Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
From Silent Struggle to Asking for Help: Faith, Family and Courage
Aaron shares his personal journey from the brink of suicide to finding peace through therapy, offering critical guidance for first responders struggling with trauma. He explores how shifting from a "hummingbird" mentality to a more balanced "hawk" approach has transformed his relationships and overall wellbeing.
• Understanding the difference between hummingbirds (constantly moving, high stress) and hawks (calm, deliberate) in life approach
• How leaving law enforcement, though initially traumatic, became a pathway to healing
• Morning meditation and spiritual practices that helped create internal peace
• The transformation of family relationships, especially with his daughter
• Warning signs of mental health crisis in first responders that colleagues should recognize
• Red flags that indicate someone may be considering suicide
• The importance of finding a culturally competent, trauma-trained therapist
• How therapeutic modalities like EMDR and neuromodulation work
• Five key questions to ask when selecting a therapist as a first responder
• Why most first responders resist therapy and how to overcome that resistance
You can reach out to Aaron at murders2music@gmail.com if you need support or have questions about finding the right therapist for your situation.
Gift For You!!! Murders to Music will be releasing "SNAPSHOTS" periodcally to keep you entertained throughout the week! Snapshots will be short, concise bonus episodes containing funny stories, tid bits of brilliance and magical moments!!! Give them a listen and keep up on the tea!
Hi, I'm Aaron your host and I would love to invite you to leave a review, send some fan mail or email me at Murder2Music@gmail.com. Does something I'm saying resonate with you...Tell me about it! Is there something you want to hear more about...Tell me about it! This show is to provide value, education and entertainment and hopefully find its way to the WORLD! Share, Like and Love the Murders to Music Podcast!
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music podcast. My name is Aaron, I'm your host and you guys are in for another great show. So on tonight's show, I want to give you guys just a little bit of insight that could save your life, it could change your world around and it could make you a completely different person. If you know, like, if you're anything like me, I am stuck in the way that I am. It's just the way that I am and this way I'm always going to be. But maybe we don't like ourselves in that position. So I want to show you a way and talk to you about a way where you can change and completely make you unrecognizable to those around you and even yourself when you look in the mirror. But before we go there, I got an email this week from a listener and this is a new listener and this is what it says. It says hey, I just want to say thank you for your podcast. I'm only on episode three, but it has been just what I've been needing right now.
Speaker 1:When I heard about your podcast, I was totally interested in the crime and music connection, but I didn't realize how much of your story about dealing with life's traumas would be helpful. The things that you talk about so far gave me hope for dealing with the PTSD effects I have. Time will tell how this affects me long-term, but I did want to say thank you for now and she signed off, and that is the kind of stuff that is the reason that we do this, that I say we, I do this podcast every week and spend the hours of talking and researching and editing and posting and all that stuff. It is simply to find people where they are in that moment and I never know how the conversation that I'm going to put forward on this podcast may land in your heart or in your mind or in your situation or your world, or maybe those around you. Maybe it's not you that's struggling, but maybe something I say you recognize in one of your coworkers or your family members or something like that, and you're like holy buckets. This just makes sense and maybe this is similar to what they're going through. It may just give you a different angle, perspective or filter to look through in those around, perspective or filter to look through in those around you or maybe even in yourself. So I just want to say thank you to that listener for reaching out and taking the time to go out there, send me a message. It was so appreciated and I really enjoyed our banter back and forth. So if you need anything else, reach out to me. Anybody can email me at murders2music at gmailcom. Murders the number two music at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:So let's get into tonight's show. See, a few weeks ago I released an episode about the hawk and the hummingbird and essentially it goes like this you see, some of us are hummingbirds. We flap our wings, our hearts beat really fast, we're involved in everything, we're move, move, move, move, move, move, move. A hundred miles an hour we might not accomplish everything that we start and at the end of the day we have high stress, high blood pressure, failed marriages, failed relationships, moving around in our jobs and we die early. Hummingbirds die early because their little heart has beat 10,000 times a minute and it just can't last over a long period of time. But then you have those hawks in the world, and those hawks are the people you work around that you wonder if they even have a pulse. They slaughter in, they do their thing, they're nice and slow, everything is calculated. They just kind of get through life and they're happy and they go home and they have relationships and they have people around them. That is the hawk.
Speaker 1:And when I got told this, I got told that I was a hummingbird and I was offended because the guy didn't even know me. But he didn't need to know me to understand and to be able to read what I was really all about. Since 2016, when this was told to me, I have had times of being a hummingbird, which has been about 94.273% of the time, and the rest of the time I've tried to be a hawk because I realized there's some benefit in that hawk-like approach to life. So when I came out of law enforcement, I came out kicking and screaming, which many of you know, and I want to talk a little bit about the therapy and the therapy sessions and I'm not going to catch everybody up to all the details because it's in all those past episodes. Right, I haven't left anything out and there's been a lot of episodes where I really spill the beans and I am honest, transparent, vulnerable, cry, all that other stuff to kind of tell you about my journey. But I want to talk to you about the good, the bad and the ugly, but tonight I want to talk to you about the good and I want to celebrate where we are today and then I'm going to tell you and everybody listening and your peers and your friends and anybody you share this with, how they can also find this peace that I'm enjoying right now.
