By Uniform Stories
I have job-related post-traumatic stress. I’ve been living with it for about 12 years, but have only known about it and been able to work on healing from it since January 2012. Just as the effects of PTSD don’t go away overnight, they don’t form overnight; no, they’re very sly things that gradually get a grip on your life and your family.
In 2004, I was the first emergency responder on the scene of what would turn out to be a fatal vehicle crash. On a cold October night, I waded into a muddy ditch and climbed into the ruins of a minivan to find the driver laying on his back, rapidly losing blood and his life was fading before my eyes. As my adjusted in the darkness, I saw a close friend from university, who, despite my best efforts at first aid, died in my arms as I was trying to stop him from bleeding to death. I worked the rest of that night with thoughts and images of what I had seen already starting to roll through my mind on repeat, like a slideshow.
I never dealt with the fallout from that night properly. I let the memories haunt me and eat away at my thoughts and emotions. Instead of talking about what happened with anyone, even my wife, I walled it off in my mind, believing that things like having to deal with the death of a friend came with the territory of being a police officer and working in the area you grew up in.
Sure, I had the occasional bad dream or flashback, but I figured that every officer experiences this. I caged the memories up like some sort of vicious animal, pushed the cage into a trench in the back of my consciousness, buried it and thought that it was over. It wasn’t over.
The repercussions from that night influenced my life for the next seven years, until I finally spiraled deeper and deeper into blackness and crashed. Neither the spiraling nor the ultimate crash were times I would ever want to live through again. At work, things were pretty much unchanged. I was calm, cool and collected. I was a leader and I always wore my game face so it appeared I was on top of everything.
A different story at home
At home, I started to grow further and further apart from my family life. Sure, I was still there, but I often couldn’t be bothered with the smaller details of two growing boys and my wife’s job. I lost my temper easily, getting mad at simple things my boys were doing, things that any kid does–play loudly, spill juice or break a toy. My reactions to these things were completely out of proportion to the small mishaps that all parents deal with.
My marriage was following the same path. Again, I was there physically, but not emotionally or mentally for my wife. She went through some very stressful times of her own and I never was the support that, after looking back, I can see she desperately needed. I never talked to her about how I was feeling either, about the images and memories that were starting to come to me more and more often, about how I was losing time and focus at work or about how scared I was of what was happening to me. I still kept it bottled up, seeing it as my problem only. We had very little meaningful communication on any topic. To be perfectly frank, we were more like roommates than spouses, just sharing space in a house and co-existing.
Toward the end of this downward spiral, I was using alcohol on a nightly basis to sleep and to numb myself. I was living in a bubble in my man cave,’ spending all my free time online, playing video games and drinking. Twice I had thoughts of suicide, which seemed like a great way out. Looking back now, it was a dark, bleak existence and I empathize immensely with anyone who finds themselves there now.
In 2012, after a move to a new posting, new city and residence, my wife and I finally confronted the issues we were having in our marriage. It was during one of these long talks that were going late into the night that I completely broke down. I was burnt out physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Only then did I finally make an admission that I had been hiding from for over seven years: I needed help. I had hit bottom as a husband, a father, a police officer and as a man. I had walled myself off from my family, I didn’t care about work and there were days that I didn’t even really care if I lived or died. I couldn’t sink any lower.
However, with making that admission, it felt as if the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders. My problem was out in the open, and I now had someone on my side that would fight with me. Now, together, as a team, we could begin to tackle not only my PTSD, but all the other issues surrounding it that had so impacted our family.
That crash in 2012 saved my life. It was only after hitting that point that I realized how badly I was broken and that I needed help that only a professional could provide. I began seeing a doctor who specialized in treating first responders and military members, who took about two minutes to diagnose that I was dealing with unresolved post-traumatic stress from my friend’s death and from the fact that I never did anything to address it. Over the course of the next weeks and months, she broke my issues down into their components and made the huge, terrifying concept of PTS smaller and more manageable. My recovery had begun.
Looking to the future
That was four years ago. Now, I train other emergency responders and human services workers on trauma, burnout, resiliency and post-traumatic growth. I write extensively on the same topics. My wife sometimes presents with me and we talk about how PTS affects marriages and families–she is not afraid to tell the world how horrible I was to live with before I started getting help and admitting that I couldn’t do it all on my own. I published a book on my experience with PTS and how I came through it a better and stronger person. In all of those milieu, I am completely honest about what I was and what I did. I made a promise to myself that if I was going to work to help others and to shape lives, I would always tell my story truthfully, warts and all.
My story isn’t always a pretty one, but it’s no-nonsense and raw. That’s what people who are in distress need to hear. That, and the fact that a psychological injury as serious, as debilitating, as PTS, is not a career or life ender.
I’m one of the lucky ones, who managed to come out on, as I say in my book’s title, ‘the other side of broken.’ I still have a home and a family that supports me. I still have a career that I love. And now I have the opportunity to share my voice with readers around the world. I have the opportunity to give back.
This article is by Brian Knowler, a 17-year police veteran who works at a mid-sized police service in southern Ontario, Canada. He is also a retired lawyer, blogger, author and nationally known speaker and media consultant on psychological issues in the first responder field.
