Episode 10 – Posttraumatic growth — with RCMP Veteran Jason Anderson

MIND BEYOND THE MISSION EPISODE 10: POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH WITH RCMP VETERAN JASON ANDERSON

Laryssa

Posttraumatic growth can be defined as positive personal changes that result from the survival struggle to deal with trauma and its psychological consequences. The process of traumatic growth can lead to improved relationships with others, more compassion, openness, appreciation for life, spiritual growth, and personal strength. This personal growth extends beyond pre-trauma functioning. Therefore, postttraumatic growth is not merely a bouncing back to the level of functioning prior to trauma, but rather a sense of positive growth beyond pre-trauma functioning. Just wanted to share that definition to set a bit of groundwork on our conversation today.

Brian

I hear the definition and I can buy into that. I think as well though in layman’s terms, you can get on with life. You can have these things and simultaneously progress. I think what some people have clued into is in some ways, you can actually get better. I think that it also gives you this spot to look back and go, “Warts and all, all the pain and all the problems that happened behind me, I actually did get through them and I know that about me now, and maybe someone else who hasn’t walked that path doesn’t know that yet.”

We’re joined today, Jason’s joining us, he’s got a background in social work, but also a long, lengthy career in the RCMP, and he’s going to be speaking to us a little bit about posttraumatic growth, how he sees it. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.

Jason

Thank you for having me.

Brian

You want to give us a little blurb background, the Reader’s Digest version of who Jason is today and how he got here?

Jason

Sure. Today, I am a therapist specializing in trauma therapies with first responders, our First Nations indigenous communities, and others.

Laryssa

That’s the really condensed Reader’s Digest [chuckles] version.

Brian

You went there.

Laryssa

That’s right. [laughs]

Jason

He started off with what am I doing now, that’s who I am now.

Laryssa

Exactly.

Jason

I guess to paint a picture of why that was somewhat of an unlikely situation, I’ll dive backward and I’ll start at the beginning. My first professional job as an adult was a youth care worker, working in a residential treatment center with a population of adolescents from the 12 to 17-year range. These were kids that were well beyond the rest of the child welfare system and they needed the secure setting for basic survival.

That was my introduction to the social services field. It was actually spurred on because of my childhood dream of becoming an RCMP officer. It was one of the areas that I wanted to get more experience in working directly with people. Because at the time I was in social work for university, it just seemed like a fit to get into that job.

Brian

You’re young and you’re sitting there dreaming. Are you dreaming of being a cop or you’re dreaming of specifically being a Mountie?

Jason

Specifically, RCMP. It goes back to when I was six years old, our neighbour where I was born and raised had gotten into an accident with wildlife out on the highway. Although we were living in the city of Winnipeg at the time, the RCMP took the statement because it happened in their jurisdiction and attended to his residence. When they showed up, I knew it was a different type of police officer because the car was different. Colours were different. His uniform was definitely different. For whatever reason, I ran next door, back home, changed into nicer clothes, came back, and I spent the next 20 minutes interacting with his police officer because he noticed that this kid left wearing shorts and a T-shirt came back wearing a suit and tie. There’s something up here. That really imprinted for me that this guy is different, and that became my push to be that guy.

Laryssa

You served 20 years in the Mounties and now you continue service with the community as a social worker. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Jason

There I am as a youth care worker, thinking that I’m working towards my greater goal. I actually started to really enjoy that type of employment, but I left as a youth care worker and started working as a direct child protection social worker after I graduated. I did that for a period of time, but I got that fateful phone call at some point that said, “We have a spot for you in training. Are you interested?”

In that moment, my childhood dream became a reality, and of course, I said yes, and off I went to Regina to do my six months of training. From there, after graduation I was posted to Shamattawa, I was posted to Winnipegosis, Dauphin, Winnipeg drug section, what was considered the Biker Enforcement Unit out there, the Manitoba Integrated Organized Crime Task Force because police like acronyms.

Brian

So you’re busy then.

Jason

Yeah, so eventually I got a phone call again from staffing that said, “Hey, do you want to go to Ontario?” I said, “Okay, sure. Just don’t send me to Toronto.” They sent me to Kitchener. I did a little bit of time in Kitchener, went out to national security after the Parliament Hill incidents, and then back to Kitchener, and finally promoted down to Hamilton Detachment.

Brian

You mentioned to us when we spoke the other day, and I think it’s a very poignant two words. There was a point in your life where you had to say, “I’m broken.”

