CHOOSE GROWTH

'Finding A Way Forward With PTG (Post-traumatic Growth)'
Exclusive Interview with Ken Falke
Featured in 'Innerviews'
Hosted by Allié McGuire

​Ken Falke, founder of Boulder Crest Foundation, has been on a remarkable journey, from leading high-risk military missions as a bomb disposal specialist to pioneering Post-traumatic Growth (PTG) through his wellness centers for combat veterans and first responders. After decades of service, Ken’s mission has evolved from saving lives in the field to transforming lives through PTG, helping individuals turn trauma into a source of strength and purpose. Through his leadership, Boulder Crest Foundation and the Choose Growth initiative have become beacons of hope, showing that there is not only a way to heal but to thrive after trauma.

ALLIÉ: Ken, you've dedicated a significant part of your life to helping combat veterans, first responders, and their families through Boulder Crest Foundation. I guess my first question is, what led you to embrace this concept of post-trauma-related growth, PTG, and how does it differ from the traditional approaches to treating trauma-related conditions like PTSD?

KEN: Yeah. Well, it's a great question, and it's a long answer. I'll give you the short version of it. I spent 21 years in the Navy. I come from a fairly military family background. My dad was a cop, so we had the first responder thing in our world as well. After he was in the Army, he became a cop here in D.C. After 21 years of service, I got out of the Navy and started a consulting business that had a fairly successful run. During the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was a bomb disposal guy in the Navy. During the wars in Afghanistan, we had a lot of bomb disposal personnel killed in action and severely wounded in action. My wife and I started a charity really just to take care of the severely wounded bomb disposal personnel. There are bomb disposal people in each service—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. We were serving this joint service community.

During about 2010, 11, 12 timeframe, the war in Afghanistan got really bad as far as amputees went. We had a lot of guys losing limbs. We had four triple amputees, meaning that they lost three limbs back-to-back, one from every service. When I didn't think it could get any worse, we had a fifth guy come in, Taylor Morris, who had lost all four limbs, or what they call a quadruple amputee. It was taking a toll on me personally, and I just thought, we've got to do more. We’ve got to figure out what else we can do. Our primary mission in our first foundation was to pay for these families to stay at the hospital. You can imagine a young guy who's from San Diego, stationed in San Diego, and his wife and kids and dogs and cats live there. He goes to Afghanistan, gets medevaced to Washington, D.C., his family's from Iowa, her family's from Florida. It's a big disruption to the family. We would pay for the families to stay in hotels, get rental cars, get meals, those types of things.

What I started to realize was that most of the parents that were there were my age. Most of these guys who were getting injured were 23, 24 years old, the same age as my daughters at the time. My wife and I started inviting their parents out to our house here in the Blue Ridge Mountains for lunches and barbecues and ultimately overnight stays if they had too much to drink, and all those types of things. One thing led to another; we had this big estate—it was a 200-acre estate—and we decided we would donate 37 acres of the property and build this beautiful retreat center. And that's what started Boulder Crest.

The first year we ran Boulder Crest, it was focused primarily, again, on this mission of a family respite, families getting together and getting away from the hospital, kind of to a home-away-from-home environment rather than a hospital room. But one thing led to another, and I think what we realized quickly, maybe in that first year, is that it wasn't so much the physical injuries that were holding people back. I mean, it was amazing to see, for example, a quadruple amputee who, in months, was up on prosthetic legs and walking, and it was just amazing to watch the physical recoveries. But what was challenging was the mental recovery. And after talking to many psychologists and psychiatrists around the country, I kept hearing things over and over again that the PTSD treatments we were doing for veterans weren't working. And the suicide rate was through the roof; at the time, it was about 22 veterans a day who were taking their own lives.

And one thing led to another, and I went on this journey to really find something that might work. I met this doctor named Tedeschi, who in 1995 had coined the term post-traumatic growth. And it really resonated with me for a lot of reasons. One was Tedeschi's primary research was families who had lost children to cancer. And I lost my mom when I was seven years old. She died of cancer at 29. So I grew up in a family where, you know, the grandparents were, "You should never bury your children," you know, all those kinds of stories that you hear about bereaved cancer losses and family losses at young ages. But that story doesn't resonate with everybody who hasn't been a part of it.

So I had asked Tedeschi, "Have you ever studied anything in the military?" And he said, "Well, actually, I studied prisoners of war from the Vietnam War." And then he had my attention because I, as a combat veteran and as a guy who's been through prisoner-of-war training, couldn't think of anything worse on the battlefield than getting captured and tortured. And, you know, during the Vietnam War, I mean, these men were in prison camps for up to eight years, some of them. So that story really resonated with me. And I thought, well, if that community achieved post-traumatic growth in their lives, then everybody should be able to.

Now, what post-traumatic growth suggests is that most of us after trauma will learn from these experiences. And over a period of time, you'll get better, you'll get stronger, and all those things will happen. But that period of time is too long. So I asked Tedeschi, "Do you think we could teach people how to achieve post-traumatic growth early in their lives?" And he said, "You know, nobody's ever asked me that, but I'm all ears." And we started building a curriculum around trying to teach the science of post-traumatic growth. And our results are, they say, seven to 10 times better than traditional mental health care. So we're super excited about where it's going.

