It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
— JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Officer Lawrence quietly crept around a parked car to get a better look at the rear of a closed business while waiting for a backup officer to arrive. It was 2 AM on a very cold, foggy morning. The business’s silent alarm had been activated, and Officer Lawrence thought he heard sounds of breakage coming from inside the building. He reached for his handgun, tightening his grip on the cool, damp surface.
It was now eerily quiet in the deserted mini-mall. Lawrence could almost hear the dampness collecting on his face and dripping from his nose. He saw the rear door slowly open and a head look out, then withdraw. Lawrence’s heart raced as he closed his left eye to focus through his gun’s sight.
A man dressed in all dark clothing came out of the building. Officer Lawrence yelled at the man, “POLICE. STOP!” The burglar turned and fired several shots at Officer Lawrence, two just narrowly missing his head. After first ducking, Lawrence raised up and fired three shots. The intruder instantly fell to the ground, two bullet holes in his chest and one in his forehead. Lawrence saw the man slowly gasp for his last few breaths, then become still. Blood was everywhere, bubbling to the surface and pooling around the corpse. Steam rose from the blood in the cold night air, an image that would be forever imprinted on Lawrence’s brain.
For the next several weeks, Lawrence saw blood everywhere. When he came home at night, he would often see blood running down the face of his five-year-old boy. Blood would suddenly appear on the dinner table while the family was gathered together eating, swirl down the drain while he was taking a shower, and even pool around his wife’s head as he watched her sleep. Lawrence had never been prepared for the fallout from such a critical incident. He was afraid he was losing his mind.
As part of his agency’s wellness program, Lawrence learned of a treatment for PTSD called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which is explained in chapter 5). After only two sessions, Officer Lawrence never experienced another recurrence of phantom blood. His spirit had suffered a blow that evening, but this therapy saved his mental health and he was able to process the incident and put it behind him.
Contrary to popular myth, emergency first responders are not invincible. We feel fear and are helpless at times, we suffer heartache, and we bleed just like everybody else. The concept of spiritual wellness is fairly new in our professions, but learning how to nurture, protect, and sustain your spirit is critical for survival. Following are twenty-five emotional-survival and wellness principles. All of them can help improve your coping ability, mitigate stress, prepare you to more effectively process trauma, and enhance your overall wellness.
You are not your job. Realize that being a first responder is not who you are but is merely what you happen to do temporarily for a living. The essence of people is never what they do for a living. Rather, it is what kind of people they are, their character, and how they have affected other’s lives. The majority of people’s time should be invested in developing who they are and nurturing their spirits while sustaining deep, personal relationships with the most important individuals in their lives. Most of a person’s life should be invested in what gives value to that life: those things and relationships that will be there long after work.
Many police officers, firefighters, and military personnel, in particular, have dreamed of pursuing their careers since childhood and derive tremendous satisfaction from work — at least initially. But perceiving the job as “your life” sets you up for significant disappointment, frustration, and despair. More so than most employees, first responders are in constant danger of losing their jobs because of injury. When you view your job as your life, life ends (figuratively) along with the job. Sadly and far too often, it ends literally as well.
Plan ahead. Make plans for activities with your spouse, children, and friends before you come to the end of your shift and before your days off, and work to maintain being active with them your highest priority. Write these plans down, or you will likely not do them. Make a conscious effort to show your loved ones that they are the most important things in your day — every day. The top two regrets of retired first responders are: wishing they had spent more time with their children and spouse, and wishing they had stayed in better physical shape (by being more active).
Remain involved with your interests. Stay involved in what you found fun and interesting before becoming a first responder: sports, exercise, time with children, your life partner, friends outside of the profession, hobbies, recreation, coaching, reading, healthy entertainment, travel, volunteer activities, pets, time in nature — anything that breathes life into your spirit. Most first responders spend significantly more time watching television and using a computer than they did before becoming first responders. Such activities tend to keep a person isolated and away from more productive, life-sustaining activities that nurture the soul.
Practice your faith. If you are a person of faith, do not neglect it. It has been estimated that the average first responder tends to reduce his or her church attendance or faith practices increasingly after the first few years on the job. Any faith or spiritual practice can be extremely powerful in maintaining a positive, meaningful perspective in life. This has been the single most effective practice in my own life and has enabled my spirit to emotionally survive twenty-five years of acute stress and trauma in law enforcement. It can help keep a first responder focused on the true purpose and nobility of the work. A meaningful faith practice can significantly help keep you from becoming bitter, resentful, self-destructive, negative, or feeling hopeless and helpless. It provides a powerful counterbalance to what you experience at work, and it offers positive coping mechanisms.
