anymore, but I remember feeling pretty awkward about it when I first got out for a few years.

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Michael Fulwiler (02:20):

Why was that?

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Christopher Brown (02:21):

I don't know if I can put my finger on exactly why. I suspect partly because I hadn't fully processed or reintegrated to be able to appreciate that people do care and understand enough to have honored the experience that you've had. I struggled with quite a bit early on in terms of PTSD and depression and physical chronic pain issues, TBI issues, so I was kind of a hot mess, anyway.

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Michael Fulwiler (02:56):

Yeah, I want to talk about that. I haven't really talked about this on the show, but my dad, who's retired now, was a foreign service officer, so I grew up abroad. My dad was posted to US embassies and I grew up around marine guards. I remember going to the embassy and you check in with the Marine Guard. I remember being in fourth grade in the Ivory Coast in West Africa playing softball with the Marines on the weekends. And so yeah, my first job actually was in high school. I remember it was on Camp Foster, which was a Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan. That was my first job. I was just like a desk job in a colonel's office. And then I went to high school, Kubasaki High School, which is a Department of Defense school. So I really grew up around the military culture even though my family wasn't in the military. I mean, we served abroad with the military, so I definitely understand the sacrifice, and I watched kids that I went to high school with, their parents would get deployed and not come home. I had friends I went to high school with who enlisted and went to Afghanistan and didn't come home, and so it's tough.

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Christopher Brown (04:09):

So you get it.

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Michael Fulwiler (04:10):

Yeah, more secondhand I would say.

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Christopher Brown (04:12):

Appreciate you sharing that though.

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Michael Fulwiler (04:14):

Yeah, yeah, and I imagine too, it has to be tough. You mentioned reintegrating kind of coming back and that's something you read about and you see in movies and TV shows, like soldiers coming home after having this life changing experience and then coming back into society. And then you have people who aren't supportive of the military or are involvement in these countries overseas too, and that has to be tough as well.

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Christopher Brown (04:41):

Yeah, I mean we certainly didn't have it as bad as the Vietnam generation in terms of societal negativity towards them. For us, it felt a bit more like apathy, though it's its own kind of challenge. I mean, I remember seeing a stat that's been a couple decades now, I guess. A stat around the amount of people in the population that joined the military and the amount of people that go and deploy and do war stuff. We're talking about less than 1% of the country. And so once I came to understand what that means and how I shouldn't expect people to get it, it made it easier for me to just not be such a curmudgeon about it. But yeah, I mean on the flip side of that, we're talking about 1% of the population carrying the burden of two decades of war for doing our government's bidding overseas. That's a lot. There's a lot of factors, but I think that's one reason why we see such a strong suicide problem in the population. They're just carrying a lot.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:02):

Yeah, I read a stat, I think it says of 2024 that more soldiers die from suicide than from combat, which is pretty jarring to read that and it's a reality. And so I think the work that you do is super important. You mentioned that. Did you say you got out in 2008?

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Christopher Brown (06:21):

Yeah, I was in from 2004 to 2008. I was an infantry guy, so doing the war stuff, and I deployed three times during those four years, so I was injured on my second deployment. We lost 41 Marines from my battalion during those three years, and I was just done. I was burnt out, ready to try to fix myself and move on with life at that point. So I got out and started to use the GI Bill.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:56):

You said you were injured. Can you tell me what happened?

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Christopher Brown (06:59):

We were in a small patrol base, our platoon, which is three plus squads, about 30 to 40 people, and we were kind of out in a rural farmland type area, and I was on a rotation where I was actually asleep when it started. I was in my underwear downstairs and I woke up to gunfire and then while crawling to my gear, a huge blast went off and it turns out that it was a suicide bomber driving a dump truck full of explosives. They were trying to drive it into our house that we were in, and that initiated a complex attack on the patrol base. And so probably an hour or so long firefight. And at some point during that, we had to go get more ammo out in one of the trucks that was parked outside and while going to get the ammo, I didn't even remember this happened until literally three or four years after, I forgot that this part of the memory altogether, but went out and got ammo and on the way back into the house is when I was shot through the calf.