Jason

Yep.

Brian

It’s a staggering thing to hear come out of your mouth. I’ve said the same words. Knowing I was going to say it, planning who I was going to say it to, but actually hearing it and you can’t take it back, it’s out there, how’d that go?

Jason

I’d call that the curtain moment. Wizard of Oz, where they pull back the curtain and find out the great powerful wizard is what he is, reality comes in. For me, it was after a trip to Vancouver for work where I had two acute onset moments of my PTSD right at the beginning where I bubbled out and said, “Here I am.” During that time that I was there, I was able to process enough to understand that this is PTSD. I’m dealing with this now. There’s no turning back. I made a phone call to my wife because I was traveling back to Toronto, and then I’d be driving back home.

I knew that I was different. There was no hiding it. My situation felt different. I called her up and had her pull over on the side of the road and told her that I’m broken and I’m coming home and shared a little bit more with what was going on and really opened up in that moment and said, “I think the baby call has finally gotten me. It’s bad,” and that was it, came home to a big hug, and then that was the start of the journey.

Laryssa

When we were chatting in preparation for this, we’d explored a little bit that process for you. It in some ways felt quicker that you had this– you talked about being triggered during a flight on an airplane. From the time that you experienced that really intense, that experience to when you actually process it to admit that you were broken, to me anyways, felt like a quicker process than for most.

I think for a lot of CAF and RCMP Veterans, that process is a little bit longer. There’s incidents that come up, there’s things that are happening, but they don’t know what’s going on. It could be a long time before they realize that I’m broken, and then from there admit it to themselves, but then speak it out loud.

Jason

Out loud, that’s the difference.

Laryssa

To your spouse too, who sounds extremely supportive, but what was it for you, that timeline? Maybe it was a little bit more condensed than maybe for some other folks.

Jason

I think it sounds condensed when it’s presented, but when I started breaking down everything in therapy, actually, that was the culmination of an entire buildup. The fact that I was able to identify that this is obviously going to be a PTSD-type situation, and one of the root cause incidences of it, I attribute it to the fact that I had that therapeutic background beforehand.

I had some general awareness of what potentially was causing some of the issues that I was having. Like I said, when I look back, for a period of eight months, I was going to work every morning thinking that I was having a heart attack because the panic attack and the impact on my chest was so severe. I was able to find every other rationale as to why I was having chest pains right down to, yes, it’s a heart attack, but you’re not dying yet, so I’ll keep on going. If you die, you’ll die.

It was, “My diet must be off, I must have drank too much coffee,” all these other things except panic. I was having disruptive sleeps for a period of time, I was having irritability, I was having issues in interpersonal relationship. All the signs were there, and I always knew that there is something going on, but you don’t admit it to yourself. I think when it became such an aggressive acute moment for me on the plane, there’s no denying it. The truth was there and you had to accept it, or you keep on denying it, then you’re going down on an even more destructive path.

Brian

For me, it was my guts. That was my litmus test of how things are going. Let’s just say it’s a thing you can’t deny or hide. It shows up, and it really affected my life because my guts, when they’re not working, guess what you’re not doing? You’re not going anywhere, you’re not meeting people, you’re not engaging in life. You’re not even accepting job interviews because you don’t know how that hour’s going to go.

Yes, the physical manifestation of these things, it hurts too. I’m focused on this fact that when you say those words out loud, not only are they out there, but now someone else heard them. Do you feel when that happens, there’s almost a little bit of an accountability? Because now you could pretend you didn’t say that except someone heard you.

Jason

It was purposeful. I knew that in order to do this, I needed the support. I wouldn’t get that support by being silent in it. Actually, I took it a step further. I know about the stigma that all those pieces– I actually had lost two friends and people I knew because of PTSD and their service. I wasn’t going to end up like that. I wanted to change this script. I sent out an email to our close friends and family. I posted on Facebook that I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD because of my service and was very clear on that impact to people.

I got really vocal. As things progressed, shortly after therapy started, I started writing and I carried a blog for probably about two years consistently through my therapy, where I was making regular posts. When I look back on them, there are some of the awareness pieces that I was coming to or some of the enlightened pieces I was coming to about my journey and about myself.

Laryssa

It sounds like you really almost– you accepted it. It almost– I don’t want to say the word embraced, but you owned it. You said it out loud, you sent out an email, which I imagine must’ve taken a lot of courage. As we’re talking about the path towards your experience with posttraumatic growth, once you accepted it, it sounds like you didn’t fight it too much, that you accepted, “This is where I’m at and this is what I’m dealing with.”

