When I saw the title of one of Kory Pearn’s columns, What Is Your Mafia Offer?, I smiled. Not because it gave me a new idea, but because it used language remarkably close to how I have privately described one of the most meaningful roles of my career for many years.
When people have struggled to understand my unusual relationship with the warfighter community, I have literally told them: Think of Robert Duvall’s character in The Godfather.
Tom Hagen. The consigliere.
That role began for me years ago, when I started leaving the traditional clinical office and meeting Marines where they actually felt comfortable opening up. Sometimes that was in the woods. Sometimes it was at warfighter reunions. Sometimes it was in places deliberately far removed from anything that looked or felt like therapy.
I became “Doc” in a very different sense of the word.
Inside the Circle, Outside the Family
Over time, almost entirely through word of mouth, Marines began reaching out not necessarily because they wanted a psychologist, but because they wanted a trusted consigliere — someone they could freely open up to and talk something through with. Eventually, that circle came to include military leaders, as well.
Without ever formally naming the role, I became a kind of unofficial, largely off-the-radar consigliere to the warfighter community.
And Tom Hagen remains the best analogy I know.
He is inside the circle of trust, but he is not a Corleone by blood. He understands the family and the world it operates in, but he also brings something valuable precisely because he is not of the family. He brings another perspective into the room.
The Value of an Outside Perspective
In a similar way, I am in the circle, but I am not a blood member of the family. I didn’t serve in the military. I didn’t come up through the fire service or law enforcement. I don’t have rank, and I don’t want it. When I’m serving a leader in this capacity, I’m also not there to be anyone’s therapist. I’m there to be someone they can think with.
Leadership can become remarkably isolating. There are things you can’t easily say to the people you lead. There may be things you don’t want to put on the shoulders of your spouse. And sometimes the people who understand your organization best are so deeply embedded in its history, politics and relationships that they naturally see a problem through many of the same lenses you do.
A trusted outsider can offer something different. You can put the messy version of the problem on the table: Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what doesn’t make sense. Here’s the decision I’m considering. Here’s the person I’m worried about. What am I missing?
These are the kinds of questions I get as a consigliere. My job isn’t to make the decisions. Or be the leader. It’s not about me in the same way that The Godfather is not about Robert Duvall’s character. (In fact, I’ve often thought that if he hadn’t stood out so much visually — with his red hair and pale skin — many viewers might barely have noticed him at all). My job, like his job, is to expand the leader’s field of vision.
Sometimes the work is to bring psychological insight to a personnel problem. Sometimes it means recognizing human risk before it becomes an organizational crisis. Sometimes it means helping a leader anticipate the second- and third-order effects of a decision. And sometimes it simply means asking the question nobody inside the system is asking.
The Work Behind the Scenes
The role depends on something I take extremely seriously: discretion. A consigliere doesn’t need credit. The value isn’t in being seen standing next to the leader. Much of the value comes from the opposite. Discreet counsel. Confidentiality. No agenda. Quiet professionalism.
So Kory’s column made me realize that perhaps it was finally time to say publicly what I have been saying privately for years.
My mafia offer is the same role I have played in the warfighter community for a long time: Someone in the circle, but not of the family. Someone you trust enough to tell what you’re really thinking. Someone who brings a different lens — and doesn’t need the credit.
A consigliere.
Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY.
