RECOIL OFFGRID Preparation How Training Recalibrates the Mind
In This Article
At first glance, the training near Vero Beach, Florida, looked like a straightforward tactical course. It was hosted by Gorilla Ammunition, a company better known for precision cartridges than emotional insight. Yet beneath the surface of its trauma drills and field exercises, something deeper took shape. The lessons were not only about how to save a life, but also how to regulate one’s own nervous system under threat. What unfolded resembled a form of therapy in motion, a physical and cognitive practice that echoed the principles of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR.
EMDR is a therapy developed in the late 1980s by psychologist Francine Shapiro. It helps people process disturbing experiences by combining focused attention with bilateral movement, such as eye motions, taps, or alternating tones. The technique activates both hemispheres of the brain, linking stored sensory fragments into coherent understanding. Over time, this process allows the body to stop reacting as if a past trauma were happening in the present. The training near Vero Beach would explore similar ground through entirely different means.
The first day began inside Gorilla Ammunition’s headquarters and was taught by Gorilla Medical instructors Kris Hasenauer, Mandy Espinal, and Scott Adams. The focus was Tactical Combat Casualty Care, or TCCC, the military’s standard for treating injuries under fire. Its civilian counterpart, TECC, adapts those methods for emergencies where evacuation is close at hand. Both systems were born from lessons learned in Mogadishu during the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident, when soldiers bled out from otherwise survivable wounds. Modern battlefield medicine has since revolved around one goal: preventing avoidable deaths.
Instructors led students through the three phases of trauma care:
1) Direct Threat Care meant getting to safety and controlling massive hemorrhage.
2) Indirect Threat Care involved assessing injuries using the MARCH protocol: Massive hemorrhage, Airway, Respiration, Circulation, and Head injury/Hypothermia.
3) Evacuation Care focused on continued monitoring and shock prevention.
After hours of discussion and hands-on training, the class moved outside into the dense humidity of Florida to apply what they had learned.
Tourniquets, wound packing, and communication drills followed. The repetition built a rhythm that anchored participants in the moment. It was a rehearsal for composure, a physical act of self-regulation. Every step reinforced the same pattern: control chaos, establish safety, and then engage in treatment. The process mirrored the first phases of EMDR, which emphasize grounding and stabilization before confronting deeper distress. Whether the subject is a traumatic memory or a simulated gunfight, the nervous system cannot process what it cannot survive.
As the heat of the day rose, the class performed a relay under stress. Teams carried teammates with simulated injuries, treated simulated wounds, and moved together through timed objectives. The noise, motion, and pressure triggered adrenaline, but the structure of the exercise demanded calm. The brain oscillated between chaos and control, the same alternating focus that EMDR uses to integrate emotion and logic. Order, it turned out, was its own kind of medicine.
The next morning, the group met at an overgrown orange grove that doubled as one of Gorilla Ammunition’s training ranges. The air smelled faintly of fresh rain and damp soil. Freddy Osuna of Greenside Training introduced the art of tracking, the ability to read subtle signs of movement in nature. Unbeknownst to the students, his approach was blending fieldcraft with cognitive science. Tracking, he said, was not about looking for footprints. It was about learning to see.
Students studied how the edges of a hoofprint could indicate motion and direction, how soil displacement revealed urgency, and how crushed vegetation betrayed presence. They practiced shifting points of view and allowing peripheral vision to widen. Tracking required the same state of awareness that EMDR encourages, not forcing an answer but observing what appears. As participants relaxed their focus, patterns emerged where none had previously seemed to exist.
In one exercise, Osuna walked a short path, leaving small nails pressed into the dirt behind each heel. Students were then asked to count how many steps there were based on their own observation skills. The first few nails were easy, the rest appeared only when the eyes softened and the mind quieted. The drill trained perception through patience and trust, a process remarkably similar to how EMDR clients notice the fragments of memory that surface once the body feels safe enough to see them.
This stage of the course resembled EMDR’s reprocessing phase. Participants gathered sensory data from a complex environment, linked it to context, and allowed insight to emerge.
The final day took place in a slash pine stand, its floor still saturated from days of heavy rain. This final exercise involved hunting Gorilla Medical instructor Scott Adams. Scott acted as an opposing force, moving and attempting to hide somewhere in the wet forest. The teams moved in slow coordination, scanning for broken branches, disturbed earth, or faint movement. Subtle environmental manipulations — distant sounds, shifting scents — kept everyone alert. After hours of tracking, the teams located and neutralized their target.
Psychologically, the exercise completed a cycle that mirrored EMDR’s adaptive sequence. Day one established stabilization and safety. Day two expanded sensory and cognitive flexibility. Day three integrated the previous two into embodied awareness under pressure. Each layer engaged the same circuitry that therapy seeks to retrain, the shift from reactive survival to measured response.
In Shapiro’s model of adaptive processing, the brain’s goal is to transform experience into learning. When trauma interrupts that process, memories remain locked in a state of alarm. Reprocessing allows those memories to econnect with healthier networks, so the body no longer treats them as threats. The Vero Beach training worked on this same principle, though in a different language. Movement, focus, and environment combined to teach the nervous system regulation through experience.
Tracking used bilateral engagement — left foot, right foot, left eye, right eye — to restore rhythm. Trauma care demanded structured breathing and decision-making under duress. Both reinforced balance between perception and action. The body learned that it could stay grounded even while facing uncertainty.
By the end, exhaustion gave way to quiet reflection. What began as tactical instruction evolved into an exercise in emotional control. True composure is not dominance but awareness. Survival, whether physical or psychological, depends as much on calm attention as on force or equipment.
The link between field training and therapy might seem coincidental, but both share a foundation in biology. The human brain seeks equilibrium through movement, rhythm, and sensory integration. When a person tracks a print in the sand or applies steady pressure to stop bleeding, the same neural systems that process trauma are engaged. Awareness, not avoidance, resolves threat.
Nature supports that healing instinct. The Florida wilderness offered constant sensory complexity. The scent of pine and soil, the shimmer of light through leaves, the hum of insects after rain. Immersed in it, the participants’ minds recalibrated without even realizing it was happening. What EMDR achieves through structured bilateral movement, the natural world offers through balance and attention. Both guide the brain from reflex to reflection, from reactivity to presence.
The Vero Beach course revealed that therapy does not always look like therapy. Sometimes it takes the shape of a tourniquet drill, a quiet walk in wet woods, or the patient search for a single track in the dirt. Beneath every tactical lesson was an unspoken one, how to steady the mind, how to stay human in the presence of fear, and how to track not only an adversary but also oneself.
Don’t miss essential survival insights—sign up for Recoil Offgrid’s free newsletter today!
Check out our other publications on the web: Recoil | Gun Digest | Blade | RecoilTV | RECOILtv (YouTube)
Editor’s Note: This article has been modified from its original version for the web.
STAY SAFE: Download a Free copy of the OFFGRID Outbreak Issue 
No Comments