Just days after her white wedding, Anne Smith’s world came crashing down, turning into a long, dark, desert period. Soon after her marriage to a Special Forces officer, Anne, a woman who helped facilitate reintegration talks in Afghanistan, who is trained and wired to lean into conflict with the hope of reconciliation, found herself on the battleground of a lifetime. Her husband started to display symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), emotional and verbal abuse. Both their worlds crumbled. Every paradigm they knew shattered and every place of comfort was removed, leaving them grappling for truth. They broke.
Listen as Anne shares her story with Tommy and the lessons from her hard journey. This episode will inspire and encourage those in a hard, dark season.
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Overcoming PTSD Together With Faith And Love With Anne Smith
I’m really excited to introduce you to a new friend of mine, Anne Smith. We’re just getting to know one another, honestly, but I felt like this was an episode that I felt a strong sense needed to go forward in spite of us being new friends. That’s probably for a couple of reasons. Anne and I were introduced by a mutual friend, Lauren. Shout out to Lauren. As she connected us, of course, I went to try to learn a little bit more about her. I was drawn to her book, which I’ll introduce, but also to just some amazing endorsements of her book that immediately gave me a confidence level that this is someone that we should hear and learn from.
I’m really excited to introduce you to Anne Smith, and she is the author of the book, Recalibrated: HOW A GREEN BERET AND HIS BRIDE OVERCAME REALITIES OF COMBAT AND A BROKEN RELATIONSHIP THROUGH FAITH, HOPE, & LOVE. That’s a mouthful, but I love the word recalibrated. Immediately, I think, from that title, you get a sense there is a substantial story behind this book. What I was also drawn to, I think, as I dove down is some incredibly powerful endorsements from people that you have a sense right on the front end you should pay attention to.
One of the endorsements read like this. “Their heart eight rings true for so many of God’s children and it is my prayer that Anne’s example of reliance on the Lord strengthens the spirit of women and girls in Virginia and across the world, promoting light and life in the midst of dark valleys and seemingly insurmountable challenges.” That endorsement came from Suzanne Youngkin, who is the First Lady of Virginia. Much beyond being the First Lady of Virginia, Suzanne and Glenn are really bright lights, incredible people of depth and substance that are worth listening to.
The second endorsement. “Anne’s transformational words, hard-won and true, are an invitation to receive the deep hope and joy available when we finally let God lead us through life’s good, hard dance.” That’s from Katherine Wolf. If anybody reading is not familiar with Katherine Wolf, she has an amazing podcast.
Her book, Treasures in the Dark and her story is a testament of strength and depth to anybody. Honestly, if I heard nothing else other than Katherine’s endorsement, I’d say I’m all in on this. Anne, I am really excited to honestly hear your story for the first time. Welcome to the show. I really appreciate you taking the time. I’m just excited to hear the powerful, hard story that you have to tell.
Thank you for having me. Thank you, Lauren, for introducing us. I’m just honored to be here and to share our story. I know our story is not everyone’s story, but the God behind it is the same yesterday, today, and forever. My prayer is that whoever is reading can draw on the goodness of God through that good hard dance, no matter what they’re going through.
An Unexpected Romance In Afghanistan
Just in our conversation before we got going, your story is not everybody’s story, nor is mine. I think so many people are going to resonate with walking through hard places. I think that’s a commonality for so many people, even if the particulars are not the same. Perhaps I’d love to begin with pre-book a little bit of your story and I guess what led up to the point where the book and the story of the book takes place. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you here.
The book is the story of overcoming PTSD and a very broken marriage through faith, hope, and love. At the time, when I met my husband, we, of course, had no clue about PTSD and we had rose-colored glasses on and fell head over heels. We met in a unique place, in Afghanistan. He was a Green Beret and he was deployed and I was a civilian working with the Department of Defense.
Young and adventurous, my background was in conflict security and development. I was living my dream, working to bring peace and reintegration to the communities that had been dealt with by the Taliban or were trying to reintegrate with people who had put their weapons down. Part of the reintegration program. I was in Northern Afghanistan and it was starting to see more Taliban activity. Petraeus had ordered an A-team and 30 days later, Nelson’s team showed up.