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(08:18):

So adrenaline is a crazy thing. I didn't even know I was shot. I didn't even know I was bleeding until probably 15 minutes later when we were consolidating the wounded downstairs and somebody's like, hey, you're bleeding. And they called the corpsman for me and I was like, no, you're bleeding. You need to get patched up. And so it was just a mess. It was crazy. We had evacuation for all the wounded and because it was just my leg and I was walking fine, I told our first sergeant, there isn't any room in the trucks. Are you guys going to come back and get us again? Are you coming back for a second time? He's like, yeah, don't worry about it. We'll be back. And they never came back. So I had to suffer through it for a night or so until I got to an aid station. That was a pretty crazy time.

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Michael Fulwiler (09:17):

Thanks for sharing that. I haven't heard that story. Is it hard to talk about now?

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Christopher Brown (09:23):

I mean, I've shared the story enough times. I think that my nervous system is regulated when I talk about these things. It's part of my EMDR journey too. That's why I like the story because there's a really cool ending with EMDR involved. But yeah, I've told that story many times over the years and every time it gets a little easier.

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Michael Fulwiler (09:48):

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing it. So you come home and then do you go right back to school?

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Christopher Brown (09:55):

Yeah, so my spouse was finishing up school at the time and I started to use the GI bill. Initially I was pursuing CIS classes. I thought I was going to get into IT, and I did about a year of those courses. And during I got into counseling and I had to take some electives and I took a psychology course and connecting the dots and what I was learning in Psychology 101 and what I was experiencing in therapy and then just looking at the IT field just seems like the wrong path for me. I think I need to change my track. So it was perfect timing. All the CIS courses ended up becoming my electives and I was able to be on track for, I actually did a human services degree with a psych minor, and that was with plans to pursue MSW later on.

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Michael Fulwiler (10:53):

You're at Western, right? At the time, Western Washington University of up in Bellingham. What was the adjustment personally for you? I mean, as you're now back in school, what was that like? Did you have PTSD from that experience?

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Christopher Brown (11:07):

Yeah, it was pretty rough. I mean, I was having panic attacks. I was drinking way too much. I was not a very pleasant person to be around, to be honest. I was... I had insomnia, sleep problems, nightmares. And this gets into the EMDR story. I had been in therapy for probably a couple months, and I think we had done EMDR on a few parts of my military experience, but we hadn't done the suicide bombing yet. And I remember being in class, the same classroom. It was actually the psychology classroom. It's the only classroom I was having panic attacks in, but it was a recurring thing for the whole quarter. And there was an occasion where I had a legit flashback. The classroom was consumed by a fireball and I was freaking out. I couldn't see very well. I had to just walk home and lay on the couch the rest of the day. It was a bad flashback, panic attack experience. And I told my counselor about it and they were like, let's go ahead and do EMDR on the suicide bombing. I think you're ready for it.

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Michael Fulwiler (12:27):

I think it's time.

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Christopher Brown (12:28):

Yeah, we did, and I processed and desensitized a lot of the different aspects of that day, but the counselor just, I think it was great intuition on their part. They asked me to imagine slowing down time when the blast initially happened, what were the senses, what did it feel like? And I remember the change in air pressure that exists around a big blast like that, and immediately it clicked. This is the same feeling I get in that classroom. There was an AC in it that would turn on and it would change the air pressure in the room. And just connecting those dots with the whole desensitization process, with EMDR, I was able to go through the rest of the quarter without having any flashbacks, and I don't think I had any panic attacks either. I mean, I still had anxiety for a while, but it was like a stark noticeable shift that happened, and I haven't had a flashback like that ever since. Those early experiences with EMDR as a client really made me a strong believer and proponent for using it in my profession once I became licensed.