Serve with compassion. Search for ways to express and demonstrate service with compassion. The virtue of service is fundamental in making you feel alive and useful. The most meaningful things in life cannot be seen or touched, but are felt with the heart. A compassionate way of life and serving helps us become less self-centered and more useful to others. The more we selflessly give of ourselves in kindness, caring, and service, the more meaning, purpose, and joy we will experience in our lives and in our work.
Being useful and helpful to others nourishes us. We should always be looking for ways to compassionately give a part of ourselves in order to fill a need, provide assistance or encouragement, and help in any way possible. An emergency first responder with a vibrant spirit is driven by the heart to solve problems, help those in need, and make the world, home, community, and work better places to be. It is important to your spirit to focus on what your spouse, children, community, work colleagues, and others need from you rather than what you want from others.
Be active with others. Become involved in causes or activities that benefit others. This will help keep you active and involved with persons of similar interests while providing additional meaning to your life. It will help prevent you from becoming isolated and detached; isolation and detachment are among the first signs of becoming adversely affected by the job.
Continue practicing self-awareness. Becoming self-aware is an ongoing process. Periodically evaluate yourself introspectively. How are you changing and growing during your years on the job? Encourage your spouse and family to approach you with any concerns about your behavior since you became a first responder. Even if they don’t approach you, ask them how you have changed, and listen to the answers.
Seek meaning and purpose. Try to determine what gives meaning and purpose to your life. What provides hope, comfort, and happiness? What are your ethics and spiritual values? How do you maintain perspective and keep in touch with the most important people in your life? In what ways do you work to improve the quality of your relationships? In what ways do you harm those relationships? In what ways do you show the most meaningful people in your life how much you value them? In what ways do you nurture your spirit? Are you drinking because you feel or believe you need to? Who and what are you responsible for, and how consistently do you fulfill that obligation?
Are you satisfied with who you are? Is your conscience at peace? What can you do proactively to improve yourself, to breathe life into your spirit and to make yourself feel better about your character and quality of life?
Value your sleep. Get more consistent, good sleep. As I noted earlier, a study by Harvard Medical School found that 40 percent of peace officers have sleeping disorders. In addition, this study showed that, out of five thousand officers, 86 percent slept only four to six hours each night. The absolute minimum of sleep that you get each night should be seven hours, if not eight. Lack of good sleep will worsen your mood, decrease your alertness, interfere with your decision-making ability, impair your task performance, cause serious emotional and physical problems, and reduce your ability to concentrate and generally think. Eighteen hours of sustained wakefulness, according to the study, is equivalent to a .08 percent blood alcohol level.
Exercise as a way of life. Exercise consistently and refrain from self-destructive behaviors. In my experience, police officers (and other first responders) tend to reduce their level of exercise as they progress through their careers. Maintaining a consistent exercise activity level — at least thirty minutes a day, three to four times a week — is essential because it will significantly reduce your stress level, reduce your chances of getting injured, and enhance your coping abilities. Consistent exercise will reduce by 58 percent your chances of getting a heart attack or acquiring type 2 diabetes. It will also reduce tension while you’re off duty and enable you to get more consistent sleep, as well as increase your metabolism rate and help prevent weight gain. Regular exercise is absolutely vital to your health, mood, and well-being.
La Mesa police lieutenant Angela DeSarro recalls an experience she had in which exercise changed her life:
After five years spent working patrol, I was selected as a crimes-of-violence detective and was soon working my first murder case. It was a brutal stabbing of a forty-six-year-old drug dealer, who had his throat slit ear to ear. During his autopsy, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, on the next autopsy table, an infant girl being taken out of her small body bag. The infant had passed away from sudden infant death syndrome and appeared to be merely sleeping peacefully, even though I knew different. I remember she had beautiful, soft eyelashes. I kept telling myself not to look at the baby as they cut her chest open to remove her heart and other organs. I couldn’t look away. I watched as the forensic examiner used a special electric saw to open her skull and remove her tiny brain. I couldn’t help it; I just kept looking and feeling numb.
By the end of the year I would lose track of the number of cases of senseless violence that I had worked. I had gained twenty-five pounds, was eating poorly, drinking too much, and taking antihistamines in addition to the alcohol in order to sleep. The image of those beautiful, soft eyelashes in my mind just didn’t go away. I was depressed, exhausted, and completely consumed with work. In less than six years of being an officer, I was already burned out. I didn’t recognize myself in photos. I was feeling weighed down not only by the physical weight gain but also by the incredible heaviness in my chest. I had grown up playing sports and had been fit all my life…until now. I remembered trying to get out of bed and feeling the weight in my stomach, and having to roll my body toward the edge of the bed in order to create enough momentum to get up. My relationship of five years soon ended. I felt dead inside, like I was just going through the motions. The job I loved so much was slowly drawing the life from my body and spirit.
