Jailed Navy SEAL Finds Purpose after Chaos | Today Helping and Inspiring Others. Taylor Cavanaugh

Описание: Taylor Cavanaugh, a former Navy SEAL and French Foreign Legion, in Episode 157 of the Transition Drill Podcast. Taylor Cavanaugh’s story is a hard look at what happens when momentum outruns self-awareness, and what it takes to rebuild when the uniform is gone.

He starts with a childhood that moved from Boston to Southern California and a home shaped by instability, separation, and an early exposure to chaos. Sports gave him structure, status, and cover. He performed well, pushed limits, and kept finding ways to outrun consequences until the military became the one lane that felt like it could hold him.

He explains the real mechanics of getting to BUD/S, including the Delayed Entry Program pressure, the fallback job he had to sign just to get in the door, and the months of repeated PST attempts with a ship date hanging over him. In the pipeline, a simple issue nearly ended everything early: boots that were too small, infection, and the mental fight to go to medical without seeing it as quitting. He makes it through, earns the West Coast, and lands at SEAL Team 7.

From there, the episode turns into an honest account of performance, ego, legal trouble, and consequences that stacked over time. He describes command support, accountability, and how a second incident brought deeper scrutiny. Testing followed, including steroid testing sent to an Olympic-level lab. He admits what he did, owns the fallout, and describes the point where clearance and the teams were no longer an option. The Navy separated him in 2017, ending a seven-year run.

The transition that followed wasn’t clean. He describes early civilian success, and then the slow drift into prescribed stimulants, Xanax, alcohol, and eventually opiates and fentanyl. The “asset to liability” moment hits, and the slide ends in Hawaii, living out of his truck and thinking about suicide. That rock bottom becomes the pivot point.

His reset was extreme: the French Foreign Legion. He breaks down why he chose it, what the structure gave him, and what happened when his content and refusal to back down put him in conflict with leadership. The throughline is simple: systems, discipline, and responsibility, built the hard way.

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CHAPTERS
00:00:00 - Intro
00:06:18 - Forced Exit: Steroid Test & General Discharge
00:07:42 - Transition Skill-Stack: Leading Without Rank
00:09:03 - Boston to SoCal: Family Roots & Early Moves
00:35:21 - Recruiter Runaround: Finding a “Yes”
00:36:49 - DEP Reality: Chasing a SEAL Contract
00:39:56 - West Coast Request: Landing at SEAL Team 7
00:40:20 - New Guy Pressure: “First In, Last Out”
00:41:40 - Getting Ahead of the Skis: Momentum Turns Risky
00:54:44 - 2017: Jail, Blowback, and the End of the Teams
00:55:39 - First Civilian Landing: Excited, Unaligned Habits
01:21:33 – French Foreign Legion – A Different Culture
01:36:31 - Outside Accountability: Poking Holes in Your Game
01:43:51 - Responsibility Now: Teaching From the Baggage

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