Inspired by his sister’s service in the Marine Corps nearly 20 years ago, Marine Corps veteran Micah Norgard spent 12 years as an infantryman, serving in a variety of roles and locations. But his biggest battle was in recognizing the cumulative effects of 21 potentially concussive event exposures and multiple undiagnosed traumatic brain injuries. That journey took him from years of internal conflict to a diagnosis at VA and, ultimately, finding daily healing as a yoga instructor.
Norgard's first TBI resulted from an assault by a fellow Marine. During deployments to Iraq, frequent exposure to the blast impacts of mortar and IED (improvised explosive device) explosions contributed to his additional TBIs. Although Norgard realized he was injured, his condition was undiagnosed for nearly two decades—unaware of TBI symptoms and long-term effects, or the extensive research on TBIs by the Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence as well as the resources available to properly support his recovery.
"I could go into each individual one, but … these were internal wounds that we weren't taught about," Norgard said. "In the time that I was coming up, it was part of that 'man-up' phase where we didn't talk about mental health, we didn't talk about brain injuries or anything like that. We just saw it as part of what we signed up for."
After he returned from his first deployment to Iraq, Norgard noticed some physical changes, including slurred speech. Various symptoms and conditions followed. "My vision was just … like everything was not right. It felt like everything had just been shifted out of me a little bit—energy, vision, thought. Everything just totally just shifted, like literally blasted a little bit out of me," Norgard said.
Then came the changes in behavior, personality and mood. Norgard aid it was "…almost like sharp knives penetrating me constantly, and I would react to them instead of being able to control them." This drastic shift was challenging to manage.
"I was a very introverted person as a kid, very silent. And here's this person who is now very vocal, very confrontational, very angry at all things all the time," Norgard said. "And as I later came to tell my students, it's this buffer that we build through resiliency, and all that resiliency that was trained and was just gone. All the emotions just ran rampant."
Exercise and participating in marathons was Norgard's main way of relieving stress, but when he injured his ankle and could no longer run, he became curious about an ancient art: yoga. Encouraged by a social media post that showed a number of intricate poses, he began practicing individually with a 30-day challenge. He was hooked.
"I started to feel something in my physical body I hadn't felt before—an awareness. And along the line I started to feel this softening, this softening of anxiety. A lightness to my body would come, especially the longer and more I breathed," Norgard said. "There's a ton of concentration techniques that we utilize to sharpen that concentration muscle, like flexing a muscle."
Through yoga, he began to process all the trauma he had experienced throughout his military career, to understand the extent of his injuries and, eventually, to seek help. He was finally evaluated at VA nearly two years ago, and his diagnosis of multiple TBI was validating, leading to a variety of treatments. Group therapy and hearing the stories of other veterans in his community was empowering and supplemented prescribed medications—at one point, as many as 34 pills per day.
"I would not change anything about the path that I took through Western modalities into the less Western modalities of yoga and other types of healing arts," Norgard said. "I think it's a combination of both, but I think now what Western medicine couldn't do, the Eastern—in the form of yoga healing arts—is finishing."
He regained a sense of community and healing through the practice of yoga. Later, as an instructor, the healing process reached a deeper level. "It was honestly the first time in my entire life, adult life especially, that I truly felt accepted for all my weirdness, all my traumas, all my injuries," Norgard said. "Everything that made me, I truly felt accepted here—not only accepted, I felt seen and I felt heard. And that is just the entire vibe of this place."
Norgard is undaunted by the journey ahead in managing his condition, confident in the tools and support from his family, his partner, Damien, and new friends he's made.
"No matter what, it takes work to heal. … Just be patient with yourself. … Progress is progress, and the moment you think you have it, just like a balancing posture in yoga, the moment you think you got it and you stop making the constant little shifts, you're going to fall. It's the same thing with our mental health. Our TBI is something that you just have to balance constantly for your entire life."
Are you wondering about TBI signs and symptoms? Check out this TBICoE fact sheet.