​ALLIÉ: That's amazing. And my hope now that I've come—because I hadn't heard of PTG until hearing your story—is that PTG becomes as commonly recognized as PTSD, receiving that level of support and curiosity about what's really possible with it.

KEN: I'm glad you said the word "hope" because I think that's the real problem in the mental health world. I mean, obviously, there are lots and lots of challenges, but when I think of men and women who go to war, put a uniform on every day to serve our communities, and the suicide rate exceeds the rate of death that happens in these very dangerous professions. I always tell people that suicide is really a disease of hopelessness. And if we can create hope in people's lives, then you can really do some amazing things. So I'm glad you used that word, and we believe the same.

It’s funny because I spoke in Texas at a Texas Psychological Association conference, and psychologists filled the room—about 400 or 500 people. I asked them how many people had heard of PTSD, and every hand went up. I said, "How many people have heard of post-traumatic growth?" Maybe seven hands in a room full of psychologists. So it's been a challenge. Last year, we were super successful, as a matter of fact, thanks to a congressman from your state, Jack Bergman, to get Post-traumatic Growth Day put right in the middle of PTSD Awareness Month on June 13th every year. So we're excited. We're trying to get the word out, but as a small nonprofit, you have some challenges with marketing budgets and all those things, but we're definitely making progress.

ALLIÉ: Well, it just speaks to the power of words, right? If you can reference something in a different way, that can change everything—to the point of what your shirt reads right there, you know, that "shift happens." That is possible for this shift to happen. We just have to create more awareness to your point. Let’s now shift to talk about resources. While resources for veterans, first responders, and their families do exist at both the government level and the private sector level. There's a gap. So, my next question for you is, can you share how the Boulder Crest Foundation works to fill that gap?

KEN: Well, you know, I tell everybody that I speak to every time we talk about why nonprofits exist, and it really is to fill the gap of the private and the public sectors and where, you know, people that can't make money off it, where there's not enough money, there's a big problem in a community, these nonprofits stand up to help the communities. And it's no different than what's happened with Boulder Crest.

A friend of mine said one time that the goal of every nonprofit should be to put itself out of business, but in certain cases, you know, mental health, homelessness, abused children, cancer—I mean, there are a lot of things that just don't have an end in sight. There are many things that we can solve, but it's hard. And this charitable giving that comes in to support allows for a lot of great things, not only to support people but it allows for a level of innovation that doesn't necessarily exist in those other sectors either.

We tried hard to get the VA initially on board with the post-traumatic growth. Now, we've made a lot of progress in the last four years, and I'm very confident that our partnership with the VA now is going somewhere, and I think it's really going to help us expand. But it was a challenge, and I think if we had been a partner with the VA and tried to innovate the way we did early on, I don't think we would have gotten to where we are today. So, you know, I think that gap is filled by small nonprofits and bigger nonprofits, but we’re trying to just fill that little gap of post-traumatic growth. And I tell everybody, you know, as far as Boulder Crest goes, we're kind of an inch wide and a mile deep, meaning that we're very focused on the science of post-traumatic growth. We're not trying to solve every problem in the world. We just believe that there's a better way to treat PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

​ALLIÉ: So, with the success of Boulder Crest and this Choose Growth movement, what are some of the most powerful transformations that you've witnessed in individuals? I guess, could you share a specific story?


KEN: I will. I'll share a story that I've shared a lot because I think it brings the point home. We've had over 100,000 people to date go through our programs, which has been, give or take, about 11 years. It's a lot of people. And I’m talking from senior military officers to chiefs of police to young patrolmen and patrolwomen at every level of rank and structure that we've served.

We’ve got a team in Israel this week, with people over there trying to help. We did a program with Ukraine a couple of years ago. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening. And when you hear the power of a story, as a matter of fact, I’m going to read you something that came in this morning from one of my teammates in Israel. So he said, "All's well here today. We had a great day and we did the Life Walk." That's one of our parts of our curriculum, this project called the Life Walk. It’s basically a walk where you go to different phases of your life and have conversations with who you want to be at that phase in your life or who you want to talk to in order to have a hard conversation. The walk was super powerful, and they needed a way to get outside of the current reality and find hope and vision for a life beyond today.

So those are the kinds of stories that we hear a lot. But one of the things we have at Boulder Crest and all of our facilities is a labyrinth. And a labyrinth is a form of mobile meditation. You walk around in circles, in and out of this thing, and you get to the center of the labyrinth, and something happens in the center of the labyrinth, and then you walk back out. Well, on the second walk—we do two walks in our Warrior Path program, which is kind of like our flagship program at Boulder Crest—on the second walk, the idea is that you’re creating this new story because the science of post-traumatic growth suggests that if you believe that today is the first day of the rest of your life, then you have this chance to change your perspective.

