Read an Excerpt
From Widow to Warrior
“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
My husband dedicated thirty years of his life to a profession that trains warriors for battle but has no context for healing the invisible wounds of warfare. Did the job kill my husband? No. Was it a contributor? Absolutely.
Our first responders are very well trained, but their training does not prepare them for the mental and emotional impacts of the job.
A majority of first responders suffer from symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress, which is a condition that develops in some people who encounter trauma. Trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience that alters a person’s ability to cope.
The average citizen has no idea what first responders see, hear, and endure throughout their careers. They are constantly exposed to and affected by the trauma of others; dysfunction, disaster, violence, abuse, neglect, victimization, and death. This type of trauma is known as Secondary Trauma.
Post-traumatic Stress and Secondary Trauma, left untreated, can be stealthy killers. They quietly ruin health, relationships, families and lives. They cause people to withdraw and isolate or rage and lash out. They create devastation and rob individuals of the most basic human rights: life, love and joy. However, they are treatable. But in order for treatment to become normalized, the shame and disgrace attached to seeking help must be eliminated.
There has long been a stigma attached to mental health issues in these often-stoic emergency responder professions. If a person is brave (or desperate) enough to speak up about mental and emotional difficulties, they face the possibility of being labeled as “weak,” “unstable,” or “incompetent.” Instead of receiving help, they might be demoted—or fired. This ridiculous stigma causes first responders to suffer in silence, forced to pretend they’re okay when they’re not.
This is what my husband did, for years and years.
In order to survive in the law enforcement culture, David felt he had to remain silent about anxiety, depression, and other symptoms he suffered over the years. He was terrified of being deemed unsuitable or incompetent for the job. He worried about being stripped of his badge and gun and being fired without the ability to support his family and collect the pension he had worked so hard to build.
The reality is, had David been able to seek assistance for the mental and emotional fallout of the job, over the duration of his thirty-year career, he might have been a more effective law enforcement officer and investigator—and he was pretty damn good as it was. He could have lived a peaceful personal life, and he might still be here.
Instead, he struggled and suffered off and on for the entire thirty years, and his suffering caused pain for the people he loved. Ultimately, with knowledge of this stigma so deeply buried in his psyche, David became engulfed in a tsunami of trauma symptoms, and decided death was the only way to escape.
It did not have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to end like this for one other first responder.
If any of this resonates with you, if you are a first responder who has suffered similarly, please know there is hope. There is help available. You can heal. You can learn skills and tools to build your resilience and survive, no matter how bad things are.