Speaker 1:So during my therapy sessions over the past three years and there's been several hundred of them we've spoke about all kinds of different aspects of my life and there's these epiphanies that come through every now and then where you have some insight into a part of your soul and a part of your mental well-being and all of that that you didn't even know existed. Right, we learn stuff about ourselves and that is really really cool. But a few months ago my therapist started to encourage me to slow down and she said you know, you need to meditate and focus on yourself and perhaps open the Bible and or find your word not that suggesting I wasn't reading my Bible, but I wasn't and find the word to study and something to meditate on and help kind of center yourself. And, without it sounding hippy dippy, I'm like all right, how could this hurt? I understand the benefits of meditation, I understand the benefits of my faith, I understand the benefits of slowing down and I understand the benefits of focusing on myself. This can't be a bad thing.
Speaker 1:So, not knowing how to do this, I just started doing something and I would wake up early in the morning and play my Calm app and do a meditation and open my Bible and really haven't been a Christian since I was, I don't know, really going to church since I was 18, 19 years old. I really didn't know where to start because I've never read the Bible from cover to cover and I don't know where to go to look for things. But you know, I found that I just opened it and started reading randomly and there was a Bible study in the middle. So I started following that and it led me in some direction and that was kind of cool. So I started doing that and I started to notice, you know, a little bit of change and the change was this I'm getting up an hour earlier every day, but I'm not any more tired. I feel more rejuvenated, kind of, throughout the day, but I'm still a hummingbird, I'm still buzzing along and as this month turns to two months of doing this, we start talking about the slowing down and this hummingbird hot conversation comes up during therapy and I start talking about my need to perform and you know I call it results driven, but it's really performance driven and I do things at work or at least I did as a cop that if I did things and I performed them well, at a high level that maybe somebody other people couldn't achieve, then everybody would clap applause, I would get a reward, I would have some dopamine releases as a result.
Speaker 1:I have an attaboy and I would rinse and repeat and do it again and I took that, as I originally saw that, as ego driven and pride. And there is some pride and ego in that. But when I was talking it over with her we also spoke about she saw it as maybe insecurity and an insecurity and there was a need to compensate or overcompensate, to prove my worth. And when she brought that to my attention it really made sense. It really made sense that I'm doing what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:I was insecure. I had the self-esteem and have the self-esteem of a gnat, you know, um, and I'm my hardest critic and I'm hardest on myself. So when she brought up this insecurity, it made me really stop to think. Is that what was happening? And you know, to some extent I was insecure and the only place that I really felt like I could hold my own and have value or worth was in my war room or in my work environment. And on the weekends I would go home and I would be anxious and unable to rest and felt out of place, like a fish out of water.
Speaker 1:But as soon as I got to the office and stepped back in front of my whiteboard, that is where I just I felt a sense of peace. And I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that feels this way. I'm not the only one that has ever felt this. And it doesn't make sense, right, I'm going to the office and I'm solving murders and I'm not the only one that has ever felt this. And it doesn't make sense, right, I'm going to the office and I'm solving murders and I'm doing all this active stuff and risking lives. And you know, heaven forbid, I could fall out of my chair and get a paper cut. Something like that could happen. But that is where I felt peace. That is where I felt at home was in that office space environment. Why? Because there I could prove myself and I could prove and I could prove my worth and my value at home.
Speaker 1:What had happened at home, well, this has happened at home. I had sacrificed my family and my kids and my wife and my friends for years. When the phone rang, the last thing I thought about was do we have a kids event? Is there a sporting event? Is there a wedding I need to go to with my wife? Does my wife have a function that she needs me to attend with her? The phone rang and I jumped up and I went and for years I took my family for granted that they were going to be there when I got home and they were going to be there to receive what I had left over.
Speaker 1:And a lot of times what I had left over wasn't pretty. It was shortness, it was attitude, it was frustration, it was yelling, screaming, swearing. It was all of the stuff that makes a hellish relationship. And you have to walk on eggshells, and my wife spoke about that three weeks ago when I recorded a show with her. She got the leftovers and I sacrificed her. I sacrificed her because as long as I was at home, I felt out of place. As soon as I got to my office, I felt like I was in somewhere that I could control, an environment where I felt at peace, and I had things completely backwards. There was a complete imbalance in my soul.
Speaker 1:So this has come up over the therapy and I tell you this, to only tell you this, that if I hadn't have come out of law enforcement when I did kicking and screaming against my will, there is a very good chance I would not be alive today. Not that I would have taken my own life, that's not it but there's a very good chance that I would have died from a heart attack or a stroke. My blood pressure was 180 over 140 the day that I went to the doctor's office. That is heart attack, stroke-ish range, and I wasn't slowing down. But then I come out of this law enforcement world and I come out and I'm forced into a world of loneliness and depression and onto this island and my work. People aren't checking on me and I won't go into the details on this because I've spoke about it before. But what I will say is this If it wasn't for the divine intervention of the separation of church and state, if you will, where my workers ignored me, didn't talk to me, didn't check on me, that allowed that separation to occur and, as a result, I could put that part of my life almost behind me because I wasn't having the daily reminder of what I was missing or what I wasn't involved in, which, at the time, is really what I craved to be Because, remember, I wasn't at peace at home.
Speaker 1:I was only at peace at work in front of the whiteboard, sniffing my dry erase markers. That is where I felt the most peace. That is where I felt the most peace. So, as we continue through this path of healing and through these different therapy sessions and my therapist's encouragement to slow down, meditate, focus on myself, bible, take time just to center and quiet my soul, I started doing that and over the past month and a half or so, between the sessions and the self care, I have noticed a huge difference in myself and it's super cool. This is what I want to celebrate, right? I never thought I would be I'm so. I feel like I'm at peace right now. I feel um grounded, I feel like the relationship.