So we ask them on the second meditation to really think about what their new story is, what’s going to happen to them after they leave Boulder Crest and that experience, and to walk that meditation. Well, anyway, after the end of that walk, our staff normally lines the sidewalk, and as people come out, there are hugs and handshakes and all the things that happen, tears. And we had a guy that ran Boulder Crest, Virginia for years before he retired. He was a big Special Forces kind of guy, and he was always the first one to embrace these handshakes and these hugs at the end. And one of the guys came out of the labyrinth walk and shook his hand, and they were both two big guys, two big muscular guys. And Dusty, who worked for us, could feel something in his hand. And as the handshake ended, he looked in his hand and it was a .45-caliber bullet. And the guy said to Dusty, "If this program didn’t work for me, this was the next step in my life." And that's happened many more times, probably 11 or 12 times over the last 11 years, but it’s super powerful. I think people who are at that stage—a lot of people who come to us have tried the system, have been on drugs, have turned to alcohol, and all the things people do when they’re in these traumatic times and post-trauma times. And sometimes Boulder Crest, unfortunately, is the last place they come. And we’ve changed a lot of lives, and we’re super, super proud of that.

ALLIÉ: As well you should be. Let’s talk about your journey—from the Navy to founding multiple organizations and initiatives, including Boulder Crest. It speaks to your resilience and leadership. How have your personal experiences in the military shaped your philosophy around growth after trauma?

KEN: That’s a great question. I tell people all the time, the U.S. Navy made me the man I am. My dad had a lot to do with it as well. I had a great family that I was brought up in. But at 18 years old, a lot of 18-year-olds were not on a good path in life. I left high school to play professional hockey. It didn’t work out for me, and I started doing the silly things you do when you’re feeling sorry for yourself—mostly drinking a lot and fighting. And I think one day, I was just sitting in my apartment in Arlington, Texas, and I started thinking of all the positive people in my life.

When I was a kid, I grew up in a very military neighborhood right outside of Washington, D.C., and all my friends’ parents were going back and forth to Vietnam. And those were the times. And all my bosses at the time, my scoutmaster, my teacher, my guidance counselor in school—my guidance counselor in school was a World War II veteran. So I had all these positive influences. I kept thinking, well, if the military made them the good men they were, what could it do for me? And literally, I got in my car that afternoon, drove down to the recruiting station, and joined the Navy.

​The Navy really made me a man, and I think it gave me a lot of values. In the Navy, our core values are honor, courage, and commitment. Understanding what that means and trying to live that life, I think, is super important. It set me up not only to be an entrepreneur but to be a better person in life and realize that other people need help. That’s kind of how I got here. I had my own journey. I got busted up real bad in 1989 in a parachute jump and thought my career was over but ended up rebounding from that. So I’ve seen my own post-traumatic growth in my life as well. There are one or two other trauma-related events that have happened in my life, including losing my best friend. And those kinds of things, I think, just make you a better person and a stronger person. And that’s what’s happened to me.

ALLIÉ: I love how you mentioned those core values and taking them with you all of your life, not just for that chapter of you, but for the whole story of you. One more question is this, for those who have endured trauma and who know there's no going around it, over it, or under it, what advice do you have for how to begin to grow through it?

KEN: You know, it’s a hard journey, and trauma affects everybody differently. The advice that I give every day is to just stop and to really try to understand that you’re not broken—that something has happened to you that is impactful, and that you’ve got to surround yourself with change and quality people to get through the next part of the journey. Because if you don’t change your circumstances in these areas, then you will never go beyond where you are today. I tell everybody, “The past is a place for reference, not residence.” So how we navigate that and how we learn about this idea that there is light at the end of the tunnel—we may have to create it, right?

A friend of mine once said to me, “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.” And I said, “How do you know it’s not the headlight of a train?” Because that’s where we are. And it could be, if we don’t change our circumstances. And what we call at Boulder Crest “changing the angle of attack”—you’ve got to find a better way to move forward. We have a wellness model that’s based on mind, body, spirituality, and financial wellness. And those four areas of wellness—if you’re healthy in those and you’re working towards being healthy in those—it’s amazing what you can get through. And no matter who we are in life, how much money you have, or whatever the story might be, all of our lives are a series of ups and downs. And there are two ways you need to have good boundaries to get through those ups and downs.

The first one is the ability to self-regulate because people who can’t self-regulate and can’t take this time to understand why this traumatic experience happened—people who can’t do that, people who can’t self-regulate, often tend to self-medicate, and that’s a journey to, you know, to hell. The other thing is to get good people around you. You know, we always talk about three-to-five. We know for sure that humans are the average of the three-to-five people they spend the most time with. So if you’re spending time with three-to-five bad people, there’s a good chance you’re not going to be a good person. We see this a lot in all sorts of communities around the country. I think getting the right people in your network isn’t always easy, but it’s possible. And if you just start with one, that person can help you create that hope and that path to growth. ∎

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Learn more about the Boulder Crest Foundation: https://bouldercrest.org