Veterans & People in the Military
Walter B. Hudson BS Ed. CPS
Advance Level WRAP Facilitator
President, Resilience Advocacy & Associates, Inc.
Project Manager, The Ohio Certified Peer Specialist Training and Certification Initiative
My Introduction to WRAP
On a Monday morning in January, I met Mary Ellen Copeland in the basement hallway of the Congregational Church in Brattleboro, Vermont on a bright snowy day. Minutes later I met Jane Winterling and Alan McNabb, the two people who ran the WRAP® (Wellness Recovery Action Plan®) Facilitator Seminar in which I was trained to facilitate WRAP Workshops. My eyes were opened, my brain expanded and my concept of personal recovery potential reinforced! I returned from Vermont and a bad cold turned into pneumonia and as a two pack a day cigarette smoker, I found myself- cigarette in hand exclaiming "I am going to die" if I did not quit smoking immediately and recover from the pneumonia.
Getting Started
I decided to write a WRAP to do just that. Remembering that Mary Ellen said you could describe, "What you’d like to be like when well" in the What I Am Like When Well portion of the Daily Maintenance section I wrote that "When Well I am Cigarette Free". I made a list of all the Triggers that caused me to light up a cigarette and they were legion: Waking up, first cup of coffee, second cup of coffee, going out, getting in the car, driving, getting out of the car, talking to someone, answering the phone, etc. Hundreds of times each day I was triggered and historically forty of those times I actually smoked a cigarette (two packs a day @ 20 cigarettes a pack).
What WRAP did for me
Next, I made a comprehensive Trigger Action Plan that focused on immediately changing my thought process when I was triggered to smoke. Hundreds of times a day I was triggered, hundreds of times a day I employed my Trigger Action Plan. This was when I began using the "Cascade of Action Plans" routine that helped me recover. I sat at my computer, wrote down all my action plans, segregated them by time required to employ each plan i.e. "which plans can I employ in 2 seconds, which in 5 seconds, which in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute etc.” Then I "stacked" my action plans so instead of invoking one plan, I invoked a cascade of action plans; some quick acting, some longer (as in 15 minutes or an hour) so that in an hour I might employ 20 or more action plan. This cascade would overwhelm my internal filters and not only extinguish the momentary desire, but reinforce my planned "obsolescence" of the desire for the cigarette. I became cigarette free in February 2002, recovered from pneumonia, and my self-esteem and self-efficacy grew proportionately.
Personally, WRAP has saved my life. I have been able to use WRAP in my recovery from Service Connected PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, three mild traumatic brain injuries, a mild stroke and been able to eliminate my use of alcohol, tobacco and all psychiatric medicines and return to work from being 100% disabled on Social Security Disability.
Taking Action
Next, I did something that at the time seemed small but had tremendous repercussions: I took the "Red Book" as we called the original WRAP Book, and wrote in it "This Book Changed My Life!" and mailed it to Michael Hogan Ph. D. the Director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health (later that year President Bush appointed Dr. Hogan as the Commissioner of the Presidents New Freedom Commission on Mental Health). Although Dr. Hogan did not know me at the time, he surprised me by emailing that he had not seen Mary Ellen's book before but that he thought "the work was excellent and of high quality" and started devoting some of Ohio's Block Grant Funds to WRAP Training. I was asked by the Ohio Department of Mental Health to pick someone to co-facilitate with me and of several people considered, I chose Carol Bailey Floyd of Akron. I had met Carol at the Depression And Bipolar Support Alliance Conference in Orlando in 2002 and told her about WRAP; she had not heard of it, hardly anyone in Ohio knew of WRAP in 2002 as I was the second person trained by Mary Ellen as a WRAP Facilitator in Ohio. I invited Carol to one of my first WRAP trainings in Wooster and she was an exceptional student. Later I called her and we met at Friendly's Ice Cream Parlor in Fairlawn, Ohio, I asked her if she would like to "go on the road" with me and I would train her as a facilitator. Carol was both anxious and enthusiastic and at first only passed out handouts or wrote on easel pads, but I quickly found she had a gift for facilitation. Carol was in the first Ohio Facilitator training where I was the trainer. Yet another Advanced Level Facilitator came out of that first training, Thelma Rist. Over the next few years Carol and I facilitated WRAP to thousands of people all over Ohio and trained over 100 WRAP Facilitators.
As a Veteran...
As a Veteran of military service who is recovering from service connected post trauma stress disorder, I found WRAP to be of great help in dealing with flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, depression and related symptoms. One day I contacted Mary Ellen (now Dr. Copeland) and asked if she would help me write a version of WRAP for Veterans. She responded, "Walter, I am the author, why don't you help me write the book?" I found her logic infallible and the offer irresistible. Working with Mary Ellen and Ed Anthes, I was responsible for taking the text of WRAP to the Brecksville, Ohio VA Medical Hospital, a psychiatric hospital with one of the few "Stress Centers" in the country. At Brecksville I formed focus groups consisting of volunteer Veterans of all ages, male and female and we went through the book line by line. The many Triggers and Trigger Action Plans from WRAP For Veterans And People In The Military come straight from the lives of those brave Veterans who volunteered to help write this Veteran Friendly version. The original WRAP For Veterans And People In The Military was published in 2007 and there is now a DVD version in which Dr. Copeland describes WRAP in detail while guiding the viewers in writing their own WRAP. I have used the DVD in presenting "Grand Rounds" to Psychiatric staff at Brecksville, VA Medical Center and recently to soldiers of The United States Army.