Speaker 1:I went on a daddy daughter date with my daughter this weekend and she took me to a daddy daughter dance and I'm out there doing these line dances and all this different stuff with my daughter in front of a ton of other strangers in a well-lit room at some, you know homeschool dance event and I'm there and it was so amazing just to spend that time with my daughter. There is no way that I would have done that in years past. And at one point we had to get down on our knee and tell our daughters how much they meant to us and what we loved about them. And I got down on that knee and absolutely stared into my daughter's eyes and started bawling and she was crying because, coming out in law enforcement, she and I had a tumultuous relationship. We were, we were going opposite directions. I was losing my relationship with her.
Speaker 1:Since coming out, I've opened up the bandwidth to be able to process and help her along her way and we have been through a lot of hell together and held hands through hell over the last three years between her mental health stuff and my mental health stuff. And just in that unspoken moment when we said nothing at all, all was said and we're both crying and I'm hugging her and there's a picture floating around somewhere that somebody took and it was an amazing, amazing moment. And that just goes to show how things have changed. Well, why have things changed? It had to do with the Bible. It had to do with slowing down, meditating, focusing on myself, scripture, faith, all of that stuff, but really it's my therapist. My therapist is culturally competent, she is connected to law enforcement and has been for decades. She gets it, she understands, she's a believer and she's an absolute 10. And I am so. I thank God all the time for putting her in my life when he did, because she has helped me grow so much over the past three years and if it wasn't for her input and help along the way, I don't know where I would be right now. I would probably be a bitter, upset, terrible human being, but instead I feel this peace and I'm able to go in in moments where I have nothing to talk about. Yet those are the most productive ones, because she knows me, she gets me and it's just absolutely amazing and part of me being here today is because of my faith, my therapist, my family and just an amazing support group. So I tell you all of this, to tell you this A few months six, eight, nine months ago, a year ago, I released an episode on finding your therapist and finding your therapist I spoke about it's called the code three response finding your ideal therapist and I spoke about the things that you need to look for into that therapist world and for me, therapy was a bad word.
Speaker 1:Therapy was a word that I didn't want to hear and I made fun of people that had that went to therapy, and some of you out there, I guarantee there's some people from the old school, old regime, like I was, that feels the same way. They're like man, this is all a bunch of crap and I'm not going to see a therapist for anything. And I get it, I totally get it, then don't. But I encourage you just to listen to the rest of this show. I encourage you to have an open mind. A mind is like a parachute it only works if it's open. Thank you, mark Big Eagle, for that, and that is exactly what I'm asking you to do is just listen to the rest of this show. I'm going to play this episode for you.
Speaker 1:This episode was recorded about 10 months ago. There's a lot of new listeners, thousands of new listeners to this show every single week that haven't heard this and, just like that writer wrote me this week where the message hit her where it needed to, I'm hoping that somebody hears this message. It hits them where they need to and they can find a better life as a result. I am more peaceful today than I have been in decades and I've said that before, about four or five months ago and it's only getting better. My relationships with my family, my wife, my kids, my work. I'm okay and I'm peaceful in the slow times at work. I find those times as opportunities to build relationships and to learn and to realize that I don't have to perform. I don't have to overcompensate to be proven worthy in my current situation. Ladies and gentlemen, please listen to the rest of the show. Thank you so much, and I love each and every one of you guys. Love each and every one of you guys.
Speaker 1:So it's 2012 and I'm standing on the corner of a busy street in downtown Vancouver, washington. I'm in front of this old building that was probably established well over a hundred years ago. I'm nervous. I can feel my palms are sweaty. I'm embarrassed to be standing there. I walk through the front doors of this big glass building. There's some couches in the front lobby. There's people coming and going. I don't know anybody there. It's my first time ever being there.
Speaker 1:So I get into the elevator and I go up to the third floor. When I get to the third floor. I get off the elevator and I look up and down the long hallway. There's doors to the left and the right all the way down. It's a pretty nondescript hallway and there's small little labels on each door. So I go down the hallway until I find the label that I'm looking for, and that label is to a therapist that I've never met. I walk in the door. Once I get inside the door, it's a smaller room entryway, if you will, very nondescript, a couple of fake plants and a desk that says ring the bell. I rang the bell and within a few minutes about a 60 year old man 65 year old came out of one of the interior doors, introduced himself and told me to come in and he was going to be my therapist.
Speaker 1:I sit down in the chair and don't really want to be there, scared, nervous. It has taken a lot for me to get to this position, to where I am. I sit there for an hour. During that hour I've already decided that I am going to bear it all because I have no hope. I just came out of the woods from having a gun in my mouth. I am literally searching and seeking for help. I need to save my life. I need to save my marriage. I need to save my relationship with my kids. I need to save my friendships. I need to save my job. I am at rock bottom.
Speaker 1:So I sit there and I bare my soul. I tell him everything, every dark secret, everything I've ever done, every mistake I've made in life, in my marriage, with my kids, with my family, every lie I've told. I tell him everything because I'm desperate to seek help. I'm desperate for somebody to help me get over this hurdle and this obstacle. I know that my life is worth living, but I sure don't feel it. We go through everything. A lot of the focus was on my marriage and my work. I go through all of this At the end of this hour where I feel completely gutted. I feel like that animal in the woods that has been shot, killed, gutted, and there is nothing left. It's a hollow cavity.