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Michael Fulwiler (13:49):

That's really interesting. I was going to ask, was there something that was triggering? Because my understanding of PTSD, especially for combat vets says it's like fireworks or loud noises can be triggering. It's almost like your body's responding to this change in air pressure, but you're not even aware of it. When you say walk through the desensitization kind of process, what was that like? Can you explain that to me? What does that look like in EMDR?

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Christopher Brown (14:19):

Yeah, so EMDR uses bilateral stimulation. It's eye movement left and right, and at that clinic we had the fancy buzzers that you hold in your hands, it'll vibrate and then earphones, it'll beep. So it's all moving in sync left and right, and it's activating both sides of the nervous system. And when you're focused on a challenging memory, what the research shows is that this BLS is doing two things. It's activating the hippocampus, which is what we use for memory recall, so we can have a more vivid recollection of a memory, but it's also not entirely but kind of suppressing the amygdala, the fight or flight response. So we have this, what we call a window of tolerance where you can do really deep work without being too overwhelmed by it. That's the idea. I mean, there are a lot of steps to help prepare and make sure that that works the way it should be, but that's the idea.

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(15:28):

So when you are able to look really close at memories like this and work through the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, where it's felt in the body, the somatic experiences, the way that EMDR folks think of it is the trauma created a blockage and the process of EMDR puts the brain in a state where that blockage can be kind of unblocked. We heal, we resolve, we reconsolidate the memory. When they look at brain scans pre and post EMDR thinking about a trauma initially, it's like right there in the primitive fight or flight center of the brain near the hippocampus and the amygdala. But then after EMDR, same memory, now the cortex is lighting up and the fight or flight center is no longer active. So the term memory reconsolidation is something that EMDR folks use a lot too, and that speaks to the seeming ability to take the memory and put it somewhere that's going to create less activation. And so that's part of the desensitization.

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Michael Fulwiler (16:41):

The memory aspect of that is fascinating. You said that you didn't even really remember what had happened or what you did kind of getting up and walking around until after the fact. So the part of your brain that blocks that out, I imagine that that's just what happens in these kinds of traumatic events. Your brain just blocks it out. You don't remember it happening until later.

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Christopher Brown (17:02):

And just now thinking about that, my hair stood up thinking about being outside that house. Yeah, our bodies remember these things and sometimes consciously we don't. Some people go even longer than I went, not remembering things that were just completely horrifying.

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Michael Fulwiler (17:23):

A lot of men especially, and I'm sure that you have seen this with guys that you were deployed with or served with that may be resistant to therapy and talking to a therapist and getting help. I'm curious what led you to first seek out therapy and did you feel any resistance to it?

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Christopher Brown (17:43):

Well, it's kind of embarrassing and kind of cool at the same time. The embarrassing part is in the first month home I was drinking with a friend I grew up with. One of my best friends and got into a fight and hurt him pretty badly. It was not cool. The cool part about the story is within that next week, my dad came to visit and he shared a story from his time in the Navy when he basically did the same thing, got into a fight with his friend and hurt him. And the way that he said it was, I ended up talking to someone that really helped with my anger, and I think you should think about doing the same thing. That's what made me think about it and consider it. And knowing that that point that it's something my dad did that I wasn't even aware of until then, that helped get rid of a lot of the potential barriers that I think I would've had otherwise.

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(18:55):

But I feel very fortunate that I was able to get into therapy within a couple months of getting out. I worked with Vietnam vets when I was at the VA, who went their entire careers without doing any therapy, working extra shifts, just overworking, suppressing as much as they could through work and drinking on the weekends. And then they retire and now their brain has all this free time and they start having memories and nightmares and all sorts of stuff coming up that they spent years suppressing. They show up and do the work and start feeling better. But I just feel so fortunate for having had the opportunity to jump into it so quickly.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:38):

Definitely. I mean, it probably saved your life.

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Christopher Brown (19:41):

Yeah, I think so.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:44):

So you graduate from Western and then you go to graduate school. You said you got your MSW. Did you get that from Washington?

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Christopher Brown (19:54):

Yeah, University of Washington.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:55):

From freedom. Okay.

