1. The first and most important step in decreasing your symptoms is to realize that PTSD is a common response to trauma. It is a biological response of your body to a personal and/or job-related traumatic incident. Your body is designed to respond to what it perceives as threats to your survival and survival to others in ways that protect you. However, your body can get stuck in a survival mode and respond as if you are under continual threat, when you are not. You are not going crazy, although you may feel as though you are. Talk to your peers that have had the same experiences that you have had. Discover, for yourself, that others have had similar reactions. Finding that others have had similar intense feelings and a distorted sense of time, vision, and hearing, can help to reassure you.

2. Social support is one of the most proven ways to Talk, talk, talk. The more you talk about the trauma and your reactions, the less power they seem to have over you. Being able to talk about the reactions helps alleviate the guilt and allows you to "let go" of the intense feelings you may be experiencing. This is often difficult, since talking may cause flashbacks. It is also difficult, because most law enforcement officers and fire/rescue/EMT professionals do not want to traumatize family members by letting them know the horror experienced in their work. Research indicates that talking about traumatic events increases the immune functioning of your body. Create support groups with other peers. Debriefing was created as an avenue to help law enforcement officers and fire fighters and other rescue personnel talk about the traumatic incidents encountered on the job. Use debriefing.

3. It may help to avoid the "anchors" or "triggers" that automatically remind you of the trauma. An anchor can be a smell, something you see, hear, or feel. An anchor can be positive, such as the smell of baking homemade bread reminding you of a loving mother. Anchors into trauma, however, can increase the symptoms of PTSD. It will be very difficult for you to avoid all reminders that trigger traumatic memories. However, avoiding reminders of the trauma, as much as possible, may help to reduce symptoms. Some law enforcement officers and fire/rescue/EMT professionals become obsessed with information about their traumatic incident. Becoming so obsessed that the only subject you want to talk about, read about, and think about, is your traumatic incident, is a symptom of being traumatized and stuck. If someone you work with is stuck, try to get them to recognize their symptoms and to do something about them.

4. It is common for law enforcement officers and fire, rescue and EMT professionals who have had a close call with death, to think seriously about quitting their job or retiring. Before the traumatic incident, your job may have been your life. It is important that you deal with your symptoms of PTSD, through the newer therapies before making a final decision on leaving a job you used to love. Many law enforcement officers and fire/rescue/EMT professionals have left their jobs because they were in PTSD, believing that their symptoms would then go away. Most found that this was not true; symptoms of PTSD are a result of brain changes caused by the stress hormones that increased dramatically during critical events. Those that last for long periods of time require specific therapeutic techniques to change them. Since law enforcement officers and fire/rescue/EMT professionals find the relationships at work to be one of the primary reasons that they like their jobs; leaving would deprive you of these relationships. There are few jobs that have the close comradely common in law enforcement and fire/rescue/EMT. Before you leave a job that you used to love, find a way to eliminate your symptoms of PTSD.

5. Exercise has been found to be valuable in helping to lift depression and symptoms of PTSD. The blood flow through the brain in aerobic exercise (such as jogging) may help to change chemicals in the brain which are causing symptoms, especially depression. Exercise will not eliminate PTSD, but may help with the intense feelings associated with it. Form a running or exercise club with other peers so that you can encourage one another to exercise.

6. Touch has been shown to be the one of the most important factor in re-regulating a body after trauma. Tell the important people in your life that you need hugs and touch, during this time. Reach out to others and pat their back, touch their arm. Nothing makes someone feel more alone than having no one that cares enough about them to touch them. Do not be embarrassed to get massages; research has shown that they can help to reduce the stress responses in your body. Go to a church or religious group where hugs are common. If you have children, make sure you find ways to hug them and pet your dogs, too.

7. Consider medication. There are a variety of medications which can reduce the symptoms of PTSD, because they quiet down the part of the brain which is over-stimulated. These medications can be taken for short periods (3-9 months) or until a particularly difficult period has passed. Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor and, some of the newer anti-depressants that work on the over stimulated part of the brain, may be helpful. Xanex is not recommended because of research that indicates it can increase anxiety to a higher than original level when it is terminated. Caffeine or other stimulants may increase the symptoms of PTSD.

