Steve has been a police officer for 24 years. He’s also been a SWAT team member for years. Those years have come with traumatic experiences. In our work together on these traumas, he told me that in a given day a police officer might have to deal with 2 to 3 overdoses and do CPR.
He told me in one session: “What you see is someone lying on the ground, with things coming out of their mouth. Imagine trying to help them while their family is screaming and begging you to do it ‘quicker, quicker.’ Sometimes you cannot bring them back, and you witness families mourning someone they love. On the same day you come across a traffic stop where teenagers are actively shooting heroin into their arms, and you have to deal with an overdose situation again.”
