First responders deal with a significant amount of psychological trauma, and I consider not only police, fire department, and EMS as first responders, I consider Emergency Room personnel, dispatchers, and various people working in a civilian capacity as first responders, as well as military personnel as first responders on a global stage.
The amount of traumas a first responder experiences in their career compared to the amount of traumas the average person experiences in their lifetime is staggering, so if you've worked as a first responder and experienced the symptoms of psychological trauma give yourself grace.
Anyone routinely dealing with graphic traumatic experiences who eventually experiences symptoms of PTSD is not fundamentally flawed, they're normal. It simply means their stress response system got damaged through over exposure without giving it rest.
The human radiator that cools the stress responses' engine is the prefrontal cortex, and for some of us our engine ran hotter than the radiator could keep up with to cool the engine off and prevent damage.
Some of us threw caution to the wind through the days of invincible youth doing this, and fundamentally altered the way our stress response system operates. This allowed us to adapt to, and survive extreme conditions beyond what we previously realized we are able to survive.
These changes to the survival system do not activate and deactivate whether we're wearing a uniform or not. The expectation that just because someone signed up for a job they should be immuned from trauma is about the same comparison as just because a vehicle was painted a particular color it should be able to withstand a collision.
Understand, No matter what uniform we do or don't wear, we're still human beings.
If our stress response system runs way too hot for way too long, for any reason whatsoever, it'll affect the way it runs at baseline.
There's noting personal going on with the stress response system changing either, it's just gorilla math; the hotter you heat metal the easier it becomes to bend. Once bent and cooled it holds shape unless bent again (and it can be heated and straightened again).
Ratio Comparison
Here are estimates regarding trauma exposure of first responders compared to civilians:
Average civilian 0.03–0.06 per year
Police 6–8 per year
Forensic crime scene processing 20-100 per year
Firefighter 5–15+ per year
EMS / Paramedic 10–50+ per year
ER personnel. 10–50+ per year
Combat military Depends on deployment tempo
Note:
With trauma there is a high propensity for self judgement and a subconscious fear of death by tribal rejection. This happens because we're built on the DNA of our tribal ancestors who experienced tribal rejection as an actual death sentence, so our systems came prewired in life to experience any possibility of tribal rejection as a threat to life.
Now consider this; if we have a perpencity for imagining ourselves as being perceived as weak for sustaining psychological damage, and of no more use to the tribe, it would activate our surival system into responsive action to be able to survive before having to think about it.
Since most people don't know what's going on in them many avoid speaking out at all, for subconscious fear of being harshly judged and tribally rejected. This could on for a lifetime with them never truly knowing what provoked the paralyzing fear in the first place.
The paradoxical thing is, speaking out and getting help is actually a strength beyond the subconscious fear of death by tribal rejection, making this strength far greater than any amount of machismo could ever hope to achieve.