I had been one of the few Americans with boots on the ground in the region where I was working, and so they had asked me to come in and brief them. I sit down and his team walks in, twelve big, burly special forces operators, all wearing beards and none wearing uniforms. It was very intimidating and I said, “Sit down.” I took one look at him and I thought, “No.” Our eyes met and it was game over. Of course, in a combat zone, as a female, you have to be very careful. Your reputation can be tainted very quickly with rumors. It took a long time for us to realize we both had feelings for each other. It gave time for a lot of conversation.
That’s in Afghanistan, though?
In Afghanistan, yeah. His team ended up out in the remote areas. I was working with the Swedish and I was with them in a little town living within an Afghan compound. They would come back for rest and refit. I would see them come in body armor and their big vehicles and the doors would creak open. I was like, “They’re coming.” It was neat. I’ll never lose the sense of honor that I got to see him in warrior mode. Most soldiers, Special Forces or any military members don’t get to see that side of their husband. When they’re down range, they just get the phone calls. I got to see them get all kitted up and ready for a nighttime patrol and I took helicopter rides and big vehicle rides and we went into remote areas together. It was a very cool experience with him.
That’s quite a romance story, though.
Navigating PTSD In Marriage After Deployment
It was. I say, “We found love in a hopeless place,” to quote Rihanna. It really was. We fell fast, we fell hard for each other. We really have a heart that I think was knitted together in a beautiful way. After we got married, he was at Fort Campbell, I moved to Nashville. After I left Afghanistan, we got married and he redeployed soon afterward.
What year was this?
This was 2012. When I came back, we actually ended up having two weddings because he got word in December that he was going on a very unique mission. It was dangerous and they didn’t recognize fiancées. We did a quick ceremony with family and then we were supposed to have a white wedding in May of 2013. We ended up having both. That was an interesting story because he was supposed to deploy on January 3rd and he was on his way to the airfield and they called.
Every two weeks they called. He would get ready to go. Finally, about two days after our white wedding, he deployed. That part of the story is not in the book because to try to figure out how to explain what was going on would have been complicated. He did deploy back two days after we did get married. It was after our white wedding and was a full deployment. Within weeks, maybe days, something snapped with this deployment. We had moved to Nashville. He was previously married, but his ex-wife got remarried and moved the kids to a different state.
I had a new job as a teacher. New family, new house, new neighbors, everything was new. I think when things shift, it shows cracks. You realize that maybe the foundation is weak. He started to display signs of PTSD, which I call episodes, but it was almost a year later that we realized it was PTSD, even longer before we started to get help for it. Things like paranoia, jealousy or the lack of feeling safe or trust, and hypervigilance started to present in just the way he would question what I was doing or where I was going or who I had been with or what are the motives of the people around me? He’s a trained operative, so he’s always thinking through the eyes of what are people doing and why are they doing it.
When things shift, it shows cracks. That’s when you will realize that maybe the foundation is weak. Share on XMy impression, which you could tell me whether I’m right or wrong, is that year-long period before you really recognized it was PTSD, that stage can often be the hardest because you don’t have a name to it and you’re not recognizing that there’s something else going on. It just seems like things are not right and that inability to define it and in some ways can make it even harder. Am I right with that?
Absolutely. You think you have it all figured out. You’re in love. You’re two people you know love each other and you’re wondering what is happening. I kept thinking to myself, “Something’s wrong with him. Something happened,” or, “What is going on,” or, “Tomorrow will be better. I just need to get through today.” Episodes started getting worse and worse. They became like waves on a beach, just one after the other. At the same time, I was teaching at a very difficult charter school. It was just extremely demanding on the teachers.
I was worn down. We’re both worn down and so we’re not necessarily responding from the right places and just compounds the conflicts. As they said, my background is in conflict resolution and I started to lose all ability to deal with conflict in our marriage. It became a point of just surviving and feeling like a non-human and who am I and what is this and how do I get through this day? The amount of verbal onslaughts and the demanding and the questioning. I ended up going to a place of striving where I figured, academically, I know what I’m supposed to be doing.