I’m not sure what happened or what the catalyst for change was; I just remember waking up one morning feeling determined to save myself. I think it was the realization that the person I had become was not the person my father had raised. I was a fighter. I needed to find myself again.
I began training for a marathon: 26.2 miles, one year away. In the process of training, I began running half marathons. I lost the twenty-five pounds I had gained. I felt my physical strength return, the muscles and definition in my body return — it was a complete transformation of my mind, body, and spirit. I was passionate about something again that belonged solely to me.
Running that first marathon was the hardest thing I have ever done. A person’s mind can go to very dark places at miles 20 through 26.2 of the marathon. It was the greatest physical and mental challenge of my life, and an even greater spiritual journey. Running changed me. The marathon is a great parallel to life. Being a marathon finisher, I knew there was nothing in life I couldn’t accomplish, nothing I could not overcome. Running saved my life.
To date, I have run more than twenty half marathons and four full marathons. Running has provided a balance in my life. It is my outlet and my passion away from work — something we all need in this profession.
Over the years, I have offered to help coworkers train for marathons or half marathons. I promised those who committed to a training program that I would train with them for encouragement. I have now trained seven employees for half marathons, including a sergeant, two dispatchers, three officers, and our chaplain. All of these people had their own reasons for wanting to train for a run. But their reasons for running did not matter as much as the opportunity for self-exploration, growth, and healing. As runners gain stamina and strength, they also build confidence, mental toughness, and an experience that acts as an incredible counterbalance to the trauma and stress of the job.
Let go of the need to control. Focus on controlling only what you have the ability to control. This will significantly reduce stress. The only things in life you can control are your integrity, your attitude, your compassion, how hard you work, your reaction to things, and your professionalism. If you try to control anything or anyone else, the effort will eventually control you or, worse, cripple you.
Eat a nutritious diet. Maintain a healthy, nutritious diet. Be careful about alcohol consumption. As mentioned earlier, first responders who drink are at significant risk to abuse alcohol far more than the general public. Do not abuse energy drinks or other caffeinated beverages, since they dramatically affect the quality of a person’s sleep.
Build your character. The quality of a person’s character is related to his or her integrity, dependability, trustworthiness, dedication, compassion, hard work, and selflessness. The quality of anyone’s character can always be improved upon. Strive each day to strengthen yours.
Consciously practice gratitude. By often remembering the truly countless things you have to be thankful for, you will naturally be kept from dwelling on all those things that could bring down your spirit. The practice of thanksgiving will help you to remain positive and deal more effectively with problems. A grateful consciousness will also help keep you connected with the people who mean the most to you, and it will aid in healing relationships.
Be humble. Practice humility, and understand that there is infinitely more to learn about any of the first-responder professions than you will ever know. Excellence depends upon constant improvement and growth. Always strive to learn more about the job, how to be more effective, and how to be more useful to your coworkers, your agency, and the community.
Just as it’s good to always be looking for opportunities to learn, we should also be passionate about passing on what we know to others. Knowledge and experience is of little value when you are the only person who holds it. True influence and effectiveness is defined by what we pass on to others, and by what we do to make the agency and the level of professional service the agency provides better than when we were hired.
The practice of being humble gives a person great strength and the power to lead and influence others, and it brings peace to a person’s spirit. People are naturally drawn to those who are humble, who are sincerely interested in others, always looking to improve themselves and learn, and never concerned with who gets credit or recognition.
Remain a student. Learning involves a search for truth, honesty, and a desire to positively influence others for good purposes. Learning also involves striving to keep your thoughts positive, constructive, and creative. Everything you experience, either bad or good, was first a thought. By learning ways to keep your thoughts positive, creative, and good, you can unleash your inner power to positively change and affect your circumstances.
Communicate what you’re going through. It is absolutely crucial to have somebody who can share your experiences, concerns, issues, or simply what happened at work that day. All humans are social creatures who thrive on engaging with others and sharing information. First responders in particular need an outlet for expressing outwardly whatever is within them — and that includes processing critical incidents, stress, or trauma. Holding in these experiences only increases your anxiety, depression, fears, and distance from loved ones. Whether you communicate with a peer, a chaplain, a colleague or friend, a life partner, a therapist, a support group, or anyone else who gives you support, you’ll find that continuous, truthful communication is essential to maintain the wellness of your spirit.
