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David Goggins’ book Can't Hurt me (2018) is a memoir that follows his experiences of growing up through domestic violence, poverty, and racism. He speaks about the mental tools he built to be able to get through these challenges. Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner who preaches mental toughness as the key for how he pushed through his hardships and completely changed his life. The book has gotten much attention for its message about resilience, discipline, and pushing past personal limits. Goggins’ story provides a lot of extremely helpful advice and things to admire, but looking at it through a multicultural lens it raises an important question. What are the limits of mental toughness, and can resilience alone fully address the lasting effects of trauma
Strengths from a Multicultural Counseling Lens
One of the most meaningful things about this book is how it shows the way different forms of trauma can overlap in a person's life. Goggins describes growing up with domestic abuse, financial hardship, and racial discrimination all at once. As one of the few Black students in his Indiana school system, he talks about experiences of racism that included racial slurs and hostility from peers and teachers. This reflects the concept of intersectionality, which suggests that people often experience overlapping systems of oppression related to race, class, and other parts of their identity. Goggins' story gives a clear real world example of how these challenges can build on each other and shape the way someone copes with adversity.
Questions About the Limits of Mental Toughness
While the book highlights the power of determination, it also raises important questions about the limits of relying only on mental toughness. Goggins focuses on self-discipline and pushing through as the main way he overcame adversity, and his story shows how powerful those traits can be. However, the book rarely touches on the role of professional mental health support or emotional processing in healing from trauma.
This raises a key question worth sitting with: when does resilience become survival rather than healing? Survival means getting through the day, managing the pain, and keeping it moving. Healing means actually processing what happened, making sense of it.. Someone can be incredibly tough and still be carrying a lot of weight on their shoulders. Goggins himself describes pushing through broken bones and organ damage without slowing down, which from a trauma-informed perspective looks a lot more like endurance than recovery.
There are also cultural aspects as well. Black men who need mental health support face a double barrier because of the intersection of their race and gender, and masculinity norms are linked to greater stigma around help-seeking, which leads to more negative attitudes toward counseling. For many people mental toughness isn't just a mindset, it's what helped them get through. Recognizing that is important. At the same time, counseling can offer extra tools that work alongside resilience, like working through emotions, building support, and learning new ways to cope.
Implications for Counselors
Can't Hurt Me can be a useful resource when used thoughtfully in a counseling setting. Many clients may see themselves in Goggins' mindset of pushing forward no matter what, and acknowledging that perspective can help build trust in the counseling relationship. The book creates an opportunity to explore broader ideas about what healing can look like, not by replacing the mental toughness framework Goggins describes, but by building on it. His story shows the capacity people have to push through adversity. A counseling perspective does not take away from that. It just encourages thinking about how resilience, community, and emotional support can all work together in the healing process.
References
Goggins, D. (2018). Can't hurt me: Master your mind and defy the odds. Lioncrest Publishing.
Coleman-Kirumba, L. M., Cornish, M. A., Horton, A. J., & Alvarez, J. C. (2023). Experiences of Black men: Forms of masculinity and effects on psychological help-seeking variables. Journal of Black Psychology, 49(1), 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/00957984221098122
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