In this week's episode of WITHPod, former Missouri Sec. of State Jason Kander talks to chrislhayes about the impact of living in mortal danger and the life changing power of therapy. Listen and full transcript:
JASON KANDER: Don't get me wrong, it was still a war. There were parts that sucked. But I felt like every part of me was at full utilization so often. That's, in some ways, I think once you've done that there's just part of you that's always trying to get back to that for the rest of your life.
And then, he proceeded in English to tell us that this man has been involved in several failed plots to assassinate him. And, the guy's just sitting there, nodding like a person does, like, oh, a joke's been told. But they don't know that, what it was. JASON KANDER: Well, if you had asked me that a year ago, I'd have said, oh nothing. Because I was in denial about it, and because I thought it was sort of necessary to my career ambitions to continue to be in denial about it.
Because nobody ever sat you down and said, okay, that was some crazy s--t. You need to know that. And it's not normal, what you had to go through. And now, it's going to be hard to come out of it. And so, as a result, what it did to my body and my brain is, it just sort of taught me that I was in danger all the time. And then, I never, well, not until recently did I unlearn that.
I mean, I would have nightmares pretty much every night. I went about 12 years without a good night's sleep. At the beginning, they were nightmares that were really all about what I had feared over there. Getting kidnapped. They were very specific to Afghanistan, into what happening, that kind of thing.
I almost never sat with my back to the door, anywhere. When I was Secretary of State, I can remember several times, people must've thought it was really strange, that we had this meeting room that was like this very large room, and I would, I had a rule that nobody could sit behind me. And I'm, I don't consider myself to have been like a high maintenance boss. So, this was very out of character.
JASON KANDER: Yes. And, the other thing that I now realize is that, and part of this is being, I think is common to folks who have experienced trauma, and part of it is just general survivors guilt, that a lot of soldiers get, whether they experienced post-traumatic stress or not.JASON KANDER: And, I went over there saying, if I do my job well, I'm going to help some folks come home. And I just never, ever even came close to feeling like I had done enough.
JASON KANDER: And that's, because that's how they program us. And again, I don't fault them for that. It's the lack of deprogramming that causes the problem. JASON KANDER: Yeah. Yeah. They just had, they had one senator, the auditor, and the lieutenant governor.CHRIS HAYES: In '16, right.JASON KANDER: That race was a whirlwind man. I mean, I had done a statewide campaign, but I had done a secretary of state's race where, here's how I described it to somebody once. A buddy of mine, who had also been a statewide politician in Missouri, he asked me the difference between the secretary of state's race and the Senate race.
You have to kind of impose yourself on people's time, and you have to kind of beg for their attention a little bit. And, you're kind of supplicant a lot.CHRIS HAYES: The way that it works in"The West Wing," or other kind of depictions, where there's like, the candidate is the principal, and sort of at the top of this big totem pole, or pyramid, or hierarchy.
And, if they use the term speech writer, if they think they're going to have a speech writer, or anything like that, I'm just like, I just stop them. I'm like,"You shouldn't run for office, because this is door to door sales and telemarketing. That's what this is."JASON KANDER: And frankly, you don't get to do the door to door, which I really enjoyed, when you run for the U.S. Senate, but it's still unfortunately, a whole lot of telemarketing.
And now, you've run for this and you've not won. What that was doing to you psychologically, about who you are, and what your sort of role was, your destiny, and things like that. And I guess, there's no saving grace at all to Trump winning. But, I suppose in the personal grief process, that was so overwhelming-
CHRIS HAYES: So, then what happens that makes you realize you do have to do that? I mean, I ran into while you were... you had a national organization that you were working on and fundraising for that was sort of voter involvement and voter protection. There was talk about other elected office. There was talk about mayor, even higher offices at certain points. And then there was-
CHRIS HAYES: Right. I'm just tortured. I'm tortured, and I can't sleep, and I have nightmares, and I'm never going to be good enough, and I'm disappointing everyone and I've got to go, go, go to keep it going, and if I let go of the kite for a second, it's all going to float away. So now I'm running for mayor. It was going great. We sold $25,000 worth of T-shirts in the mayoral campaign on the first day. We raised three times as much as the other eight people in the race combined in the first three months. I mean, I was going to win, and objectively I was like,"Things should be great." And I realized the campaign had been 99 days long and I had had 98 bad days, and it was just getting worse and worse.
CHRIS HAYES: I mean, dude, this is like a hobby horse of mine, and the space that you're talking about is something I have no subjective access to whatsoever. I've never served a day.
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