Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander joins Cheddar Politics to discuss his new book, 'Invisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PTSD,' in which he explores the struggle of living with PTSD and his decision to withdraw from political life, for now.

Cheddar Politics

Jason Kander Talks PTSD Struggles in New Book 'Invisible Storm'

welcome back to cheddar politics. I'm Megan prats in Washington, D. C. That's baker machado in new york, Jason Kander was once a rising star in the Democratic Party, serving as Missouri's secretary of state and then mounting a campaign against Missouri senator Roy blunt, where he nearly won. But in 2018, he's surprisingly bowed out of political life to seek treatment for PTSD. He suffered after serving in Afghanistan. Yeah, really incredible story. Make. And I sat down with candor discuss his new book, Invisible Storm. We talked about his political life living with PTSD and what future he might have in politics. But first we started with why he wrote this book and why now take a look in terms of writing the book. I mean, I guess it was really just that I saw the value in telling this story when I first announced that I was going to step back from public life to get help for post traumatic stress. I heard so many I heard from so many people who, you know, that inspired them to say, well, maybe what I went through is enough to justify getting help. And then over the course of a few years, as I talked to more of those people and thought more about what my journey had been like, as I went through therapy and everything I realized, you know, one of the things that had stopped me for a long time from going to get help, was this sense that there was really no point. I mean, the the way PTSD is portrayed on screen and on tv as always as if it's a terminal diagnosis, either from a life perspective or at a minimum from a career perspective. And now that I knew that that wasn't the case. I realized a lot of other people still thought it was. And so if I could tell my story of getting to post traumatic growth, that might inspire a lot more people to go after it. Yeah. And we're to talk about the therapy component to it as somebody who talks about going through therapy as well and and how amazing it has been for me. Was there something that maybe you wish you knew along the process writing this book that somebody like you or somebody else reading this book would have would have really liked to have known going throughout all of this. There's a bunch of things. Um one of them I guess really is just the treatment actually works and that you're supposed to get better. You know, I was a few months into therapy when I went to my therapist and I said, how is it possible that I've gotten better after a few months when most people never get better and he was like, what do you mean? Most people never get better? And I was like, well, I just have heard of so few people who reached post traumatic growth and he pulled out a bunch of a studies and showed me that the main indicator of whether or not people got better is whether they committed to the program and whether they did the homework they were given by their therapists between their weekly sessions, which I had done. And he showed me that the vast majority of people who do that actually do get better, they get to a point where it doesn't disrupt their life and it becomes a manageable injury like any other. So I wish, you know, going into it, that I had known that I had known that there was a very achievable goal in front of me and what I think most people appreciate what you're doing is you're de stigmatizing so much about the therapy process and the pTSD aspect of it. What do you think people get wrong about all this? Maybe if they haven't gone through it or they don't have somebody in their family or know someone that's gone through it. What do you think they get wrong about it? You know, I'll tell you the thing that probably was the preconceived notion that I had, that was the most incorrect, which is I when I imagined what therapy was, I thought of it as a very passive thing, sort of going in talking with somebody and it was hard for me to envision how I was going to get better through that. But right, when I started therapy, my great uncle said to me, give me a great piece of advice, he said therapy is getting a Master's degree in yourself and it turned out that's much more what therapy was like, it was much more like graduate school. It was learning about my brain and what my brain had gone through and about the brain in general in ways that I hadn't understood before and then taking that knowledge and applying it. So now I feel like I have that master's degree in myself. But the point is it was a lot of work, it wasn't passive, it wasn't just sort of laying back on the couch the way it's portrayed on tv and talking about your feelings. And it wasn't that at all, it was doing work during my weekly therapy sessions and then doing actual work on myself that was assigned to me by my therapist in between. So it was much more like graduate school than I imagined You open your book by the way with this paragraph that I thought was really sort of striking men will literally run for president instead of going to therapy, but I think you're absolutely spot on about that. What do you say to other men out there who haven't sought therapy? Who maybe think I don't I don't need to do that. I think I've got everything under control. That's for somebody else. It's not for me. What do you say to them out there? Yeah, I just want to start by making sure I credit that was a gal on twitter who I saw named Colleen who I don't know who I just saw that it was just a tweet that resonated