Peace Leadership for Veterans: From Head to Heart | Global Connections Call Notes 6.5.2024

After retiring from the United States Navy, Dr. Nick Irwin found himself in a transitional space searching for his identity and his next steps. Moving towards connection, self-discovery, and healing, Nick began pursuing a Ph.D. in Education and Leadership Studies. In 2023, through the encouragement of his friend and Euphrates community member Dr. Whitney McIntyre Miller, Nick joined Euphrates’ Peace Practice Alliance (PPA) to build connections with others who also want to emanate positive peace in their communities around the world. From the volleyball court, to creating a community of student veterans to better serve others in the community, to the virtual meeting spaces of the Peace Practice Alliance, Dr. Nick is a bridge builder, bringing his passionate, authentic, and thoughtful self to everything he does, including our June Global Connection call, see the transcript from our call below.

Nick’s background:

Nick: I was born in Hayward, California, but I was adopted at a young age in an “open adoption”.  Within an open adoption, my birth mother was able to call and see me anytime. My birth mom would come and visit me during my birthday parties and different events in my childhood. Since I didn’t know who she was, I referred to her as the balloon lady because she'd always come with balloons and say happy birthday. When I was around 7 or 8 years old, I asked my parents, “Am I adopted?” They responded that indeed, the balloon lady who's been coming around, she's your birth mom.

[After getting the chance to reconnect with my birth mom during my adolescence] I began to experience trying to find my identity, trying to find my sense of community, trying to really understand more just who I am. I think being adopted made that challenging because I didn't always have a direct answer or was given different types of stories…I was really just confused ultimately, and that led me to not really know who I was.

Due to these challenges, I would try to make friends in high school. I oftentimes would do what I thought they wanted me to do, and I would go over the top with it. Looking back on my adolescent years [seeing myself go through] these different cycles, I see my search for my identity eventually led me to a street gang. I felt this sense of community with them. We liked the same kind of music, and as the darkest kid on my street growing up, this street gang brought me a sense of community since we all looked more like each other. 

This is where the military came in. After I went down this dangerous path with the street gang, my parents and sisters had an intervention. They sat me down one day and stated they were going to take me to a [military] recruiter. They told me that I needed to straighten my life out. It was a call to action from my family and helped me in so many ways. I joined the U.S. military in December 2002 and my military career lasted from that December until July of 2023. 

Talk about going through new changes! During my military career, the changes of environment, meeting different people, and establishing different sets of community really began to transform me. At first, I continued to do a lot of similar things to my adolescent years, not really knowing who I was and trying to figure out those things, but as time went on, I started to really understand who I was and found my authenticity. 

Career in the U.S. Navy:

Nick: In the military, when we go through “Boot Camp” (basic training for new military recruits), we are essentially stripped away of our individuality. We are taught that we can't speak up as individuals. We’re taught how to follow orders. We are taught to look the same (uniforms).  It's always “going for the team” and doing what's always best for the team, not yourself. 

There could be something wrong with your personal needs or your home life, or your whole self as it is, but if you're taught to not express your weakness, not express any emotion. In turn you may not have a healthy way of handling the different feelings you're experiencing. 

When I was first coming up in the U.S. Navy, there were a lot of interpersonal communication situations where people would downright haze and harass me. They were rude, aggressive, and violent. It was really hard to be on the other end of their harassment, but because of my military rank, I had to bottle my feelings, I had to hold them in. I didn't know how to handle it. This led me to excessive exercise. It led me to screaming on the flight line when there were airplanes going by and no one could hear me. That was the only way I could get all my emotions out. 

I didn't have a healthy way to process my emotions. Coming up into leadership roles in the military, I would oftentimes avoid [difficult] situations or I would enable people by just doing the work for them. I didn't know how to have these conversations and I didn't know how to handle what I was experiencing inside. 

However, once I reached that 10 year mark there was a total shift and a lot of that came from a lot of inner work - a lot of leadership development and really understanding who I was, my purpose, my values. And that’s actually what led me to leave the military. So, after 12 years of active duty service, I left active duty and went into the military reserves in 2015. 

