ARMY 2006-2016 — Three weeks at Home Base Program, Mass General

Three tours, infantry, ETSed as a staff sergeant in 2016. Took me until 2022 to get into intensive treatment. I had been doing weekly therapy through the VA for four years and was treading water. My therapist suggested an IOP — intensive outpatient program. She referred me to Home Base at Mass General, part of the Warrior Care Network. Application took four weeks. They flew me up from Tennessee, covered the hotel within walking distance of the program, provided three meals a day. My wife came up for the family weekend midway through. The program itself: three weeks, Monday through Friday, eight hours a day. Individual therapy (Cognitive Processing Therapy), group therapy with eight other combat vets, family sessions, yoga, sleep hygiene work, and a session each week with a psychiatrist managing medications. The treatment dose in three weeks was equivalent to what I would have gotten in nine months of weekly outpatient. I came home different. Not fixed. Not even close. But I had a vocabulary for what was happening to me that I had not had before, and I had eight other guys' phone numbers in my contacts. I still talk to four of them. The other four are doing better than they were and that is enough. If your VA therapist or community provider mentions IOP and you have the time to take three weeks off work, go. The Wounded Warrior Project covers most of the cost outside the program itself. I would not be writing this without it.