Evan and Jenny Owens Built Reboot to Heal Hidden Wounds

Speaker 2 (00:00.108)

Hey, Nashvilleans, welcome to the You Matter Nashville podcast, the place where every story we share is a celebration of you, the heartbeat of our community. I'm Jason Hoover, delighted to be one half of your hosting duo.

And I'm Mindy Hoover, joining you alongside Jason to bring you the stories of inspiring individuals and unsung heroes making a positive impact right here in our hometown.

Every episode is about passions, dreams, and actions that stitch together the Middle Tennessee community.

So if you're looking to get inspired by the good happening around us, or if you want to hear from the change makers who believe, just like us, that you matter, then hit that follow button on your favorite podcast platform.

And if you are looking to make a move in the middle Tennessee area, Mindy and I are real estate professionals and would be honored to serve you with excellence.

Speaker 3 (00:45.194)

Now let's dive into another episode of You Matter Nashville.

Welcome to You Matter Nashville. I'm Jason Hoover joined by my beautiful wife and co-host Mindy. Today we are honored to sit down with Evan and Jenny Owens. They are visionaries and founders of Reboot Recovery. Now Reboot is a faith led peer facilitated recovery model that's helped transform the lives of over 30,000 people dealing with traumas from military veterans and first responders to everyday individuals struggling with life's hardest hits.

With Jenny's background in occupational therapy and trauma rehabilitation and Evan's leadership in nonprofit and tech spaces, they've built a powerful 12 week program that now spans 44 states and 11 countries. We're excited to dive into how Reboot is helping people not just survive trauma, but truly heal. Evan, Jenny, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:46.828)

Guys, to get us started, can you take us back to the beginning? What inspired the creation of Reboot Recovery? And how did your personal and professional journeys shape its mission?

Well, that is a long story, so I'll try to keep it brief, but it stemmed out of my work with active duty service members. I was doing brain injury rehabilitation back in like 2008 timeframe. every encounter that I had with a soldier who was dealing with a traumatic brain injury was also dealing with trauma because of the context in which those injuries happened.

When we're trying to rehabilitate the physical and mental wounds, there's also, I recognized, a soul and a spiritual wound that's so prevalent. And if you ignore it, then all the work that you can do in these other spaces will never help the person really get back to living a life or embracing a life that they feel is worth living. Because so many of these service members were grappling with depression and deep things like guilt and shame about what had happened.

that was impacting their relationships with their family members. And so it just was kind of a passion project initially that Evan and I dreamed up of creating a space for these families to come together around this topic of what happened to you beyond just your physical wounds, what happened to your heart and how can we help rebuild some of those connections with other humans that are in your life, hopefully with God as your creator and your sustainer.

and seeing him as an ally and not an enemy when I think trauma kind of forces us to ask hard questions. Why did bad things happen to good people? Why am I alive when he died? What do I do now that I've damaged goods, quote unquote? How do I find purpose again? So that was really the origin story of Reboot. But as you mentioned, it's grown well beyond that to address lots of other populations, not just military families.

Speaker 2 (03:45.324)

You know, survivor's guilt is a real thing. For sure. And, yeah, I've known one that dealt with that and it was very troubling for him. so I have, I'm sure you probably have helped some of those people as well.

for sure. Yeah, I can remember a specific story of a young man who stepped on a pressure plate. I think this might have been in Iraq and another friend of his who had a young child and a wife did not survive. And he was like, I don't have as much to live for as this guy, but why am I still here and he's not? that's something that those are questions that are not easily answered. But we want people to feel

We wanted people to feel safe asking them to know they're not going to be judged and to know that they're not the only ones that are grappling with those issues and to help speak life into those dark places because you can get down in a hole and just keep spiraling and begin to think that your life does not have worth. So that's where we saw our job is like we had a different vantage point. Evan and I are not military. We have a heart for military. But we began to say, we're standing in a different place.

