Jay – Page 8 – Cracked Badge

Let’s Talk Diagnosis….

Yep, you get your diagnosis and you become a Winner…. believe it or not, you really do become a winner when you get diagnosed with PTSD. Dont believe me? Indulge me a bit.

A funny thing happens when you get diagnosed. You get vindicated. There become a reason for all the strange things that are happening to you. That’s right, the nightmares, the flashbacks, the anxiety, the irritability, the craziness is happening for a reason and you now know why. You have PTSD. You can access the resources, you can seek out treatment and you can finally understand why. But your diagnosis is also the start of the hard work still ahead of you.

The funny thing is that with a diagnosis of PTSD, you will also get a couple of other diagnoses thrown in for fun. For me, on top of the PTSD diagnosis, I have recently been diagnosed with depression or should I say a major depressive episode. That is over and above the depression that is entwined within PTSD, along with anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks and everything else. Does it change anything? Not really but it definitely provides more perspective as to what is going on for me daily.

All this to say that I have PTSD according to the DSM version 5 with a side dish of depression thrown in for fun. As bad as it sounds and truly is, once you get diagnosed, you have a few choices to make on what you do with it. For me, it was an easy choice, I got help. And I continue to seek out other means to get help with my focus being on finding a group comprised of first responders for a peer to peer connection. Basically, it’s because as much as I write about it, I only those that are going down the same path know what you mean.

The other choice I made might sound a little strange but I am trying to make my diagnosis a positive. I’m taking this opportunity to become better, stronger and more alive. I made the choice to allow PTSD to be a first place ribbon. To Win the battle with PTSD.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. It all in how you frame it.

I am Not My Badge and My Badge isn’t Me.

No, this isn’t some off the cuff approach to announcing my retirement from policing. Far from it (especially seeing how I know that I have a good number of years left in me) as there is more to do. No, this is something completely different.

I was asked a few weeks ago by my psychologist to answer this question, “what have you learned from your journey so far?” What I thought was going to be a nice and easy answer turned out to be something a lot more. As the title to the post says, my answer was that the identity of my badge and me are two distinct and different things. I realize that this goes against every bit of indoctrination that police forces throw at recruits but a) I am nowhere near a recruit anymore and b) it really is the truth.

In training, you are pushed to conform, to become one with your Troopmates and join the big old happy policing family as brother and sisters. They go to great lengths, using tried and true actions and techniques to make sure that they break you down and build you back up to become the ideal police officer. Now don’t get me wrong, it is required. Aside from the military, what other job puts a gun in your hand and trains you to be ready to use it. I remember the first time that I had my gun drawn and leveled at another human, knowing in that split second that if the individual did not comply with my directions, I would pull the trigger and “stop the threat”. This is only possible through the indoctrination process.

This process also strips you of your identity in many ways, making a person another clog in the wheel. Once again, a necessary evil required to ensure that you will comply with the orders of your bosses and get the job done. It also protects a person to some degree as you can brush off what you did, experienced and lived through as being done for the job. But that is also where the problems begin.

Instead of reacting to the experiences, which in most cases are negative, we just brush them off and move on, Mountie Up as I like to call it. You become you badge and use your badge a shield to protect yourself (I wonder if that’s why they call badges shields?). You end up building layer upon layer of traumatic experiences that never truly get dealt with. Then one day, you say hello to your not so friendly friend, PTSD.

Well, six months of weekly psychological therapy completely smashed almost 18 years of indoctrination and Mountie Upping. I cam to the realization that my badge isn’t me, Jay and Jay is not my badge. I am a living breathing human that can be hurt and traumatized by the experiences that I deal with. Jay is a police officer but first and foremost, I am Jay, the human. Along the way, I got lost in the badge and forgot that I am me, someone who needs to be taken care of.

We, my psychologist and myself, have chronicled a shit tonne of situations / experiences that have damaged me. Many would not have been to the extreme that they are at now had I treated myself like a human and not a badge. Heck, I will go so far as to say that this is epidemic across the policing universe. There is a need for indoctrination but there is also a bigger need to teach and show members how to remain human and not become the badge that they wear. For me, this will be the battle that I must take up for myself.

