Transcription:

Angela: Hello, everyone. And thank you so much for joining us for another episode of the survivors.org podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Color Street Nails, a creative beauty brand with limitless possibilities. I'm your host, Angela Rose, the founder of PAVE, Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment.

I am so excited to welcome our guest, Linda Vester. A little bit about Linda. She was a foreign news correspondent and anchor on NBC and MSNBC for over a decade. As an Arabic speaker, she was often sent to war zones. After covering the Rwandan genocide, she produced the award-winning documentary Back Home. In 2005, she left television to raise her four children. Then in 2017, during the #MeToo Movement, she revealed that she had been sexually harassed by NBC's Tom Brokaw. As a survivor of complex PTSD, she's now a mental health advocate and leads the foundation dedicated to helping people get a highly effective treatment for PTSD, which we're going to talk about today called SGB.

Welcome, Linda. Thank you so much for being here today.

Linda Vester: Thank you for having me.

Angela: So, Linda, I always like to start off our podcast by talking a little bit about you. I know faith and family is very important to you. So I just want the listeners to get to know you as a person. Tell me what sets your soul on fire. What's important to you?

Linda Vester: Well, I would say family, for sure. I have a big family. Together, my husband and I have four children plus one adopted plus his three boys, so total of eight. So it's a big, noisy family with two dogs. My faith is very important to me. And I feel like that's an important part of resilience and I was sort of late to that party, but God tapped on my shoulder after my insistence for many years that I was an atheist. And that's a big part of my life too. And really helping people with mental health get access to treatment, that's really important part of it. And being mom really to my kiddos.

Angela: Oh, that's so beautiful. You bravely spoke out in 2017 about the harassment that you experienced with Tom Brokaw. And I know that you were not always met with a lot of support. Can you talk about the experience of coming forward and maybe some of the retraumatization that you experienced as well?

Linda Vester: Sure. I would say actually that was some of the worst trauma I experienced and I'm not really sure why, because I have seen some terrible things covering wars and experienced a lot of terrible things and nearly died a few times. And yet, somehow the experience of revealing what happened to me at the hands of Tom Brokaw and when he tried to force me to do things with him that I didn't want to do, bringing that out, telling the story and then the blowback I got was traumatizing in ways that I just didn't expect and really took me down and took me into a very dark place.

And part of it was this really crazy nasty screed that he leaked to the media afterward, denying everything and victim blaming and shaming. But also what people may not know is that, you know, on a daily basis, I was getting telephone threats from his lawyer threatening that he "had people" ready to tell things publicly about my integrity as a journalist and my integrity as a woman. And I think we can all read what that code is. None of it was true, but that didn't stop me from being terrified by it because it's just frightening. And then having some women within NBC kind of, from what I heard, being compelled to sign a letter of support for him. So basically, you know, the corporation making women essentially take sides with him and women who I knew, who I had worked with. It was creepy and scary and unnerving. So that was a rough time.

Angela: Thank you so much for sharing that. That's so brave. And I want to know for you, was there a moment when you knew that you wanted to speak out? Because speaking out is certainly not for everybody. But I want to hear from you, is there like a moment that you thought to yourself, "I want to shout out the silence"?

Linda Vester: Well, it wasn't me wanting to shout. It was the morning that the Mat Lauer story broke. And that was all over front page news and a very few close friends knew of what happened to me at the hands of Tom Brokaw. I didn't really tell many people. But one of them called me and said, "Are you going to tell? It might be important. It might help." And I was processing all of that and it took me some time to think about it. But then I decided that because I had access to a good lawyer and PR support and so on, that it was up to me to use my voice, to tell my story in hopes of maybe giving other women courage to tell their stories and maybe create some collective empowerment. So I didn't want to, but I felt that it was my duty to.

Angela: And thank you for speaking out. How did you feel when you found out that there were other women impacted by your perpetrator?

Linda Vester: Relieved. Because for many years, I had held this, I had been confused for years wondering, "Why me?" I knew I wasn't giving off any signs. I knew I was very straightforward at work. I was very work-oriented and no business. And so I didn't know why I had been targeted. And I was always afraid that it was only me and I definitely, you know, blamed myself, like "How could I be so dumb?" and, you know, all those things that women sometimes do. And then when two other women came forward, I felt so relieved because I thought, "Okay, there's a pattern. It wasn't just me." And one of them spoke to me in detail. In fact, she called me. We were put together by a mutual acquaintance. And when she told me her story, I was so viscerally unnerved by it, that after I got off the phone with her, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

Angela: You know, I'm so inspired by your journey. And I think one thing that really struck me was when we spoke originally and you talked to me about how you have had guns to your head in doing the work that you have done, being a war zone news correspondent. But dealing with the trauma, not just of the abuse and the harassment, but the aftermath was even worse, you told me, than literally having a gun to your head. And so what I would love to do is to talk about how you have a very happy and joyful life. And I want to talk about how did we get there? If you can give some advice to survivors, that would be great.