8. Be very careful about using alcohol to decrease your symptoms. Alcohol will numb parts of the brain which are over-stimulated. This will temporarily make you feel better. However, alcohol will soon become its own problem, because it will take a good deal of alcohol to keep symptoms of PTSD numbed all day and night. Research has found that an increase in alcohol use following a traumatic incident is a predictor of developing PTSD. If you are having symptoms of PTSD, adding alcoholism to them will make them (and all the problems in your life) much worse. Don’t do it.

9. Because the symptoms of PTSD will often cause an individual to feel dead inside, to withdraw from family members, and to stop wanting to do anything that is fun, relationships with significant others can easily get into trouble. The body’s response to traumatic incidents increases the levels of testosterone in a male; as a result, he is thinking about sex much more than before the traumatic incident. (It is not yet documented whether testosterone also increases in traumatized females). Divorces in law enforcement officers are extremely common, perhaps for this reason. The pulling away from those you care about at the same time you are thinking much more about sex, can lead to affairs and sexual activity that can destroy relationships which were important to you in the past. The loss of the people you care about can make your problems even worse. Take care of the symptoms related to being traumatized; although you may believe that sex is the only thing that makes you feel good, in the end, having affairs will not get rid of your symptoms. Just as alcohol abuse will make your problems worse, the loss of those you love when affairs are discovered can make you feel much worse.

10. If you lost co-workers, friends, family members in the traumatic incident, you will be experiencing grief, along with any symptoms of PTSD that you may have. Grief and PTSD have very similar symptoms in the beginning. Grief is a normal reaction to the loss of someone who helps to define who you are. Grief related to someone very close to you commonly takes at least two years before it begins to decrease. However, if you are having symptoms of PTSD related to the loss of those you care about, your grief will not process; it will become frozen. It is important that you find ways to let go of the traumatic images and flashbacks related to the loss of those you cared about, so that your grief can process and you can retrieve the positive memories of these relationships.

11. There are a variety of new techniques which research has proven often quickly decrease or eliminate symptoms. For most people who have been traumatized by a critical incident, symptoms decrease over time. However for those in professions which continually re-expose them to traumatic incidents as a part of their jobs, symptoms can continue to increase until they seriously impact job and personal functioning. The effectiveness of any technique to treat PTSD will be dependent on many factors: the skill of the therapist, the therapist’s knowledge of PTSD and experience in treating those in PTSD, the willingness of the person in treatment to deal with the traumatic incidents in therapy. There are many proven treatments for PTSD. In addition to Multi-Sensory Trauma Processing-MTP (the treatment technique designed by Dr. Davis), Eyemovement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Traumatic Incident Reduction, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy have been found to be effective at treating the symptoms of PTSD. Dr. Charles Figley, a researcher with the University of Florida, has recently tested these methods and found EMDR to be the most effective for quick reduction in symptoms. These techniques may take as little as one long session to eliminate trauma symptoms and flashbacks from a single-incident trauma. It is unclear how these therapies work, although there are several theories. You may locate therapists in your area trained in these therapeutic techniques through websites. Make sure that they are qualified to treat PTSD.

12. If, as a child or adolescent, you experienced long-term physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse, the death of a parent or other very significant traumas, therapy that combines the newer techniques to reduce symptoms of trauma with Cognitive Therapy (or talking) is extremely helpful in reducing the impact of future traumas. Remember that unresolved traumas can piggyback onto present traumas, causing symptoms to be much more extreme than those of someone who did not experience trauma when growing up. Resolving past traumas is a way of preventing extreme symptoms related to future traumas.

13. Although this has to be extremely difficult, try to find something that you learned from your traumatic incidents that is positive, something that will make you stronger or feel better about fellow human beings. Helping traumatized peers and their families has often been healing for both parties.

Remember that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a common reaction to trauma. PTSD is widespread in law enforcement officers and fire, rescue and EMT professionals who work in horrific and traumatic scenes where many people died, where there viewed body parts, where they know some of the people who died and where conditions are extremely difficult. Trying to deal with these common biological reactions by pretending they don't exist and not talking about them is one of the primary reasons that the symptoms persist or even grow more severe. The more techniques you use to lessen the reactions to your trauma, the quicker these reactions will disappear.