If We Didn't Abuse Our Children, Would We Even Have a Military?
What Navy SEALs on ibogaine revealed about the trauma pipeline we refuse to see
April Note: This compelling piece by Linnea Butler cut right to my heart. Last June, on Fathers’ Day, I dedicated a piece To My Father. My father was an Army Ranger, similar to the Navy’s SEALs. After reading this piece by Linnea Butler, I too wondered, “If we didn’t abuse our children, would we even have a military?”
Part II:
Where Science Meets the Spirit
Let me ground this in what we know:
My nervous system learned this early: calm was the moment before violence. High alert felt like home. Years later, I’d learn the polyvagal theory behind this - how nervous systems trained in chaos wire themselves for constant threat detection, how hyperarousal becomes the baseline. But I didn’t need theory to know it. I lived it.
ACE studies (Adverse Childhood Experiences) predict not just physical and mental health outcomes, but where people seek belonging. The higher your ACE score, the more likely you are to join organizations built on shared danger. This is measurable, documented, reproducible science.
And then there’s what the medicine shows:
Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT don’t just treat PTSD; they’re truth-tellers.
These medicines take you past every story you’ve told yourself about your strength, your choices, your identity. They take you to the root. The original severance. The moment you learned you weren’t safe, you weren’t loved, you were fundamentally alone in a dangerous world.
For these Navy SEALs, the medicine revealed what I’ve witnessed again and again in my work with clients:
Every dangerous place you’ve sought safety since childhood has been an attempt to heal that first wound.
What We’re Willing to Sacrifice
What I’ve learned holding space for people doing this deep work, both as a therapist and as someone who has done her own healing, is this:
We look away from childhood abuse because it’s unbearable to witness.
As individuals.
As communities.
As a culture.
I think about one of my clients, I’ll call him James. He was sexually abused by another student at school when he was thirteen years old. A teacher walked in on it happening.
James can’t remember the face of the student who abused him anymore. Trauma does that. Fragments the memory, protects you from what you can’t survive knowing in full detail.
But he remembers the teacher’s face with perfect clarity.
He remembers the pause in the doorway. The way she took in the scene of a child being violated. The way she looked directly at him, frozen in terror.
He remembers her mouth twisting… into a smirk.
And then she walked away.
That smirk — that moment of an adult choosing to look away — did more damage than the abuse itself.
The abuse taught him the world wasn’t safe. But the smirk taught him something worse: Even when people see that you’re not safe, they choose not to help. You are fundamentally alone. And the world thinks your pain is amusing.
This is what looking away does. It doesn’t just fail to prevent harm. It seals the wound. It makes the trauma structural. It teaches children that their pain is invisible, or worse, entertaining.
And in looking away, we give implicit permission for it to continue.
Our entire systems of organized violence - military, police, prisons, even some forms of emergency response - depend on a steady supply of people whose childhoods taught them that:
Danger is normal
Hypervigilance is survival
Brotherhood must be earned through blood
Safety comes through strength, not vulnerability
Belonging requires proving you’re willing to die
What if ending childhood abuse would dismantle the trauma pipeline that feeds our most “essential” institutions?
What if we’ve built a society that needs traumatized children to function?
The Both-And We Have to Hold
I’m going to ask you to hold complexity here. Because this is where Sacred Science lives - in the refusal of false dichotomies.
These warriors are both victims of childhood abuse and adults who chose to join organizations of violence.
The military both exploits trauma and provides genuine experiences of brotherhood, purpose, and meaning.
Ibogaine both reveals unbearable truths and offers real hope for healing.
We both need to honor what veterans survived and prevent the conditions that created them in the first place.
It’s about bearing witness.
I know what it’s like to be the child who survived. I know what it’s like to spend years seeking safety in all the wrong places. My nervous system found ways to survive that would have destroyed others.
The SEALs were survivors who got so good at surviving that they built an identity around it.
And then ancient, indigenous, sacred medicine showed them the truth — you don’t have to keep fighting the original war.
You were never meant to live like this.
There’s another way.
If You Recognize Yourself Here
Maybe you weren’t in the military. Maybe your dangerous place looked different.