Speaker 1:And he says well, here's a piece of paper for you that talks about overcoming obstacles and hurdles in a marriage and finding love. And I'll be honest with you, aaron, your case is too complex for me. I am getting ready to retire. I don't have the time, the availability or the bandwidth to take your case on. You're going to need to go back to EAP. Tell them to reassign you to a new counselor. Thank you for your time, but we won't be meeting again.
Speaker 1:That was my first experience with a counselor. Now, how did I get there? I got there because I am sitting in a training session in Seattle, washington, and my life has sucked. I've made some really piss poor decisions and I have determined that I'm not getting through this on my own and I'd rather this training session. In this training session, I see this tall, good-looking model police officer, state trooper. He's up there teaching this class and he's telling a story about how he's a Washington State Patrol trooper. He's SWAT team, he is everything, a poster child for the Washington State Police.
Speaker 1:Yet he found himself in a spiraling downward turn of his career. He found himself addicted to alcohol, addicted to painkillers, suicidal, held his family hostage, was inside holding his family hostage and holding himself hostage, while his very own SWAT team was outside trying to negotiate to bring him out. And how did he get there? He didn't get there because he wanted to make these decisions. He got there because it was a slow fade from the poster child that he was when he started to where he'd become. Over a matter of time, he didn't even recognize the person that he was, so he ultimately gave up, turned himself in that night, sought help and then started helping others in these mental health crises. And then he crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis anyway. Then he put up on the board a list of indicators of mental health stressors and suicidal warning signs and I checked off 18 of the 20 of them and that is how I knew that, me putting the gun in my mouth and wanting to take my life.
Speaker 1:Just a few days earlier, I was in a really, really bad place, so I reached out to EAP. Eap is an employee assistance program. It says, hey, we're going to find you a confidential counselor and you're going to go see them and they're going to help you with all your problems. The problem is those counselors aren't vetted out. Nobody knows really what they are. They could be counseling you on financial issues. They can be counseling you on marriage, or they can be counseling you on financial issues. They can be counseling you on marriage, or they can be counseling you on the crisis that you experience as a police officer or a first responder. So these are just random people and that's the guy that I got. That experience left me feeling discouraged, vulnerable, raw and generally opposed to any kind of future therapy.
Speaker 1:And I think that, as first responders, oftentimes by the time we reach out and we're ready to seek help, we are ready to expose things, and sometimes we get shut down. The idea of this podcast is not for me just to share my ideas, but I have sought the help of some very skilled, talented professionals and I want to share their information with you. So here we go. What are the stressors of first responders? And when I say first responders again, from fire to doctor and nurses, we're trained in resiliency. We're trained in how to deal with crises in front of us not how to deal with crises inside of us world and know exactly how to respond to that, but when we see disaster and crisis inside of us, it scares us, we run, we hide, we feel like we are less than we feel, like maybe we're not good enough or capable to do the job that we once did. So instead of dealing with that head on, we hide from it and we allow it to compound, and when it compounds, that is what creates a lot of problems for us, including PTSD and cumulative PTSD, and stress and suicide and mental illness and mental health problems all along the way.
Speaker 1:So what are some of those stressors? You see, we deal with loss and grief all the time and it's not we hear about it. We have direct encounters with the situation and then the aftermath the crying, the pain, the screaming, the families, the stepping over the bodies in crime scenes, picking people back up, dealing with families. We deal with that every single day. Life-threatening situations. Life-threatening situations Whether you're getting shot at as a police officer or whether you're bailing out of a window as a firefighter. Every single day there's another life-threatening situation and we can only take so many of those before we find ourselves needing help. But again, there's a stigma with asking for help and that stigma just adds to our overall compounding stress.
Speaker 1:There's moral dilemmas. Sometimes we make decisions that may violate our personal and moral codes and that can last in emotional scars forever. We're making decisions, we're doing things in the line of duty, under the color of authority, that maybe violate what we truly believe. There's all this pressure and public scrutiny. If you were around during Black Lives Matter, everything we did was getting scrutinized. The quick decisions that we have to make in a split second. Once we make them. They get to get armchair quarterbacked for the next 10 years and people will always question our decisions. You know we don't have time. Whether you're again a firefighter, a doctor, a nurse, a cop, whatever, we don't have time to really analyze the outcome when we make that decision. We just have to rely on our training.
Speaker 1:That is, a high pressure force, the physical strain, the physical demands of the job, from our equipment to getting in and out of the cars, to running, to jumping, to falling, to getting burned, to having smoke inhalation, to getting shot at, whatever it may be, we have all of these physical strains that compound and affect us. These are the stressors that we deal with every single day. Us. These are the stressors that we deal with every single day. So when you find yourself, when I found myself, needing help, these are the things we forget about. Right, because we're just the tough person that goes out there. We don't need help, we are the help. We don't call for help. We show up when you need help, we take control of situations and we bring chaos back into order.
Speaker 1:So with those, that mentality in our mind of saving lives and taking control of situations that are out of control, it's really hard for us to say. You know what I'm feeling, these stressors and these are the things that are really bothering me, and this is why I need help. Instead, we hide from it and we hope that it just goes away on its own, but I think we all know that's not the case. So I'm really thankful for the person that reached out and says hey, I need help. I don't know how to find a therapist. Can you help me? And that's the answer I want to give. But I really want to talk about how we get to that, because I don't think I'm the only one that's ever felt this way, and there may be somebody listening to this right now that is feeling all of these things, and they're like I thought I was the only one, because we don't talk about this in the report writing room or in the fire bays or in the hospital lounge. These aren't things we talk about, because these things make us feel less than what we think we should be.
