The path to a career in massage and bodywork often comes through the map laid out by a therapist’s personal experience with pain. For Shawn Shimkets, it was needing to find his way out of the darkness of PTSD that brought him to massage. Now he works to help others do the same.

A Recipe for PTSD

After serving two tours in Iraq in the 2000s, Shimkets came home a US Marine Corps veteran who found himself dealing with a new enemy—posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), wreaked on his body, mind, and spirit by the havoc of war. Although quick to say he hasn’t experienced the level of trauma some of his fellow veterans have, his journey reminds us how trauma at all levels embeds itself deep within.

It was 2004 when Shimkets was first deployed to Iraq. “As high school came to an end, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to college, and I didn’t want to be buried in student loan debt.” With no plan at hand, a trip with a friend to a Marine Corps recruiter’s office sealed a young Shimkets’s fate. “[The recruiter and I] agreed I’d go in as an aircraft mechanic . . . and I signed my life away,” he says. “My parents were not happy.”

But the young recruit thought he had chosen a fairly “safe” path. “In the back of my mind, I think I always assumed that by signing up to be an aircraft mechanic in the Marine Corps I would be safe from combat zones,” Shimkets says. He soon found out that wasn’t the case—he and the other young mechanics in training were told to expect to be placed on aircraft carriers during their tour. “No part of me wanted to be on an aircraft carrier; I joined the Marines, not the Navy. When I finally checked in to my squadron, I found out I would be working on two-seater F-18s—which don’t go on the boat.” But his relief was quickly snuffed out when he learned they “don’t go on the boat” because the planes and their maintenance crew fly directly into combat zones. “I checked in to my unit only to find out that we were going to be the first F-18 squadron in Iraq, and we were deploying in six months.” 

The next assignment for Shimkets took him deeper into the belly of the war. “Being a low-ranking Marine on that first deployment, and with limited experience working on the jets as the ‘new guy,’ I was transferred when a requisition came out that the squadron had to give someone up to be a detention facility guard. A few days later, I was on a helicopter headed for Fallujah.” This began the next layer of Shimkets’s PTSD timeline.

“That helicopter dodged a rocket attack while we were en route, which really set the standard for where I was headed for the next few months,” he says. “The detention facility had four times the amount of detainees it was set to house. We were grossly understaffed, and we caught rockets and mortar fire several times a day. The artillery cannon that returned fire on those attacks was directly next to the facility, so several times a day, as it fired shells into the distance, we could all feel the teeth rattle in our skulls from the percussion of the cannon.”

Shimkets says part of his duties also included providing security for the surgeons who were administering aid to the wounded. “On those security tours, especially during the height of the Fallujah battle, it was just one truck after another bringing in severely wounded and dead soldiers—Marines and enemy—and civilians.” That first deployment took its toll on Shimkets, and while he says his second tour was significantly easier than the first, the PTSD groundwork had already been built brick by brick, mortar by mortar.

Coming Home

It wasn’t until Shimkets returned home after his two tours that he became aware things weren’t right—he was using alcohol daily, avoiding crowds and gatherings, and not finding joy in the world around him. He describes it as a time when life felt somewhat lifeless. 

Shimkets is comfortable talking about his struggles with PTSD today because he knows the impact it can have on others. “There are so many misconceptions around PTSD. People see homeless people walking around the streets talking to themselves and think that’s PTSD, or hearing a loud sound and jumping under a table and think that’s PTSD. Maybe that is the case for some people, but not for the majority of veterans who are suffering.” 

It was several months after his return when Shimkets began to understand why things felt very different. He says the moment he knew something was “off” was when he was filling out a post-deployment health assessment after his second tour. “There was a question that asked something like, ‘Do you experience little joy in recreational activities (movies, sports, etc.)?’ At that moment, I thought about it, and it was true. Life was just kind of bleh.”

The alcohol use was not only a coping mechanism, but leftover remnants of his time in the Corps. “There is a very big drinking culture in the Marines—the whole work hard, play hard mentality . . . At that age, college kids are doing the same thing, but I suspect a lot of us (in the military) were using alcohol to numb the things we witnessed overseas; it’s a habit you see with many police officers, first responders, etc., who experience a lot of atrocities in their line of work.”  

