My New Book for Officers and First Responders

What book?

Stop Letting the Job Become Your Life: How to survive working in a high-trauma environment without losing yourself.

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone working in a high-trauma job including corrections officers, law enforcement, first responders, and military personnel. If you’ve experienced trauma on the job and find yourself bringing work home or feeling high stress going to work each day waiting for another trauma to happen, then this book is for you.

But it’s not just for people currently working in these positions. My book includes skills to manage the side effects of working in high trauma jobs. Those side effects don’t go away just because you’re not there anymore. So even if you’ve transitioned out of the uniform, you might still be experiencing issues with being in work mode.

After all, the job will change you. You can’t unseen what you’ve witnessed. And you can’t go back to who you were before you trained yourself to shut off your emotions most of the time to do the job. There’s no going back but there is going forward with healthier coping skills, with healing, with improved relationships with your loved ones and with accepting who you are and that’s not all bad. You’ve learned some kickass skills working as an officer or first responder, so don’t minimize that.

This book is also for their loved ones so you can understand what they’re going through, why they see everything from a threat response and how you can support them, sometimes just by changing your expectations or reminding them of some of the skills I include. Especially the transition from work into the home environment, it’s so important to support them in this process.

And of course, this book is a great resource for any professional working with this population. I use easy to understand explanations that you can use to explain to clients why their brain is reacting this way because of the job. And you can use these skills in session with clients to help process their emotions and weed through all the racing thoughts.

What’s it about?

This book is both proactive in helping people set up a solid foundation of healthy skills, routines, and habits in all areas, mentally, physically, emotionally, and it’s reactive in that I explain how to process incidents after they happen, so they don’t get stuck in your head or body. Which emotions often do, hello heart attack. And I provide guidance on how to make the transition out of the job, no matter the circumstances because yes sometimes it’s not your choice to leave and it can be especially hard if it’s for medical reasons like being injured on the job.

My book is focused on action steps. I’m a “let’s get shit done” kind of person. I don’t spend a lot of time on deep neurobiological explanations, most of you know the problem is the job and now you’ve changed and your life is shit and you just want to know what you can do about it, not what your amygdala is doing. Which for the record, I don’t think I ever mention the amygdala in my book. I just wanted to get to the point of what action steps to take. What skills to use.

Why I wrote this book.

First, there’s just not enough me to go around. When word go out that I was a therapist for corrections officers, my case load quickly filled up because there is such a large need for mental health care in this field of first responders. If there was this level of need in my own state, for tools and skills to manage the stress and trauma officers were bringing home then I knew there was a need nationally and I had to find a way to reach them. Besides my website, blog, and YouTube channel, I could put all the techniques and guidance in one place, this book.

While working with officers, I noticed that they’d come in frustrated and confused by vague statements they were given by their work training sessions and what they were hearing around them: you need a work-life balance, create healthy coping skills, use stress management techniques, don’t bring work home. They were left asking, what does that actually mean? How do I create a work-life balance when I’m working 16-hour shifts? And when looking at their coworkers, they didn’t see any examples of healthy coping skills so they didn’t know where to start.

Unfortunately, going to the gym and eating a salad doesn’t always work to shut off the racing thoughts when you’re trying to sleep or stop you from yelling at your kid like he’s in lockup.

This book gives officers specifics in every area, physically, mentally and emotionally as well as a four-step technique to process an incident quickly after it happens. I provide various strategies because I know there’s not just one thing that works for everyone. You need to try several and find the one that works for you.

Why you’d benefit from reading it.

I’ll start by saying my book doesn’t replace therapy. However, I understand that it’s not always easy or quick to find a therapist that understands the nature of the work you do, where being exposed to daily trauma is in your job description, making processing it harder when a new trauma is being thrown at you day after day.

And if you’re unfamiliar with the barriers officers face, check out my blog on this topic, Help Wanted: Barriers to officers getting mental health treatment.

I also understand your schedule with mandated 16-hour shifts makes it hard to make time for therapy. But you’d benefit from some of the tools and techniques that are taught in therapy, and that’s what I provide in this book. Again, it doesn’t replace having a professional help you process if you’re stuck, and it doesn’t replace talking to a real person who cares about what you’ve gone through and can listen without judgement. But if you need a place to start managing the work stress, then yes start here and use these skills.

Speaking of not having time, the number one complaint I hear for why officers can’t take care of themselves better is because they don’t have time. So I made sure my techniques and tools are super quick to do. If you don’t think you have an hour once a week for therapy, you won’t keep up with it. But if you can do something in 5 minutes before leaving for work or even on the drive to work, you’re more likely to make time for it.

Now I don’t believe my book is the only one you can benefit from reading but mine is very specific to people working in high trauma jobs and helps take the vagueness out of what it means to have healthy coping skills and work life balance when you’re faced with lots of triggers. There are some other good books out there that are helpful and I’ve included those in my recommended reading list at the end of the book.

If you’re looking for easy to use strategies to manage the job stress, stop bringing work home, process trauma and transition into civilian life when you take off the uniform for the last time, then check out this book and Stop Letting the Job Become Your Life.

When and where can you get a copy?

This book is available now on Amazon as an e-book, paperback and audible version. Just search for the title, Stop Letting the Job Become Your Life or if you want to see something cool, search for “corrections officer survival guide” and see that my book shows up as the number one result. Totally cool. Even though, again, my book is not just for corrections officers, but it does make for a pretty handy survival guide if that’s your job title.

And please share this book with your friends, family, coworkers and anyone who could benefit. To help Amazon boost its visibility for others to find it, you gotta leave a review so please do that. And don’t be afraid to ask your department to purchase bulk copies to have this book as part of your mental health training or just to have it on site, especially after an incident to help people process the trauma. If you don’t tell your job what you need from them, they won’t know how to best support you. This is an easy-to-use resource to have on the job site. So speak up about your mental health needs and for those around you.

For more information about this book, check out my website www.findingyourwaytherapy.com/books

Until next time, stay safe, stay strong, stay sane.