Linda Vester: Sure. I mean, I don't have magic answers. Well, you know, we all find our own path, but I will share openly what worked for me. And I tried a bunch of things. I mean, I definitely tried talk therapy. I, remain in talk therapy, which I find hugely helpful. My faith is really important. The book, Resilience by Steven Southwick. It's called Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges. I think I've read and re-read probably five times and I continue to highlight it and I give it to every trauma survivor I know, because I think it's the definitive work on discovering resilience and post-traumatic growth.

But, you know, I definitely tried medications. IV ketamine helped a little. Transcranial magnetic stimulation helped somewhat. But the thing that really worked and took my trauma away, I mean, changed my life, was something called stellate ganglion block. It's SGB for short. And I found out about it by accident from a friend who is SEAL Team Six, so, you know, one of the baddest of the bad. But you know, he was visiting our family for the summer. And I said, "Nate, how is it that you're the happiest Navy SEAL I've ever met? And he said, "Oh, well, in 2012, I got this neck shot called SGB." And I was like, "What is that?" You know, "Hold everything. Tell me." so he told me and I looked it up and I tracked down the doctor in Chicago who has pioneered the technique. And I said, "I need to have this." And so, with some trepidation, I mean, I recorded a video beforehand saying like, "What if this doesn't work?" You know, "Then what?" But it did. And it set me free. And the transformation was so powerful that my husband said, "Oh my gosh, I've got my wife back." And my children continue to say, "Thank you, mom, for doing that." And so I've since gifted it to several people. And my husband and I set up a scholarship through ErasePTSDNow.org for people who can't afford it to get this because, you know, through further research, the efficacy rate of this is 82% to 92%, which is higher than anything else out there.

This is a procedure that has been safely used and FDA approved since the 1920s by the FDA and has been used for pain syndromes. And it was an accidental discovery that it worked for PTSD. So it's totally safe. And I even allowed two of my teenage children to get it after traumas they suffered. So, if I let my own children, you know it's safe. And I really want this word about this to get out for people who can afford it to go to StellaCenter.com; for people who can't afford it, to go to ErasePTSDNow.org, to apply for the scholarship and for people to donate to contribute to that scholarship, because there's a lot of trauma walking around right now. And I am here by issuing a challenge that anyone who wants to donate to the scholarship, to ErasePTSDNow.org, I will match your gift dollar for dollar. I'm saying it right here in front of God and everybody. And I want to get that out there and to anyone who wants to donate, even if you don't have a whole lot, maybe go on, you know, smile.amazon.com, so when you make your Amazon purchases, and then you put in ErasePTSDNow.org, Anything you buy, there's a donation given to the nonprofit. So just any little way you can help, even donate air miles for people, because so many people have trauma in general post-COVID, that there's a lot of people who need treatment and need to know about it.

Angela: I would love if you wouldn't mind sharing with the audience a little bit about what was PTSD like for you before the treatment? How did that manifest itself? I know that there was, you mentioned a lot of shame and humiliation, but how did that manifest itself in your life?

Linda Vester: I had a lot of different things. So I would say the one thing that really affected my family was I had a hair-trigger temper and probably, you know, definitely some war and violent crime victims will recognize what that feels like. And that was just damaging. But I also was hugely sensitive to noise. Like, so a car backfiring would send me running for cover. I was very avoidant of crowds. I was very avoidant of any shows or books or movies that involve sexual trauma, couldn't do it. I had a lot of repeat nightmares of being coerced by Tom Brokaw and being chased by him and so on. And disruptive sleep and anxiety and depression.

Angela: And would you say after you had that treatment, was it automatic? Was it a week later? Talk to me about after you had that shot. And for the listeners, maybe you can talk about the actual procedure too, that might not understand that it's an actual injection.

Linda Vester: Sure. So it's pretty simple. And, you know, basically I've had fillings that are more invasive and scary. It's super easy. You know, you go to the doctor who's trained in the procedure. You can opt to have a sedative, you know. I did, because I wanted to kind of be mellow when it happened. But they give you an IV. And then you lie down on the table and it's ultrasound-guided. And it's two injections in the side of your neck. Right here at the C4 and C6 level on the right side. You can also in a week or, you know, a minimum of 24 hours later, get it done on the left side. I opted to have both sides because what they're finding is that if your trauma is only in adulthood, that's generally the right side. But if you have childhood trauma, it's the left side, so I opted for both.

