Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Dear listeners, you know, like um there are places in the world where trauma is not something that you read about. It is something that you breathe, where grief is not an abstract concept, it is a landscape, and yet in those very places, people find ways to keep going, to serve others, to hold on to something larger than survival. And today we are going to talk about what it takes to carry hope into the hardest places and uh what uh that kind of work does to a person over time, right? So, hey dear listener, welcome back to another powerful episode of Healthy Mind, Heavy Life. I'm your host, Avik, and um I'm really glad that all of you are here today. So, uh, this is the show, it's all about the real, messy, wonderful, beautiful work of taking care of the mind. Yes, one conversation at night. So, today we are having a conversation that goes deep out of resilience, faith, and what it means to witness suffering while still choosing to show up. Yeah, and we have a very lovely guest who is joining us. Please welcome David Small. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Hi, Alex. Thanks so much for having me on. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Amazing, amazing. So, dear listeners, like before we uh get into the discussion, I'll quickly love to introduce you with David. So, David, um, who has spent the last 10 years working with uh three Burma Rangers in one of the most conflict-affected regions in the world and has uh just written a book uh called Nameless Faceless People about their journey. I mean, it's really great to have him here uh uh having uh David with us here today, Dear Reserve. So I'll not take much of a time. Let's get started. Yep. Great, yeah.

Witnessing Trauma Versus Living It

SPEAKER_01 2:02

So so David, a lot of people think that trauma is something that only affects a person who went through uh uh the event directly, but uh you have been surrounded by it for years and years, not as someone who experienced the war as a soldier or a refugee, um but as someone choosing to be present in it. So uh if you can share, like what is the biggest misconception here people have about what drama does to those who witness it, especially for I mean long periods of time.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. Um you know, I spent I spent I had some training as a soldier. I was in the Canadian army when I was younger, so I did have some training as a soldier, but as an aid worker or somebody who's working in a nonprofit, um I you voluntarily choose to go to the front line, or you voluntarily choose to um to go and serve in conflict zones. And when you're a soldier, you're forced to go there. You know, it's your job, it's your description, and you're actually paid um often a good salary to go and and see these things on the front line. And I really think there's a big difference between those that are paid and and like doing it out of obligation, forced to be there, versus those who have made a decision based on a calling in their heart to say, I will go and help these people because they need help. And then you experience trauma in that situation. And for me, trauma was a difficult thing because um it's it became like a buzzword, especially in North America where I come from. Um, trauma is almost like a buzzword, like, oh, somebody cut me off in traffic and I have trauma, or they made my my latte order the wrong kind of latte, or they used the wrong kind of milk and now I have trauma. And it just kind of became this cultural buzzword. And so then when I was serving in the war zone, yeah, it was like, oh, I'm not gonna even entertain the idea that I might have trauma because I just don't want to go down that that road, because it was just I was sick of it being a buzzword, but in reality, it it is something that we all will face and we will all have um to come to grips with what trauma looks like in our own lives.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

No, correct, definitely correct.

When Trauma Becomes A Buzzword

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yeah. So when you were when you were in it uh day after day, uh did you notice it happening to yourself, or was it something that only saw looking back?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Um good question again. It's you know, it's something where there were there, I can I can name some very specific moments in the war in Burma. And Burma's been having um the longest running civil war in the world, and so for 70 over 77 years, there's been fighting in Burma. Some people might call it Myanmar. Um and so yeah, there were very specific days where I came home at the end of the day or came back to our camp area and thought, wow, okay, there are things that I saw today or things that were I experienced today that I'm gonna need to deal with later. But in the moment, you don't really have a lot of time to to deal with it because of the pace of of the day-to-day and the pace of our lives. And even in the West, you know, the pace of our lives is so fast. And we often um we often don't give ourselves enough time to slow down and actually say, okay, what happened today? And so I came up with a quick little check-in for my team that was super helpful in in just allowing us to say, okay, what happened today and how did I feel about it?

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Definitely. I mean, and that is the definitely it's the longest war in the world for sure. Yeah,