But if you’re reading this and something in your body is responding with recognition, here’s what I want you to know:
Signs you may have sought safety through danger:
You feel most alive in crisis, confusing intensity with intimacy and hypervigilance with caring
Calm feels uncomfortable, even threatening, to your nervous system
You’ve found your deepest connections in shared struggle or trauma
“Normal” relationships feel boring or fake
You need to be needed, you need to be essential, you need to prove your worth through what you can endure
This doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means your body wisdom helped you survive the unthinkable.
You found safety where it was available. Even if that meant seeking it in high-stakes roles, in situations where you had to earn belonging through sacrifice.
And now, if you’re ready, you get to learn something new.
You can experience secure attachment without earning it through risk or danger. You can feel safe in actual safety.
It takes practice. It will feel wrong at first. Safety often does when you’ve been trained in danger. Your nervous system will tell you calm is the moment before violence. Your body will tell you that people who stay without you proving your worth must not really see you.
Let it be uncomfortable. Let it be strange. Let yourself learn what you were never taught.
The Practice of Looking
Here’s what that means, practically:
For your own nervous system:
When you notice yourself seeking intensity, pause. Not to judge it. To witness it.
Ask: What is my body seeking right now? Is this intensity or is this intimacy? Is this danger or is this home?
Practice tolerating calm. Literally practice. Set a timer for five minutes. Sit in a safe space. Notice every impulse to create urgency, check your phone, start a fight, manufacture crisis.
Your nervous system is trying to return to familiar territory. Let it be uncomfortable. Stay.
Build relationships with people who can hold your intensity without requiring you to perform it. Who see your worth without you bleeding for it. This will feel fake at first. Stay anyway.
For what you witness in the world:
When you see childhood abuse in families, in systems, in the casual cruelty we’ve normalized, name it. Out loud. To someone.
When you see systems that depend on traumatized people to function (military, police, healthcare, social work, teaching) ask the question: What would it take to interrupt this pipeline?
When you hear survivors tell their stories (veterans, former foster youth, people who grew up in violence) believe them. Believe what it took to survive.
This is how cycles break. Through witnessing. Through naming. Through refusing to look away.
The Invitation That Changes Everything
Those Navy SEALs went into the jungle. They took the most powerful medicines known to us. Medicines that heal what Western science doesn’t have adequate tools for: soul wounds, spiritual injury, the severing that happens when a child learns the world is not safe.
And they came back with a question that shakes the foundations:
“If we didn’t abuse our children, would we even have a military?”
It’s asking: What are we willing to see? What are we willing to interrupt? What are we willing to build differently?
Because here’s what I know from my own healing and from witnessing hundreds of others do this work:
Every cycle of abuse that we name, we give ourselves permission to stop perpetuating.
Every person who looks instead of looking away weakens the pipeline.
Every child who experiences secure attachment instead of trauma is one less adult seeking safety through danger and intensity.
Every veteran who gets to do this healing work is breaking the cycle not just for themselves, but for the children they won’t pass it to.
The war started at home. And it can end there too.
If we want to stop creating warriors, we start by protecting children.
If we want to heal veterans, we acknowledge that many of them were casualties before they ever deployed.
If we want to build a different world we have to be willing to look directly at the one we’ve created.
That Navy SEAL looked. Under ibogaine, he couldn’t look away anymore.
Then he asked the question on camera. Creating an opening for all of us.
Will we look? Will we interrupt the cycle?
Or will we keep looking away, keep calling it heroism, keep sending our already-broken children to break further, keep pretending we don’t know exactly what we’re doing?
The medicine won’t let you lie to yourself.
And neither will I.
If we didn’t abuse our children, would we even have a military?
The answer is no. And that’s exactly why we have to look.
The healing of childhood trauma is both personal and political. If you’re recognizing yourself in this essay — whether as a veteran, a survivor of childhood abuse, or someone who has sought safety in dangerous places — please know: your nervous system’s brilliance got you here. And it can learn something new. The cycle can end with us. With this generation that’s finally willing to look.
From my heart to yours,
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