What can we share? can we offer that maybe they don't have in this time? How can we be a bridge to lay down our lives, so to speak, to help them get from that place of hopelessness, disconnectedness, isolation, to a place of feeling that they belong and that they have worth and they have a future despite what they've walked through.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:24.022)

Hope, when hope is gone, it's like life is gone. And I'm sure they struggle with that quite a bit.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:30.828)

Right, exactly.

Speaker 4 (05:35.926)

Yeah, when you talk about survivor's guilt, we have a whole thing that we teach about the difference between real guilt or deserved guilt and false guilt. And I think that there's all these t-shirts around, live life with no regrets, know, no guilt, all these kinds of things. But that's not actually the way that God designed it. Guilt is actually a good thing. Guilt is actually what the protective instinct to keep us from going and making the same mistakes that we've made in the past. You guilt should lead us towards

better choices, but things like survivor's guilt, helplessness, guilt, catch 22 situations, et cetera, et cetera, this whole laundry list of types of false guilt. The reason that they're false and the reason they're trapped is they don't lead us anywhere. There's no fruit that comes of them because they're based in in factual twisting of reality. And so what happens is people get caught in these cycles of false guilt where everybody can say, no, that wasn't your fault. And yet

you are the one condemning yourself. So how does it end when you're the judge and the jury and you've already found yourself guilty, even though the facts state otherwise? And I think that's the real root. That's an example of a soul wound that when people believe in this false guilt, when they become their own prosecutor, then who will stand with them? And that's really where I think community could come into play and say, like, hey, I'm going to defend you even if you're not ready to defend yourself.

Right. that is true across like, all types of trauma, you know, from being abused to, you know, to anything that it can really feed into that. And that guilt also kind of ties into, you know, your empathy for the other person and it gets complicated. So, mean, I know you guys work a lot with the emotional side, but your OT, your occupational therapist,

I grew up, mother is an occupational therapist, but she works mainly with like stroke patients and trying to get those abilities to come back. How do you use the OT profession to help revitalize, I guess, the brain and the brain injuries? I would love to hear more about that side.

Speaker 1 (07:44.674)

Well, Reboot is our nonprofit and it's something that we do that's non-clinical, but again, it's rooted in my experience as a clinician. So I don't work clinically anymore, but when I was working clinically with brain injury, we base a lot of our work on neuroplasticity, this idea that you can retrain some of the functions of the brain by putting it in scenarios and giving...

people opportunities to use skills that maybe have depleted or changed to help the brain be able to navigate new ways to do things and compensate. So there was a whole lot that I could share about what we did at, I worked at Fort Campbell with brain injury rehab, which is another whole topic, but we were helping soldiers with mild traumatic brain injuries get back to the front lines, which was almost a morally.

injurious challenge for me because I was like, I don't want to send you back to the front lines. But that was their motivation. That was their goal. They felt like they didn't want to be the weak link in their unit. So we were really pushing very hard to help these soldiers to fine tune to the highest level of mental ability, almost like a pro athlete. were doing really fast visual reaction speed type activities, decision making, visual attention or alternating attention, because we know that when you're scanning,

the battlefield, you've got to be aware of lot of different sights and sounds and smells and feelings at once. And then ultimately we created a return to duty program, which was an intensive five day program where graduates of the traumatic brain injury process had done all the therapies. They went out and did field exercises with the therapists and with what we call green suitors to put them to the test. We did paintball scenarios.

We did mass casualty scenarios where they had to do like tactical buddy aid and apply tourniquets and they used Humvee simulators and shooting ranges and all those kinds of things just to put their cognitive and visual and balance and emotional capabilities to the test to see that they were ready to go back to the front. So that was a really fascinating part of my journey. Not really something that we do now in Reboot, but I can just say that, you know, once an OT, always an OT. what I feel like I bring into Reboot is really

Speaker 1 (10:00.28)

looking at the whole person, recognizing that we're a body and mind and a soul, and that we're designed to function in community. those are all things that I learned back in school to help people to recognize their own inherent worth and their residual skills. If you can't do this thing, what can you do? And to hone in on those things. I think even the idea that there's a readiness for change. And I think Reboot is a step in the journey, not.