Jason

I think part of me saw it as a medical diagnosis. It wasn’t a psychological diagnosis, it was a medical diagnosis. If I was diagnosed with a disease that was going to have an impact on me, I would’ve done the exact same thing. This is going to have an impact on me. It’s going to have an impact on my family. We’re not going to be as involved in the next little while with other matters that don’t seem important to us because this is more important to us.

It really was pulling back the veil and saying, “This is who I am. This is what I’m dealing with. If I’m not responding to your phone calls, this is why. If I’m posting weird shit on social media, this is why.” I didn’t buy into the stigma from the start.

Brian

There’s a leadership aspect to this too, right, Jason? Especially in an organization like the military, like the RCMP. Many people stood up at a lectern and said, “Our doors are always open, we’re mental health positive,” and all of the above. Significantly different though when one leader that’s respected puts up his hand and says, “Me, this is me. I’m that guy.” That’s a different moment.

For me, I remember watching one person. I’ll leave their name out of it, but when they came forward, now we had to contend with it. It couldn’t just be this thing that we were saying, “If we encounter this, we’re going to handle it good. Right, guys?” No, this was like, “Here it is. We got this now,” and probably in 10 more people than are willing to put their hand up.

Jason

I think because of that experience where I had two people that chose to deal with PTSD by suicide, you don’t want that to happen anymore, so if me being vocal and saying, “This is what’s happening to me,” and the messages of support that we’re seeing, maybe it will help somebody else in that moment say, “Okay, if he can do it, I can do it too. I’m going to talk about it versus keeping it quiet,” or, “I want to at least go to my doctor and start talking about this.”

Brian

Is that point where you’re saying, “Look, I’m talking, I’m open, and I’m saying what’s going on,” is that part of the growth you’re speaking of?

Jason

If I look back on hindsight, I think the openness in general that this wasn’t something that was hidden– When we try to hide our diagnosis, it’s shame-based. I had a diagnosis, I can’t feel the shame of it because that diagnosis reflects things that I did and saw in my career that nobody else did or saw whether they weren’t there or they didn’t want to be there. That openness to me was me owning that, “You know what? This is mine, this is because of the things I did that got me into this position,” but those things nobody else wanted to do or were able to do in those moments.

Laryssa

I’m going to quote you. We were chatting before and you said something that really resonated with me. You said, “You have to understand that you can’t struggle with PTSD, you have to dance with it.” Can you explain that a little bit more?

Jason

Yes, you had asked me what my definition of posttraumatic growth was, and that was it, is that learning to dance with your PTSD versus struggling with it because that’s the difference. When you struggle with that diagnosis or the fact that you have PTSD, and there’s lots of people that just the diagnosis itself, in and of itself, that diagnosis is the biggest struggle that they’re facing on a daily basis because that diagnosis represents the stigma, represents the shame that they’re feeling because they’re not responding to situations the same way.

When you start recognizing that you’re struggling with something, you then decide, “Does this make sense for my energy?” I’ve got limited bandwidth because of the symptoms that I have. My anxiety at the start of it would only allow me to get up in the morning, make my son breakfast, drop him off at school, come back home, and fall asleep on the couch for a couple of hours.

How much energy was I putting into struggling with my anxiety that was wiping me out on a daily basis? When you start recognizing, “You know what, I can do something different with this energy. How can I dance?” When we were talking about it, it’s what I present to clients. You have a choice. You can be either Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali if you want to fight this.

Mike Tyson, how long did he last in his career? It was a big splash, but it fizzled out pretty quick. Muhammad Ali, on the other hand, the guy lasted for decades, and his motto was, “Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He was all about dancing his opponents. Let’s start dancing with PTSD, and then the other piece is you’re actually dancing with yourself because that struggle is all internalized. Everything that is associated with PTSD is an internalized process. You’re fighting yourself if you’re trying to fight your PTSD.

Brian

In another conversation before this where Laryssa had to remind people that the grocery store is not a benign moment for people like us, it was being presented as, “Hey, a trip to a grocery store is a neutral event.” It’s like, “No.” People slamming freezer doors sounds like mortars, I can smell the meat section when I come in the door.

I bring this up because, for a lot of us, we go to work for a break, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. You’re supposed to go home to take time off. You’re supposed to take a vacation to take time off. If handling your dreams at night, your daymares in the morning, you’re stressed as heck when you’re driving into work.

