She served as a first aider. Now he helps them maintain their mental health.

Stephanie Neuman isn’t a shrinking violet or minces her words, but her energy is contagious.

“I am offering crisis intervention when you are exposed to my curses,” she told a crowd full of smiling and giggling emergency workers gathered in Cheyenne this summer.

Neuman is engaging, quick-witted and easy to joke around, but she becomes serious when needed. In this case, that means talking about trauma from a first aider. She was a former police officer turned licensed social worker in Cheyenne.

In a room full of nodding heads and delighted faces, it was clear that Neuman’s description of how labor recovers from first aid resonated with those attending the Laramie County Trauma Conference.

“When we go out to work as first responders, we usually just work on our game,” she said. “We have energy, we love adrenaline, we are excited. We laugh, we joke, we have fun.”

This can last for an entire shift, whether it’s eight or 96 hours, she said. But it doesn’t last.

“At that point I learned that first responders don’t go to therapy.”

Stephanie Neuman, LCSW

“Then we go home and crash,” she said. “Boom. We sleep for three days. We don’t vacuum, we don’t walk the dog, we just check out.”

This leaves their family, often the most important person in their life, with a low-energy, distant version of themselves.

“Is this fair to them?” she asked. “Is this what they signed up for? NO.”

Therefore, first responders must learn how not to waste too much energy on the job and also learn to cope with events at work. And if stress and trauma builds up over time, both at home and at work, it may end.

“When this upper limbic system (brain) becomes extremely full with calls for service, divorce, financial problems, children, mental illness, disease, the death of your parents, whatever it may be – when it gets full, then you have no room to think.” – she said. “And then when a 16-year-old backs into the garage, you explode.”

Statewide, recently suicide deaths, legal settlements and struggles with sustainable development emphasized the ongoing need to support the mental health of first responders. However, convincing them to seek help is easier said than done. What happens if someone questions their ability to do their job or perceives them as weak? What if the therapist just wants to hear the gruesome details without helping him emotionally “be there” for his spouse?

Stephanie Neuman’s tactics may be part of the solution.

Trauma

Neuman experienced her own trauma as a first responder. She started as an officer at the Sublette County Jail. Then, at age 24, she worked as a patrol officer in Cheyenne.

“I learned everything I could at the academy and I was just ready to take on the world,” she said. “Eight weeks later I was involved in an officer-involved shooting.”

Her boss sent her to a therapist even though she didn’t want to go, “and it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said.

A few years later, fresh out of training with the FBI’s Crisis Negotiations Unit, Neuman was sent to talk to a suicidal man who had a gun and had been drinking. He shot himself. She went to unload her rifle – something she had long known how to do – and suddenly couldn’t remember how. So she went back to therapy, which helped. Six months later, the friend who was also involved in the death looked terrible. He hadn’t slept since the suicide, he told her, and he hadn’t gone to therapy.

“At that point I learned that first responders don’t go to therapy,” she said.

Deep work

For Neuman, just talking is not enough. It’s impossible not to notice burnt, bloody or decomposing bodies, which is why he prefers neuroscience solutions instead of trauma.

“Talk therapy is bullshit,” she said.

Instead, it points to solutions like brain spotting Or EMDRwhich means desensitization and reprocessing via eye movement. These methods can reach the parts of the brain where all the trauma is stored, she said, and don’t require someone to verbally repeat everything they’ve been through or spend hours talking about their feelings.

“We don’t need someone who will beat around the bush or be soft-spoken, but someone who can get straight to the point.”

Keith Groeneweg

She said that for those who are still not convinced about seeing a professional, there are techniques they can use on their own. This includes things like grounding yourself in a specific space, breathing exercises, and even listening to double-sided music, which can be found for free on most streaming platforms.

“Use it with earbuds,” she said. “This two-sided music is like brain flossing, okay? It stimulates the left and right hemisphere and calms the limbic system.

External perspective

According to Keith Groeneweg, Neuman’s honesty and directness reassured the emergency services. He speaks their language, he said.

Groeneweg has worked with the Wyoming Highway Patrol for 30 years and currently works with the Rocky Mountain News Network to provide more mental health solutions to Wyoming. He is also a Neuman client.

“We don’t need someone who will beat around the bush or be quiet, but someone who can get straight to the point,” he said. “Stephanie has this talent and she makes law enforcement personnel especially comfortable… I trust her completely.”

She added that Neuman has a big heart and loves the outdoors, hunting, fishing and being with her husband and son.

“These are the things she is passionate about,” he said. “Her husband, her son and the outdoors.”

Sandra Brausch said Neuman was also a great shot.

Brausch works as a therapist in the same building as Neuman and they are good friends. So do their dogs. Neuman brings her dog as a therapy aid, Brausch said, and the pup helps visitors feel more at ease.

“Having a dog can help a lot because people can turn away when petting a dog,” Brausch said. “But (Neuman) just has a natural talent for getting people talking.”

But it’s not just customers and dog lovers who connect with Neuman, Brausch said: “It’s almost everyone.” Brausch recalled all the times she had seen Neuman strike up conversations with complete strangers, such as trampoline park employees and flight attendants.

“How do you sum up someone?” – Brausch said. “It’s very difficult because (Neuman) is such a visionary… She just instinctively knows what people need.”

Although Brausch has experience working with veterans who have experienced acute trauma and those facing death, she said Neuman taught her how to better serve police and other first responders outside of the military.

“You can’t classify one person’s traumatic event as the same as the next person’s,” she said. “(Neuman) was able to give me more information about the political and administrative climate in the departments here, which was very helpful.”

Brausch said Neuman’s work is of great benefit to both other therapists and clients.

“He’s definitely one of the top five therapists I’ve ever worked with,” Brausch said. “She is amazing and I am lucky to be such good friends with her and to be able to work with her.”

Past and future

Neuman did not voluntarily leave law enforcement to become a mental health professional.

She said that after about 10 years, she felt dissatisfied and unsupported. She pushed back against some of her superiors and said it resulted in her firing.

“Now I call it a blessing because it’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

Neuman is now talking to first responders and other mental health providers about the needs of paramedics, paramedics, cops and firefighters.

“I do a lot of training for therapists who work with first responders because there are a lot of therapists who don’t understand how to deal with such a tough personality,” she said. “The client comes in and everyone is therapeutic and loved and cuddled, and the client who is the first aider says, ‘Go f**k yourself.’”

Almost all of them have some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder, she said, and that lends itself to a dark humor even in the most extreme circumstances. They don’t need to be coddled, she said, they need treatment.

She’s even working on a subscription platform for law enforcement agencies who may simply be willing to pay a small fee to access her videos in which she talks about mental health and what they need to get out of work and be healthier.

Neuman said they can contact her via email at [email protected]. But she hopes that more mental health professionals beyond herself will learn what this group of hard-working trauma survivors need to provide them with more help.

She said first responders may also seek special treatments, including EMDR and cerebral spotting. He also recommends books such as “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk and “Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement” by Kevin Gilmartin.

Ultimately, he just wants to help the people he knows need it most.

“I try to stay as professional as possible, but at the end of the day when you’re talking about helping first responders or helping people, the reality is that sometimes you just say things that no one else will say.”

BEFORE YOU LEAVE… If you learned something from this article, please spread the word and support WyoFile. Our job is funded by readers like you who commit to impartial journalism that works for you, not algorithms.