A note before you read: this story goes into PTSD and veteran mental health. It's told with care, but it is told honestly.
There is a question that arrives in every mother's life, and it almost never arrives on schedule. It comes at the wrong hour, in the wrong room, from the smallest person there.
For Amber Capone, it came from her daughter, sobbing.
Mom, how much longer do we have to do this?
She had been holding the line for years by then. Her husband, Marcus, had served thirteen years as a Navy SEAL, and the man who came home was not the man who left. What followed was the long private erosion that so many military families know and so few talk about: the treatments that did not work, the medications that dulled without healing, the way a house can become a place where everyone learns to move quietly around the thing no one is naming.
Amber had made her choice about all of it long before her daughter asked. She would stay. She would fight. She had told herself, as mothers do, that the family unit was the most important thing she could protect, and that keeping it intact was what her children needed most.
Her daughter's question undid that arithmetic in a single breath.
"I suddenly realized that it didn't matter how tough I was," Amber says. "I was forcing them along on a journey that they had no control over, and it was impacting them in ways I'd never considered."
It felt like I had to choose between my children and their father. And I was absolutely going to choose them every time.
She decided, in that moment, to leave.
And then came the second realization, arriving right behind the first, the way the hardest truths often travel in pairs. If she left, she would be removing the last source of stability Marcus had. His family. Given the depth of what he was carrying, she understood what that could mean, and what it would mean for two children who would spend the rest of their lives without a father.
"This would stay with them for life," she says, "and affect generations of our family's lineage."
So she did not leave. She did something harder. She stayed and changed the terms entirely.
"I knew I had to keep fighting," she says, "but in a new and unexpected way."
The quiet hours
The first thing she changed was not Marcus. It was herself.
When the family's life began to spiral in a way she could feel accelerating, Amber made a decision that sounds almost too simple for the size of the problem. She would stop starting her days from empty.
"I knew I couldn't do this from a place of depletion," she says, "so I chose to start my day off with dedicated quiet time every morning."
Sometimes that meant fifteen minutes. Sometimes it meant hours. She describes it as sitting in surrender, letting grief and unprocessed pain surface instead of outrunning it, which is the maneuver most of us have perfected by the time we are thirty.
What she found underneath was not a stranger. It was herself, in every version she had left behind.
"The fierce little girl who became angry as a teen, and felt irrelevant as an adult, and sometimes exhausted by serving as a single parent to our kids."
Somewhere in those mornings she got hold of something she recognized as her own, a tenacity that had been hers all along.
"When I grasped ahold of my tenacious, fighting spirit, I found myself becoming the eye of the storm for my family."
I found myself becoming the eye of the storm for my family.
She also built a practice that reads, in retrospect, like the blueprint for everything that came after. She would picture herself five years forward, and then make today's decisions from there.
"That clarity allowed me to visualize where I wanted to go," she says, "while at the same time being completely surrendered to how it all was unfolding."
Quiet time. Journaling. Prayer. It is not a strategy that photographs well. It is the one that worked — and it belongs to the same family of practices as nervous system regulation, the unglamorous daily work of getting your own body out of crisis mode before you try to steady anyone else's.
What changed when she changed
Here is the part of the story that is easy to miss, and it may be the most useful thing in it for anyone currently living inside a version of it.
Amber did not find a better argument. She did not find the right ultimatum, or the correct combination of pressure and patience that finally cracked the thing open. She changed what she was bringing into the room.
"I replaced guilt, shame, pressure, anger, and frustration with love and compassion for Marcus," she says. "When I showed up differently for myself, I was able to show up differently for him."
And then, the sentence that turns the whole story:
"He wasn't expecting that from me, so he responded differently, and that changed our entire trajectory."
What came next has been documented on a scale the Capones could not have imagined then. Amber learned about ibogaine, a psychedelic compound with a long history of ceremonial use and almost no legal foothold in the United States, through a friend she trusted. She arranged for Marcus to receive treatment abroad. He came back changed in a way that nothing else had touched.
In 2019, they founded VETS, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, to open the same door for other families. It has since funded more than a thousand treatment grants, supported research with Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Ohio State, and helped drive legislative wins in Texas and California that unlocked funding for clinical trials at a scale the field had never seen.
But ask Amber how a woman goes from surviving her own kitchen to running a global organization, and she does not describe a pivot. She describes a widening.
"I deeply understand the pain," she says. "I also understand the feeling of being overlooked and left behind by the system, which is oftentimes the case for military and veteran spouses and families, the unsung heroes to our nation."
"I'm driven by the same love of family in the work I do today. But now I'm able to fight for far more families than my own."