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Christopher Brown (19:56):

And there was a two year gap between two or three years. It was a one year gap, and I started the program and it was a three year program, but in that gap between getting my bachelor's and getting my MSW, I also started a nonprofit and that was a really meaningful experience. I'm still on the board today.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:21):

And that's Growing Veterans.

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Christopher Brown (20:23):

That was Growing Veterans.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:24):

Yeah. Can you tell me about that?

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Christopher Brown (20:25):

The premise was if we create a space outdoors within a community mission, community agriculture, growing food, giving it to people. For a time we were selling it and now we just donate it to food banks, but the mission is the food, the place is the farm. If we have this where we can invite vets and community members out to really cool organic peer support can happen. So the idea was the farm is the catalyst for peer support, and we did that for a couple years to varying degrees of success, and we started to realize that maybe there are some things we could do to really amplify the ethos and the culture of peer support. And we ended up developing a training that all staff and volunteers or staff are required. Volunteers are encouraged to go through, but it was a really well thought out peer support training that has since been validated by a couple studies through the VA's office of, it's one of those big acronyms, the Center for Innovation and Disability Rehabilitation Research there in Tampa, Florida.

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(21:48):

But they validated what we built. And this actually might be interesting for your audience. The training itself, licensed providers can get 20 and a half CEUs if they take it. So anybody that needs CEUs and is interested in peer support might check that out. But yeah, that was an interesting time. And in terms of business, like we're talking about on the podcast, I learned a lot through that. Nonprofits still a business, and that's not how I approached it in the beginning, but it's really helped shape my understanding of money and its utility in the world and being able to get meaningful things done. It's been a big learning journey and it certainly has helped influence the way I think about business and money now.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:41):

Are there any specific takeaways or learnings from that experience for you specific to the nonprofit?

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Christopher Brown (22:48):

As far as business and money goes?

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(22:51):

Yeah, I mean, we're still trying to recover from this with the nonprofit, but like I said, approaching it as a business requires you to be producing something, can produce its own revenue. The training, while in theory it could, we've relied on grants and state funding to really pay for it, and that's just not a sustainable financial model. They're currently figuring out ways to potentially monetize and not have to rely so much on other people's money, being able to generate it on our own. In terms of the donation world, I mean, I've certainly developed a huge amount of gratitude and appreciation for people that contribute their hard earned dollars to important missions that other people are working on for not enough money. Early on, I took a very low salary and I regret that because it set a precedent for future leadership that I've been trying to unravel over the last five years. In order to attract and maintain solid people, they need to be paid well. And I was willing to sacrifice my own income because I felt this higher calling mission that I was trying to build, but I wasn't thinking about what that might've meant for future people getting involved as staff members. So that's something that I certainly have taken away that I am considering as we build this startup. Yeah, I'm sure there are others, but those are some of the big ones that are coming to mind right now.

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Michael Fulwiler (24:39):

And you were working on this nonprofit in between, so you hadn't started at Washington yet?

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Christopher Brown (24:47):

So I had a whole year and a half, maybe two years where I was just full-time executive director. It was a three year program, so it was designed for people who are working a part-time program. We met once a month for a weekend, and the rest was asynchronous learning online. So that allowed me to continue building the nonprofit while doing the initial grad school stuff. And once I started the practicum, that's when I started to pull back on some of my hours. Obviously with the organization, I had to be seeing clients through my practicum and starting to get that level of clinical exposure and recognizing that early on, and I don't know if I still feel this way, sometimes I do. I considered this ambition to be a therapist as this is going to help me be a peer supporter on steroids. I'm going to work with vets, still going to be working with this population, but I'm going to know how to actually do deeper meaningful work with them and support them in that way.

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Michael Fulwiler (26:02):

I'm curious, kind of following this story, you're kind of in practicum, you're doing clinical work. I was going to ask sort of moving from nonprofit into being a therapist and doing clinical work. Was that the goal or was it just you were exposed to clinical work and then you're like, oh, this is actually something that, or is it more so you're doing this peer support work through the nonprofit and you're feeling good about it, but you feel like you need more training and you want to go deeper?

