Donate to Support First Responder Healing

Five years ago, I crashed and burned, and this place, Onsite Academy, helped put me back together. In honor my upcoming birthday, I invite you to make a small contribution to Onsite Academy. I’m hoping to reach $1,000 by March 19th.

Onside Academy is a small organization in Massachusetts that devotes its programs to helping first responders and their families get their lives back together after experiencing the impacts of major trauma. First responders include chaplains like me, as well as nurses, doctors, police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, and so on.

For many of us, the trauma we experienced was “vicarious,” that is, we might have seen someone shot in front of us, but we weren’t shot ourselves, literally, by a bullet. Nevertheless, we felt the biological, psychological, and spiritual impact of being a witness to violence.

I spent about ten days at Onsite Academy in the summer of 2020, with small groups of other first responders. There was, for example, a young police officer who had arrested a man who shortly afterwards died of a drug overdose in the back of her squad car.

As I had done after being present during the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, she began to have nightmares, she stopped eating, she had panic attacks, and could barely focus on her work. Her family was hounded off the internet and she was blamed for the arrested man’s death.

She was about the age of one of my daughters. With her, I felt this profound commonality, though we were worlds apart in terms of our backgrounds and life histories. One summer afternoon, she and I and a young firefighter from Worcester, MA, sat outside by a fire and were able to relax and listen to music for a while, while COVID raged around us and fear ruled.

We learned how traumatic events cause a biological cascade of hormones and brain chemicals that, unless promptly addressed, can keep coming back to haunt us. In other words, healing from the effects of a traumatic events is NOT about “getting over it” or “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” or “thinking positive thoughts.” Try saying stuff like to a cancer patient or a recent amputee. Trauma affects us physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Onsite Academy gave us new tools and new lenses to deal with that had happened to us. EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and techniques from critical incident stress management were key to giving us a way to continue to address the post-traumatic stress symptoms once we left.

I was there on a partial scholarship, so if you donate to Onsite, consider donating to their scholarships program. Mission of Onsite Academy