In public safety, pain and stress are just part of the job. Missed birthdays, lost sleep, gut-wrenching calls, the chaos of the streets — first responders give a lot (and give up a lot) for their chosen professions. They also tend to encounter people on the worst days of their lives. But what happens when the emotional toll becomes more than anyone can silently carry?
Dr. Cherylynn Lee, a psychologist embedded with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, tackles this question in her powerful webinar, “The Road to Resilience: Transforming Post-Traumatic Injury Into Growth for First Responders.” Throughout the insightful event, her message is simple: Trauma is real, suffering is preventable and resilience is not something you’re just born with. Rather, it’s a skill you can develop.
Below, we’ll dive into a few key highlights from her presentation that every first responder (and agency leader) should take to heart.
‘Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional’
Quoting the old Buddhist adage, Dr. Lee cuts right to a core truth about working in public safety: “You signed up to pick up teeth on the railroad tracks,” she says. “You signed up to miss anniversaries. That’s the pain — and that’s what makes you exceptional. But the isolation, the disengagement from your family, the suffering? That’s not what you signed up for. That’s what we can change.”
Pain is encoded in the DNA of public safety. It’s the cost of being the first on scene, the weight of finding order in turmoil, the burden of making impossible choices. Every shift brings new forms of hurt, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry that weight alone, forever.
Suffering is what happens when the pain is unexamined, unprocessed. It’s the quiet deterioration that sneaks into your relationships, your sleep, your health and your sense of purpose. It manifests as withdrawal from family, as a short fuse with coworkers, as losing your cool during interactions with members of the public. It’s in that quiet voice that whispers, “I can’t do this anymore.”
While pain is part of the calling, Dr. Lee says, suffering doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies, systems and support, first responders can learn to process their experiences in healthy ways. It takes constant work, but it’s possible to reconnect with your values and prevent your trauma from becoming a lifelong injury.
“I can’t take the pain away,” Dr. Lee tells her viewers. “But the suffering — we can absolutely do something about that. That is not what you signed up for.”
Building resilience starts with giving yourself permission to feel the pain — to acknowledge it and deal with it. It continues by developing habits, resources and a culture that supports emotional and psychological recovery. And it thrives when leaders normalize the human response to trauma, then provide real avenues for healing.
Because the truth is, resilience isn’t about never hurting. It’s about knowing how to heal. It’s about learning you can still be strong even when you need help. And it’s about refusing to let pain become permanent suffering.
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Resilience isn’t about never hurting. It’s about knowing how to heal.
The Physiological Effects of Trauma
Trauma leaves physical marks — not just on the body, but also on the brain.
As Dr. Lee explains, when she refers to post-traumatic stress as an injury, she means it literally. The limbic system, the emotional center of the brain, changes under chronic exposure to trauma. As with any injury, if trauma is not addressed correctly, it can become permanent and even crippling. Here are the key areas of the brain that are impacted by trauma and stress:
- Hippocampus: This area, which governs memory, shrinks under prolonged stress. That’s why remembering emotionally charged calls can be so difficult. For many, this can make it difficult to even remember how you got home after a shift.
- Amygdala: Under constant stress, your brain’s fight-or-flight hub grows in size, leading to heightened threat awareness. This hypervigilance puts your mind and body in a constant state of stress, and can make simply leaving your house feel all too dangerous.
- Prefrontal Cortex: Responsible for empathy, morality and insight, this area of the brain becomes less active under trauma, which helps explain why many first responders feel emotionally numb and struggle to maintain relationships.
“There’s a biological reason for why you feel and behave the way you do,” Dr. Lee reminds us. “That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.”
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The Difference Between Stress and Trauma
Not all stress is trauma — but all trauma involves stress. Dr. Lee defines stress as a physical and emotional reaction to challenge. It can be positive (like having a baby) or negative (like being reprimanded by your superiors). Acute stress is short-term and event-driven, while chronic stress builds gradually — like endless mandatory overtime or the cumulative weight of dealing with human misery and tragedy.
Trauma, however, is different. It’s the response of your body and mind to events that overwhelm your capacity to cope.
“Trauma is less about the call itself and more about who you are and what you bring to it,” Dr. Lee says. “Two officers can have the same call. One walks away fine. The other walks away changed.”
This personalized nature of trauma is why agency-wide solutions must also include individualized strategies. Building resilience means understanding your own triggers and capacity to cope.
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What Happens When You Drink Too Much Water?
To help demonstrate the impact of stress and trauma, Dr. Lee turns to an unusual metaphor: “You drink trauma and stress through a firehose. At some point, your body gives you signals that it’s time to go to the bathroom. You can either listen, or wait too long and have an accident.”
Hope is not a strategy, Lee points out. Ignoring the early warning signs — fatigue, irritability, isolation, poor sleep — leads to breakdowns. Pent-up trauma can cause strained relationships, health problems, disciplinary action or worse. First responders are trained to observe every detail on a scene, but they rarely apply the same vigilance to their own wellness.
Dr. Lee emphasizes how taking breaks, asking for help and going to therapy are not weaknesses. They are preventative maintenance. You wouldn’t drive a patrol car with faulty brakes — so why push your mind past the point of control?
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What Is Moral Injury?
One of the most impactful parts of the presentation centered around moral injury, a complex, deeply personal wound that’s inflicted when a person perpetrates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that conflict with their deeply held moral beliefs and values.
Moral injury is not just about what happens externally — it’s also about how those events resonate internally. It occurs when your sense of right and wrong is shaken by experiences that leave you feeling betrayed, powerless or complicit. In public safety, this can stem from both what you witness on the job and how your organization responds (or fails to respond) to those moments. As Dr. Lee describes it, “Moral injury is the part of the job that changes you.”
The consequences of moral injury can be profound: guilt, shame, anger and a loss of trust in oneself, others or institutions. It can arise from actions taken under extreme duress, from being forced to make impossible choices or from feeling unsupported by leadership when facing moral dilemmas.
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Dr. Lee shares some examples that may sound familiar to many first responders:
- Watching over 150 child abuse videos in a case investigation.
- Being told to wait to act when lives are on the line.
- Choosing which patient to render aid to first when both need you.
- Feeling betrayed by the chain of command.
Unlike acute trauma, which may fade with time or treatment, moral injury can linger because it damages the core of your identity and purpose. Resilience here requires rebuilding meaning, seeking peer support and restoring your own moral compass.
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You Are Worth the Work
Dr. Lee closes her presentation with an important observation: “The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to walk through water and not get wet.”
You will be changed by the job. But how you change — how you respond to those changes — is within your control.
To help cope with the challenges of the job, Dr. Lee offers some important tips:
- Bookend your shift: Visualize putting on a “backpack of work” at the start and setting it down when you return home.
- Exercise: Mandatory physical fitness standards shouldn’t be optional. Physical strength bolsters mental resilience.
- Mindfulness: Keep your head where your feet are. Anxiety often stems from having your brain stuck in the future.
- Find the green: If you only look for the blue (the threats, the dangers), you’ll miss the good. Train your brain to see the green.
Perhaps most importantly, first responders need to learn how to know when you’re not okay. If you can’t recognize it in yourself, let your loved ones help. Give them permission to call you out. And develop the humility to listen when they do.
You may be trained to save others. But saving yourself? That’s the bravest act of all.
