I am currently working with New York Times best selling author Laura Munson, founder of Haven Writing Retreats, as I write my memoir. Here is a summary of what to expect.
Police officers, in fact all first responders, do the best they can to protect and serve the people they represent. Just by the nature of the jobs they do, there are so many expectations placed on them. The pressure for perfection is unrelenting. When everyone else is falling apart, they are expected to keep it together. They are so busy looking after everyone else, it never occurs to anyone, they need to look after themselves.
In 2013, two years after retiring from a 25 year career with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I was diagnosed with C- PTSD. I was dumbfounded, embarrassed, ashamed, and angry, while struggling to make sense of it all. I was an expert, or so I thought, at keeping things together, my emotions tucked deep inside as I constantly dealt with the challenges of being a police officer. If only I had understood that the traumas from my policing world were going to be piled on top of the traumas from my personal world, and also that the vicarious trauma I was exposed to from my husband’s policing world would make that pile even higher. I never knew there was a limit. I never knew there would be consequences in trying to carry so much.
I had so many questions, why me, why now? Am I weak, what is wrong, what will people think? The stigma attached to a mental health diagnosis is difficult in the best of circumstances, but in the policing/first responder world, it is cutting. So much negativity. Negativity in language and perceptions and understanding. Keeping things inside is how we keep it together. Now I felt vulnerable.
And what about healing. What does that look like? How does it work? Where does it end?
I was terrified of therapy, of opening up and exposing myself. But something happened during my treatment that changed everything. It involved words, words that came to me on their own. I didn’t solicit them… they called out in the middle of the night. With pen in hand, the words flowed, and the story came. Not just any story, but a story that laid the pain and grief of my world on paper. Before me, lay a poem, a beautiful gift. A poem, that started the most incredible healing journey…