Set goals. Develop professional and personal goals that are reasonable and attainable. Lay out short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals that you can work toward every day. This will help keep work and life from stagnating. Always have a goal that you are working toward.
La Mesa police sergeant Greg Runge shares his life-plan principle:
It is within our nature to want to improve, to want something better for ourselves in our professional and personal lives, and to feel good about the direction of our lives. I have used a principle I call a life plan, which I reevaluate and adjust every year at New Years. My life plan for the year is not a simple halfhearted New Year’s resolution that is soon to be broken and forgotten about. It is a commitment for the entire year to work on specific physical, mental, financial, and spiritual goals. My objective is not so much to achieve what I had hoped to achieve by the end of the year, but to remain committed to trying every day to do something positive to fulfill my life plan.
I think it’s safe to say that we all have in the back of our minds a laundry list of goals, tasks, and intentions that, if they are accomplished, will lift a serious amount of emotional and psychological weight off of our shoulders. This list seems to grow longer the older we get, and, year after year, I never seem to get around to crossing anything off. This is true for even the seemingly menial things that I’ve put off forever while waiting for a couple weeks off so I can tackle them — seems like that time off never happens.
Sometimes the tasks may relate to physical health, such as improving your general health, losing a specific amount of weight, running a half marathon at a certain pace, or even getting a medical procedure or some dental work done that you’ve been putting off. Or the goal can be a financial one — paying off a credit card, saving a certain amount of money, increasing your retirement fund contributions, or opening an educational savings account for your children. People who are close to retirement may be putting off meeting with an advisor to get a feel for how life will be financially after they stop working.
Some of the biggest tasks can be the hardest to define. These life goals are the very personal intentions that weigh on us year after year and are the most difficult to carry out. Is there a difficult conversation that you’ve been meaning to have with a friend or family member? An event in your past that has taken an emotional toll on you that you know you should talk about with someone, maybe even a professional? A broken relationship with a family member, friend, or coworker that you want to repair? A new hobby or interest you’ve been mustering the courage to try?
Then there are the mental and spiritual goals, such as studying something new, books you’ve been wanting to read, or improvements you want to make in your character and the strength and wellness of your spirit.
There are all manner of things that could be on your list, and everyone’s list will differ. The key to making your own list is to pinpoint the life plan that, if accomplished, will make you feel better about your life. I believe the best chance to make meaningful progress in your life plan is to choose two or three areas of your life that you want to focus on during the year, and then pick one or two tasks in each area that you will commit to working on each day. Make sure your life plan for the year is reasonable and attainable. Then write it down (a yearly, month-to-month planner is perfect for this). Give yourself sensible goals and deadlines that incrementally push you toward being successful. This is your life plan for the year, and in it you will keep track of where you are, your successes, your setbacks, and, hopefully, your ultimate accomplishment — the day you cross the item off your list.
Regarding a life plan that involves character improvement and the wellness of your spirit, it is helpful to list seven to ten character traits or virtues you wish to improve upon throughout the year. Then, work on one for an entire day, then rotate to the next trait or virtue to focus on for the next day, and continue to rotate through your list one item at a time. When you’ve finished going through the list, start again at the beginning, and continue on this way throughout the days of the year.
The character virtues that you work on may include being more patient, letting go of anger, being more positive in your thoughts and speech, being more helpful to your spouse and others, being more honest, being less negative in your thoughts and feelings, not wasting so much time, being more grateful, being more humble — or any other trait you desire to improve. In fact, one of the greatest minds in all of American history, Benjamin Franklin, at the age of twenty, wrote a list of thirteen character traits he wanted to work on, and he did so for the rest of his life. His life plan included moderation, justice, sincerity, peace, humility, chastity, cleanliness (in habits, thoughts, and body), industry (waste no time), silence, temperance, order, being resolute, and frugality.
The objective of this work is to keep yourself on a trajectory of improvement. You may not meet a life-plan goal to your satisfaction at the end of the year, but through consistent effort you will have most assuredly grown closer to reaching that goal.
Discipline your will. Train yourself to make better, more positive choices in life and to refine your habits, replacing negative or harmful habits with more positive ones. Choose to express yourself in the best way you can. The practice of disciplining the will also involves consistently fulfilling resolutions and objectives, being honest in all things, and living up to all legal, moral, and ethical obligations.