A Simple Daily Trauma Check In

SPEAKER_01 6:07

yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

And you know, I I came to grips with trauma just to by by saying, um, okay, was it overwhelming? Was there something today, or is there something in my past that felt overwhelming and out of control? Yeah. And and something might be overwhelming, but we maintain some semblance of control over it, and other things we might be out of control, but it's not that overwhelming. And so neither of those events kind of classify as trauma, but when an event is very overwhelming and you have no agency and no control, suddenly that is a moment where trauma is growing, and and your um ability to have trauma held in your brain or held in your body is big when it's out of control and overwhelming. And so at the end of each day, I would just circle up the team and say, Okay, hey guys, you don't have to answer this publicly, but I want you all to think about it. Was there something today where you felt out of control and overwhelmed? And it allowed them just to name that moment or name that thing in their lives, and that's half the battle is just naming it because we're so busy and we're the pace is so fast. And so a simple question like that allows us to just name it and and give it space to say yes, okay, that did feel overwhelming, that did feel like I had no control in that moment. Okay, that could be something I need to pay attention to.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Exactly. It is so so important. And we often assume that we will uh know when we are being changed by what we see, but sometimes the weight accumulates so quietly that uh we do not even notice until we kind of try to sit down, like so. Um yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, like it's like you know, if you're carrying a backpack and you you add a small rock into

The Backpack That Slowly Breaks You

SPEAKER_00 8:02

your backpack, yeah, you don't notice too much. But as if you keep adding small rocks and you're never taking any rocks out of your backpack, eventually that backpack is gonna weigh you down. And maybe it takes you a year, and maybe you get a little bit stronger from carrying that weight, but eventually it's gonna weigh you down and tire you out, and you're not gonna be able to go any further, you're not gonna be able to help people, and so you have to then deal with the rocks in your backpack, the trauma that you've collected in your life.

Grief Waves And The Need For Purpose

SPEAKER_01 8:32

And and uh one more thing is like you have also written about the grief and uh loss and in some of the most extreme circumstances, uh which is I mean imaginable. I mean, so what have you uh come to understand like about why some people are able to continue moving forward in the face of devastating loss, like at the and at the same time while others get stuck, not because they are weak or weaker, but because something inside them cannot seem to find a next step.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

I I I wish I wish I had a magic answer for that, or I wish I had a a secret, a secret formula. Like if you just do step one, step two, step three, step four, um, then then you'll be fine and you'll be able to keep moving forward. And to be honest, I I don't it's like you said in the introduction, like this is messy. This stuff is a is a messy uh journey for a lot of us to go through, and we all will deal with that mess in different ways. Um in my in my book, Nameless Faceless People, um, I wrestle with a lot of grief and and and a lot of um dear friends that have been killed in the war zone in Burma over the last decade that I've been working there. And um yeah, it's really hard. And you know, grief it comes in waves, it comes at us in different waves, and sometimes you'll have a long time between one wave and the other, but then one day you'll just be sitting at a stoplight and you'll get this wave of grief crash on you uh that seems to come out of nowhere. And and it's just part of the process of grieving, and it's nonlinear, and so you know, we talk about the stages of grief. And and now I run a school, it's called the Jungle Discipleship School, and I take young people from the war zone and and we spend 10 months together at the school, but and we talk, I teach them about the stages of grief, but it's not a linear process, and you'll go from one stage to stage one to stage seven to stage four, and then back to stage one, and you're kind of bouncing all around. And um yeah, it's so it's a different journey for each of us. And I all I really believe that one of the biggest things that sustained me is having purpose. I have purpose and I have a mission that I feel called to do, to serve the people in Burma, to serve the young people at the jungle discipleship school. And that purpose keeps me going. It's not a paycheck, it's not, it's not a financial thing. I'm not no one's getting I'm not getting rich running a nonprofit. And so it's this purpose that I definitely feel that my life has been called to this mission, and that helps sustain me through grief and through trauma and through all these difficult times.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Very true, and and uh also like in the communities that you worked with, uh, were there rituals or practices around like grief that helped people mem, I mean, uh metabolize it in a way that felt different from what you had seen elsewhere?

Alcohol As Numbness And The Power Of Community

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Um in in the in the ethnic communities that I work with in Burma, um, I primarily work with young people, kind of 18 to early 20s. Um those are the people that attend my school, and and they come with very serious um addictions and alcohol, uh especially to alcohol. And so this is not I I I don't haven't seen any sort of unique thing in the in the culture community, how they intentionally deal with grief. There are unintentional ways they do it. But one of the things is that these soldiers they don't know how to deal with grief, and they're losing their friends and their comrades on the front lines in the war, they're losing family members. Every single one of my students has had to flee, or their family has had to flee from the war, and so they they often don't have the tools or the or the words or to know how to handle grief and how to deal with it, and so they turn to alcohol and it's and it's this homemade kind of whiskey moonshine that they make out of rice, and it's everywhere, and it's what people use to shut their brain off, to stop thinking about the the the memories and the images, and and then they end up with uh major dependency on alcohol. And so, one of the things at our school is sometimes we have these soldiers or these young people that come to the school to to spend time learning what we're teaching there, but first they need to go through this process of detoxing and learning to name their addictions and learning to kind of heal uh from the alcohol dependency that they've developed. But the other the other flip side to that is that in Burma and a lot of Asian countries, the the community is so important, and so people are not isolated, and you know, in in the Vietnam War, Korea War, World War II, soldiers come back to North America or come back in the West, where we live in single bedroom apartments, or we live on our own, we don't live like with with family and and second and third generation family members. We all we live in these one-bedroom apartments and we're very isolated. And even you know, we live in the day and the age of Facebook and social media, and you may have 10,000 friends on social media and feel so isolated and feel so alone, and so I think in the Asian culture, and especially in Burma, they have a big uh they place a big importance on cult on community, and and you nobody lives alone. I've never seen anybody where it's a single person dwelling, everybody lives with other people, and and I think just that being immersed where what I bring to the table is needed in this community, it helps people to heal from grief and trauma.

