Filled with Purpose
U.S. Navy and Army Veteran Chris and Service Dog Brent
When the memories become too painful, you find a way to empty them.
It left Chris as a shell of a person.
No feelings of joy, no feelings of sadness— because feeling nothing at all was the only way to get through.
The mass casualties, the blasts, the faces that stuck in his mind with vengeance. They couldn’t stay, so Chris emptied them. His life compartmentalized.
“
You put them all in a safe,” Chris says.
“And you lock that safe door. And you don’t open it. Ever.”
But his subconscious whispered to him, and as much as he tried to erase his memories, his body told his secrets through symptoms. Panic attacks, spiraling thoughts, impending doom… the wreckage in his mind as complex as the explosives he’d been trained to disarm. But there was no protocol for defusing his thoughts.
Lock them away.
“My nervous system was constantly overloaded,” he says. “I couldn’t be present in the moment.”
He knew something was wrong, and he needed help. Deep therapy helped him unlock the safe and find a way out—to a place where service dog Brent had been waiting, tail wagging and paws ready to stay close.
With the firm pressure of his soft chin on Chris’s knee, Brent pulls his person out of the patterns of his mind and into a life that no longer passes him by.
“The way Brent looks at me. Leans on me. It opens the floodgates.” Brent fills Chris with purpose, teaching him to be present and welcome emotion and connection.
What once felt empty now overflows with hope.