Your break is when everyone expects you to show up and start functioning at a high level, and that’s actually for a lot of guys when their exhaustion just takes over. I look at this like, “How does this play out at work? How does this play out at home, and where do people breathe when this is going on, and they’re not handling it? Because I wasn’t.

Jason

One of the things that we find comfort in is immersing ourselves repeatedly into that trauma. That is why it takes so long for an individual that’s starting to feel the effects of the traumas to actually step away because it’s a comfort. We know how we’re going to respond in those traumas. We’re trained, we have an automatic response to run to the fire.

Shots are fired, we’re going into them. We’re not running away from them. The house is burning, firefighters are going into it. Car crash, EMS is going into it. That’s what we’re trained to do. That’s what is comfortable for us. When we are struggling and things don’t make sense, where do they make sense? Where do we spend the last 20 years of our life? Immersed in that.

Brian

That’s absolutely the truth. That’s the thing. You go to a bomb tech or an ERT specialist, an ERT guy, and ask him like, “Hey, do you want to get off this team and go to a more relaxing environment?” Hell no. The team is the therapy. That’s where you want to be. Absolutely, I look at whether it’s police work or firefighting as you’ve brought up, war-fighting even, it’s complicated. There’s a lot going on, but why we’re here and what we’re doing is real simple. Real simple. I crave that simplicity.

Jason

People go into those careers because they want to serve, they want to give back to their community. They want to do something for Canada. If we break it down, we go into these jobs because we’re service-oriented. It’s our values. It’s what we carry with us and because of the process of indoctrination and then being in there in our experiences, we start to forget that piece. We’re doing this because of our service. What ends up happening is we see that service as a negative because it gave us PTSD.

One of the turning points for me in this kind of evolution of it, was starting to really understand what my service represented. When I started breaking it down, there’s a couple of things that happened around that time. One was I attended a residential treatment program that was– I told you guys in our conversation, it was life-changing for me because that was the moment where my awareness just got blown wide open.

The perspective that I was carrying of situations I realized was only one of many different perspectives that each situation brought with them. The service idea really started springing from that kind of idea and concept. I started looking at my service and realizing that maybe this stuff happened to me for a reason. Maybe I was exposed to these traumas because I was meant to learn something from them. What was that message?

Laryssa

Wow. A couple of things just fell into place for me. It explains to me, and I read one of your biographies that says that you continue to serve. You didn’t have to change that part of yourself. You are someone who chose to serve. You served your community as an RCMP officer, and now you continue to choose to serve your community, but as a social worker, and that’s one of my curiosities about posttraumatic growth. Is it about finding meaning or making meaning out of your trauma in your experiences?

Jason

Yes, it’s starting to make choices that are different than what you normally did because they were impacted by your traumas. When you start reframing and rescripting what these things mean to you, getting back in touch was the service, well, that’s my values. The reasons why I went into policing is because of a set of values I carry. How can I then take those values and start moving them forward?

I went through looking at my traumas and I actually got to the point that it shocked people when I said it for the first time in peer support. At the end, we’d always do a round of gratitude, the things that you’re grateful for. I used to always say, “I am grateful for my wife and son because of what they’ve given me and that they’ve been with me during this process.”

Once this all came together for me and I recognized my service is something to be proud of, my PTSD is the badge I earned for what I did. I said it in the peer group session for the first time, “I’m grateful for my PTSD.” When I rip it apart and look at it, all those experiences I had, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever, however you want to label them, they all came down to teaching moments where I got so focused on a negative, I forgot to see the positive. The positive is what was driving my service. When you tap into that, you see that you have no choice but to be grateful.

Brian

Can you maybe highlight a thing or two that you would say, because you went through it, because it hurt, you are actually better now than you were before? For me, it’s empathy. It’s only now that I can realize I probably didn’t have a lot of it. It was probably now that I look back and think, maybe I wrote some people off that I shouldn’t have. Maybe that person just needed some more time. All the things wrapped in being a little more aware of what someone else might have gone through.

My empathy, I thought it was fine at the time, but now I can tell you, I actually have a bit of it. I can look back and say, yes, that probably wasn’t sufficient. Is there anything like that for you that stands out you could say, “Look, I’m actually better.”?

