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In this episode, I’m joined by Mark Ross.
Mark is a former Marine, husband, father, grandfather, and host of the Speak Your Truth with Mark Ross podcast and Soldier Stories Podcast. He speaks openly about mental health, PTSD, and his own experience of spending years suffering without really understanding what the fuck was happening inside him.
What I liked about this conversation was that it wasn't really about being a Marine. It wasn't even really about PTSD. It became a conversation about what happens when something from our past continues running our life without us understanding that it is there. Mark spoke about nightmares, anxiety, anger, hypervigilance, drinking, suicidal thoughts, and thoughts of hurting other people. For years he was experiencing all of this without having a name for what was happening to him.
That lined up almost perfectly with the statement left by the previous guest. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll direct our lives and we'll call it fate. Mark had never heard the quote before, but his response was simple. If you don't change what needs to be changed, you will continue to feed it.
We spoke about how trauma lives beyond our thinking mind. Mark described needing to know where the exits are when he enters a room, struggling in crowds, being hypervigilant, and feeling his body move into survival mode before he has consciously decided anything. I shared my own experience of being surprised at my twenty five year sobriety celebration and how quickly my nervous system reacted to darkness, noise, lights, people, and everything happening at once. It reminded me that we can understand ourselves intellectually and still have something much older happening underneath us.
That became a big part of the conversation. It is not necessarily what we know about ourselves that causes the biggest problems. Sometimes it is everything we don't know. The reaction that happens before the thought. The anger that seems to come from nowhere. The fear we cannot explain. The behaviour we keep repeating while convincing ourselves that everybody else is causing it.
Mark said something that probably captures his story better than anything else. He described himself as the author of his own destruction. Not because what happened to him was his fault, but because eventually he had to recognise what he was doing with what had happened to him.
That distinction matters to me. I speak about it through my own alcoholism as well. I don't believe it is my fault that I'm an alcoholic, but it is absolutely my responsibility to do something about it. The same applies to so much of what we carry. Something can happen to us without our consent and still eventually become our responsibility to deal with.
Pain not transformed will be transmitted.
Mark could continue suffering silently and passing that pain into the lives of the people around him, or he could start looking at what was happening inside himself. He chose to speak. He sought help. He started understanding PTSD and eventually created podcasts where other people could speak about the shit they had been carrying as well.
We also spoke about the idea that healing doesn't mean the work is finished. I compared it to mowing the lawn. You don't mow the fucking thing once and expect it never to grow again. Mark still experiences triggers. I still experience triggers. The work is recognising them, understanding them, and becoming conscious enough that the old version of ourselves doesn't automatically take control.
You can meditate. You can do breathwork. You can go to therapy. You can read every book you can find. But if the moment you are triggered you become completely unconscious and destroy the people around you, there is still work to do.
Mark's life looks very different today. The old Mark, as he describes him, is gone. What I found interesting was that he doesn't speak as though he has beaten PTSD or completed some journey. He speaks about continuing to learn who he is now and continuing to do the work.
Mark can be found on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6nsErY0GR2KJNSNd2wIhwn
Maybe that is the point.
The statement Mark leaves for the next guest is this:
It's okay to not be okay. Just do something about it.
It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME. In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor. Author of It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME
No tips.
No fixing.
Just real conversations.
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