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Chapter 4

His Buried Trauma

The Effects of Accumulated Stress and Trauma

Since David’s suicide, I’ve learned a lot about trauma and secondary trauma, and how they can permeate and affect every aspect of a person’s life. My husband carried a tremendous amount of trauma that had roots in his early years, grew exponentially throughout his police career, and affected all areas of his life.

The Impacts of Trauma

Trauma occurs when a person experiences or witnesses abuse, victimization, neglect, loss, violence, and disasters. The term “secondary trauma” refers to exposure to the trauma of others. Unfortunately, the majority of first responders experience some kind of trauma during their career, and it can be toxic to them mentally and emotionally. To make things worse, many first responders are carrying around trauma they incurred prior to embarking on their career.

This is certainly true in David’s case, and I want to share with you a couple of experiences he had early on that I believe initiated, or at least contributed to, his lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression.

Age Sixteen

When David was only sixteen years old, he and three friends were in a car on a country road. David was seated in the back seat, behind the passenger. The driver lost control of the car and started to veer off the road. There was a downed telephone pole on the side of the road. David saw it and ducked as the pole crashed through the windshield, decapitating his friend sitting in front of him. David was not injured.

As David recounted this story, what struck me was the fact that the three surviving boys received no counseling of any kind. Of course, this would have been around 1980, a time in which counseling and therapy were not ubiquitous, as they are now. However, I suspect this traumatizing experience did more damage to David emotionally and psychologically than anyone knew. He definitely had survivor’s guilt, often wondering why he was able to avoid the pole, but his friend wasn’t.

Age Twenty-One

In my husband’s first year of policing, when he was only twenty-one years old, he was involved in a shootout that began with him being shot at, and which resulted in his killing the shooter. Afterwards, he was called in to the police station, where his badge and gun were taken away and he was sent home.

David spent the next several days in an apartment alone, afraid, and isolated, not knowing what was going to happen to him. Then he got a call telling him that the incident had been ruled “suicide by police,” and he had been cleared. They told him to report for roll call the next day. When he returned, he was given his badge and gun, went to roll call, and climbed back into a patrol car. And that was that. Back to work. No counseling, no conversation, no debrief, and no support of any kind.

When I think of all of the trauma this incident caused, it makes my heart heavy. For starters, he was only twenty-one. I can’t imagine the trauma of being shot at, fearing for your life, and then ultimately taking someone else’s life. I know this incident haunted him because, whenever he talked about it, which was rare, he would become extremely emotional. He could never reconcile, in his head and heart, taking the life of another human being. And he lived with that guilt until the day he died.

The Cost of Untreated Trauma

If nothing else upsetting had ever occurred in David’s life, these two incidents alone would be enough to cause distress. But that wasn’t the case. David encountered a tremendous amount of stress and trauma in his lifetime, and much of it was concentrated in the eight years he served as a police officer. As a federal agent for the final twenty-two years of his career, he worked some difficult cases and encountered challenges, but nothing like those eight years in a patrol car. Those years were brutal.

Yet he never sought, nor did he receive, proper treatment.

Throughout David’s career, the untreated and unprocessed trauma caused him to experience recurring symptoms, which he was intermittently able to numb—typically with alcohol. He battled with anxiety and depression off and on, and he suffered from recurring dreams and nightmares. In his dreams, there were three consistent themes: he was in a police station, he felt a sense of being lost or in the wrong place, and he often needed to discharge his weapon but could not. He would even wake up with a sore hand from squeezing it tightly and repeatedly in his sleep.

Over time, accumulated stress and trauma grew so overwhelming and so powerful that it infiltrated David’s personality, turning an otherwise great guy into an angry, paranoid, cynical character, or an emotional wreck who could not stop crying. These stress-induced symptoms ultimately left my husband unable to cope with change, uncertainty, or the most basic daily challenges.

As he approached retirement, I believe all the unprocessed pain, fear, anxiety, and depression that he had contained over the years began creeping up and oozing into every crack and crevice, flooding and engulfing him mercilessly. He began taking an antidepressant. That didn’t help. He added an anti-anxiety drug. That didn’t help. He drank. That didn’t help. He kept himself busy. That didn’t help—and that had always helped.

The Dark Side of the Light of My Life

It has taken me a long time to summon the courage to speak honestly about my husband, his issues, and our struggles. David was a very proud and private man, so telling his secrets feels like a betrayal of sorts.

I don’t want to let strangers into the dark corners of our life together. I’d much rather talk about the good times, and there were plenty of those. Anyone who knew us knew that we loved each other deeply and shared an intimate friendship that I may never know again. But toward the end of his life, when he was unraveling, that changed, and he turned on me.

My sweet, loving husband became someone I hardly recognized and could rarely reason with. He vacillated between despair, anger, bouts of crying, and hostility. He said and did things that were out of character and extremely hurtful, and he made some choices he would never have made in his right mind.

The last few months of his life were like the scariest roller coaster you can imagine, with hairpin turns, inversions, barrel rolls, negative Gs, no brakes, and no seat belts. The man I had known to be as solid as a rock was up and down and all over the place, unpredictable and inconsistent in every way.

What I now know, having interacted with a lot of first responders and their spouses, is that a high percentage of spouses experience the roller coaster at some point in their relationship, if not throughout. It’s terrifying to be on the receiving end of that kind of whiplash, especially if you are trying to keep a marriage and family together.

The truth is, throughout our marriage, there was a dark side to David that cast a shadow on our otherwise sunny life—like a murky figure lurking in the background. When he got emotionally triggered by anger or felt threatened in any way, this dark figure would step out of the shadows and take over. This happened rarely, but when it did, it was intense.

That dark guy was never violent toward me, but he was angry and hateful and completely out of control. After each “episode” had subsided, David was embarrassed, ashamed, and apologetic. And, even though these episodes were awful, I felt so sorry for my husband because it was clear he was full of pain. I believe this dark alter ego developed as a result of years of unresolved trauma and suffering.

In the last days, there was very little left of the David I had known and loved. His eyes were vacant, and his personality was totally altered. On the day he died, however, he left me with a gift. As we were passing each other in our bedroom, he reached out and stopped me. He stood in front of me, placed his hands on my shoulders, stared right into my eyes, and said, “I love you.”