Being Trauma-Informed and Early Warning Signs to Recognize

What Does It Mean To Be Trauma Informed

Trauma exists. It exists in all law enforcement agencies, their employees, as well as the communities those agencies serve. Today, there is much discussion around the importance of law enforcement officers, including leaders, being trauma-informed. The concept of trauma-informed leadership is about recognizing trauma in the workplace and working to minimize the impact trauma has. Trauma-informed leadership is about understanding emotional reactions and experiences occurring for each employee and as a leader, modeling, encouraging, and supporting employees with compassion and empathy.

Being a Trauma-Informed Leader in the Workplace

As leaders you can recognize what trauma is and become trauma-informed. Potentially traumatic events can affect emergency service professionals in diverse physical, mental, and emotional ways. While some may automatically equate a trauma event to the development of PTSD, this is not always the case. In addition, regular stressors from public safety work can impact mental health and quality of life if not recognized and addressed as you would symptoms from other physical injuries or more obvious traumatic events.

If leaders are not trauma-informed, employees may receive a wide variety of unhealthy or unhelpful responses or mixed messages regarding emotional health and wellness. In turn, employees fail to receive the needed assistance. As a result, these same traumatized officers and supervisors respond to calls with traumatized community members. This can lead to the perception that officers lack empathy and understanding.

Being a trauma-informed leader also means recognizing that your employees can be affected by trauma and still make the best employees, depending on how the trauma affects them and what they’re doing about it. With all the resources invested in recruiting, hiring, and training these officers, leaders should ask if they are doing the best to help officers thrive. Trauma-informed leaders should assess their status with the following:

• Building a culture of real wellness support.
• Consider incentives for health and wellness.
• Developing a well-vetted, trained, and trusted peer support team.
• Find a culturally competent mental health provider who is genuinely concerned about officers’ wellness.

Early Warning Signs

While historically, emotional and psychological trauma was viewed as being attributable to a single traumatic event, this has changed over time. Certainly, there are many cases where one single event produces emotional and psychological trauma. However, equally applicable, especially to those with a career in the fire or law enforcement field, is the ongoing, cumulative stress that someone may experience.

Knowing the “red flags” and then intervening early is a powerful strategy for preventing stress and trauma from escalating into a mental health injury or chronic condition.

Some emotional distress following a traumatic event or critical incident is a normal reaction to an experience that is abnormal (at least for most people). Typically, following a traumatic event, one would expect to experience a range of reactions, which could include anxiety, arousal caused by adrenaline, fatigue, irritability, hypervigilance, increased emotionality, problems sleeping, bad dreams, exaggerated startle response, change in appetite, feeling overwhelmed, impatience, and/or withdrawing from family and friends. This does not indicate development of a mental health diagnosis/disorder. These symptoms are normal in every way and suggest a need for early intervention and action to limit the impact they may have.

Similarly, stress responses from day-to-day public safety work are common, and may also lead to symptoms that should be addressed early. Symptoms of ongoing stress that are ignored can become more chronic, ingrained reactions that may lead to potentially destructive and unhealthy coping habits, and more severe mental health symptoms.

Signs or indicators of a more potentially concerning response occur when physiological, emotional, cognitive and/or behavioral changes persist for longer than four weeks, cause unmanageable levels of distress (including depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts), or have a significant negative impact on important areas of functioning (i.e. work, school, family, relationships). It is important to watch for red flags of more serious problems such as:

• Significant changes in family, work, or school patterns.
• Persistent sadness.
• Ongoing sleep disturbance.
• Persistent and/or increasing irritability.
• Ongoing increase in the use of alcohol or other addictive substances.

If months have passed since a particular critical incident or traumatic event and an individual is still experiencing significant distress, a more chronic or potentially serious stress reaction may be the reason.

For more information about early warning signs and how to recognize them, please visit the Early Warning Signs to Recognize of Trauma webpage. For more information on taking early action on those warning signs, visit the Early Intervention Strategies webpage.

The Leader’s Takeaway

With the uptick in discussion regarding wellness initiatives and programs in public safety agencies, simply checking a box is no longer acceptable. Employees need to see now, more than ever, that their leaders care about them and their well-being. Being a trauma-informed leader means ending the barriers and ending the stigma. Leaders need to be vulnerable themselves, pay attention to their employees, and put their employees first. A healthy employee makes for a healthy department, leading to a healthy response to the community.

Return to top of page