Spiritually, I grew up in the church. I know I’m supposed to be praying. I am praying, “Lord fix this situation. Lord, fix Nelson. What’s going on?” Nothing’s happening. It was a long, hard fall to the bottom, to hit rock bottom for me. When I did, I looked up and the Lord Jesus just, he was like, “I’m the only one who can fix him. I’m the only one who can fix this.”
He said, “Let me start with you.” I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m the victim here. I’m the one who’s trying to finish. I’m not the problem.” I was brokenhearted at the time and a mess. Gently, he led me to realize and to show me the ways that I was adding conflict to the marriage and the ways that my view of God himself was incorrect or had been shifted or was off. I was looking at him through rippled water rather than a clear pool. The ways that I brought my own weak foundations into the marriage or false identities into the marriage.
When I say that, I mean the structures we’ve built in our lives for self-protection and self-defense just through the normal ways of living and growing up and the things you deal with in high school and college. He showed me how he could realign who I was, who I thought I was, who I thought he was, and then who I saw my husband as. When I could realign all of that, then I could enter into a place of hope and faith, peace. I could learn a lot.
It’s so counterintuitive that it would seem from the outside and probably, I don’t know how evident it was to other people, about his struggles, but if someone heard from the outside, it would just seem so much that it’s got to first be about solving, healing, curing his issues. As you said, you were just a victim of it as opposed to being the place where healing began. It began with you while he was continuing to deal with these issues which weren’t brought on by him but are expressed through him.
When you realize that he was operating out of a place of woundedness, which wounded me, which then I’m responding out of a place of woundedness, and it’s just a caustic cocktail, just constantly one’s feeding the other. When you can remove yourself from that and heal and you’re no longer rooted in the woundedness, but rooted in Christ, then you can see and pray into the situation in a different way. You can actually be praying, “Your will, will be done, Lord.” His will is always for good and is to call forth the good in others and to call forth the true and the right in others. Instead of dwelling on the whys and the woes, which only come from that wounded place, I was able to pull myself, I didn’t pull myself. The Lord lifted me out of the muck and the mire.
Finding Healing Through Faith And Suffering
That’s such a difficult place. I know our story as we talked about it of walking through the years of our daughter’s parents’ cancer, which created such a woundedness. The suffering, I think, in being wounded is so intense that the ability to do anything beyond survive it and the natural tendency to just simply want to flee it. We didn’t really have any ability to flee it other than, I would say emotionally, we could have tried to do that. I would imagine there were a lot of times when it just seemed so natural to just want to run away.
It took everything in me to not. I think the Lord was gracious. He gave me a word that I knew was from him early on in these dark days. He said, “Be patient with him, I’m working on him.” It was just a very still, small voice, as you’re sobbing on the floor. I cling to that. I knew that in the depths of my heart that this was not my husband. This was not the real him. If I ran away, I’m bringing all of my gunk with me at the same time. I’m going to bring all of this woundedness into whatever new life I was going to try to form. On top of that, then ignoring those small voices of, “Can you be patient? Will you be patient? Will you let me work on him? Will you let me work on you and then see where you are?”
One of the things that I think about often is when people like you, us, and others go through these really incredibly hard trials of life. We speak about it from the other side. I think too often people get a sense that, if you’re Christian, if you believe in God, then somehow, that enables suffering to not be suffering. If you have faith and hope and love, then those carry you through hard times and make the hard times not hard times.
As we did talk just a little bit before, I think honesty requires us to say suffering is suffering. It is painful beyond description, even though God is in it, even though God is working and all those things, it doesn’t lessen the tears and the pain and the woundedness of it. When that’s going on for years, that’s a journey that’s almost beyond description. I think of that because I know of others right now, people that I love and care about that are just in that mire that you talked about. There just doesn’t seem any way out. It’s been going on for a long time and it seems beyond rescue and right. It sounds like you were in that place.