Everybody's not always at the same place as another, but when they come to a group and they see someone who's just a few steps down the road in their recovery, it's inspiring to that person where they're at. helps them to hope and to see that there is progress to be made. And Reboot gives them a space and a runway to get from maybe coming in. And this is a true story. Sunglasses on, hat on, arms folded, sitting in the corner. I don't know if this is for me.

Two, at the end of 12 weeks, coming in, smiling, bringing in a bucket of fried chicken, picking up somebody else's kid and swinging them around. And we've seen these transformations. And it's because of that community aspect. That's like called, I think it's social behavioral learning, but that's a part of Reboot that I think is probably undergirded within OT as well.

That's gotta be so... I don't know.

You got a good brain, Jenny Owens.

Speaker 1 (11:24.05)

And OT came from, the roots of OT came from World War I and the roots of OT was built and they were helping soldiers to rehabilitate from those wounds back in the day before it was even called OT.

not

did not know that either. That's pretty amazing. I mean, pretty much the military kind of started this idea. That's incredible. so it kind of crossed over into mainstream to civilian and now it's kind of going back but with therapy. So I love the whole thing. It is a full circle and there's things that I, jobs that I had, training that I had way back when that

didn't think I would ever really use in my life that God kind of just went, now this is integrated into your new career. And you're going, okay, that wasn't wasted. And so that's something my parents always told me, nothing's wasted. Nothing you go through is wasted. You may have to weed the bad things out, but then you got to take those good things and to move forward.

That's a reboot tenant that God doesn't waste a wound, even though those are things we wouldn't embrace or wish on anyone or want in our lives, but God can take it and help you discover purpose in that painful experience.

Speaker 2 (12:39.918)

You know, sometimes I just wish he would start writing on the wall again.

Daniel 5.

Yeah. Just have a hand up here. That'd be nice. You're involved and you need to learn.

right and make it a lot easier. Yeah, but not as fun, I guess, right?

The journey is not there in that.

Speaker 2 (12:58.414)

Going back to what you said earlier about the cognitive, there's, and I may be saying this incorrectly, correct me if I'm wrong, but the plasticity of the brain is a double-edged sword. Because what you tell it over and over, repetitively, that's what you start believing. And so whenever you're going down that dark spiral, you're constantly...

you're the judge, the jury, you're talking about just how bad of a life that you have and that everybody else would be better off. And it's a lie. But, know, with that 12 step program, seems like you're just you're you're changing that you kind of flipping it on its head to where it's you're you're the judge and jury feeding into yourself that you are worthy. You do have importance. You know, your voice does matter. And so it's

I love that you guys have started this and that there are programs for people because isolation is probably one of the worst things that you can do.

Absolutely.

yeah. I would love to hear about your 12 steps. I know we can't probably go into detail about everything today, but I would love to hear how someone journeys through your program.

Speaker 4 (14:15.534)

Yeah, I can take that. I think just what you were saying real quick about what we tell ourselves we believe, there's actually a pretty groundbreaking study that's been done that actually is disproving a 30-year standing positive affirmation theory that if you look in the mirror and say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh, aren't people like me kind of thing, that you'll start to believe that's true. And actually, the data has actually shown that the opposite occurs.

When you're saying something to yourself that you actually in your innermost person believes untrue what will happen is your brain actually will start to fortify the belief Stronger it's like it's it's sort of like trying to convince somebody that disagrees with you politically the more you argue against them the more they dig their heels in the same is true That's why we believe so strongly that getting down to those root wounds that until you really change

You don't believe it.

Speaker 3 (15:05.036)

wrong now.

