William Kimmins

Licensed Mental Health Therapist

My story is a little longer and a lot different than many of my colleagues in the mental health field. I grew up in Maryland but not the parts most people are familiar with; my hometown is out in the mountains in the western part of the state. After high school, I accepted an Army scholarship to pay for college. Since I'm the child of a single mom who taught in the public school system I knew that I would need to get college funded independently and the Army has often been happy to oblige if you've achieved enough in high school and show leadership potential.

After college, I began my service at Fort Bragg in North Carolina with the 82nd Airborne Division. Initially, I didn't plan on making a career out of the military, just wanted to do my required time in uniform to get college paid for and then pursue opportunities in civilian life. That all changed during my sophomore year of college at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I remember waking up for a sociology class on 9/11/2001. To this day I don't know why I put an 8 am class on my schedule since I already owed 3 early mornings per week to my ROTC unit. I remember picking up a coffee at the campus store right after the first plane hit the North Tower in New York before we all knew that the attack was just that. I became part of a generation of soldiers who knew that going to war was a “when”, not an “if” after I earned my degree and received my commission.

Once I returned home from my first overseas deployment, during the infamous troop surge in Iraq, I was fortunate enough to be asked to try out for the Army's Special Operations component. I spent over a year in that training pipeline and then, despite my Russian language skills, I went right back to the Middle East a few more times. In fact, it was only after I was hired into a small command outside Washington, DC that I actually got to use those language skills and work in Europe. In total I spent 21 years in uniform (if you don't count my college experience when I was contracted to the service but not on active duty) and amassed deployments and utilization tours that number in the double digits. I participated in every major named operation the US undertook between 2001 and 2025, and worked in a lot of places that don't often make the news.

Over the course of my service, I had a front-row seat to observe the toll that the GWOT (that's the Global War on Terror for those who didn't experience it) took on my teammates, their families, and the culture surrounding military members. I think everyone has heard some concerning statistics like the suicide rate in military members since 2000, or the rate of military divorces (many years twice the level of non-military marriages), to struggles with substance abuse. I also experienced some of those issues firsthand (though thankfully the core relationships in my life somehow remained strong). As I watched these effects and experienced these issues I also saw something that really disturbed me: despite there being plenty of people wanting to provide mental health services to military members, their families, and the veteran community very few people seemed to improve their mental health.

The symptoms that I saw in my community didn't fit with what the media would often tell people to expect from PTSD, but this was before I started my training so I had a very limited understanding of the range of mental health disorders our lifestyle and careers could generate. Eventually, I hit a moment in my career that every soldier gets to at some point: I was very advanced in both the rank structure and in terms of my competence but as I took stock I realized I had done just about everything I wanted to do in my military career. It's counterintuitive for many folks but the further you rise in the rank structure the greater the limitations on available opportunities. High-ranking officers simply don't perform certain functions, and those were the jobs I most enjoyed. As I looked forward to the opportunities that would still be available to me I realized that even fewer actually interested me enough to continue the sacrifices that the job requires. Example of said sacrifice: my oldest child spent the first decade of his life with his Dad deployed 6 months out of the year or prepping for the next deployment overseas.

As I started thinking about my next chapter I came back to the people I had served with over the years and what their service had done to their personal lives and mental health. These were some of the most effective operators you could ever hope to meet. People who had double-digit deployments and who had always gotten the job done. However, during part of my command time, more than one of these people came to me because they were experiencing suicidal ideation. At that point I hadn't committed to this new career so I did what the Army had trained me to do: I repeated the "script" we had been trained on, I took them to the offices on base like behavioral health, and I trusted that by doing this I was being a good teammate and protecting my people. It turned out I wasn't exactly correct on that score.

To the last operator, they came back with a similar story. They told me about the very nice people at behavioral health who tried to offer helpful suggestions. Some of them talked to me about meeting with a psychiatrist and receiving a prescription before being told to come back if things didn't feel better in a month. Others told me about the clergy who had advised them to put their faith in a higher power (for the record I support people of strong belief leaning into their faith as part of their journey to mental health) and how they had never been a church-going person before. And then they all said something that struck a chord for me without me realizing why: "Boss I'm fine, I need to get back to work"

With the benefit of time and training, I realize that what that statement brought up for me was part of my own struggle. Because I know that there were years when the world of the fight made more sense to me than the civilian one. Times when I felt like I had become a different creature than the men, women, and children I was protecting with my service. During those times, I leaned on the consistency of the deployment cycle as my coping mechanism. To us (and yes I 100% mean us) the fight had become our drug of choice and what frightened those folks telling me they just needed to get back to work most was not having that drug to make everything else seem manageable. I say this with confidence because I looked into their eyes and I saw my own fear reflected back.