Speaker 1:So, as we talk about these stressors, these stressors are going to sometimes at least in my situation, which I can speak for firsthand are going to cause me to react. They're going to cause me to feel a certain way, and you know, there were some of these red flags that my coworkers could have seen, should have seen, did see and ignored. Well, why do they ignore them? They ignore them because they're scared to get involved in somebody else's world and somebody else's business. When I'm sitting in the locker room getting dressed for shift, night after night after night, bawling tears rolling down my face, I'm getting dressed out in a police uniform, I get on the road, I'm taking calls, I'm getting into fights with every single person that I contact, those are all red flags and clues that somebody should have seen. They saw them, they watched me cry in the room.
Speaker 1:But there was only one person after months of this, who stepped up and says hey, I hear there's some stuff going on. I'm here to help you. I love you. If you need it, you know I can help, and I thought that was super, super cool. Everybody else ignored it because it's not their problem. Yet if I were to go out on that street and call for help, I would have a hundred cops at my back door instantly. If I needed a code three response because I'm getting into a fight, right. So it's just the difference.
Speaker 1:When we start talking about mental health, not only is there the stigma from us, there's the stigma others feel that they feel like I can't help, I'm not trained, I don't know what to do. So here are some red flags that you can watch out for in yourself and some other people. First of all, social withdrawal. I've spoke about this in the past Isolating and insulating from yourself, your friends, your family. If there's a distinct change where sociable individuals start preferring to be alone, change where sociable individuals start preferring to be alone, isolating and withdrawing from normal activities, somebody should pay attention to that.
Speaker 1:Any kind of increased substance abuse turning to alcohol, turning to drugs, stealing drugs out of the drug turn-in area, whatever it may be. If you see that it's a clue. Neglect of personal responsibilities, a decline, any decline in a regular commitment to taking care of themselves, disheveled look, not showering, not caring. You can tell when somebody has given up. When they're dressing, coming to work like they're going to Walmart. That is a clue. We shouldn't be wearing pajama pants to the office. Yet it happens and people don't question it. Any changes in sleep patterns insomnia, oversleeping, nightmares, night terrors, cold sweats all of these things I've experienced not too long ago. These are all things again. These are red flags that we should watch out for Risk-taking behavior, engaging in things that are out of character, dangerous actions, things that say I just don't care.
Speaker 1:Outbursts, blow-ups, feelings of despair, feelings of trapped, comments about feeling trapped, comments about being depressed, comments about being sad all things that we should be watching for in ourselves and others as we move through this first responders world and look out for each other. Take care of each other all the time, not just when the devil jumps up in front of you, but let's take care of each other when we see these red flags. Again, these red flags were there long before I was suicidal, yet nobody stepped up to help and I felt so, so alone. Let's talk about suicide. Remember, I said there was that suicide list, you know, and I pulled up a list and again, I'm not an expert in this field, right but I've done some research because I want to provide meaningful stuff in this podcast, not just my opinions or feelings. So I pulled up a list of warning signs for suicide risks among first responders and a lot of them are some of those same red flags that I just spoke about.
Speaker 1:But self-isolating from friends and family, exhibiting a sudden and unexplained improvement in mood after being depressed or withdrawn, and that I mean this is a particularly dangerous sign because if the officers come to terms with their death and with their end of life, all of a sudden they may be happier because they know, may be happier because they know the end is near. They're giving stuff away, they're doing the things that we, as first responders, know suicidal people do, right. All of a sudden they're giving away their worldly possessions, again, neglecting appearance and hygiene, openly discussing that they're out of control, expressing that they're overwhelmed, unable to find solutions to problems, developing morbid interest in homicides or suicides or going to all the homicide calls or all the suicide calls. Behavioral changes that include hostile, argumentative, insubordinate, fighting those types of things, inappropriately using and displaying their weapons or unnecessarily using them. You know the clue to me, the clue in my situation. Somebody should have seen that I was fighting with every single person, every single person I was getting into a physical altercation with every single night. That is not my style. And somebody could have seen that. Exhibiting some reckless behavior, taking unnecessary risks on the job, developing problems with alcohol or drugs, which we spoke about, asking other officers to keep their weapons, making future plans for the family, increasing insurance. These are all things that are listed out there through the National Suicide Prevention Hotline that says these are the suicide risks that we should be looking for.
Speaker 1:Why wouldn't people seek help? People don't seek help, and I think you know this, but people don't seek help because there's a stigma for therapy and therapists. Again, oftentimes we feel like by the time we're ready for help, we're broken, we are no good, we're damaged, we're not the person we used to be. These are all things not true, but these are all things that we feel inside that help us, keep us sorry from getting the help that we need. I know one of the things that I really felt was a lack of trust. For me to reach out to my EAP was very, very hard. I didn't trust anybody. Being a cop, I didn't trust anyone. So, having that lack of trust and then, once I got there, to have it thrown right back in my face, I really wanted nothing else to do with therapy.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, as the years went on, you know, my mind got changed and I was able to get some help and find a therapist. That I absolutely think is amazing, but it took a lot of time and you know there was another therapist in the process that came by. That I'll tell you about in a second. But that therapist you know we didn't necessarily see eye to eye, we didn't jive on everything and there were some real warning signs and red flags there with that therapist that I should have picked up on. I didn't, and thankfully it didn't cause too much damage. Have picked up on I didn't and thankfully it didn't cause too much damage. So let's talk about how this whole thing got started.
