Welcome to Resilience Development in Action with Steve Bisson.

This is the podcast dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, fire,

EMS, dispatchers, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their teams.

Let's get started.

Okay. their teams. Let's get started. Well, welcome back and Kemi Sandler. You're back again. Okay, well, we already said that we'd be back anyway. Just wanted to finish up a little

bit on the identity. One of the biggest factors that I find people do is that becoming a civilian

is like a dirty word. And we talked about that in the previous episode, but I really feel like

it's not about being a dirty word, being a civilian, but that loss of identity not having that badge, is there, do you feel like you're losing the club, so to speak?

Are you losing that kind of like connections to other people that do the same thing?

I don't know, maybe a little bit of both.

You know, I mean, I think once you're no longer in the club,

it changes the relationship with people who still are. So it's kind of a double whammy in some ways.

It is a hard sell. I mean, you know, the other part, too, is the next day, you're a civilian.

Right. You're going on a cross-country trip

and now you know what i find also with a lot of guys and gals obviously if i ever use guys i mean it

in a general sense not in a sexist way for all of you listening but you know when i see a lot of

like that that loss of identity then you're like oh crap

all this stuff that kind of happened in the last 20 years 15 years 25 years 10 years doesn't matter

really all comes back and rushes towards you so we talk about healing but now again you have the stigma

from the past and now you got to heal but it's still the stigma from the past. And that's kind of like the devil on one side

and the angel on the other. How do you deal with all that? Right. Well, I, I, around the time that I,

well, let me back up, a couple years before I retired, I started to...

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