Speaker 4 (15:12.428)

the true most inner belief, simply trying to change the behavior of, I'm gonna change the way I talk about myself. I'm gonna change what I say. That actually really won't really perform very well over a long term period of time until the core belief actually changes. And so throughout Reboot, that's really what the 12 sessions are really about. And it starts with a 12 week or 12 session program and then it continues into a year long aftercare program of community. And so we've got groups in 400 plus locations all over.

We got three to one civilian to military location. So if you're not a veteran, you're not a first responder, that's fine. There's tons of reboot groups for you. But I do just want to say that pretty much in the program, we set the stage by asking a core question, can your soul be wounded by trauma? And if so, what would the symptoms of a wounded soul be and how would we go about treating those symptoms? And that's really the origin of a question that most people have never really thought like, okay, if I'm my body and soul,

and I can get on board with my mind and body is wound by what I experienced, can the part that I can't see my soul be wounded. And if so, am I treating that? most people aren't treating that. Am I just trying to re-label it as a mental health issue and really it's a soul issue. And so as they go through these things, we have identified five core wounds of how trauma wounds our souls. And we talk through in each of the sessions, weeks five through usually 10.

Ignoring it.

Speaker 4 (16:34.112)

each one of those sessions is specifically set around a specific way that soul wounds occur in us. So it's the wound of loss, the wound of betrayal, the wound of rejection, neglect, and abandonment, the wound of guilt, shame, regret, the wounds of misplaced identity. And then those wounds manifest through unforgiveness and through bitterness and through isolation and all these other things, which is what we get into in the second sort of stages of the curriculum. And so each week we tackle one of those root wounds.

All on a peer-led process and everybody goes through those wounds and as they do it, it's interesting You know sessions four or five or six of like yeah That wasn't for me and all of a sudden you get to the wound that you'll know which session was your wound Yeah, because it'll feel like someone's pouring salt on that area and you'd be like, I don't like this anymore I was I was cool up until this point and that's usually that's where you know, okay That's where my wound is. That's that's how drama got to me. And then once you understand that and that was really my heart for reboot is

I felt like people were fighting an invisible enemy. It's one thing to fight an invisible enemy. It's another thing to fight an invisible enemy that you don't even know is there. If someone could come along and say, hey, there's an invisible enemy you're fighting and here's how to start winning against that enemy, the wounded of the soul, then they could all of sudden start healing those invisible wounds. And that was really where my passion began for this was that simple premise.

Yeah, I mean, that comes from what comes from our military grounding, which was one of the tenets is know your enemy and that the soldiers taught that to me. And I just had this vision of a lot of our soldiers were like fighting with blindfold on. It's like they don't even.

know where the enemy is, what his tactics are, or like you said, they didn't even know they're in a fight. And so again, it's a military can inform the civilian population and we're talking more spiritual warfare sort of analogy, but you do have to know that you're in a fight and that you have allies and an ally that's going to stand beside you and equip you and empower you. That's one of the things we talk about even before those five wounds in the book and in the curriculum is just kind of like,

Speaker 1 (18:34.222)

trauma has been around, we would say, since the Garden of Eden, since sin entered the world, since Adam and Eve were displaced from the perfect harmonious living with the Lord. And yes, what they lost in that, you know, they lost, they had shame, they lost connection with the Lord, they kind of fumbled with their purpose. But we also see in Genesis 3 that God, He covered their shame in that moment, He clothed them.

He reminded them specifically of their purpose. And we talk about what Adam's going to do, what Eve's going to do. And we say he began that redemptive plan that has played out in the rest of human history, which is God bringing us back into community with him through Christ. And through Christ's purposeful suffering, can find that. We can rejoin the Lord and find our reconnection with him and with one another. And so that's kind of how the book ends is like, you have purposeful suffering too.

It's a sad reality. We're in this world and it's broken, but there is joy and healing on the other side of it. If you can endure it and you can maybe reframe the way that you see it.

Yeah. I mean, that's amazing. And you look at the statistics too, for faith-based versus not faith-based therapies and just how much more successful it is for faith-based having that core of hope and that core of love, you know, and grace. mean, just knowing that someone is willing there to forgive me, wanting to do that, you know, helping me through the forgiveness. You're not alone in it.