Speaker 1:So I received this email and the email says Hello, aaron, in your recent podcast Pathways to Healing, you spoke about how important it was to find a therapist that you connect with. I've been wanting to seek therapy, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to not only find a therapist that I connect with but somebody that is willing to do in-person therapy. I was wondering if you had any insight on different ways to find a therapist and or if you felt like you had enough content to create a podcast about the subject. I think that would be very helpful, not just for myself but for others out there struggling with some of the same situations myself, but for others out there struggling with some of the same situations. So with that I reached out to my therapist and I said hey, this is what I've got going on. Can you help me put some information together as to what people should be looking for as they're trying to find a therapist in the first responder world? So I'm going to read the response and here it goes Aaron, this is something I feel passionate about and also protective. I've seen too many first responders reach out for help and not find a good fit, so they feel therapy will not work for them and or they are too discouraged to keep trying.
Speaker 1:At the foundation a counselor needs to be trained in is how to process ongoing traumas. You see, it's not only the past events for a first responder, but a daily lifestyle of re-entering their environment, of crisis trauma and associated emotional responses. It can accentuate damage when this happens and there is a lack of internal support from the department. Trauma registers when an individual is consistently living outside of their emotional, mental and physical capacity. It is not usually a singular event, living outside the capacity for a long period of time, which happens for most, if not all, first responders. It causes one to look for relief and find coping strategies that further hinder returning to their true self. There is little healing that takes place when a therapist merely focuses on a symptom relief. This is just another way to mask what is taking place under the surface. Resiliency, nervous system repair and perspective are not to be defined by the trauma. Therapies and modalities such as EMDR reprocessing are helpful in this, and the new lifestyle choices with greater self-awareness can all provide support to heal. Counselors do not have training in this during their education and many now say they focus on first responders because it's marketable. A client needs to ask how they address first responder trauma differently than other clients, their experience or exposure to first responder culture, their advanced trauma training, holistic care of emotional, mental and psychological modalities. More importantly, most clinicians and psychologists that specialize in the field are trauma-informed and very apt in this area. Pulling from singular modalities, however, trauma accentuates other areas of vulnerability for most individuals that lay dormant. Therapists need to meet an individual personally, where they're at, while utilizing an eclectic holistic modalities that support these other areas. The balance is crucial and hard to find in trauma care providers.
Speaker 1:These are my initial thoughts. Let me know if you want to talk more. So that is the response to the email. Now let's break that down just a little bit. There's a lot being said there and I want to break it down and take it in chunks. Right, you could eat a whole elephant. You just have to do it one bite at a time. So here's what we got.
Speaker 1:So first, the therapist should be trained as a trauma therapist and training complex trauma. Well, let's define what those terms are. A therapist should be trained as a trauma therapist and trained in complex trauma. Well, let's define what those terms are. A trauma-trained therapist is a licensed mental health professional who's received specialized training and significant clinical experience in working with individuals who have experienced trauma, allowing them to effectively guide clients through processing trauma events in a safe and controlled environment, often utilizing evidence-based treatment modalities like EMDR. So that is a training to trauma therapist. Now, what is complex trauma? Complex trauma refers to a condition that develops after repeated exposures to multiple severe and often interconnected traumatic events. It goes on to say that typically, during childhood or adolescence is when these are experienced. However, we know that these are also experienced in our profession as first responders. That is what complex trauma is.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that my therapist said was that we need to find a therapist that will not only deal with the historical issues, but the current issues that occur every time we reenter that world. You see, it's much like a hole in the boat. I heard somebody say this when I was researching this. It's much like you have a boat and there's a hole in it and the water keeps coming in and you just have to keep bailing it out. It's not like you're trying to bail the water out of the boat and then everything is good. Every time you're bailing water out, more water is coming in, and that's the way we are as first responders. We have the traumas that we bring to the table that get us to that therapy session.
Speaker 1:However, every single day, we are reaffected by more trauma and we need to learn how to deal with that, and we need therapists who can also deal with that. You see, therapists who are trained in that will give you skills to put in your toolbox. They will give you skills that will help you process those traumas as they happen, help you find that safe space, help you find that grounding that says I'm okay, I need to compartmentalize this, I need to push through this and move on. I don't get to take a timeout. Take a timeout, but I know that in this moment, this is what's going on. I can process this. We can deal with this later, but I need to move forward and that is a much better approach than the first responder that doesn't even recognize that there's an issue, because the one that doesn't recognize the issue doesn't know there's anything to come back and reprocess and deal with. That is the one that compounds, compartmentalizes and all of a sudden blows up and takes you out of a job, kind of like me, and I think it's very important to find those therapists that have that experience and that are trauma trained.
Speaker 1:You know, another experience I had is during this coming out of law enforcement 2022, 2023, whenever it was the first therapist that I got through my medical insurance. He says he's trauma trained. He says that he knows all about it, he has some experience there and he can help me. Well, when I took my problems to him, it literally shocked him when I told him some of the things that had happened to me and some of the things I was involved in. It shocked his conscience and he was unable to maintain his composure at times. It got so bad that when we would try to meet, instead of talking about my problems and my dreams and my nightmares that I was having, he's asking me what kind of guns he should get to protect his house, with what caliber, what make and model. I like guns and I'm not there to talk about guns, but this is his way of deflecting and sidestepping a situation that he is not prepared to deal with or hear about. He doesn't want to hear about the negativity and the things that occurred, and you know. Instead, he wants to deflect. Well, this is. I mean, I have the gut feeling that this wasn't going to be the right guy for me. I just didn't listen to it and we're going to talk about gut feeling in a moment. But that is super, super important.