It’s as Easy as……..

telephone

Picking up the Phone?

NO, NO, NO, NO,NO AND NO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Whoever coined this phrase and/or thought it would be a good message to get across to those that need help obviously never had to “pick up the phone”. It is far from easy to do. From personal experience, picking up the phone and calling to get help was the hardest thing that I have ever had to do in my life. And, the second call to tell my wife that I called to get help was even harder than the first phone call I made.

There are probably a whole bunch of psychological terms or concepts that explain this but here is my simplistic reasoning. For me, making the call to get help was the first step in acknowledging that there was something wrong. All those little signs had finally come to a head and there was no choice left to make. I had to call for help before things got to far away from me. (I firmly believe that if I didn’t call when I did, I would have set myself up to go down a very dark and destructive path to get the help.) There was no way around it, I was broken and needed to get fixed for myself and my family. There was no other option for me. Even though I knew making the call was the right thing to do, it also tore me up as I was admitting to the world that things were okay…….

Think of that for a second. Making the call means that you know that things aren’t right. Even more so, the next call was harder because I was telling my wife and family that I was broken. So, I just admitted to myself that things weren’t ok and now I was doing it to the person that was closets to me. Even in the best of situations it is hard for anyone to admit that they were wrong or that something isn’t right. Picture doing it with you thoughts and mind firmly entrenched in the perfect storm known as PTSD. It is not easy. Nobody wants to be seen as broken.

When you add to it the fact that almost every first responder is a type A personality, it gets worse. As a first responder, admitting that you need help is like a figurative death sentence. We have all seen what happens to co-workers that go sick and don’t want to have the same thing happen. We will push it down and carry on. I have heard the famous words, “Mountie Up” being said to others more than once in my career. It’s not easy to call for help as you don’t want to be “one of those members”.

But the bottom line is that even though making the call isn’t easy, you still have to make it. It will probably be the hardest thing that you ever do but you will be glad you did, at some point. Remember my equation: PTSD + Silence = Death. You have to make the call for help in order to change the equation:

PTSD + Talking = LIVING.

That has a better ring to it.

If you are in a bad spot or heading down a dark path, stop what you are doing and tell someone, anyone. Call a crisis line or talk to a friend, coworker or family. Hell, email me if you want just CHANGE THE EQUATION.

When your Childhood Dream becomes your Adult Nightmare

littlenightmaresthedepths

So, lets go back in time and revisit history a bit why don’t we.

Being a police officer, or to be specific, a RCMP member, was a truly a childhood dream and I can tell you the exact moment that this become my lifelong dream. I was a young whipper snipper of a 6 year old, playing outside of my house with my neighbour when a police car pulled up infront of his house. The car was different then the normal city police cruisers. This one had a huge buffalo crest on the side and the police officer that got out had a yellow stripe down his pant leg, not like the city police. In fact, to my 6 year old mind, this police officer was completely different than any other police officer I had ever seen.

I told my firend that I had to go home for a second and raced into the house. I ran into my room and puled out my suit from the closet. I quickly got changed and headed back outside, I was on a mission. I don’t even think I had the time to tell my parents what I was doing. I marched over to my neighbours house and knocked on the door. When I was let in, I went right to the police officer to introduce myself. He stopped what he wasdoing (taking a statement from my neighbour for a vehicle accident) and spent the next 20 plus minutes talking to me. His actions that day set in motion my childhood dream.

When I was 12 years old, my parens and I took a tour of Depot in Regina, Saskatchewan. At one point in the tour, you end up at the Chapel, here you sit for a Q&A session. During a lull in the activities, I leaned towards my mom and told her that one day, I will be here as a Mountie. Fast forward 16 years and the next time that my mom and I were in the Chapel was on my Graduation weekend for the church service on the Sunday morning.