The first one, I woke up and I felt good, but I was like, "Well, maybe it's the anesthesia. I don't know." And then within 30 minutes, I started spontaneously laughing and I just felt happier. And I came home and I looked at the front yard and I saw a rabbit and I was like, "Oh, bunny. There's a bunny in the yard." And you know, all of a sudden, just kind of I felt this access to the joy, pure access to joy, the way children feel that I hadn't felt since I was a child. And later that night, I walked out on my backyard and somebody was playing classical music and suddenly the music sounded so beautiful that I burst into tears of joy, and I felt such relief.

And so I would say that like, if I had to quantify, I would say my PTSD symptoms were 70% better. And I was happy that like, wow, 70% improvement was great. And if that's all I get, I'm good. But I still want to go for the other side. So we did a week later and I woke up immediately laughing. And I knew then it wasn't the anesthesia. And I felt like I had been carrying around this backpack, this invisible backpack weight, you know, that nobody could see, that it was just this weight of the world. And I felt that I was putting it down once and for all, and it felt great. And so, it was just immediate. And then over weeks I started to feel subtle additions, things like people who had harmed me over the years, I was just spontaneously able to let go and in ways that like before then I had been like, "I'm sorry, I'm not forgiving you. Thanks very much." You know, I know people talk about forgiveness, but no can-do. And all of a sudden I felt like I could, and I was free.

Angela: That is so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I think the notion of forgiveness is so hard for people sometime to understand. But I always say, you know, we forgive not to condone and not for the other person. But by forgiving, we can help free our own selves and our own soul because, you know, it takes a lot of energy to have that negativity. But if you can replace that with, like you said, joy and spontaneity, and I love how you talked about having like that childlike playfulness and that joy in your life. I'm so grateful. And so what advice do you have for other people, maybe other survivors that might just be starting their healing journey? What advice do you have for them in terms of healing?

Linda Vester: Honestly, I would say if your trauma involves anxiety, I would actually suggest that people start first by looking up StellaCenters.com or ErasePTSDNow.org. The reason why I say that is because removing that trauma and resetting your fight or flight in your brain, and that's what the shot does, is that, you know, basically, it's like a reboot for your mental computer, like hitting control alt delete. Your brain gets to reset and go back to factory settings, so to speak. And then afterward, the talk therapy, the reading, the faith, all that stuff comes afterward. The reason why I say do the trauma, you know, shot first is because it moves the thousand-pound boulder out of your way and allows the rest of the stuff, the long-term therapy, talk therapy, faith work, et cetera, et cetera, just makes it so much more successful. So that's why I strongly recommend it as kind of a first step. And again, I'm big on medical efficacy and safety. So I wouldn't say that if I weren't completely convinced of its safety and efficacy. And in fact, my husband and I have endowed a very large research study through NYU to further document its efficacy and really then be able to get word out to the public in a grand scale, and that study is underway right now.

Angela: Oh, I can't wait for the results of that. Thank you so much. So my last question for you, Linda, is I know you didn't have support from everybody in your life. There was some people that were supportive and some people that weren't so supportive. So my question to you is for some of our listeners that might have somebody in their life who's a survivor, what advice do you have for somebody when somebody discloses? What's the best way to react?

Linda Vester: Wow. Okay. So based on, you know, I had a couple female relatives, specifically a sister-in-law who did a lot of damage with her reaction and even a psychiatrist, a female psychiatrist. I swear to you, a female psychiatrist, my psychiatrist, I stopped seeing her immediately. But she literally, when I told her, and it took so much for me to tell her, she said, "Oh, on some level, you must have enjoyed it." And I about fainted. And I was gone, right? So I would say for anyone who is on the receiving end of someone revealing that to you, check whatever judgment you have, set it aside. Assume that it is taking a tremendous amount of courage for that person to share this painful thing with you and just hear them with love and support, know that it is taking all the courage they have in their bodies to tell you. And say, "Thank you for sharing this with me. Tell me how I can support you. What can I do for you to give you strength?"

Angela: That is so beautiful. And that is such Sage advice. Linda, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. You are such a beacon of light and hope and your joy radiates from you. So thank you so much for sharing and for anybody that might be triggered, survivors.org is here for you, also ErasePTSDNow.org. We're actually very proud to partner with them on an upcoming campaign. We are so happy that you joined us today, Linda. And just remember, everybody that's listening, to love yourself, support each other and together, we can change the world. Thank you all so much.