Speaker 1:Some of the things that this guy, some of the warning signs, is. I didn't feel like he was trained for it. He said he was, but he didn't have the right answers. I knew enough of the right answers. He didn't have them, but we continued on. He did not understand the culture. He never assessed me for suicide At the critical point where my world is falling apart and I have this huge identity crisis. Never was he asking specific, isolating questions, direct questions about suicide or feelings was a very feel good, touchy, feely type conversation and not hey, are you going to blow your head off today. Um, there was no assessment for suicide or self-harm, you know, and the fact that he couldn't keep up with the conversation and ground himself enough to not completely lose it emotionally during our conversations Um, that again I guess should have been a red sign I mean sorry, a red flag and a clue to me, but it is what it is. Thankfully it didn't last long six, eight weeks, a couple months, whatever it is and then I found my new therapist. So let's talk about my new therapist.
Speaker 1:What did she say? The first thing she said is that she was passionate and protective of first responders, and I think that is something that is critical. If you're out there looking for a therapist, you want somebody. You're at a point in your world where you need somebody who's going to advocate for you, somebody who's going to be passionate and somebody who is going to be looking out for your best interest and not just trying to collect a paycheck Super important. Then she said the counselor needs to not only process and address the past trauma, but the ongoing, daily traumas.
Speaker 1:The first responder lifestyle is a daily reentering of the environment of trauma, crisis and emotional response. Well, that's what I spoke about a moment ago. You need to find somebody who can help you not only bail the boat out once, but bail the boat out every single day, because we're just adding to the complexity of your situation. So then she went on to say that a lack of awareness, empathy and support from your agency support system, friends and family, can accentuate the damage. And I added in there about the friends and family and support system. Friends and family can accentuate the damage. And I added in there about the friends and family and support system because that is something that I found important to me when I'm going through my journey, when I went through my journey. You know, when we don't have that support and people don't understand what it is that we're going through, it just isolates us and makes us feel that much more alone, right?
Speaker 1:And then she went on to say that trauma registers when an individual is living consistently outside of their emotional, mental and physical capacity. It's not usually a singular event, living outside of capacity for a long period of time, which happens to most, if not all, first responders. It causes one to look for relief in finding coping strategies that further hinder returning to their true self. What does that say? So what I hear there is that this is not a singular event. This is a compounding event that has got us to where we're at. We're living outside of our capacity. Sometimes it's outside of our control because it's our job and we feel like we need to go in support, so we need to keep subjecting ourselves to this. So, as a result of that, we find ourselves doing things, finding relief in places that really don't allow us to be who we truly are. Right, you're not truly an alcoholic, you're not truly an adulterer, you're not truly a drug addict, but we find these coping mechanisms that help make us feel like we're kind of whole again and it's not helping us in the healing process. You're not abnormal you listening to this right now that have been there. You're not abnormal the vices you've turned to. This is a byproduct of what we've experienced. Now it's not an excuse for what we've done, but it is a byproduct of it. And you're not alone. But what can we do? She went on to say that resiliency, nervous system repair, perspective to not be defined by the trauma EMDR reprocessing and a new lifestyle choices with greater self-awareness can all provide support to heal. So this is a tip for us on how we can be better in our world, no matter where we are, with or without therapy.
Speaker 1:And there's something in here I want to talk about. I've spoken about EMDR in the past. Emdr for those of you who don't know, emdr is a modality where you are holding on to either pucks or you're watching a light, and if you hold on to the pucks, they vibrate left right, left right. That is activating the left and the right side of your brains. When you feel that stimuli in your hands, you talk.
Speaker 1:You find out what your I am statement is I am not worthy of love, whatever it may be. Then you find the root as to when the first time maybe you felt that way is, and you go back and you start talking about it and maybe you felt not worthy of love. A dozen times throughout your life, every relationship you've been in, you feel that way. You go back to the very first one, when your parents got divorced, and you feel like you weren't loved and you weren't worthy and it was because of you they got divorced. Now that's not true, but that's what you feel. So you go back and you start dissecting that and you change, you reprocess your relationship with that feeling, with that trauma.
Speaker 1:So, instead of feeling like you were the one to blame, through that you talk about, okay, parents are. Why did they get divorced? Over money situations, over a money issue? Okay, did you have anything to do with the money issue? Well, no, I really didn't. So, did you have anything to do with the reason they got divorced? Well, no, but I've been blaming myself all these years. Okay, so now that you don't have anything to do with the divorce, with their divorce, how does that make you feel, man? It's a weight off my shoulders. And then you come back out to your happy place, right, and there's a lot more to it than that, but that will help sever that feeling that you're not worthy of love.
Speaker 1:And now, when you sever that feeling of you're not worthy of love with your parents, all of a sudden, maybe those other dozen times also clear up, because you realize that the story, the narrative you have added to each one of those situations is not necessarily true. It's all just a story, it's a relationship that you have in your mind with that set of circumstances. If you change that relationship, then all of a sudden the trauma goes away. The other modality that I hear her talking about in there. So there's a modality called neuromodulation and my layman way of explaining this is as follows your brain is like a dresser drawer in your bedroom.
Speaker 1:The dresser drawers has multiple drawers. Each drawer is organized with your socks and your underwear and your pants and your sweaters and your t-shirts and everything. They've all got a special place. Well, your brain, there's areas of your brain, lobes of your brain, where certain things happen. Everything gets packed away into those certain lobes of the brain Over time in your bedroom.