Well, childhood dream completed. I was in my dream career, fulfilling my promise I made back when I was 12. The rest was suppose to be gravy. But, apparently, there was another plan in story.

I quickly became aware of he realities that my dream career brought with it. There were the assualts, the injuries, the dead bodies, the pain caused by senseless violence, stopping cars in the middle of nowhere, knocking on door at 3 a.m. to make a Next of Kin notification and the countless other things I was part of. It didn’t take long for the affects to being having an impact. And, it also didn’t take long for the dark and sick humour to come out to protect myself and others. Not to mention the “choir practices” with other members where we would sound off about all the shitty stuff that happened and start “one upping” each other to tell the shittier story.

I remember the terror I felt when I was hit by a chunk of ice and knocked under as I was trying to save a man’s life. Much the same with the sound of a shotgun being fired at me or the high powered rifle bullet that I clearly heard wiz past my vehicle. I remember the times I fought for my survival against guys that were bigger and strong and somehow I got the better of. I remember the death threat made against my wife and I as well as when I was notified that a street gang had taken a $25 000 hit out on me. I still shake my head when I think about the pipe bomb and dynamite I held in my hands at a search site, which caused he evacuation of homes and business within a kiometer of the site. And most importantly, I remember that little innocent baby as she died.

But the problem with me remembering all these things, many in very vivid detail, is that they have turned that childhood dream of becoming a police officer into a nightmare that I am now living. Today, for the first time since May 2018, I went to my office to pick up some paperwork. I was a mess. I had a full blown anxiety attack on my way there, with tears in my eyes just thinking of going. Once I was there, i wanted to leave ASAP. I got my stuff together and left, not wanting to spend another second there. At home, the exhaustion kicked in and I am drained.

So, I now fear what I once dreamt of and it is now my challenge to get a control over the nightmare. Do I regret being a police officer knowing that the dream turned into a nightmare? Nope, no regrets at all. It is simply part of the dream, whether I like it or not, that I have to go through. It’s my new normal and I have decided to use it as catelyst to bring on the changes I need to make for myself, as well as changing the current views of PTSD and first responders.

What was I saying????

Yep, the struggle is real people. The stories are true. The effect is mind blowing, really. Your memory takes a nose dive with PTSD. Well, at lest mine has.

You kow those times that you go to another room, say the kitchen, and as soon as you get there, you forget what you were going to get? Well, I don’t even have to get up off the couch now and I have already forgot what I was planning to get once I got up from the couch and go to the kitchen…… Yes, it is that bad. I can easily go a whole day with this scenario playing out every hour on the hour, if not more often than that.

From what I understand, it has to do with the fact that the PTSD has kind of rewired your brain to work differently as you are enveloped by the trauma, side effects, syptoms and all around fun that it brings. Remembering what you need to do is the least of the concerns that your brain has. Its the perfect examle of how PTSD effects EVERYTHING in your life.

But I have found away around it, sort of. I make notes. Heck, I have even made notes to remind me about my other notes. I kid you not. I have to remind myself to check the calendar on my phone before I agree or decide to do something to make sure I’m free. That’s even if it is for something on the same day. My mind just can’t seem to hold on to anything too long.

Perfect example. I will call my wife to ask or say something that at the time seemed important. But if she picks up, I’m a blank and have no idea why I called her. I have to take a second an quickly scan my memory to see if I can remember why I was calling her. If she doesn’t pick up, she might as well not bother calling back, because unless I wrote it down, it’s gone. Sucked into the PTSD vortex, only glimpse of the memory to be seen as it swirls away.

Yep, PTSD and memory does not see eye to eye, except if it is the negative stuff. Those memories easily pop up and invade your thoughts non stop. But if you are trying to remember if you put your son’s agenda in his bag, forget about it. Not going to happen. If your out for dinner and having a good time, you can be assured that a PTSD memory will pull up a seat and plop down for you to endure for the rest of dinner. You can recall all the words spoken, the images engrained in your mind, the sights and smells but you can’t remember what you ordered as an appie.

PTSD affects your memory, or st least some of it.