What I also realized at some point was that the problem wasn't a lack of people wanting to help this population. My journey to becoming a clinician and practice owner has put me in contact with tons of phenomenal people who want to do exactly that. The problem in this scenario was that the people trying to help couldn't understand the life-world of the people who came into their office. I talk about this a lot with other therapists who want to get into working with the military and veterans, but some things make a normal person pull back. When that happens, the veteran client (or law enforcement client, or kid who has survived being trafficked) often loses faith in the therapeutic process and reaffirms their belief that they are so broken that there is no way to make them whole. The solution to this issue was once summed up nicely by another of my teammates: "People like us need a therapist like us."

One of my realizations in this was that military members and those closely connected to us form a distinct culture within American society. Much of it comes down to the way we relate to the world and people around us. Our concept of empathy is different, the ways we communicate with each other are different, and even our concepts of family are somewhat different from the rest of the populace. We tend to cope with daily stress in ways that most people who aren’t a part of our world won’t understand. We seem rougher around the edges, our humor is often very dark and addresses things that polite society thinks are off limits. I could go on about this (and often do when I’m working with other therapists or practices to help them understand who is sitting across from them in session) but the key point was that the very well-meaning and highly trained folks interacting with my teammates and friends throughout my career simply couldn’t understand the culture of the people they were trying to help.

I began my journey into the mental health field working on the simple idea that there was a major problem out there that no one else was able to work on effectively. One of the things you learn in special operations is that the job is solving problems but those problems have more severe consequences than others. As I progressed through my training and began working with clients I found that many groups benefit from the way I practice. I worked with a few law enforcement professionals (specifically tactical teams and career homicide detectives). While doing my internship I came into contact with my first child who had survived being trafficked. I found that those kids vibe really well with combat vets and had a truly rewarding experience working with them.

There is a similarity in life experience between the two groups that isn’t easily seen at first. Both groups have spent time in situations where their actions directly and immediately affected their survival. Both groups have been at least partially at the mercy of people they likely didn’t understand while they interacted. These circumstances create a set of survival skills that look very similar and a worldview that is the foundation of that connection. I often tell a story about a client during my internship who other therapists had struggled to connect with. As we were walking from one room to another there had been a series of very loud noises and shouting in another part of the building. I moved through the door as though I was still working overseas. It’s easy to spot, strong step through the door with a hard pivot to put you a few inches off the wall but out of the center of the hall. What I didn’t expect was to look back and see that client move almost the same way. Right down to check the corners at all times to see what might be there. What I realized then was that both groups were defined by achieving their goal regardless of the obstacle. The difference was the level of agency for each group as they moved through those experiences.

That’s part of why I practice a bit differently than other therapists. What I learned from observing both my community and those other groups is that many people for whom therapy hasn’t worked thrive on agency. Not a “good to have” item but a bone-deep requirement. The center of my practice is client agency. Building it, helping them maintain it, helping them reach a position where they are making deliberate choices even if their personal struggles are particularly hard at a given time. I approach the problem that a client brings me first because helping them gain some relief and control allows them to start working their way down to the root of the problem. Without fail though, the clients who work well in the therapy I provide do best when they are the ones making decisions based on my services. This puts them back in control of their mental health, and yields change that lasts rather than momentary shifts in experience.

Another unifying trait in the populations who benefit most from my method is their interaction with animals. It would be oversimplifying to say they all love dogs or cats, but to a person they have some kind of non-human living creature with whom they connect instinctively. Animals take you as you are, no social demands or niceties required. The people who I work with regularly really connect to that aspect of the relationship and over time the animal assistants become both anchors for when they are struggling and models for how the client should behave in certain situations. This realization led me to achieve a certificate in Animal Assisted Therapy.

I created my practice and named it Overwatch Counseling Services for a very simple reason. In the military when planning a ground combat operation you always set part of your force apart. Their job is to support the main effort, to see the threats your main force might not, and to deal with those threats before they bring the whole operation to a halt. We call that element your overwatch. I view my work in therapy through a similar lens. My job is to help my clients make themselves safe and secure by looking at their whole situation and helping them make healthy change that lasts. I, and any future clinicians who come on board, become their mental Overwatch.