Develop your sense of sincere purpose (right motivation). One of the most meaningful questions you can ask yourself is Why? The reason why you do something — what truly lies behind your motivation to say or do anything — reveals your true character, heart, and spirit. If your motives are not good, noble, selfless, and altruistic, then you are being controlled by your ego and selfishness. Through the discipline of right motivation, you can significantly improve your effectiveness with others, the health of your spirit, and your own quality of life.
Discipline yourself to let go. This is the practice of learning to be aware of how much you identify yourself with negative thoughts and emotions, while learning to let them go. Every time you become aware of feeling a negative emotion, you must try to replace it with a more positive one. Every negative emotion, including anger, sadness, jealousy, envy, hurt feelings, revenge, and being unforgiving, acts as a heavy weight on your spirit and significantly depletes your energy.
Become more aware of how often you reinforce negative emotions through your speech and thoughts. These habits can be changed into more positive, constructive patterns of behavior. But rather than ignoring, reinforcing, or suppressing negative thoughts and emotions, learn to acknowledge them and let them go. The book Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, by Dr. David Hawkins, is a valuable resource in learning how to let go of all that hinders our well-being.
Speak positively. Discover the power and influence you wield when you focus on speaking only that which is true, helpful, encouraging, and positive. People’s speech is the outward expression of the quality of their thoughts, heart, and spirit.
Serve your colleagues. The training of most first responders tends to be focused on protecting and serving the community, and ironically, rarely do they see their colleagues as part of the community. Wellness in spirit is also a sense of connectedness and devotion to coworkers, who sacrifice to protect each other. Our coworkers are our brothers and sisters. They are family who deserve the utmost honor and respect. The well-being of the spirits of those who risk their lives for us, at our sides, must become one of our primary concerns. Only then can first responders coalesce together to protect each other, as well as the community, and to emotionally and spiritually survive together.
Make spiritual wellness a priority. Become proactive about developing your own spiritual-survival and wellness practices. Take an active part in developing positive habits that will sustain and enliven your spirit, as well as your physical and mental health. If you are doing nothing proactively to sustain your spirit, then you are passively allowing your spirit to decline and, eventually, suffer.
Think positively. Positive, optimistic thinking doesn’t mean that you ignore reality and refuse to face difficult problems. Rather, it is a proactive approach to improving your mind-set and life by practicing a more positive and constructive attitude. Instead of feeling negative, victimized, or helpless, you will, with a positive mind-set, gain a higher perspective of the issue and think of constructive ways to manage or mitigate problems rather than feeling defeated. The consistent practice of positive thinking has an innate power to reduce stress, improve effective stress management, improve coping skills after trauma, reduce the intensity and duration of depression, and even improve your overall health.
If your thoughts tend to be mostly negative, your outlook on life is more likely pessimistic and defeatist. If you develop the habit of thinking and viewing life in a more positive and constructive way, then you’re someone who is far more capable of sustaining a higher quality of life. Stress has been shown to be reduced by limiting negative thoughts and letting go of negative emotions.
A positive mind anticipates happiness, joy, health, success, improved opportunities, and favorable results. With a positive attitude you can experience greater hope and more pleasant feelings, and you can visualize the results you want to achieve. Your thoughts continually shape your attitudes, feelings, and quality of life, and so they affect how you deal with stress.
In what ways do you release or manage stress? Are these outlets healthy? How can you improve?
Overwhelming stress is an inevitable aspect of your work. Without effective de-stressing and coping practices, stress can eventually consume your spirit to the point where all you do each day is try to survive. That is definitely not a healthy way to live, and it will cripple your ability to provide quality service at work.
The purpose of this question is for you to consider not only how stressed you have become but also all the contributing stressors you experience each day. Then, rather than merely reacting to being stressed, you can evaluate what proactive steps you can take to process and reduce your stress levels. The many stressors are not going to go away, but you can learn how to work through the feeling of stress, process it, and release more of it in order to keep your spirit from being weighed down.
Do you feel the “need” to drink or consume any other substance? Do you need alcohol to sleep, to enjoy yourself, or to relax? Can you do without alcohol or some other substance for three days without feeling any effects? (If not, a potentially serious problem is developing.)
This question is designed to help you realize whether you have become dependent on alcohol or another substance and, if you have, to find a positive way to heal your spirit. Often first responders don’t realize how dependent they have become on alcohol or other substances just to function — to sleep, to relax, to enjoy life. If you perceive as a need the consumption of anything other than what is medically required, then you have become dependent on it. Such dependence is typically a symptom that your spirit is suffering and needs your attention.