Successful
Transitioning Stories By Dr. Julie Ducharme www.synergylearninginstitute.org
This month I was excited to interview Dr. Tiffany Tajiri, a retired Air Force officer. Dr. Tiffany Tajiri is a licensed, board-certified clinical psychologist, veteran U.S. Air Force officer and Special Operations-trained psychologist that has taken part in the selection and assessment of Special Forces personnel. Dr. Tajiri is the author of “Peace After Combat:
Healing the Spiritual and Psychological Wounds of War” – a book about recovery and restoration for military veterans and their families. Dr. Tajiri is currently chief of the largest behavioral health clinic serving Fort Bliss (El Paso, TX). She and her team work with soldiers providing behavioral health treatments to improve coping and resilience. When you were getting ready to transition what was your process:
Reality is we don’t know all the nuances that will spring up for us. We have to have a general idea of where we are going, the time, patience, practice and get educated on what we are doing and this will start opening new doors. When I was in the Air Force, I would not ever think I would write a book or create recovering programs, but I had an idea of where I wanted to be and that was in helping and serving other people. This guided me to all these other opportunities and accomplishments. Tips for Transitioning - Visualizing Your Future Our brains do not know the difference between a real or imagined experience. I tell veterans you have to see what you want for yourself. When you start doing this you start laying down new neural networks in your brain. And you start gravitating to the places you need to go. There is a book out there called The Secret of Attraction Secrets by Timothy Willlink and it echoes that what comes out in our thinking will also dictate the paths we are looking to go towards. Let me give you a great tidbit from research. There was a Doctor Kelly back in the day. She did a research project having one group do visualizing exercises, one that physically did the exercises and one that did not do them. 48
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In the end the ones who did the visualization exercises had clinical significant muscle gain for muscular strength. You think, how could this be? What you are doing in your visualizing is you are strengthening the neural connections in your motor cortex just by the process of visualization. Let’s talk about your book and how did you get inspired to write a book? This really goes back to my active duty days. This is about where is God in War and in Trauma. Faith and spiritually is the greatest protective factor when it comes to suicide prevention. I wanted to provide a book that would educate them on what trauma is and that it’s normal. How the brain functions and how the brain understands and deals with it. There are some very serious, raw, and graphic stories but it shows how the progress of how these service members are recovering from their trauma, rewiring their brains, and using visualization as a means of healing. When all we see is pain we have these pain blinders on; the memory is stored away in the amygdala, this is the fear center of the brain. We can only see with blinders on and we have to learn how to remove those blinders. Physical and Mental Health So when people are getting out of the military their battle rhythm or as we call is their operational tempo slows down and then what happens, the idle mind is the Devil’s playground. Everything that is unprocessed and unresolved from combat to life experiences causes chaos very quickly. Then they don’t know what to do, their means of coping before was immersing themselves into work. One of my greatest tips is take care of your physical needs before you get out. You need and take care of your spiritual and psychological health, go talk to a behavior health specialist and process these unresolved emotions. Final Tip - education I have a podcast called Peace After Combat to offer more education and tips for active military and as well veterans. I co-host this podcast with a VA psychologist where we cover all these topics such as: transitioning, trauma, and struggles, with the goal of continuing to help and provide support to our active duty and veterans. Feel free to find us on any place that you can get a podcast. To get education from Dr. Tiffany click link below https://drtiffanytajiri.com/meet-dr-tiffany/ To watch the Dr. Tiffany live interview click the link below https://youtu.be/oeWm4Oa3keA For more help on active duty transition, education, and more click the link below www.synergylearninginstitute.org