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Christopher Brown (26:33):

It's a little bit of both. I remember when I was in undergrad, I was a work study at this PTSD clinic, and I remember looking at the business cards and seeing MSW, LCSW, what do these letters mean? And I looked it up and I was like, oh, maybe I could do that. That actually seems achievable. So I had this idea in mind that being a therapist would be a cool career, but having had that peer support experience, it was hard for me to separate the two in my mind. But the more I got into, like I was saying, when I started doing my practicum, doing the clinical work, I started to realize how much it takes to be a really solid, competent clinician. I had a year left in the program and I started to have this internal tension around my role with the organization. I knew that I wanted to become a licensed therapist, and if I were to do that, I couldn't stay with the organization as a full-time executive director.

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(27:44):

So by the time I graduated, everybody understood that I was going to be moving on. And in the context of building an organization three years after you start, it is not really the greatest time to do that. I wish I would've had at least five years. That was a learning moment for sure, or it has been since, but the summer I graduated, I had a month or two before my job offer with the VA would've started, and I had passed the reins off to the new executive director. It was a weird summer. I was trying to stay involved without stepping on people's toes, waiting on the bureaucracy to let me in. It was just a weird time. But the first staff meeting I went to when I got hired or when I started at the VA, one of my first questions was, when can I get trained in EMDR? I had been doing preparation work with clients as an intern and then collaborating with the EMDR providers so the client could do the EMDR processing work with them and then following up after. So I was close enough to the process and getting really excited about being able to do that on my own with clients. So yeah, I was ready to jump right into it when I started full-time there.

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Michael Fulwiler (29:15):

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(30:13):

I'm curious, as someone who was still in graduate school and then you graduate and you go to the VA, you're a new therapist, probably still a pretty young guy, you're working through your own challenges coming back home, and then you're working with, I'm assuming mostly men who haven't talked about that. You mentioned guys, they went to Vietnam, they haven't talked about it. What was that experience like for you and how did you navigate that? I imagine that must've been pretty difficult, the transference and all of that.

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Christopher Brown (30:47):

Yeah, I mean, looking back at it, it didn't feel too difficult. I mean, the clinic I was in, it had a very unique model, and again, this is the peer support overlap. It was started in the eighties as a response to the challenges the Vietnam vets were having, and initially this program was just for Vietnam vets and it was clinics outside of any big VA facility where Vietnam vets could come and support each other with peer support. Over the few decades before I got there, that had evolved into, we only employ licensed therapists, but we try to employ licensed therapists who are also veterans in order to maintain that sort of more easy rapport peer type vibe. And so it just felt intuitive and easy. It was part of the way that program was structured, and I had really good mentors in support that I just learned so much in those first few years. It was tough. Initially the hardest part was learning how to leave work at work and not bring it home with me. I've developed some really useful tools over the years that helped a lot with that. I've continued to do EMDR over the years as needed.

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(32:14):

So it was mostly good and intuitive, some hard parts that I think probably a lot of early trauma therapists struggle with.

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Michael Fulwiler (32:25):

And then how long were you at the VA?

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Christopher Brown (32:28):

So I was there full time, I think seven years.

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Michael Fulwiler (32:34):

Oh, wow. Long time.

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Christopher Brown (32:37):

And by the time I left that the ethos that I described was starting to change and it just kind of felt different than when I started. It was tough to leave the clients and the staff that I had developed good relationships with. It was clear that I was being guided in a different direction, and so I started building my private practice on the side for a good six months to a year before I left. In order to know that it was going to work out, I have to be able to keep food on the table.

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Michael Fulwiler (33:16):

Right, yeah. How did you do that? What were the steps that you took to start your private practice?