Shimkets hoped the Veterans Administration (VA) would help, but he found no relief there. “The VA is all about SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors),” he says. “I gave the VA a chance, and they turned that bleh feeling into what I can only explain as being a zombie. There were no more bad feelings, but it took away the good ones as well. I remember thinking, ‘If I have to live life feeling like that, life probably isn’t worth living.’”

A Door Unlocked and Serendipity Unfolds

During that time, Shimkets fell into a dark place. But even with a divorce looming and the loss of his job, he was determined not to quit. “I started researching the ways people were dealing with mental health, not using pharmaceuticals, and I kept seeing meditation pop up everywhere. It seemed too hippy-dippy to me at first, but it just kept showing up. I finally jumped on YouTube and began to go from video to video trying different versions of meditation.” He says the results came quickly. “I felt so much more relaxed, and my brain seemed to be working better. Meditation opened the door to the next chapter in my healing journey.”

That journey had Shimkets finding a home with massage, in a serendipitous sort of way. After the service, Shimkets was still doing contract aircraft maintenance for the military. The contracts were designed to keep the personnel employed without lapses in their tenure, but due to COVID-19—and someone within the contract-writing industry retiring—the workers were left without jobs. At the same time, he heard about the VA’s Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program (VRRAP) that sent veterans to a “tech school” and offered job placement in the end. The program would pay a school 75 percent of the tuition; the remaining 25 percent would be dispersed when the veteran was employed.

Shimkets jumped on the list of schools to see what was available. “I was scrolling through the list and it was mostly computer programming, cyber security, etc.—things I really didn’t have much interest in.” When he started looking at the location of the schools included in the program, he saw Escondido, California, which was near his home. The course they were offering? Holistic Health Practitioner. “I was very intrigued! I was already a National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) certified personal trainer, I’m passionate about health and nutrition, and my fiancé is a naturopathic doctor. I immediately reached out to the school and got started.” 

Still, massage was not an immediate marriage for Shimkets. “I think it took a while for me to embrace it. I felt very out of my element in the first class doing basic circulatory massage. I always got positive feedback, but I felt like I was just following a recipe and not really connected.” He says he started to get a better grasp of the content while learning deep-tissue massage. “I like to say that all the beginning modalities were like math for me: I could do it and pass the class, but when I took physics, math made sense. Structural integration was my physics of the massage world. Being able to see someone get off the table with noticeably better posture, feel taller, have better alignment, etc., I was really sold after learning the technique.”

The experience of being a “giver” was also transformational for Shimkets. “I didn’t come from much as a kid. There was always food on the table and clothes on our backs, and there was a lot of love from my parents, which is all I can really ask for. But we didn’t have many of the luxuries of those around us.” He uses that history to inform his work moving forward. “I want to ensure that no matter what I do in life, I don’t leave any barriers to those who are less fortunate. Everyone can use a massage, but most don’t get them because they can be quite expensive. Anytime I can volunteer my services somewhere, I jump on it, and anytime someone complains about pain, I make them get on my table to see what I can do.”

Sharing the Work

The path Shimkets has traversed makes him a safe space for others who have seen the impact of war. Through him, other veterans have found comfort and a healing touch. Shimkets has done some recent work with Veterans Walk and Talk (VWAT), a therapeutic program for veterans based in Southern California. He reached out to get involved with the program and has been offering bodywork at various veteran-centric events ever since.

Because of the shared military experience, Shimkets says there is a layer of trust that’s unique in the work he does with those veterans. “At a Guardian Grange event that I volunteered at, a good chunk of the veterans that showed up were special operators (Navy Seals, Green Berets, etc.). In the cases where they knew the veterans were really struggling, they would often come get me to work on them. I haven’t experienced the level of trauma that many of these guys have, but I can certainly relate, and that camaraderie, I think, allows people to truly be able to relax and let go.” And Shimkets, fueled by his own journey through pain and recovery, is there for them in that process. 

Stories of Inspiration

Shawn Shimkets was one of the winners of the 2022 Massage Is for EveryBody awards, also in this issue.