Jason

You know what? I think one of the big pieces of my gratitude journey and really getting in touch with it and looking at and processing the traumas and how that moved the growth forward, I would be comfortable in saying probably the biggest and hardest lesson I learned was self-acceptance. Those times that I questioned my actions in the traumas, those times where I didn’t think I was living up to the standards that I set for myself, all the negative self-talk that comes from PTSD, the inner bully.

It could be the inner inspector, the inner sergeant, whatever you want to call it, but that voice that always beat you up when you’re down already. I think that the most powerful thing that came out of this was self-acceptance and recognizing the importance of it.

Brian

One of the things in there because we talked about stigma the other day, I’m never going to claim we’ve solved it or it’s cracked or anything like that, but I do believe that most of the stigma today is self-induced in that a lot of us we look for other people to drop the stigma, but the biggest perpetrator of stigma to Brian has been Brian.

Jason

We beat ourselves up. We tell ourselves, you don’t need to go out there because nobody’s going to want to talk to you at the party. Why would they want to talk to you? You’re just going to cry, or you’re going to get mad and swear or do something wrong. We stop ourselves from doing the things that bring us enjoyment because of that, because of the way we feel.

Laryssa

Would you be willing to share the water park story with us?

Jason

Back in 2018, this is shortly after diagnosis, we had gone through a rough patch with everything, the upheaval of everything at home. We went to a water park in the States with my son just to change it up and get a bit of a holiday. It was great because the water park offered me an opportunity to cry throughout the day whenever it came up because the water, whether it was the slide or the wave pool, I could just blame it on the situation. It was perfect.

I remember talking to my therapist about that and saying, “It was great because I masked all the tears. It was a shitty holiday.” Even when I look back on it now, it wasn’t shitty. It was an awesome holiday because it was a family time and the joy that it brought my son at the time. I went back about a month and a half ago with him. It was a dude’s weekend. Him and I went back to the water park. We had gone back since, but this was just him and I for the day.

There was one moment where I was starting to get caught up in anxiety, where things started coming up, and you’re in the States, so you have all the news coverage about shootings and what’s going on. There was such a mix of people, young, small, old, some triggers were present as well, things that really got me going, and I noticed I’m going. It was in a blink of an eye where it’s that realization, “Okay, no, you have a choice here, Jason. You can keep on thinking about all these negative things. You can start entertaining your anxiety even more. You know where that’s going to take you.”

That wasn’t an option for me anymore. I look over at my son, and in that moment I realized that’s the important piece. That is where I need to focus my attention and focus on not this anxiety bullshit, and that changed it. From that point on, the rest of the holiday and the rest of the weekend, I knew what my focus was. Sure, I had anxiety. Sure, things bothered me. There was the side glances from people, stuff like that. I didn’t care because I was with my son, and that’s the most important thing because he’s going to take that memory away and hopefully use it for himself when he is older.

Brian

For you, your time in the RCMP, it’s a substantial period of your life, but it’s bookended by social work. You started there, you got a root in that, you did this long policing career, got beat up from there, probably learned a lot, and now you’re back at it again. Why’d you go back into that world when there’s so much rawness from that in your own life?

Jason

Back in about 2017, I started looking at what programs that were available to upgrade my education. I was naïve enough, and I’ll use that word loosely, but I was naïve enough to believe that I was actually doing pretty good, that things weren’t bugging me, that I wanted to not have somebody else lose two people they know to PTSD. I figured, you know what, if I’m doing this job and I’m not really too damaged, maybe this might be something positive that I can do.

I guess that little bit of ego was pushed to the limits by the diagnosis less than a year later. During the process, what I found out, and this taps into that service aspect of it, is that I joined policing because, yes, it was a childhood dream, but that childhood dream was to serve people. It really was the catalyst for me wanting to do that job to go into service. Part of my therapy was looking at, I did that before, I served others in my capacity as a social worker.

It really started to evolve, and I realized that was my desire is to work with people one-on-one, not in that kind of policing sense. It really became this understanding that I had what I was looking for before, now I just got more experience to bring to the table, but I got to go back to that. That’s really what pushed me into going into becoming a therapist, upgrading my education.

Brian

I’d also say that one progress point that I’ve noticed that the Canadian Forces has made is they’re actually looking a lot more now at the activities of daily living in both assessing how you’re doing and also trying to get people prepared for life afterwards. That wasn’t really a part of it for me. My process on the way out, things were mentioned like, “Hey, do you have a BC healthcare card yet?” but there was no real assessment of what are you going to do to service purpose, meaning, and identity, and actually feel that you have value once you get out.

