MAY 2023 - Blues Vol 39 No. 5

A BADGE OF HONOR healing

A BADGE OF HONOR healing our heroes YOUR BRAIN DRAWER It doesn’t matter how much time you have on the job as a First responder. Triggers begin from the day you take the oath to protect and serve others. Take look back at who you were prior to raising your hand in that oath. Look at how you reacted to certain situations, and how you may have changed. In some cases, for the worse, and maybe some for the better, but a change has taken place. Your mind remembers all interactions, every sound, sight, smell, and touch. Which is sometimes quickly dismissed as “Déjà vu” but other times sparking a reaction to a past action. The brain will compartmentalize these encounters to protect us. Trauma being one of those compartments. The brain can place the bad things which we have seen or may have been victim of in a folder inside your “brain draw” This allows the file to be secured so you can move onto normal daily activities. A first responders’ life can cause these draws to become full very quickly causing the “Brain draw” not to close securely. We all know if we leave something open, certain things can leak out or become accessed easily. This happens with many first responders. The easy access to these draws, denies our Pre-First Responder coping and reasoning skills to be pushed aside for a more direct, sometimes inappropriate response to the active issue. Let’s look at sounds. When someone who has been exposed to many domestic violence incidents or heated confrontation events, any type of argument has the potential to become highly agitated. It could be the tone, the voice inflection, word, or phrase. Your brain will remember this, access the file in which it first heard, causing your guard to go up making you react in the same manner you did the first time you heard it. This is called the protection factor. It’s your brains way of letting you know danger is close or immanent. As a First Responder we go into protection mode everyday of our careers. In some cases, 30 plus years of wearing a suit of armor. We are conditioned to take control of every situation, because in the field it can be the matter of life and death. The brain doesn’t know that you are having an argument with your spouse over an overcooked dinner, all it hears or may recognize are the same inflection or tone once heard, immediately accessing the draw, continuing the file, containing the domestic dispute you responded to 10 years ago, where you were jumped from behind and had to use violent force to stop the attack to protect your life. This may have work well on the street, but not as well in a dinner issue. Arguments with a spouse should be handled in a much calmer fashion with more compassion and a less heated response. We need to learn the difference. Visual triggers can also have the same effect. We as humans are very visual by nature. We take in everything around us. We see things and store things we don’t even remember seeing. When we walk through a park, we not only see the people in the park, but we also see trees and birds, paths and benches, trash yrs. SAMANTHA HORWITZ & JOHN SALERNO cans and water fountains. We will remember the things that stand out and dismiss the other things as irrelevant. We retain only certain objects in our short-term memory and store everything else away in the Brain Draw. Now if there were colorful trashcans along the path it may stay in the short term as a topic of conversation, but if they were typical trash bins you would most likely dismiss them and place them into long term memory. As first responders, we sometimes view the most horrific events moving through them in a robotic way during our shift dismissing them into our longterm memory like the discarded trashcans. If one of those trashcans continued a noticeable stench permeating from it, and someone talked about a bad smell, your brain would access the Brain draw with the bad smell of the trash bin in the park as a recollection. I can go on, but I am sure you see the picture. We need to begin and notice the changes within ourselves when we feel our anger begin to rise, or as we begin to slip into a depression state of mind. Ask ourselves, what happen in the last 5 or 10 minutes that may have triggered these emotions. Why did I suddenly go from happy to sad, or calm to anger? What was the reason, and/or the trigger placing me in my current state of mind. You will find many of these times, it was a sensory trigger that has accessed a past memory. What this does, it compromises your coping mechanisms, blocking your ability to handle certain situations in a more reasonable way. Keeping you safe and in control of the situation. Arguments with your spouse should never turn into a violent rage. Seeing a car accident should never put you into a deep depression, and a plane flying over your head should not make you duck for cover. It’s great to have the protection factors and skills we have learned and experienced, but it is equally damaging if those same protectors are not controlled or managed allowing us to enjoy the normal beauty of what life has to offer. Now let’s reflect, Life as a First Responder holds many responsibilities when it comes to the public and their health and safety. We are willing to lay down our lives in our missions to help a stranger, but we must look in the mirror and re-introduce ourselves, to ourselves and afford ourselves that same level of responsibly we give others. Its ok to give back to yourself. Its ok to take a break. Its ok to feel. You are allowed, just give yourself the permission. It’s not ok to deprive ourselves, our spouses, family, and friends to the person you truly are. The person before the oath, the person before the job, the person before the trauma. I am giving you the permission to be that person again. You owe it to Yourself. Ret. NYPD John Salerno A Badge of Honor click or scan here, for your FREE BLUES Subscription. 102 The BLUES The BLUES 103