Definitely in that place. It’s a long and it’s a hard road. It’s the saying, pick your hard. It’s hard to leave, it’s also hard to stay. The point of the book is not to say, we were broken, we prayed some verses, and God healed us. It’s that it is hard when you’re in it as a believer, as one who’s trying to cling to faith and you’re not seeing any results. He’s saying, “You might never see external results, but can I change you from the inside?” That’s why the book is recalibrated. “Can I recalibrate you so you can see suffering as I see suffering? Can you see pain as I see pain? Can you see the goodness of repentance? Can you see the goodness of basically turning to me and letting me lead you through the valleys?”
Which is a healing that goes far beyond just fixing.
He basically said, “If your circumstances don’t change, can you still trust me?” That was a really hard question to answer. “No, I don’t trust you, Lord. How can I when this is unbearable?” You don’t even feel human. That’s where he led me. During those first few months of my initial journey of healing, I was a teacher and it was summertime.
I had a large chunk of time, and this is not normal for most people, but I could and I didn’t have kids at the time, sit for three hours at a time. I would wake up, get my coffee, find my prayer chair, and some days, I would just sob over a verse. Some days, one verse I would just write over and over again. Some days, I would journal and pour out my heart, but that was balm. That was the true balm of learning to sit at the feet of Jesus and hear his voice and know him and get to know him.
That was totally our experience both that we did this crazy thing of just taking this long hour to really sit without pain with God. It was described as rehearsing the goodness of God. We just spend hours rehearsing the goodness of God to give us just enough fuel to get through the difficulty of the day ahead and then we would repeat it the next day.
That’s rehearsing the goodness of God. At the time, I’d heard Anne Graham’s conversation on the radio. She called them lightning bolts back to heaven. When you find in scripture the promises of God and you take that promise and you send it right back into heaven and say, “Lord, you promised to bring me through. You’ve promised to hear my voice and to cry.” It’s not saying you’re going to hear it every day, but that posture of going back to the Lord and saying, “This is what you promised. Make it happen, more time and in your will, but make it happen.” He doesn’t promise things he’s not faithful to do.
God does not promise things He is not faithful to do. Share on XAs we’ve said, it’s so powerful that in a sense God began the healing part of the journey with you. It sounds like prior to being able to see the healing going on outside of you. That defies the way we would typically go about resolving conflict.
Jesus, who was very wise, did say, “Take the log out of your own eye.” I was standing there slamming Nelson in front of the Lord being like, “Fix him. Why aren’t you fixing him?” He said, “Let me show you ways that I can fix you. You need to be recalibrated and realigned and you’re missing the mark.” When you allow him to do that, that is pursuing peace. That’s doing reconciliation, both with reconciliation with God reconciliation within yourself and with others around you.
Understanding PTSD: The Complexities Of Healing
I know PTSD is very complex and difficult. How did his healing begin to show or how has that affected him?
We called an emergency session with our pastor, Father Thomas, and he’s the first one who said, “You’ve got hypervigilance, extreme paranoia.” He would wake up in the middle of the night, and clear a house as if he were in Iraq. Nelson didn’t realize that was not normal. Father Thomas was like, “I don’t do that. I don’t know anyone who does that. Really?” When he said that it still took a while, many months, before he realized, “I can’t live like this anymore.” He made that first knock on the chaplain’s door, which then led to going to the psychologist or army psychiatrist who referred us to the soldier center in Clarksville with Dr. Hurley, who was one of the leading practitioners of EMDR. They use eye movement.
Some who are reading may not be familiar with it, but it’s a very specific technique and method to help people deal with trauma. Am I correct?
Yes, that is correct. To use it, apparently, when you sleep at night, your brain processes the day’s events. When there’s something traumatic, it gets stuck in a rut, and it actually cannot move forward, it doesn’t process it. That memory is as alive in your mind twenty years later, as it is the day it happened. Your responses will come from that memory point, which is still very alive and wounded.