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Christopher Brown (33:22):

I got on Alma and set up all the standard things, set up Psychology Today, put together website, put together my simple practice. The way that my work schedule was, I already had Friday afternoons off, so I started scheduling clients Friday afternoon, and then once that filled up, I started taking leave from work Friday mornings, so I have all Friday with private practice clients. And then I started taking leave Thursday afternoons also, and it just started moving into the week. And at some point when I had enough clients on my caseload and saw that these systems were working, I knew that, okay, this is not going to work if I keep going and keep trying to work here too. This makes sense now to switch. During that time, I was letting all my clients at the VA know that I was going to be leaving and made sure that they got connected with whoever they needed to be connected with. So it felt like a good transition as far as that could go. But yeah, it was a pretty liberating transition at the end of it. I remember feeling probably two months into private practice, just like the absence of stress and it's like this. I didn't realize how much stress I had until it was gone, but that was pretty profound. And just being able to run my own practice now, it's really empowering.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:01):

And were you working with the similar type of client? So you were working with veterans kind of folks struggling with PTSD?

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Christopher Brown (35:09):

One of the reasons I went to private practice is I wanted to start expanding my client base into other areas. So I did want to keep working with vets, but I wanted to be able to see other folks too. I got a clinical partnership with the Headstrong Project, which is a really cool nonprofit that connects licensed providers with veterans seeking care outside of the VA. I still have clients that way, but with Alma and Telehealth. So I was able to connect with some folks in the Seattle area and around the state. And also I'm licensed in Arizona, so I've seen some clients down there. I started talking about the EMDR approach that I take and some of the work I do on LinkedIn and some firefighters reached out and said, this is something that we want our agency to have access to. And that was over a year ago now. But that led to some really cool conversations and some really great opportunities to help out first responder clients, and that's kind of morphing into the Helicon business that we're building, first responders being kind of the initial client base, but recognizing that there are other high stakes professions that EMDR can support. That's kind of where things are going, and it's exciting.

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Michael Fulwiler (36:34):

That makes sense from a marketing perspective. It's kind of an adjacent niche. You're working with veterans and then first responders, firefighters, EMTs, police officers, people who are kind of exposed to a lot of traumatic stuff as well.

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Christopher Brown (36:50):

In those talks, I realized the way that they're talking about mental health care and stigma. These are the same conversations the veteran community was having 10 years ago. I know this stuff. I can help with this stuff. This is cool.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:05):

Definitely. So you're certified in EMDR. When did you get certified?

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Christopher Brown (37:11):

When did I get certified?

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Michael Fulwiler (37:13):

Were you at the VA at time or was that once you were in private practice?

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Christopher Brown (37:17):

It was a few years ago.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:18):

Yeah.

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Christopher Brown (37:19):

Yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:19):

And I know EMDR now is very popular. I see it talked about a lot. I feel like Prince Harry talked about doing EMDR and it was like in the news, I saw a lot of therapists talk about that. When you were first introduced to EMDR, you were explaining back in college and then when you got into doing clinical work, EMDR is something that you wanted to learn and be trained in. Was it popular at the time?

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Christopher Brown (37:45):

EMDR has had a challenging go in terms of reputation and it's weird. I remember when I was taking the training, my trainer worked directly with Francine Shapiro, the EMDR kind of creator back in the early nineties, and she would talk about how challenging it's been for EMDR to establish a reputation because for the last, and this was when she was talking the last previous few decades, there were therapists who would incorporate eye movement into therapy and say they're doing EMDR, but never actually got the training or knew what they were doing. And clients would get on forums and talk about how harmful EMDR is. And there's just a lot of unfortunate, there's been unfortunate stories like that over the years, and my trainer's take was if Francine would've patented this and standardized it so people couldn't just make these claims, it could have protected some of that reputation.

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(39:03):

But Francine Shapiro wanted this to be available to as many people as it could be. So I think EMDRIA now, which is our current gatekeeping body, they acknowledged that as a problem and developed the standards that inform basic training, that inform additional certification and consultation. And I think the whole point is to try and make sure that people aren't saying they're doing EMDR and causing harm when they weren't actually trained or don't know how to do it. But now newer therapists who learn about EMDR and they see these extra hoops that they have to go through.

