By Mallory Mattingly
Former Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson East and her husband, Andrew, faced what might have been their “toughest” challenge yet on the reality TV show SPECIAL FORCES: WORLD’S TOUGHEST TEST.
The hardest part of the show? The “fear-inducing activities that are simulating drowning.”
“It’s really fun and extreme things, like once in a lifetime. That’s part of it is just kind of facing those fears and dealing with the adrenaline that comes with that. And so we did everything from simulating a plane crash into the water to rappelling down a dam,” Andrew said on their “Couple Things” podcast.
SPECIAL FORCES follows “16 celebrity contestants [as they] battle through a set of emulated special forces training challenges, [and] they are removed from society and the staff sergeants control everything within the camp.”
Related: Shawn Johnson East Reveals If She’d Support Her Kids’ Olympic Dreams
Shawn continued, “They truly exploited fears. They took every possible fear of claustrophobia, heights, authority, pain, interrogation, kidnapping, explosions, and all of this. And put an activity or a challenge around it to see how mentally tough you are in being able to push through some of your biggest fears.”
The couple even had to sit down with a psychologist before the show.
“They’re taking notes on any quirks or blind spots that you may have, any fears that you may have,” Andrew explained. “You take a 340-question psych quiz. You take a couple of personality tests. You do a couple more interviews with other people in the medical field. And so they get to know you really well, and they kind of purposely put you in situations that they know are going to be uncomfortable, specifically for you as well as the other cast members.”
But they discovered “beauty in the hard.”
“I think as time progresses and we get further away from this, there was an aspect of hard to it of these four men who were leading this were absolutely incredible human beings. Their ability to look at each and every one of us and see our flaws way more than we ever could and push us to break through them was incredible,” Shawn said.
“…it’s like self-help on steroids,” she added.
Andrew emphasized, “It really is. There’s a certain amount of self-awareness that you gain from being put in such an uncomfortable position with a bunch of strangers you don’t know, and all of a sudden, you’re using these toilets and making eye contact. It’s just uncomfortable in so many different ways, along with the physical and the fear, that you learn a lot about yourself, which is good. And what you do with that learning — whether you stand up to it and confront it and tackle it, or you bow down to it and walk away from it — is also informative.”
Shawn and Andrew’s episode of SPECIAL FORCES aired last Thursday on FOX, which can now be streamed on Hulu.
“I think it strengthened our marriage just because we got to do something surreal together,” Shawn told USA Today. “We both got to see each other struggle and kind of persevere and go through a bunch of really hard things individually.”
The Easts certainly are great examples to keep doing hard things that push you to your limits.
Read Next: Savannah Chrisley Learned This Life Lesson on SPECIAL FORCES
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +1Share:
– Content: +4