But just having that power of not being alone, I think, I mean, you guys see it every single day, but I know that's such a core thing. But I mean, it's staggering, like the difference though, between the non-faith and the faith-based.

Speaker 1 (20:23.502)

And I'll again, just getting my nerd hat on again, but because of my training, we do research of our programs. We've been doing collecting data, survey-based data since we started essentially. We just published our eighth article in a scientific peer reviewed journals on the effectiveness of our courses. And these are surveying people who come to our course. Some are believers, some are not believers. Everyone is welcome.

And we asked them at the beginning to rate their anxiety symptoms, their depression symptoms, their feelings of social connectedness, their sense of meaning and purpose, all of those factors. And then we measure them again at the end of the 12 weeks. And since we've started consistently, we've seen large statistically significant improvements in every category that we measure in all of our populations, both civilian, military, and first responder. And so we're doing our best efforts to put this

out into the scientific community to say small group peer led faith based solutions have a place in trauma healing. They are leading the charge in many ways because everyone's starting to recognize that there's so much fruit to be found in these communities versus just a therapist client relationship and communities that can go on and on and on. Like Evan said, it's not just 12 weeks. You get into an aftercare program. You're doing life with these people and like that we sustain those gains that way.

I like that because a lot times you can just get into yourself going to a therapist, not knocking therapy. I'm a huge proponent for going to therapy, but having that community on top of that, it's kind of like AA or any other type of group like that. Just having that peer led and that having someone you can call to do life with you, that's huge. You can't do that with a therapist usually. You can't say, I'm having a bad day. They're like, that'll be $150.

those relationships end at some point, you know, and so this can go on as long as you want it to.

Speaker 2 (22:20.492)

It reminds me of a song by Jelly Roll. I don't know if you know Jelly Roll, but...

love jelly rolls.

Jelly Rolls are the best.

He has a song, I don't know the exact title, but I think it's called Winner. But it's about addiction. he says, or one of the lines is, nobody walks through the door a winner. you know, that's just that resonates. It's like, wow, we always think we've got to be perfect. We've got to understand our feelings. We've got to, you know, I guess, level up to this expectation.

And, you know, but we can't do that. And if we grade ourselves based on what the community wants us to be, then we're going to fail. We're going to fail. And when we fail, we're going to be hurt. So I love the after, you know, the 12 weeks is great. And then the afterwards, it keeps feeding that person so they don't go back down.

Speaker 1 (23:27.758)

Absolutely.

down that spiral. So I love that piece of it.

Can I toss in 20 cents real quick on that though? real quick. know, essentially I work with so many great recovery organizations around the country, a lot of even Christian faith-based substance abuse recovery organizations. And one of the things that I think the Lord's really been challenging me over the last couple of years, and I was trying to understand why I would go to these conferences or speak at them or whatever and feel like we're the same, but we're also not.

I always would leave feeling like, man, we're so close. We say a lot of the same things. But I think that one of the fundamental differences is what are we rallying around? At Reboot, I don't really want to build a community that rallies around how broken and wounded we are. I want to build a community that rallies around how redemptive God is and how we redeem things. I think that when I see it, think the mistake a lot of times what happens in these communities where they actually become...

their identity.

Speaker 4 (24:28.236)

Come a little bit, what's that called when you eat humans? Like cannibalistic, like they start sort eating themselves is, is the end. Thank you all.

campus.

Speaker 1 (24:35.95)

You have to finish that metaphor.