Nutrition, Safety, And Learning To Dream Again

SPEAKER_01 14:51

I agree, I agree totally and um also like um I think you have been running uh something called the Jungle Disciplineship School in Burma, where you teach students about uh nutrition psychology in a war zone so for someone who is listening who has never been in that kind of environment, uh if you can share like how does something like nutrition even matter when people are just trying to survive? Like uh uh and what what have your students taught you about the connection between body and the mind in those conditions?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Yes, I'm I'm so glad you asked that question. Um this was something you know, I'm not I'm not trained in, I'm not trained in counseling, I'm not trained in trauma. I've lived the last 12 years in this war zone, and there's things that I've had to just figure out or learn or or observe. And I spend my own time every summer in counseling um and and debriefing the year, and so I've learned some of the skills along the way, and I do a lot of reading. But one thing I was not anticipating was the value of nutrition. And as we're talking about grief, we talk about loss. You know, grief is tied to loss. You've lost a family member, you've lost a home, you've lost something. And um, I was surprised, I shouldn't necessarily have been surprised, but I was I was a little bit surprised that my students were able to vocalize that they've lost their ability to dream. They've they feel like their dreams have been stolen from them because of the war. And so as this school year went on, and at our school year, we you know, this was just because I like nutrition, not because it's I'm a nutritionist, but I like to have you know three meals a day with lots of vitamins and just a healthy diet. And the thing that's interesting is that if you don't know where your food is gonna come from tomorrow, psychologically, you you actually cannot dream about your future. You can't uh plan what you want to be or have goals or things like that because all you're worried about is, hey, where's food gonna come from tomorrow? And then over the course of the school year, the students stopped worrying. They knew, okay, tomorrow we're gonna have food at the school, tomorrow we'll have nutrition at the school. I don't need to worry about that anymore. And it takes time, it takes time for the brain to um to relax and accept it. But once they do, excuse me, then they're able to start to dream about the future, they're able to uh set goals and start to imagine, you know, I'd really love to become a medic, or I'd really love to become a teacher, or I'd love to become a lawyer. And they have these kind of dreams that are suddenly unlocked because they're no longer worried about their their nutrition, they're no longer worried about where is their food security. And um, the other thing that I noticed is that my students physically started to grow. And I have these 19, 20-year-olds, and it was like suddenly they're getting nutrition every single day. And over the span of nine months, some of them shot up like five inches, and it was incredible. Like their bones and their body were saying, like, whoa, I'm I'm getting nutrition. I'm I'm suddenly um I'm suddenly healthy again, and now I can start to grow, and and their bodies actually started to to respond to the nutrition in a healthy way, and it was so cool to see these students just shoot up like four or five inches over the course of the school year.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

I agree, I agree, totally agree. Uh, did you see moments where uh addressing something as basic as what someone was eating actually uh shifted? They have the ability to cope emotionally or spiritually.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Um I I don't I didn't pay enough attention to

Art As A Window Into Healing

SPEAKER_00 19:10

that. Um, but so I don't know something specific that they would have eaten that would have shifted in them, but I did notice we give our students um an outlet to do art artwork. And in in the beginning, and it's kind of unstructured time where they can paint whatever's inside them, whatever they want to do, whether they're a good artist or a bad artist, it doesn't matter. And in the early days, I noticed that oh, the colors they were choosing to use were these reds and oranges and yellows and blacks, and very it was like kind of these fiery colors that were coming out that they that they were just subconsciously choosing to paint their pictures with, and it was because their country is on fire, and it seems like your whole world is burning down around you, and they use these colors to express, and maybe they're drawing something nice or beautiful, but they use these colors, and as the school year went on, I noticed a lot of the artwork started to shift to blues and greens and um softer colors, softer, um, softer images. And it was almost as if their body was relaxing. And without any sort of prompting or guidance, their brain and their mind were able to say, okay, I'm no longer on fire. I'm not in a place where I'm I'm burning up anymore. Now I can relax and and kind of express things in cool and relaxed, calm colors. And so just the ability to give the students an outlet to paint and to do art, which is something I'm not very good at, but I just thought, okay, I'm gonna give them this opportunity. And then it was just so cool to see their response to that.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Amazing, amazing and and um also like uh looking back, is there something you wish you had known earlier about how to protect your own heart uh while still staying open enough to do their work?