That was nowhere on the discussion board. What they were just touching on was things like, “Well, what do you want to do for a living? Where are you going to live?” I think I might have to give the Forces some credit because I think that’s one of the progress areas I’ve seen is they are actually starting to look at the full picture of the person and what they’re going to look like once they’re out the door. How’s that going in the RCMP world, in your opinion?

Jason

I have walked away from the RCMP world, and I don’t look back that often. I know through comments and conversations with others, in some areas, there’s definitely an evolution in this process. There’s more of an understanding that there has to be more of that exit planning.

My process for medical retirement was pretty straightforward. I had it mapped out for myself that I’m going to be leaving at a certain time. I’m going to finish my education, I’m going to start into the second career afterwards. Family-wise, this is taken care of. All those pieces were really kind of in place for me. It’s hard for me to say that I didn’t get any support that I needed because I think I had those supports already in place external to the RCMP.

Laryssa

I’m going to switch gears a little bit. Part of our conversation before, I’ve supported people in their journeys with PTSD, observed them, and right now we’re talking about posttraumatic growth. Brian, you’d asked a question earlier about being better in some ways than you were because of the trauma.

Jason, I’m picturing you on the plane, or pick whichever scenario, where you were in the depths of things, and if someone would’ve said to you, “But wait, you’re going to experience posttraumatic growth,” I’m imagining that in that moment it would seem absolutely impossible when you’re struggling with self-worth when you’re struggling with all of those things. What would you say to a person who’s at that point in their experience right now about posttraumatic growth?

Jason

Just me being who I am and what I’m doing now for a living, from where I came, from just, let’s say, five years ago from the acute onset, I think that’s your posttraumatic growth right there. That’s the answer to that question. When I look at the almost evolution for me of getting to that point of recognizing that there is a potential for something other, when you’re dealing with PTSD, that it’s not you have PTSD and that’s it, that you’re sitting with it for the rest of your life, and you’re not going to improve any, it was nine months into my journey before posttraumatic growth even became something I was aware of.

It was the residential program that really brought that to the forefront saying, “This is what we’re looking at. We’re looking at having you realize there’s a different experience that you can have at the end of this if you start making choices that lead to that experience.” That really then becomes it, and I think that would be my message to anybody is that in your darkest moment, you have a different choice to make than the one that you think you need to make right now. That choice that they think is negative focused, there’s a positive that can be seen.

Brian

There’s growth and you are in the social work world again, but are there ever times that the cop comes out?

Jason

Yes. There are parts where I have a very clear– and I always have had this trigger with a certain type of individual that represents a bully or a bully-type mentality. That is always one that gets my back up a bit, but the difference in growth is instead of getting mad at that person or mad at the situation, I feel sorry for them.

Brian

Well, I bring it up because it’s actually one of the parts of my own growth was I needed to realize where the soldier way of handling life was inappropriate. I also had to give some credence to that guy. He should show up sometimes. There are some things in life where he is perfectly suited to handle it, and the situation is almost begging for him, and I don’t apologize for that anymore.

I think that might be some of my own growth is having a good or at least a better appreciation of what Brian do I bring to this table; the colleague, the employee, the dad, husband, or the guy that looks at a situation and just says, “This has to be smashed forward and I’m going to do it,” because he’s needed sometimes.

Jason

In a lot of my interactions, my bringing out the experience of being a police officer is now more of a therapeutic bring-out versus it coming out unexpectedly. Whether it’s that I’m telling a specific incident to help hammer home an awareness piece for someone to understand, or that it is those moments where a hard-line confident– it has to be a quick response to a situation comes out, I say it comes out therapeutically, it’s controlled. That beast is tamed a lot more than it used to be.

I think for me, that’s the difference, but it really does. When I see those situations that I start used to respond to in a more kind of cop-like matter, I take a step back and I see it very differently now. I see that there’s a reason why a person is acting that way towards me and I feel sorry for them because they’ve been carrying that for a long time.

Brian

One thing, I almost want to hit rewind here a little bit, we talked earlier about– I’ll call it coming out, the words unbroken, but you’ve probably had to mention, “I suffer through this,” to more than one person in your life. Can you tell me what you read on their faces when you’ve said that? Is it shock? Is it like, “Yes, we know.”? Because I got a lot of that. I had a lot of people like, “Yes, thanks for telling us what we’ve known for a long time, Brian.” How does that happen for you?