Alright, and that is a wrap folks.

on the pod. I think that's where it can start becoming an issue is when we start saying, we're really rallied around this codependent, we're all broken together indefinitely. I don't think that that's what Paul speaks of when he says, I've learned to be content in all situations. says, we're just all broken and messed up together and we're so wounded that we can't go out and minister to a hurting world. And I worry that's where so many of even Christian people are getting.

culture is that we're so self-focused and yes, we have our therapists and we have our self-care regiments and we've got our boundaries and we've got all these books that we read God love all those authors but also if we're so isolated and we're so convinced of our own brokenness all the time that we can't go mend other people who are broken then we're not marrying the great physician You know, and I think that becomes a selfish faith and I'm not sure that's where the Bible wants to leave us I think we've come in where we're not all winners, but I think that we are more than

You know, and I think rallying around the fact that you can't do that in your own, you know, I'll start preaching but I just think that's a I think that's what I've really been feeling convicted over the last couple years is like That's the kind of community we want to build not one that rallies around Wow, look how wounded we are together, you know

Speaker 1 (25:55.03)

And one of the things we discovered after doing this for so long is just that one of the first signs that healing is happening in an individual is that they're able to see someone's pain outside their own and that's why this movement became a movement. We didn't expect it to. We just started something in our living room for a small group of people who we thought were hurting. But when we started to see people growing and looking outside themselves and taking what their pain had been and recycling it,

not going through to that.

Speaker 4 (26:04.942)

I'm gonna it.

Speaker 1 (26:22.976)

and using it to help encourage somebody else, we were like, ooh, there's something here. And it began to grow wings beyond just us. And that's why we have thousands of people volunteering to lead these courses in all those locations I've been talking about, because they've seen that too, and they've seen it in their own lives, and they're starting to see it in their group participants too.

Right. And having people that have gone through the program then take leadership roles, know, I have an education background, talked about about 15 years, but it was in music. But with that, my goal was by the time from freshmen to senior year that they not only learned from me, but they were also turning around and leading groups, leading rehearsals. you know, and I, there was days, you know, that I was sick. There'd be a sub in the room, but they would be leading the class and we were getting behind. But

The thing about that when you learn and then you learn to teach others, there's something that happens in that transition and it gets deeper. You're rooted. So scaffold teaching is something that we actually teach a lot in schools is that if we can teach them, but if they can turn around and teach someone else, it just goes so much deeper into their psyche. becomes more, they believe it more. Does that make sense? it. And it's just, there's empowerment in teaching others.

Yep.

Yeah, and empowerment. That's kind of what Evan was speaking to is we really want to equip and empower people to go be a world changer.

Speaker 4 (27:50.51)

Also, think it's a little bit like if you pick a bunch of fruit from a tree and you just put it in the basket, it's going to start going bad. I think that at some point you're meant to go take that fruit and start giving it to other people because you're producing so much fruit in your life, you want to share the fruit. I think there's a level of healing that we can get to that if we don't start sharing that healing with others,

Right.

Speaker 4 (28:18.166)

we actually will start reversing the other direction again. It'll start rotting again. Because I think that there's levels of healing I think you can only get to by loving someone else who's going through something, by teaching somebody else, by being a leader in someone's Or by sharing your story. By vulnerable and sharing your story, whatever it is. I think there's these levels that you can get to. Level might be the unfair word. Level's probably not the best word. But I think there's chambers of healing that are only unlocked when you're leading someone else.

being born.

Speaker 2 (28:45.146)

I believe that completely. believe that. So I'm interested on the evolution of the program. So you said you started it in your living room with probably a handful of people, but you eventually got with three people.

Very humble beginnings.

So how did it go from that to a 12 week program and then other people taking it to more states and countries?

Yeah.

Initially, we had some amazing doors open at Fort Campbell. We were doing it in our living room, but then through some connections that I had with my work there, a gentleman who ran a facility who was a retired chaplain said, why don't you come bring this on post and use our kitchen, use our childcare? It was a tremendous blessing and they flung the doors open wide for us. So we started advertising, I'd share with the therapists on post or the, you know,

Speaker 1 (29:45.738)

nurse practitioners. And within a year, what started with three, had to bring chairs and tables from our own church because we ran out. We had 50 plus people at this group, which was humongous. And it just, I think, I don't know how we got connected with other cities.

How have you been getting- Original