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Michael Fulwiler (39:49):

Yeah, it feels like it's exclusive and you have to pay thousands of dollars for these trainings.

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Christopher Brown (39:54):

Exactly. There's new criticisms now. I think it's what they're criticizing is a response to something that was even worse. I get it. And I feel very fortunate that I was able to get my consultation and training for free. That was part of my program I worked for. Part of my ambition with Helicon is to figure out how to make it as streamline and efficient and affordable as possible to get plugged into this and be able to offer EMDR in a way that maintains high standards and ethical clinical standards. That's the ambition, and I know we've got a long ways to go, but I feel like the more I talk about this with providers, they see the need and are excited about it. And agencies who would like to access a vetted pool of providers like this, they're excited about it. So it feels like this is something that's going to be really helpful for folks.

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Michael Fulwiler (41:03):

What is Helicon? You've alluded to it a few times. I definitely wanted to get to it.

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Christopher Brown (41:08):

Helicon. We're trying to build an ecosystem of support for EMDR providers and connect them with high stakes professionals who might need their services. So right now it's pretty piecemeal, but we're working on building some technology to support it at a larger scale. We're piloting it mostly in Washington, but EMDR professionals from around the country can apply to get connected. For right now what it is is private communication channels so we can start coordinating and collaborating and sharing resources, referrals, and then again, piloting and Washington private vetted directory that we're offering to first responder agencies just to start seeing what these systems need to look like in order to be as helpful as possible. But in the future, like I was saying earlier, we also want to be able to offer a streamlined consultation and certification track that's aligned with EMDRIA, but just makes it easier to navigate. There is a lot to it and it's kind of complicated and it can be expensive, so we're trying to fill those gaps.

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Michael Fulwiler (42:25):

That makes sense. For folks who are listening who are already practicing EMDR, they're interested in learning more and getting more connected to this community, how can they learn more about it?

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Christopher Brown (42:37):

gowithhelicon.com and I think any EMDR providers will know why it's named that. "Go with that" is probably the most common phrase that we use in EMDR, but helicon, H-E-L-I-C-O-N, gowithhelicon.com or folks can connect with me on LinkedIn. I talk about these things quite a bit on there.

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Michael Fulwiler (43:01):

Yeah, no, you're a great follow on LinkedIn. Why is it called Helicon?

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Christopher Brown (43:07):

It's been an interesting journey just finding a name. It's crazy how these things are, but Helicon is the name of a mountain in Greece that is associated with the ancient Greek muses that we're known for creativity and innovation, and was also the home to the thespians who supported the Spartans at the famous Battle of Thermopylae. So trying to lean into themes of support and creativity, it felt like a good fit and happened to not be taken.

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Michael Fulwiler (43:48):

That's the short answer. Yeah, it was available.

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Christopher Brown (43:50):

And when I sent it to a few of my colleagues, they're like, yeah, this feels like what you're talking about. This feels like a good name. So here we are.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:00):

I like it.

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Christopher Brown (44:01):

Thank you.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:02):

All right, Chris, we're getting to the end here and we like to wrap up with the rapid fire round. I know you're a Pacific Northwest kind of outdoors guy. Do you have a favorite hike right now in the Washington area?

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Christopher Brown (44:18):

Table Mountain up near Mount Baker. That's a good one that tests my anxiety because it's really steep on just slippery rock, so that's an awesome one. Once you get up to the top, it's just amazing views.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:36):

Yeah, such great hiking in the Pacific Northwest. I'm from Seattle. I live in New England now, and the mountains here are really like hills, so there's not the same level of Viking, but we haven't had a chance to talk about this. I want to give you the opportunity. What's your take on psychedelic assisted therapy specifically for working with veterans?

