Topic: The Club House / Ptsd and family members

I retired from Ohio DRC and was working in other facilities when those events took place, so I know them well. Prior to working in corrections I worked the street as a police officer and was involved in a fatal shooting. After all of that the investigations, physical injury, mental stress, court inquiries, being sued, then moving into corrections a few years later, I had a fair amount of stress in my career. I want to point out that PTSD/stress isn’t caused by the incident – it is caused by our REACTION to the events. While it’s simple to say “It’s all in our heads”, to a great extent it is, but it’s a real reaction to events. Everyone reacts differently, and the negative aspects can produce terrible reactions, mental and physical in us.

I worked for many years dealing with officers, both police and corrections, who were dealing with the aftermath of traumatic events. There are groups and meetings that offer peer support that helps most individuals. If you feel like you need to talk to a professional psychologist, I recommend inquiring ahead of time if they have experience dealing with police/corrections/criminal justice related stress. The Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy at London used to offer an excellent one-day class on dealing with PTSD, mostly involving police officers in post-shooting situations, but also other forms of criminal justice stress as well. You might contact them and see if they still put on this class and try to sign up. You could contact a major police agency close by and see if they use a particular psychologist to deal with their own officers.

Others have recommended reading articles and books on the subject. That is a great way to learn what is actually going on inside your head. The biggest point to take away is that this is a reaction to what you have experienced. You have to roll it around and decide what you are going to do with this memory. You can’t get rid of it, but you don’t have to carry the thing around with you, staring at it every day. Mentally, you have to box it up and put it on the shelf and go about your daily business. Get it down off the shelf to share it with colleagues or others when you want to show them what you’ve been through, then put it back in the box and back on the shelf. It sounds pretty simple – more simple than it is to do it, but that is how lots of folks deal with it over time. Good luck!