Jason

I think there’s a little bit of that where people are kind of like, “Duh, really? You didn’t realize things were bad?” The one for me that bugged me at first was the pity. When you told someone that you have PTSD and you’re dealing with it, because of that image and that propaganda that’s out there in the community, that if someone, especially a first responder or a cop has PTSD, they will die by suicide. That is that mentality that is out there when they hear PTSD, and right away there’s a pity that you see from them, that, “Oh, you’re dealing with that.”

It’s almost like it’s beyond you as a person. It’s to everybody else around you, “I’m sorry for your family.” “No, no, I’m still here, give me a second and I’ll explain that it’s not as bad as what you think it is.” Yes. I’ve seen some ugly things and I used to tell people when they would ask what’s going on or why I was off, I would say that my eyes have seen more than my brain can understand. That usually ends that conversation pretty quickly because they don’t want to know what I saw if my brain’s not working right.

Brian

I found something that’s helped me is to remind people Veterans, not victims. Lots of things have happened. Lots of problems, lots of pain, absolutely, but I’m a victim of absolutely nothing. I found also almost some patronizing like, “You didn’t know what you were signing up for.” Like, “No, I knew exactly what I signed up for. I wanted more of that actually, and loved it. 95% of it, I’ll tell you, was a blast.” Within that, there was pain and I want to fix it, but don’t feel sorry for me, not a cent.

Laryssa

I think it makes this conversation even more important that there is– I don’t want to say the other side of PTSD because I think posttraumatic growth is intertwined in it, but there’s more to it, that maybe people would be more curious as opposed to pitying, or whatever the case is. Appreciate this conversation. One thing I do want to touch on is the family perspective. I know you may not want to speak for your family, but in your experience, how has posttraumatic growth impacted or affected, or what do you see different in your family members?

Jason

It’s still an evolution because especially from my wife and I, we’re in the process of relearning each other in some ways because who I was as a person, because of the way I responded to the traumas, and then the triggers or activators of those traumas after the fact, she knew me as a police officer my entire time. I am, I would say, more aligned with who I was before I got into policing than I was during policing.

That’s definitely a different person than the policing experience where a lot of what you gain of that very subjective, very black-and-white thinking in policing, I started dialing that back and becoming more objective, more open, more understanding and seeing. That’s been a shift and we’re still doing– we’re learning to dance with it. It’s different. My style of things are a little bit different than hers now where we used to be very much aligned in approaches.

We’re coming back to that medium, but with my son, I think I’m seeing a very different interaction that I’m having with him because I’m understanding that interaction differently now. I know what it’s like not to have it, and I don’t want to not have it. I want that interaction and I want that calmness between us.

Brian

I often think about these things, I hear people ask me, “Well, can we solve this with training?” Well, yes, probably some of it, but I have to say it’s got to be a dual-pronged approach, but yes, we can train as in educate and prepare, door’s always open. Leadership have to understand that they are going to have to deal with these things. That’s one aspect of how we can get better, but we cannot pretend that that’s going to solve all the problems.

Look, these jobs are inherently dangerous. The government calls on the military when it doesn’t know what else to do, and citizens call on the police because your normal is handling everything that they think they can’t handle, which is why they’re calling you in the first place. You get a collection of their bad days as a society, and that’s the career of a cop. With that in mind, I really feel that as much as we can train and protect and educate at the beginning, we simply in these jobs have to accept that we’re going to do some damage, and we just must be ready to catch people on the backend and help them.

Jason

Yes, I think there’s a couple of things that– if they want to effectively address this and try to minimize overall impacts of these careers, the first piece is that they need to do a better job of education about the job. In my work as a therapist, one of the very common themes that I’m hearing from first responders is, “I had no idea the amount of death I would be dealing with.” When you’re trying to recruit people, that’s not the first thing that you’re going to– “Join us and you’ll have more than your fair share of death.”

They need to start getting that out. When I look back on my training, it was three days on death investigations, whereas you might have three deaths in one day in the actual– depending on where you’re working. There needs to be a greater education on that stuff. There needs to be a greater awareness from the frontend of, “This is what you are going to be witnessing and seeing in your career, and these are the things that you need to be doing after each and every one of these incidences that you’re part of to mitigate the damage that might happen.”

They need to change that training philosophy to that, where it becomes trauma-informed training of, “You are going to face ugly shit. That is what you agreed to do, but we are going to help you try to navigate that when it comes up,” and making it standardized for regular assessments, making it standardized for a couple of quick intervention sessions for members when something happens.