with me. So that's how I started the book and what I'm trying to get at in that part is that one, obviously that's what I did, I mean so it's rather apt to start the book with that, but also because I think what a lot of us are doing is what I learned in therapy is called avoidance, which is staying busy or staying for some people staying you know high or staying drunk or staying, you know, working out or whatever the thing is that allows you to avoid yourself um that's what I was what I was doing and it just happened to me that the thing that was in front of me that was available to me was my career which was being a politician and so you know, I guess that the message for men or women out there is really that you know, the thing that you're doing that keeps you from being alone with your own thoughts that are disruptive and intrusive to you, That's not necessarily good for you. That that's you trying to outrun your trauma and the truth is that you know, you either deal with your trauma, your trauma deals with you, you can't outrun it, Jason, you've been really sort of a rising star within the Democratic Party for years for our viewers unfamiliar with your story, you bowed out of political life to seek help in 2018. So you basically missed the last few years of the trump years and the first few years of the biden years. And by the way, in Missouri, you kind of have a different perspective also of sort of the world than a lot of other political observers having been at a political life. Do you have a different sort of look at the political realities that we're all looking at now A little bit? I mean, you know, I've been out of it in terms of I haven't been running for anything, but you know, I was a biden surrogate in 2020 and I still have my podcast majority, so I'm still involved politically. I'm just not involved as a candidate, but it has given me a little bit of distance and what it's allowed me to do is see that, you know, I think as a country, in a lot of ways, we are sort of struggling with avoidance. I mean, we've been through a national trauma over the last few years. I mean, there's an international trauma with Covid, but then the trump administration, the everyday, what sort of danger is around the next corner, that sort of thing. There's a national trauma there and there's a tendency for us as a country to want to avoid it to want to focus on the more trivial things or in some cases to just kind of you throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do about it. And you know, like any other trauma, the only way out is through, you've just got to face it down, Jason, look, there's major dissatisfaction right now with both parties right now, we have President Biden's approval ratings below 40%, Congress's approval ratings below 40%. People are yearning right now for something new and something different. You have said, you know, look, you you're happy as your life as a husband, your dad, you're a little league coach, you kind of still kept the door open. You haven't said no to maybe coming back into the political life, but what would it take to get you back into this political life? It would have to be a situation where I wanted to do it because it seemed like a better job than the job I have. Um, and right now I have a great job. I'm the president of national expansion of Veterans Community Project. I love what I'm doing, I love what I'm doing and the rest of my life, so probably if it happens, it's gonna be when my kids are a little older to be honest, it probably then, and the thing is when I say that a lot of people get upset because they say, well, you know, but the country is in trouble and one of the things that I learned in therapy was that I finally was able to get myself to a point where I feel like America and I are square, I understand that I've actually done quite a lot for my country and I didn't feel that way for many years. I felt like I hadn't done enough and now I do things for my country, but it's because I want to and because there's a change that I want to make in the world, but I'm not willing to give up what I have, which is time with my family. The other reason that I make sure to leave the door open, I mean obviously the first is I may want to do that again. But the other reason is honestly, there's a lot of people watching this right now who are either thinking there's a job they want to get or there's an employer who's thinking about hiring people. And in both cases, you know, PTSD could be something that like the stigma of trauma could be something that keeps people from hiring folks. It could be something that keeps people from thinking they can do a job. And if, if I were to say like, no, I don't think I'm going to run for president. People might like ever, people might say, well that's because he has pTSD because he can't, so I want to make it clear to people that if at some point I decide that that's what I want to do. I can't and that PTSD wouldn't stop me from doing that because if I act like it would stop me. Uh then, you know, that could stop somebody out there from getting another job. And I don't want that to be really enlightening conversation to Jason Kander, author of the new book Invisible Storm, that's available wherever books are sold and making he said something that is incredibly remarkable to me as somebody who also goes through therapy. Doing therapy is like getting a Master's degree about yourself. And that is so true. Oh, I love that. I also go to therapy, Big Fan, find yourself a therapist. Okay, after the break baker. And I talk more about there being no, we were on the week in Washington and discuss what we're watching over the next seven days in the political world. So don't go anywhere.