While I was in the U.S. Reserves, I went to Chapman University to pursue my master's degree. As Dr. Whitney was mentioning earlier, I entered Chapman’s MLD program. This is where I found peace leadership, and finding peace leadership is what really shifted my own story for me. I began to understand who I was, and how to handle relationships, and how to actively engage with the community. I had a lot of moments where I was pushed to use my intuition and began to pair that with the peace leadership practices I was learning. 

When I went through this peace leadership class, I found literature, I found theories. I found different forms of practices and instruction that helped me understand it from a theoretical lens. I was able to pair the practices with my intuition. This totally shifted me in so many ways.

Transitioning from military to civilian life:

Nick: When you're in a military environment for so long, you get used to the culture. You get used to direct communication. You get used to the stoic environment. I had a hard time adjusting in the civilian workforce, and I kept looking back to my sense of purpose that I discovered while in the MLD program - to give back to the community where I came from. For my MLD project, I took peace leadership and emotional intelligence and designed a course. This course used emotional intelligence and mindfulness. The “Good Life” (course title) was to help people understand who they are, who they want to be, and a learning plan to get there. 

I wanted to take this course and bring it to adolescents. In my own adolescent life I had felt very conflicted and I wanted to help others who may be going through the same thing. The way that I was able to do that and gain employment was actually going back into the U.S. Navy. I had this idea that I was going to be able to give back to others by being a recruiter. I quickly learned, however, that that wasn't necessarily the case because the military was more focused on numbers rather than the actual quality of the person. However, I did have the ability due to my discernment, to really find those who wanted to either serve their country or find the right position for them by mentoring and guiding those who I would interact with. 

[While working in the Reserves] I continued pursuing my PhD, which reignited this ability to work with peace leadership. I was chatting with Whitney, and she introduced me to Peace Practice Alliance (PPA) and Euphrates Institute. Euphrates literally took the integral peace leadership theoretical framework and implemented it into the Peace Practice Alliance (PPA). It’s [learning about] integrating inner work or personal peace to interpersonal peace to community peace, and lastly, global peace or the environment.

Building a catalyst for veterans to practice personal peace:

Nick: I started to notice a lot of things that not only did I see in myself, but I saw in other military veterans as well. Reading student veteran literature led me to note that I wasn't the only one experiencing this, it’s also in literature as well. When we leave the military, oftentimes we don't have the same support. structure, or guidance that we received in the military where we were told what to do, what to wear, how to show up, where to show up. We had shelter. We had food. We had all these things. Yet once you leave the military you have to figure those things out for yourself. We need certain skills to learn how to do that. We were in an environment where we were emotionally stoic. We were taught not to expose any weaknesses. Exposing a weakness brings shame amongst us. Looking at peace leadership and at the PPA, I thought we can use a lot of these practices amongst military veterans to be able to see if these things will actually work. Can we have conversations around inner peace, interpersonal peace, community peace and global peace. Do these things actually help us? 

I'll be the first one to tell you that it does! What was so amazing about this study is that there were five of us, coming together for four weeks. We spent Monday through Friday for four hours a day together, for a total of 80 hours. [As a group], we went through each of these parts of the PPA curriculum. What was so interesting is that we had four hours to literally talk about these things together. 

Because we all came from shared experiences from the military, my group and I were able to talk about our different traumas, our different adversities, different experiences we faced in the military. When we built this comfort base form the peace leadership curriculum, we were able to unload things that we haven’t really had time to process because we were given that space to process it. 

Before the study I did a pre-interview to understand the adversities they experienced from the military into college. A lot of what came up during the pre-interview was the veterans’ preconceived psychological and social barriers. Those barriers were that people often didn’t understand the veterans, that others don't know the experiences they have gone through, they were older students, etc. So they put up a block, not wanting to engage with others because of these barriers.. 

Oftentimes student veterans will remain neutral. If they don't feel comfortable they are not going to expose their veteran identity to others. When they expose this identity it can lead to a lot of stereotyping and prejudice from other students. So they are very cautious. Thankfully, in this space together, because we're all veterans, it was so easy to just not filter our communication. We're trying to be more sensitive to others. However, in that process of fitting in more in the university setting, we may lose our military identity which makes you feel you’re in this weird flux - a back and forth of our identities. 