There’s some great solution-focused approaches out there that you can deal with an acute trauma pretty effectively and minimize the long-term impact for an individual. That’s what needs to start changing for people to not be as impacted from the job.

Brian

Jason, walk me through a scenario here. You’ve got a guy that’s speaking to you about his current experiences today, and he’s telling you about how he’s failing, how it’s not working, how he went out for a walk yesterday, felt a bunch of pressure around him, stressed, and it’s just didn’t pan out. He had to turn around, go back home. He sees a big mess, it failed. What do you see?

Jason

I see nothing but a positive in that. I think when we start breaking it down and looking– one of the hallmarks of PTSD is this very negative focus. I talk with clients about it. Picture that PTSD is picking up a pair of glasses, putting them on. From that point forward, you see nothing but negatives that are happening for you. That scenario that you’re describing perfectly fits it where an individual’s outside, they’re walking, and all that they’re seeing is the negative, the experience that they’re having is negative.

Well, to me, right there as a therapist, there’s the first positive. First positive is that you notice that something’s not right with you. You notice that you’re focused on something negative, so that’s a positive actually. That’s self-awareness. You’re starting to understand that something doesn’t sit right in this situation. The fact that you’re even out of your house, that’s another positive and that is something different because you might not have been out of your house for a week, and this is the first time you’re back out.

The fact that you were able to go out, do this walk, feel the way you did, and simply return back home, there’s another positive because guess what? Any worst-case scenario that you had made up in your mind that could happen if you went out on that walk, didn’t happen. You just proved your mind wrong.

What we’re saying is that you have to look at this. This is part of our training. As a police officer, as a firefighter, as a EMS, as a military, you are taught from day one, always look for the worst-case scenario and plan for that. Look for the negatives. Figure out what’s wrong, what’s not sitting right in that situation. It’s as simple as a police officer doing a search warrant. What’s out of place in here? I.e. what is the negative that doesn’t fit?

Brian

Pessimism’s a skill set. How could this scenario go wrong? Let me develop three plans for each one of those ways this could be a mess. At no time do I train my soldiers about how to optimistically look at this because it could go really well.

Jason

No. When you think of it that way, Brian, you’re right. I came up with three potential positive outcomes to the negative situation, but with a PTSD focus, even those three beneficial, positive responses, you start ripping them apart because you got to find the flaw in that because there’s a negative that you missed. Then the next thing you know, it’s three hours later and that 20-minute walk that you’re planning to do hasn’t happened yet because you’re trying to mitigate what happens if a bird flies over and drops something in front of me, and it scares me.

That’s how involved this stuff gets. When you’re doing it, it’s natural because that’s what we are trained to do. When you start breaking it down and looking what you’re actually doing in those situations, when you get the chance to go out and do it, you start seeing positives. You start changing that dynamic because if you don’t start looking for positives, what happens is your world gets really dark, and when your world gets dark, it gets dangerous because if you’re not seeing anything positive in your life, you start wondering what’s the point. It starts bringing up that questioning, and then all of a sudden, your mind starts rationalizing things to you that in a normal situation, you might not have ever considered.

Brian

When a person starts to give themself credit for having that awareness, that’s a piece of growth.

Jason

Yes, because you’re doing something different than you did before and you’re recognizing something about yourself. Growth is learning about yourself, pure and simple. If you want to experience posttraumatic growth, start by noticing what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, or what your emotions are in any moment throughout the day because that’s an awareness that you didn’t have before, and you start building on that awareness and then you start realizing that, “Hey, what I thought was a negative for me. Maybe it’s actually a positive, or maybe there’s something positive from that that I can take.” It starts changing your narrative about things.

Laryssa

That growth is a process like you were saying.

Brian

We’re going to wrap up here. I want to thank you for joining us and I want to thank you for actually highlighting some things that are attributable to growth. I really think that “I’m broken” moment, if that doesn’t get said, then we can have a really bad story here. When those things come out and there’s accountability to both yourself and whoever you heard, and it’s a self-assessment, it’s not a diagnosis, but you know exactly what you’re handling when you say those words. I think that’s one of the key things I’m going to take away from this session today. I appreciate your time, appreciate your service, your continued service to our country.

Laryssa

Thanks very much, Jason.

Jason

Thank you. It was a pleasure being here, you guys.