Protecting Your Heart With IFS Parts

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, I uh that's a big that's a good question. Big question. Um I I I wish I knew that um, you know, there's a there's a form of therapy called IFS Internal Family Systems, and I I I'm a big believer in the ideas, the concepts behind IFS. And um basically there's all these different parts within us. And and in conversation, we say something like, Oh, uh, part of me wants to do that, but part of me wants to do this, or part of me wants to go here, and part of me wants to go over there, and and we we express it in this way. Of there are different parts within us. And um, I wish I knew about that years ago, and to and to just say that okay, all of these different parts of me are trying to uh protect me and they're not bad. And even the part of me that um, for example, if I'm getting bombed in a bombing in the war zone, there's one part of me that is terrified, that is like my hands are shaking, my body is shaking. And then there's another part of me that's kind of angry at that, that's angry at this, that wants to be able to prove myself and to prove that okay, I can take care of people, I can take care of myself. And these are two different parts, and neither of them are bad. They're both trying to do something and say something to me. And and I wish I would have learned this earlier that I need to welcome all of these parts of me, and all parts of me are welcomed to what I'm experiencing, what I'm facing, and who I am.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Got it, definitely, definitely. I got it, yeah. So um that's amazing. And if you have to give one advice to the less master, what that leading, um, I I would um I yeah, you know what?

Healing Takes Intention And Other People

SPEAKER_00 23:27

None of this stuff is happens accidentally. No, nobody heals from trauma accidentally, nobody heals from trauma in isolation, and so we have to be intentional about it. And we can say something like, Yeah, I'm fine, no, it's no big deal, it's okay, I'll be fine. I just need a little bit of time, but in reality, we need people in our lives. I nobody high heals from trauma alone, nobody heals from trauma by reading books. You heal from trauma by talking with other people and being in community with other people, and so I just think we need to be intentional to take it seriously, to take our health seriously. Like the health of our our minds affects the health of our body, and um and and you can keep putting it off and keep waiting, but it's taking away years from your life and life from your years, and so I just think it's so valuable for people to say, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna take this seriously. And um, there's so many resources available nowadays, and counseling is available. Like you can get online counseling, and you can say, after five or six sessions, you can say, you know what, this counselor is not for me. And I'm gonna fire that counselor, and I'm gonna find the counselor that is right for me. And you don't just give up, you don't just give up after one or two tries, but you actually say, Okay, you know what, this is something that's important and worth me finding the right fit so that I'm comfortable to unpack some of my life and some of my story.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

I agree. Amazing.

How To Connect And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 25:13

And if listeners wants to connect with you, how they can connect.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Um yeah, so I run a program called the Jungle Discipleship School, and we call it J JDS for short, jungle discipleship school. And so um people can go to jds.asia um or jds or jungle discipleship school.com. Both of those kind of lead to the same place. Um, and people can also, my book, Nameless Faceless People. Um, it just came out recently and it's available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, and basically anywhere that books are sold, you can get a copy of my book. Um, and if people want to connect with me, they can do it through the Jungle Discipleship School. There's ways that they can um yeah, just let me know. And I'm curious there are questions that they may have or or what they thought of this podcast episode. They're welcome to email me their feedback and uh or or any questions about the war in Burma or or what we're doing at the Jungle Discipleship School.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

That's really amazing. Really, really amazing. So great. So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for easy reference. And uh, I'll say if there is one thing uh to carry from this conversation, it is this that uh healing is not about escaping the hard things, it is all about I'd say, uh learning to move through them without losing your way. So yeah, yeah, so that is the most important thing I'd say. And uh and thank you, David, for sharing uh your story and your heart with us today. And it's very, very important, yeah. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Thank you so much, Avik, and uh thanks everybody for listening.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Amazing, and and listeners, like um, thank you so much for being here today and uh for uh letting this conversation sit with you. And I'd say, like, whatever you are uh carrying right now, I hope uh you know that showing up for yourself, even in small ways, is much enough. And uh taking care of your mind is not about getting it perfect, but it is about staying curious, staying compassionate, and uh and remembering that you are allowed to be human, right? That is the first important part. So, so yeah. So, with this hope, this is your whole stomach and this is all the life. Until next time, take good care of yourself. Thank you so much.