Speaker 1:As you take clothes in and out of that dresser, sometimes they don't get put back where they should. Sometimes everything gets stuffed into one drawer or everything gets mixed up and your socks, you know, gets mixed up and your socks are, before you know it, are in with your pants and your t-shirts, are in with your underwear and your wife's bras, in with your socks, and you just don't understand how all these things occurred. And then sometimes there's a drawer that's completely empty. It should be filled with stuff but it's completely empty. As you process things in your brain and as you experience different things in life, that things are get shuffled up inside your brain and things that should be happening in one area your brain are completely empty and frozen and you're having way too much activity in another area. One drawer is too packed, while the other drawer doesn't have enough in it. Well, when you're in that situation you have to balance everything out and sometimes you have to reorganize those drawers or reorganize the areas of your brain. So how do you do that?
Speaker 1:In neuromodulation there's a lot to this. I have done a lot of sessions and I've never truly understood anything that she said afterwards. But I know that it works and here it goes Neuromodulation they put sensors all over your head. The sensors read and hear the brainwaves that come out of your head and turn them into an audible tone. You're listening to earplugs. You have some earplugs in those headphones, not earplugs. Headphones are playing back the audible tones from the different brain waves that these sensors are picking up. Well, when you hear them, you reorganize them into their correct lobes, into their correct drawers. You put things back where they go. Then, over the next period of time, that pendulum swings and even when you're not doing the neuromodulation, there's still things going on behind the scenes where these drawers are getting reorganized and you try to balance out those different areas of your brain. So that one drawer that was empty, that one area of your brain that was frozen. You're trying to reorganize and make everything work again. That is neuromodulation. For those of you who are distrusting, it sounds like some hocus pocus, you know hippy dippy stuff. It's not. It truly, truly works. So that's the neuromodulation. Now let's see.
Speaker 1:She went on to say that counselors do not have training in this during their education and many now say they focus on first responders because it's marketable. A client needs to ask how they address first responders' trauma differently than other clients. What is their the therapist experience or exposure to the first responder culture? What kind of advanced trauma training do they have and what is their holistic care of emotional, mental and psychological modalities? Again, you need somebody that is going to look at multiple areas of your life at once, not just treating the symptoms in front of you. For first-most responders, straining relationships, the home, feelings of failure, helplessness and interpersonal struggles begin to appear. Trauma-informed counselors can sometimes just focus on work-related events and not see the bigger picture. Build rapport and meet an individual where they are while utilizing an eclectic, holistic modalities that support these other areas. This balance is crucial and hard to find in trauma care providers.
Speaker 1:So, getting back to the root of the question. What are some things that we can look for in a therapist that will help us make a good decision when we go find somebody? All right, so here's the five things to ask. Right? We're going to boil this whole thing down into five things to ask when you're searching for your therapist. First, are they culturally competent and, if so, how? You want to know what their experiences are. Are they a cop? Were they a firefighter? Are they married to one? Are they 19 and fresh out of school, or do they actually have some street smarts and some experience behind them? You want to find that stuff out. Are they culturally competent? If so, how? What are their experiences? What is their basis of knowledge? You know, for those cops out there, if we were writing a search warrant, you got to have a basis of knowledge for everything, and that means you have to know where it came from, what is its roots, where did that information come from? How do you know what you know? Those are all questions that we can ask these therapists. Two, are they trained in trauma therapy and complex trauma? Three, ask them how they treat their first responder patients different than their non-first responder patients. Do they have a plan for that, and have they treated first responders in the past a plan for that, and have they treated first responders in the past? Four what modalities do you utilize? Emdr, neuromodulation, cognitive-based therapy, talk therapy what do they use? You want to find somebody who is not just a talk therapist. You need to find somebody that can help you in the complex ways that we, as first responders, need.
Speaker 1:Faith. Number five I am a Christian. My therapist is a Christian. While it's not faith-based counseling, there's definitely faith that gets brought into it. And if you listen back to episode 11, the Moose, the Mentor and the morning, where I talk about my partner getting killed in the line of duty and me holding onto that for 20 plus years and blaming myself for it during the EMDR process, I would have never got over that had she not brought up God being there that night with my partner, john and this being a part of the plan that I had nothing to do with. Once we were able to interject that into a storyline and the narrative, then I understood and that was what I was able to release my own guilt and my own hard feelings from that situation and be cleared of it and put it behind me and not have that emotional tie to it.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, the bonus and a gut check. Are they book smart? Do you feel good about them? Do you connect with them? Does it feel like a good fit? We all judge people every single day. Judge these people. You need to find somebody that fits with you.
Speaker 1:You know there's a lot to unpack in this and I've told you some personal stories. I've told you the breakdown from my therapist. I've told you how we got here with the letters from the listener, shared some kind of insight from a clinician's point of view as to things that you can look for as you are picking out your therapist. I've shared my experiences where things went wrong and I've shared them when things went right, and I am just so thankful that I have a therapist that understands me, she's passionate, she's protective of me and wants my best interest in mind. So final, some things to consider. Does a therapist have a solution for treating people out of the area? Some therapists have intensive training where they will bring you in for a week or two at a time and do it every single day. So ask about that. Are there discounts available? Is there any first responder discounts or grants out there? What is their availability like? So these are all things to consider.
Speaker 1:I sure hope this podcast tonight has helped you guys and have some insight on how to find the best counselor. You know, I love you guys. I want the best for you. I thank you guys for listening. I love you guys. I want the best for you. I thank you guys for listening. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. If you want to connect with me, hit me up at murders2music at gmailcom. That's murders, the number two music at gmailcom and, ladies and gentlemen, that is the Murders to Music podcast. Thank you.