What EMDR does is it takes you through lights and sensors, they lead you back to that memory and then process the memory so that it doesn’t have the sting. The memory that is always there, but the feelings that are attached to that memory that then create the trauma and respond to the present day are changed. It was very effective. Dr. Hurley was a godsend. He walked us through both. He would meet with Nelson once a week and then meet together for marriage counseling after that.
I’m calling him a godsend and I know that when you’re going through something like what you guys were going through or these deep dark times, there are 100 places that you can go and 90 of them may not do any good. They may just exacerbate the problem. In essence, what we really do need is a godsend, a God-directed path towards the person who can do the good while many people can. It sounds like a tremendous mercy that Dr. Hurley was there as the first place for you to go to receive that help.
We have him on speed dial, “We’ve got to come in.” He was from Southwest Virginia and Nelson was from Southwest Virginia. He had been a chaplain in the military and had worked with Special Forces around the world. He understood and could speak a language that Nelson could respond to. We had tried 1 or 2 others before that, and it fell flat. I had tried on my own, and I can tell you how crushing it is to walk into a counselor’s office and then have them look at you and be like, “Why are you still with this guy?” You’re thinking, “That’s not what I need.”
That’s what I mean by the godsend. There are so many paths that are out there that are meant to be paths for good, that actually can completely take the opposite direction.
I truly believe that when we speak life into something, you’re going to see the fruit of life in that person or in a situation or even in an office place, anywhere. You breathe out life. You’re going to see the response of that. We can breathe out death by just the way we say, and what we speak. I learned that lesson, just the grumbling that can happen in your heart, in your mouth, with friends. I became very aware of who I shared our story with because we needed people who weren’t going to speak life into our relationship.
We can either speak life into a situation or breathe out death. What we speak and who we allow to speak into our lives matters deeply. Share on XSpeaking life is sometimes speaking hard. I would call a friend in the middle of an episode and she would ask the hard questions, and not trying to sympathize with me, not trying to make me feel better. “He’s horrible to you. You need to take care of yourself.” It was, “Anne, how are you responding? What are the thoughts that are going through your head? How can we make sure that you are doing and speaking to yourself the way the Lord would speak to you or speaking to your husband the way the Lord would speak to him?”
Those are rare people.
Very, but they’re gold and we can all be those people. We just have to learn to operate outside of our flesh. We swear every day and ask the Lord to be bigger in me than I am in me.
After the EMDR, you began to really see Nelson come back.
It’s long and it’s a hard road. It’s not a quick fix. When you realize we both hit rock bottom, then you wake up and you realize, how do we move forward? There’s so much pain and hurt and brokenness. To overcome, to learn how to forgive, you have to put one step in front of the other. You realized how much of it was then learning to walk together again in a rhythm.
How long was the journey from when things first began to deteriorate to a point where not everything was all fine? It’s almost never that way, but to where you feel like, “We have our life back?” How long was that period?
Five years.
Five years is a long time.
I say it’s like the first spring day when you wake up and you’re like, “It’s light out.” Every day, it’s gotten a little lighter. It’s just that moment when you realize. I would say that was our healing. Walking out our healing was every day was maybe 2 steps forward, 1 step back, but there was room for that light to grow. It was very slow.
Healing is not always instant. But as you walk out your healing each day, it gets a little lighter until you realize there is room for that light to grow. Share on XAll of a sudden you wake up one day and you go, “This feels like spring.”
Yes, exactly. We haven’t dealt with an episode in a while or I actually managed that. You can still have triggers. You can be healed and still have triggers that you have to overcome and deal with and realizing, “That didn’t push me in the direction I used to have. I didn’t have the response this time around.”
Finding Hope In Darkness: Healing Wisdom For The Hurting
I got a real sense just talking to you early on that your book, Recalibrated, is something that’s very needed in that it has a level of honesty with truth that’s needed for those who are going through a really difficult time. My encouragement to those reading is that we’re just touching the surface in our conversation here.