She and Marcus began helping friends before there was an organization, before there was a name, before anyone had used the word founder. "When we know better, we must do better," she says. "There was never a question about doing it any other way."
The blank canvas
Ask her what she wishes she had known, and she does not reach for the practical.
"I wish I would've been more cognizant of the immense gift and responsibility it is to birth a blank canvas into the world."
She is talking about something specific here, and it is worth sitting with. Motherhood in crisis has a way of collapsing into logistics. Get through today. Get everyone fed. Keep it from getting worse. Survival mode has its own moral clarity, which is part of what makes it so hard to see past.
But Amber's point is that nothing gets left out of the record.
"Motherhood sometimes feels like survival," she says, "but every experience, by default, is written on the canvas of our children's lives, and shapes who they become, which shapes future generations to follow."
"I wish I would've been more aware of how these difficult circumstances would leave a lasting impact on their innocent lives, and how generational trauma is passed down when not properly mitigated or managed."
Every experience, by default, is written on the canvas of our children's lives.
Which is not the same as wishing she had hidden it from them. She never did.
"I've never shied away from difficult conversations with my kids, nor tried to pretend as though everything was okay," she says. The family talked openly about what was happening and about the paths they were choosing toward healing.
And what her children absorbed, in the end, was not the catalogue of details.
"More than all the details, our kids have known the fighting spirit that has allowed us to find healing. They also know and understand why fighting for other families just as hard as we've fought for our own is so important."
When the world was watching
In Waves and War, the Netflix documentary directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, brought the Capones' story to an audience of millions. This past spring it took home a News and Documentary Emmy.
The filmmakers made a choice early on that gave Amber pause. They wanted to center the relationship between Marcus and their son, Caden.
"That did give me pause," she says, "given the immense struggles we experienced during Caden's teenage years."
She describes the family's process with the kind of care that tells you everything about how they operate. They did not want their son to feel obligated. They were not certain he understood the full magnitude of what he was agreeing to. So they talked with him, and they made an agreement: he would sit for the interview, and no one would decide anything until after it was done.
"Of course, my mother instinct wanted to protect him from further judgement, scrutiny, and pain," she says.
Then they watched the footage.
"When the footage was so powerful and raw, we agreed that our family had a responsibility to show up authentically and vulnerably in hopes of helping others who may be suffering."
They supported Caden through the entire premiere process, which Amber describes as emotional for all of them. And when the response came back, and it came back as love, they knew.
"As a mother," she says, "I knew that Caden's placement in the film also brought him healing and closure in some beautiful way too."
Twenty-three and twenty-six
Her children are adults now. They have told her what it was like to watch her fight for their father the way she did.
"There isn't a higher compliment on the planet than hearing my kids say they're proud of me and us," she says.
She describes the relationship the way you describe something you were not sure you would get to keep.
"Every time we're together, we never want to leave each other. This is truly the greatest blessing."
Three words for her motherhood, she says: the greatest gift.
For the woman three years in
There is a specific reader Amber wanted to speak to, and Momé asked her directly. The mom who is three years into supporting a partner with PTSD. Exhausted. Invisible. Still standing, mostly.
Her first instruction is not about him.
"I would encourage her to first focus on herself. Stabilize, reconnect, and practice self-compassion."
Then she would ask her to rethink the approach entirely, the way she once had to.
And then she says something that lands well past the borders of the military community, into any life that has quietly narrowed into a single role.
"We all have an identity outside of caretaker, spouse, mom, sister, friend," she says. "By connecting with who we were created to be, before life began writing our narrative, we can show up authentically, boldly, and in new ways that unlock possibilities we never dreamed of."
We all have an identity outside of caretaker, spouse, mom, sister, friend.
"If you feel stuck, it's because something isn't working. Which is why it's important to think in new ways and envision the life you want to be leading."
She does not offer comfort in the soft sense. She offers something sturdier.
"There is hope even when it feels utterly hopeless," she says. "And those times, for me, have been my greatest gifts. Keep moving through them, pay attention to what lessons are being shown to you, cling to every good thing, practice gratitude, and dig deep in discovering who you truly are."
We asked her what resilience means to her now, after all of it. As a mother, as a wife, as a founder.
She did not need long.
"Resilience, to me, is the conviction to continually show up for something you believe in. It's understanding the cost that comes with that, but choosing to do it anyway."
She unlocked that fighting spirit for two children who needed their father. It ended up reaching thousands of families she will never meet.
That is the thing about the canvas. You never really know how far the picture goes.
Amber Capone is the co-founder and CEO of VETS, Inc. Her family's story is told in the Netflix documentary In Waves and War.
If you or someone you love is struggling, support is available. In the U.S. and Canada, call or text 988. U.S. veterans and their families can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1.
