To begin, thank you for checking out this site. The inspiration for it came from my contacts with many officers while I was collecting data for my dissertation research. Some thanked me for my interest in exploring recovering from exposure to trauma--be it a shooting situation of their own or that of a peer, or something other than a shooting that stayed with the officer(s). What I found during my research confirmed a bit of my suspicions from my own experiences following a shooting incident I was involved with in 1998 that ultimately led to my retirement from law enforcement. One thing seemed evident was that there was a discomfort in knowing how to approach peers who had been involved in something--other than to give them a nod and a "good job", or worse yet, how to ask for help for ourselves following our own experiences.

From my research, a couple of things were confirmed. The first was that there was a reluctance for officers to engage in the process, despite my law enforcement background. I had read other research previously that had found this same thing, but had hoped that my background would open a few more doors. While it may have on the administrative end, I was a little disappointed in the slow response from the actual officers. What I later came to think was that it was not so much distrust as discussed by other researchers, but a desire to avoid thinking about negative incidents that affected the return on my survey requests. This idea was surely consistent with other research that I had found. In fairness, as I look back on my own prior ideas about psychologists--even my own research would have been something I would not have been very excited about either.

Perhaps the biggest thing that came out of the research, however, was the idea that officers do not necessarily offer support in traditional ways (i.e. offering visible emotional support). What did seem to happen more was that officers did get together following incidents to discuss the more tactical aspects of the incidents--not so much the emotional experience. Unfortunately, some of the interventions used by police agencies following traumatic incidents rely on the ability and/or desire to engage in emotional discussions, and if there is a reluctance to do so, one wonders how helpful these approaches actually are.

In any event, the idea here is to provide a venue for officers (current and retired) from other areas to share concerns and experiences, to give and to receive support from each other, and to hopefully learn ways to not only be more tactically sound, but maybe how to be a little more emotionally healthy as well. Please feel free to let me know what you like or dislike about the site--it is still a work in progress. The hope is that it will be something that grows as more officers find out about it and actually get benefits from this type of interaction.

Thank you again for your interest. Stay safe,

Adam Pasciak
Retired Police Sergeant (Redford PD 1987-2010)
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
www.lakeorioncc.com

Send emails to me at:
adam@woundedbadge.com