Particularly if someone’s reading and they’re in that mire and they’re in that suffering and maybe it’s gone on for a good while that there’s a lot of healing wisdom in what you’re offering. As I think about closing our conversation, I’d love to just hear a couple of thoughts from your perspective. If someone’s in that place of real darkness, and in a sense, what feels like total hopelessness, what would be the 1 or 2 things that you would encourage for that person?
The promises of God are real and they are true and we can have hope because of that. Cling to those promises and don’t look for miraculous healings. Just do the hard work of seeking peace and then pursuing it. Putting that one foot in front of the other and asking the Lord, “Start with me. What needs to change with me and the other person?” Give him time to do what the Holy Spirit will do.
That’s such a good, nonobvious word because even in seeking the promises of God, the first indication is to think of those promises as just trying to back God into a corner to fix things. To seek the promises of God, which include trusting him with the pain and the suffering, that’s a really difficult thing, but also, it’s a very freeing thing. Peace and suffering are not mutually exclusive.
You can have peace in the midst of that storm. Have it by keeping your eyes on Jesus. Peter, the minute he took his eyes off, the storm started to pull him down and he started to drown. You can have it. It takes work. It’s not a quick fix. There’s nothing besides practice and just forcing yourself to do it sometimes. It doesn’t even seem reasonable.
I would want to say I know there are readers that are not in that place of faith. They haven’t walked that path, and they’re not even sure if they believe that path to be true. My encouragement would be, even in that place, to take the risk of stepping forward into a place, even if you don’t know, even if you don’t believe it will be true that God will show up in any way to still step there. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to have faith that you don’t have or hope that you don’t have to still step forward in that way. I think these words apply to all of us wherever we are on that journey along the way.
Even if you don’t know Jesus yet, or you don’t know fully who God is, even just the longing or the wanting to, he’s going to respond. You give him a needle point worth of space and he’s going to come in and show you his goodness and his mercy.
Thank you. I do feel like we just touched the tip of the iceberg, but I think there are going to be a lot of people who want to learn more about your story and read your book. How can people connect with you?
My website is AnneWSmith.com. You can order the book at any bookstore where books are sold. You can order from our website or Amazon or Hasbro Press. Barnes and Noble.
You can find it with simply the word recalibrated. There’s all of the additional part, but you don’t have to remember all of that. If you just look for Anne Smith, Recalibrated, you’ll find that.
There’s a picture of me on it, looking over the desert. The picture from when I was in Wadi Rum, Jordan.
Even if you do not know who God is, give Him a needlepoint worth of space. He will come in and show you His goodness and mercy. Share on XAs an author, it’s those things that you never imagined happening within your life and a picture in a book or things like that, that these journeys that are beyond our imagination become our lives.
I’m in for the adventure.
Thank you, Anne. Thank you for just sharing very honestly. I know it’s a very vulnerable place to be in that you’ve been willing to do. As we spoke before we started recording, writing the book is an act of obedience. I totally get that. Thank you for sharing with me and with all those who are reading your story. I know the story is continuing and there’s a lot more ahead. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Please everybody, even if you’re not in that mire, my guess is there are very few of us who don’t know someone who’s in a space where Anne’s story and the lessons that she’s learned wouldn’t be highly applicable. Share this episode with others, share the book with others, and I look forward to talking again next time. Thank you, everybody.
Important Links
- Anne Smith’s Website
- Anne Smith on Instagram
- Recalibrated: HOW A GREEN BERET AND HIS BRIDE OVERCAME REALITIES OF COMBAT AND A BROKEN RELATIONSHIP THROUGH FAITH, HOPE, & LOVE
- Treasures in the Dark
About Anne Smith
Anne is a passionate advocate for peace and reconciliation. With a background in mediation, education, and international conflict resolution, she has worked in some of the world’s most challenging environments, including Afghanistan.
Dedicated to helping individuals and communities navigate conflict and find restoration, She uses her unique skills to guide others toward healing, offering hope for those seeking peace in their relationships, communities, and within themselves.
Anne holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a MA in Conflict, Security & Development from King’s College, London.