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Christopher Brown (44:56):

Very promising. I spent a big part of last year diving into it. I was consulting with providers about psychedelic harm reduction integration therapy. I did a training on combining the psychedelic assisted therapy model with EMDR protocol for the EMDRIA conference last year. I was trained in the Maps MDMA assisted therapist training when I was still at the VA, and that really opened up my eyes to what's going on in that space, but it's still very much the Wild West. It's very, very powerful. These plant medicines are very powerful and they can create some amazing healing outcomes, but there are also bad outcomes that happen too. And some of my EMDR colleagues in the UK are actually focusing on EMDR as a support for helping people integrate from a bad experience. I mean, it can be like a trauma, but yeah, psychedelic therapy, I definitely think there's a place for it.

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(46:09):

And I think personally, I think it would be naive to assume that you're not going to have to know about this stuff as a therapist over the next five or 10 years if you're in a state where these are becoming legal or even adjacent to one. It's just a matter of time until clients start asking about it, especially if you work with trauma population, it's just EMDR therapists I think are definitely going to have the same kind of clients seeking psychedelic therapies as would EMDR, but we do need more research and we need more regulation, and I see efforts for that happening. And I work with vets who have gone with these nonprofits to South America or Mexico to pursue psychedelic healing opportunities, and it's pretty amazing the difference that I see just from one week to the next. Saw them one week before they went, saw them the next week, and it's like I'm talking to someone different.

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(47:16):

When I was at the VA, there was a few examples like that, and they went and did these unbeknownst to me until later. But in assessing outcomes, how they're storing memories, how they're feeling about things now, I was hearing the same kind of answers that I would've expected after half a dozen EMDR sessions from a single psychedelic experience. When I started having experiences like that, it's like, I can't ignore this. This is some important stuff that's going on. So I just kind of took on a curious mindset and started learning when and where I could. And now not a lot of my clients, but a few clients reach out to me because they know that I can have these kind of conversations. I've been through the trainings. I'm not involved in the psychedelic experiencing part, but the tools that I have can be really helpful in the integration part once people have come home from an experience like that.

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Michael Fulwiler (48:22):

Definitely. It sounds like EMDR and psychedelic assisted therapy can work well together.

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Christopher Brown (48:28):

Yeah, I believe so.

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Michael Fulwiler (48:30):

What's one thing that you wish people understood better about veterans?

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Christopher Brown (48:36):

I don't know how true this is. Just through interactions that I have had over the years. I get the sense that people lump veteran into a certain kind of mental schema in terms of whether it's religious or political or socioeconomic affiliation, but the reality is the veteran population is just as unique and diverse as the rest of the population. It's just kind of a sample of the rest. So I don't know if those are legit misconceptions, but it's kind of the impression I've gotten over the years. And that's why I think groups like Growing Veterans are so cool because it creates an opportunity for people who may have stigmas in their minds to sit next together while cleaning carrots at a wash station and talking about real life things that matter.

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Michael Fulwiler (49:35):

Yeah, it's not this toxic masculinity stereotype that people may associate with the military. I think that's a really good point. Alright, last one here. What's one thing that you want therapists to take away from this conversation?

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Christopher Brown (49:49):

For EMDR providers? I guess it would be to know that there's something that we're working on to make your life easier and more meaningful as a therapist. And for therapists who aren't in the EMDR camp yet that maybe there's an opportunity to in a way that's more accessible in the future with Helicon that I talked about before. Yeah, I think that's it.

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Michael Fulwiler (50:20):

That's great. And I know that you mentioned this already, but just to repeat it for folks, how can they get in touch with you or learn more about what you're doing and even get involved?

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Christopher Brown (50:31):

So they can check out, gowithhelicon.com. There's a signup link on there that they can fill out to get into the database and we'll reach out when there's opportunities and we'll send them a link to join the private communication channel. Or they can just connect with me on LinkedIn and stay in the loop that way.

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Michael Fulwiler (50:53):

Great. Chris, thank you so much. This has been amazing. Really appreciate your vulnerability, especially.

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Christopher Brown (50:59):

Yeah, of course. Appreciate you.

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Michael Fulwiler (51:01):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School, brought to you by Heard, the financial management platform for therapists. To get the class notes for this week's episode, go to joinheard.com/podcast. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you in the next class.

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