Two Years Later: How Tree Lipton’s Family Got Their Dad Back
PTSD. Suicide attempts. VA hospitalization. Then five days changed everything. Two years on, Tree completed trade school, became the dad his daughter can come to, and watched 27 of 28 cases around him recover the same way.
Tree’s 2-year update — and what the data shows across 28 similar cases.
Watch the full extended interview →
70% Disabled. Just Trying to Live.
Tree Lipton served in the US Air Force as fuels. He came back with PTSD from a traumatic experience during deployment — something he never reported, never pursued, and tried to bury.
Sleep fell apart. Drinking got worse. Manic episodes. A suicide attempt. The VA hospitalized him. He ended up in long-term inpatient care. His VA disability rating: 70%.
His wife was the sole parent. His daughter had learned to route around him. He wasn’t accomplishing anything. He was just trying to live.
Two to three years in, a relative of his wife — Mark Squibb — offered an olive branch: come to Colorado. We’ll try something.
“At that point, I had basically given up and resigned myself to navigating my life the best I could.”
Five Days That Rewired the Equation
Tree drove to Colorado. No expectations. Just exhaustion and a borrowed hope.
Over five days, he did multiple sessions per day on a stationary bike — at least 15 minutes each — with oxygen alternating between high and low concentration. Mark’s place had everything dialed: clean mountain environment, camaraderie with other veterans, physical training reminiscent of military PT but accessible regardless of fitness level.
Day-by-Day Shift
Arrival: Stressed from the drive, emotionally erratic, sleep-deprived, in zombie state from medications.
After first sessions: Physical release — “like a cramp letting go of my head.” Emotional pieces starting to fall back together.
Day 2: The emotional ping-pong — erratic highs and lows within hours — began to stabilize. “The day after was almost like the episode didn’t happen.”
Day 5: Speech clearer, posture changed, emotional stability maintained. Processed memories without re-traumatization.
First week home: Offered to put daughter to bed for the first time. Wife laughed and cried.
PTSD Is a Family Disease
“Whether you know it or not, PTSD is a communicable disease,” Mark Squibb said. “When you come back jacked up, it’s hard for your family to help you — and what we see is that we need to help their families come back to okay too.”
Tree’s wife had been a full-time caregiver for years. When Tree recovered, she had to figure out who she was again. The burden she’d carried — adjusting the environment, managing his states, parenting alone — was suddenly gone. She laughed about it. She also cried about it.
Tree went back to school on his GI Bill — something he’d failed to do before, losing benefits he couldn’t recover. He completed a full year of a desktop support technician program. Kept the schedule. Did the work.
“She comes and asks me for stuff. She asks my opinion. She asks what I think. She asks for help and advice. I’m the dad — I’m somebody she can come to, as opposed to somebody who needed to be avoided or walked around.”
— Tree Lipton, two years after treatmentWhat the Data Showed Across 28 Cases
Tree wasn’t alone. Mark Squibb’s team ran neurological panels on 28 post-concussive PTSD cases. The results were consistent.
Program Outcomes
Among the cases: Nathan, who had been isolated for 15 years post-injury. He arrived stuttering through every sentence, unable to complete a thought without stopping. By day five, long smooth sentences. Body language shifted. Posture taller. He said he felt things coming back that he hadn’t realized were still there.
Why Veterans’ PTSD Often Has an Organic Component
The Hidden Brain Injury Inside PTSD
Many veterans classified as PTSD also have undiagnosed post-concussive syndrome. Training exercises, blast exposure, physical altercations, and accidents accumulate over careers. Each concussion restricts blood flow to portions of the brain. Over time, those sections go offline.
The result looks like PTSD: emotional dysregulation, cognitive fog, sleep disruption, social withdrawal. But underneath it, the brain is simply starved of oxygen and blood flow — not psychologically broken.
What Oxygen Training Does
Oxygen training drives oxygenated blood directly into brain tissue that has been operating at reduced capacity. When enough oxygen reaches dormant regions, they can switch back on — often within the first few sessions.
This is why recovery can be so rapid in cases that have been treatment-resistant for years. The problem wasn’t psychological rigidity. It was physical. The brain was offline. Oxygen brought it back.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of injury you have,” Mark explains. “What matters is whether the brain tissue is truly gone or just offline. In most veteran PTSD cases — it’s offline. Oxygen gets it back.”