After serving in the armed forces for fifteen years, Michael Maisano wanted to continue his career in a profession that helps others, but this time, mentally and emotionally. He partnered with Arizona State University to develop a pipeline of undergraduate and graduate military “culture studies” counseling programs. Maisano continues to counteract the stigma of “mental health” within the military by embracing the feat ahead of him and continuing to educate future counselors and officers on the importance of emotional intelligence.
I saw that you first signed up for the Marine Corps in 1988 and then you went on to join the Arizona National Guard, after which you joined the US Army National Guard. Could you speak a little about your history of military service?
I signed up to enlist in the Marine Corps when I was still 17, my senior year. I tried to enlist earlier just to get away from my home life, but they (the Marine Corps) wanted me to graduate high school. A few months after graduation, I went to the Marine Corps Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp and spent four years in the infantry. The first Gulf War obviously happened during the 1990s, and at the end of that, they had so many people that they had too many personnel, so they started discharging people and I couldn’t reenlist the way I wanted to.
Then, after 9/11 broke out, I joined the Arizona Army National Guard, became an officer and deployed to Hurricane Katrina in ’05 and then ’06. A year later, we deployed to Iraq during the surge after Saddam was tried and executed.
Then I spent ten years in The Guard doing a lot of different things–four years of training, four years of full-time deployment. I got out again after the war slowed down and was called back in and asked to come into the reserves. I have been out after fifteen years of total service for about four years now, almost five.
I noticed that during your deployment with Operation Enduring Freedom, you began your journey in assisting your fellow service members with combat trauma. What inspired you to start doing that work?
I had studied psychology in my undergrad before I deployed. I saw too many individuals and myself not knowing how to deal with the experiences. One person’s traumatic event is just another person’s experience. I got injured, so I had to find something I could do sitting down, and I would never have gone back to grad school if I didn’t get injured. I would see things that other people didn’t see, and just look at people differently in the sense that I could tell they were hurting or in pain or what they were saying wasn’t really matching what was going on. It was more of any interest than anything else and then it just started the journey to where I am now. It’s always been my focus to work with veterans, not just with trauma, but [with] family dynamics, reintegration, and misconceptions. The biggest problem is many people who serve in the military think that mental health is taboo so reducing the stigma of mental health is important. It’s hard because it’s something that not everyone wants to do but we are now in the midst [of] a formal pitch to have an emphasis on working with military and veterans [at this school]. It’s been in the works for a while but it’s now coming to fruition, and there’s a need for it.
I recently attended this conference in which a panel of scholars, mental health providers, and veterans, were discussing the difficulty in trauma-informed care for veterans. One of the presenters said at times civilian physicians that work for the VA would ask their patients how many people they killed in combat or out on the field and I think that demonstrates the gap between the perceptions civilians hold of veterans. How do you think we can eradicate that sort of insensitiveness in the civilian population?
Yes, the insensitivity is definitely there because people don’t understand it. I think it comes too much from the idea that people’s perception or reality is based on their experiences and most people’s experiences of war is something they see on television or in the movies and I can tell you I never had to draw down on anybody.
Most veterans who have gone to war have never had to think of taking someone’s life, but that doesn’t mean their life wasn’t in danger.
Another way of bringing that out is asking more about the individual like, “what was your experience like in the military, not just combat but what was it like in the military,” and it’s going to be different for everybody.
We don’t give a good job of doing cultural awareness for the military. I’ve been working with clinicians, asking them questions about their knowledge of terminology. For example, the difference between the Army and the Navy, the difference between an officer and enlisted, etc. So, it’s just as simple as this: instead of asking them how was your childhood, ask what brought you to come into the military and then they’ll tell you the truth about their childhood, the traumas or the things they were escaping, or [things they were] trying to prove, and they’ll give you more insight.
Another thing came out of a more recent panel I was a part of. We talked about how veterans appraise themselves or how they rate themselves and they usually rate themselves very low in comparison to their skills, abilities and everything else, and that’s due to them always comparing themselves to people around them. When you get out, you don’t have that comparison anymore so you’re trying to figure out, “how do I compare to these people around me,” and that’s why veterans isolate so many times.
I also ask veterans did you like everybody you served with and ultimately, they’ll say “no.” So many times, they only hangout with people in the military or individuals with a like mindset, and I like to challenge that so they’ll be open to experiencing other people. I think it’s not so much reverting back to society, you’re not going back to where you were, you’re going to think “where am I in society now?”
Earlier you mentioned how it’s important to inform clinicians about talking to and about people of color and members of the LGBT community, amongst others. Yet it seems to fall short for some reason in the military community. I saw that you were planning on doing a course in the spring specifically geared towards how to approach counseling veterans. What does that look like?
Well, we had to reschedule it just because we didn’t have enough people that had interest in it. It might have been because it wasn’t advertised properly. So we decided to move it to the summer because that’s when people usually take electives. I think it’s scary now, when they think [about] cultural awareness they don’t think [about the] military. It’s ironic because it’s a culture that you volunteer to be a part of, and people don’t understand that it is a culture where you sign your life away.
It’s hard because you probably lose a lot of good people that would normally do that, but they do want to go through all that. To be a good clinician to work with takes a lot of grit. Long story short, I think it’s [about] trying to bring more into the fold that are willing to do that. I’ve actually been contacted since I transitioned into this position by potential graduate students who wanted to work learning that environment with me, but I don’t have the mechanism to do that yet, so I had to bring it to my boss because there’s a need for this. People are interested. They may not be veterans but they’re interested in working in that environment. That’s what their goal is. So, there is a need for it and there is a desire. I think it will [happen] but it just takes time so we’re looking at a five-year plan versus a fifth month plan.
And what would that five-year plan consist of?
One, having a full blown focus on the graduate program and undergraduate program in military and veteran culture. At first, working out in the community, specifically with veterans, in community training. I would love to see something like a specific training environment where we only work with veterans or they work fifty-fifty with veterans and other populations, something that is more focused on that environment. Not just in the community but the surrounding community, given we have the resource, which might offer a different perspective. That would be my aspiration. I know that the dean (Lisa Spanierman) wants to make military and veteran initiatives a key element especially here at the Poly campus.
You were speaking earlier about how you were attempting to give tools to future soldiers and sailors on how to deal with their experiences–so what have you done on that front with the ROTC program?
It’s more of laying the foundation. The initial step is looking at the stigma of mental health in the military or the perception of it in future leaders.
The [problem] is that mental health is such a “dirty word,” you can’t come in and say we’re talking about mental health because no one wants to participate, or no one wants to deal with it because the fear [of being] labeled or stigmatized is so big. The individuals who are brave enough, who might have problems in their relationship or family dynamic might come in and take a chance to deal with it. But how we do that is we have to go out there and teach, [and] normalize it so what we use instead of “mental health” is terms like “emotional intelligence” which is a phrase the Marine Corps uses talking about empathy, how do we empathize with people but also do it in a way in which is not just caring about people but also having a mission focus.
How to develop career goals. The one thing the military doesn’t do as well as it does everywhere else is career counseling, evaluations, or preparing people for the next time. Asking questions such as what is a good leader, how do they mentor other people, and how do you do that with people that are older than you, or maybe more knowledgeable than you. So, if you look at it from a focus of career counseling that’s the approach and we’re hopefully going to talk to them more about that and also reduce the stigma. The more you do it, the more it helps.
Interviewed by Suzanne Bigelow
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