However, when veterans have that safe space like the five of us did, things can start to transform. In particular, we gave permission for people to be vulnerable, and this was something that was very different from their military experience. When they had that permission to be vulnerable it allowed them to process, to heal and to liberate themselves. We spoke about all sorts of different things, whether it was death, losing a child, suicide, etc. These things came out organically because we built that space for each other. In the military things are “Go, go, go!” It's fight or flight - your stress response is always on. You're very alert, and we're not always given the space to be able to bring that stress response down and slow down. With our group, we had that space to relax and to actually process what happened.

Healing with his veteran community:

Nick: One of the participants in our group actually lost his best friend five years ago. For five years he kept this pain inside, not talking about it at all. 

When we were in our space together, he was able to open up about it. At first he was extremely quiet. He wore a face mask the first  day for his psychological safety. By the second day he removed that mask and every day after that. By the third day, he was laughing and joking. He learned the importance of being more compassionate and more empathetic towards others. [Through our 80 hours together] each veteran discovered things in themselves they wanted to work on. The study not only helped them learn these peace skills, but it helped them transform their mindset about how they see themselves, and also how they see others.

After the workshop was done, we created a club together. We found ways to connect with other veterans on campus. We discovered that there are 231 military-connected students on our campus! We advocated to teachers, staff, and administrators to discuss veterans' needs, to discuss their strengths and  issues that they experience. These discussions led us to a national conference in Washington, D.C. to actually talk to our elected representatives about what veterans are experiencing. And this year a congresswoman came to our campus! When she visited, she got to see our space, or a lack of space and see what's going on.

This vision moving forward is to find a way to get standards across public and private universities in order to assist veterans all over the U.S. We want a place where veterans have the right structure, the right services, the appropriate staff, so they can get their needs met. 

What I found in my study is that they go through this continued transition, which just means that every time they go to a new school, they are experiencing a varied degree of services, a varied degree of structures, a varied degree of staff, and they may revert back to their military socialization. In order for them to fully heal and fully transition, they could use improved standards and peace leadership from the PPA offerings to help them have this cultural shift. 

Community discussion:

Community Member: I'm so inspired! It is so important for us to keep considering what is our unique gift that we can bring to the puzzle. I just think, “What am I good at? And how can I bring that together with what somebody else is good at?” Then we can create those communities, similar to the veteran community that you did just by being yourself - you didn't do anything except you were yourself. 

If we can just lead from that place and not try to think and intellectualize it and make it complicated, and just come back to ourselves and our own inner peace that's the answer. 

Community Member: I was so moved by Nick’s transformation from the military to Peacebuilding. I just want to reflect back on how you started by saying the military creates a sense of community by stripping you of identity. You have to look the same, eat all the same food. You don't get to think for yourself. You're taught to follow orders. So in a way, it's like homogenizing humanity down to its basic level to create a sense of community. 

Yet what you've evolved into is creating a sense of community by living in the fullness of people's gifts and discovering their individuality and that includes their incredible service to this country, and who they are, and not having to hide that. It’s finding a much fuller sense of community. 

That personal journey that you went on… It just gives me chills because you show us that it's healing isolation and loneliness when we can be our full selves and accepted for who we are with each other -  not having to be stripped down, but really live into that fullness. 

Community Member: The people said that the military is a place of discipline and where you follow many rules, and are under command structure, where you will be highly disciplined. Coming into civilian life, how did this sense of discipline impact you after the military?

Nick: One thing military socialization and culture taught me was discipline and how to be a self starter. I had to be able to put myself in situations where I'm uncomfortable, and turn that discomfort into comfort. I struggled with my discipline [after the military]. I had to figure out my own structure since I didn't have that guide to inform me of what I needed to do, or how I needed to go about things. I had to really rely on the self-reliance of what I was also taught in the military to just try to figure things out]. 

I came back from Djibouti in 2020, and I recognized that our whole world was experiencing isolation. Our whole world was experiencing loneliness. Multiplying this with coming from the hazardous environment that I just came from, and not necessarily understanding what was even happening inside me, I really struggled entering civilian life at first. If I was to do things differently, and had that space where I had that community and felt safe to talk about those things, I could have used that discipline even more effectively. What I did find with the PPA and then with student veterans was the impetus to use that discipline. For example, coming into this class every day no matter how I was feeling.