Stephanie Neuman is no shrinking violet, nor does she mince words, but her energy is infectious. “I do offer crisis intervention after you get exposed to my cussing,” she told a crowd full of grinning and chuckling emergency medical service workers gathered in Cheyenne this summer. Neuman is engaging, quick-witted and jokes easily, but gets serious when she needs to. In this case, that means talking about first responder trauma. She’s a former police officer turned licensed clinical social worker in Cheyenne.  With a roomful of nodding heads and rapt expressions, it was clear Neuman’s description of how the work comes home with first responders resonated with attendees at the Laramie County Trauma Conference.  “When we go to work as first responders, generally we are just on our game,” she said. “We have energy, we love the adrenaline, we’re excited. We laugh, we joke, we have fun.” That may go on for the full shift, whether that be eight or 96 hours, she said. But it doesn’t last.  “It was in that moment I learned first responders don’t go to therapy.”Stephanie Neuman, LCSW “Then we go home and we crash,” she said. “Boom. We sleep for three days. We don’t vacuum, we don’t take the dog out, and we just check out.” That leaves family, often the most important people in their lives, with this low-energy, distant version of themselves.  “Is that fair to them?” she asked. “Is that what they signed up for? No.” So first responders have to learn how to not expend too much energy at work, and also learn how to deal with what happens on the job. And if stress and trauma from both home and work build up over time, she said, it can boil over. “When that upper limbic system [of the brain] gets extremely full of the calls for service, the divorce, the finance issues, the kids, mental illness, sicknesses, your parents died, whatever it is — when it gets full, then you have no room to think,” she said. “Then when the 16-year-old backs the truck into the garage, you blow up.” Across the state, recent suicide deaths, legal settlements and struggles with sustainability have highlighted the continued need to support first responders’ mental health. However, convincing them to seek help is easier said than done. What if someone questions their ability to do the job or sees them as weak? Or what if a therapist just wants to hear the gruesome details without helping them emotionally “be there” for a spouse? Stephanie Neuman’s tactics may be part of the solution. Stephanie Neuman talks with EMS workers from around the region at the Laramie County Trauma Conference. (Madelyn Beck/WyoFile) Trauma Neuman experienced her own trauma as a first responder. She started as a detention officer in the Sublette County jail. Then, she worked as a patrol officer in Cheyenne at age 24.  “I learned everything that I could in the academy, and I was just ready to go conquer the world,” she said. “Eight weeks in, I was involved in an officer-involved shooting.” Her chief 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, freshly graduated from FBI crisis negotiations unit training, Neuman was sent out to talk to a suicidal man who had a gun and had been drinking. He shot himself. She went to unload the rifle — something she’d long known how to do — and suddenly couldn’t remember how. So she went back to therapy, which helped. Six months later, a colleague who’d also been involved in the death looked terrible. He hadn’t slept since the suicide, he told her, and hadn’t gone to therapy. “It was in that moment I learned first responders don’t go to therapy,” she said.  Deep work For Neuman, talking isn’t enough. Burned, bloodied or decomposing bodies can’t be unseen, so she prefers neuroscientific solutions to trauma instead. “Talk therapy is bullshit,” she said.  Instead, she points to solutions like brainspotting or EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. These methods can get at the parts of the brain where all the trauma is stored, she said, and don’t require someone to verbally rehash all they’ve been through or spend hours talking through how they feel.  “We don’t need somebody who is going to beat around the bush or soft-talk issues, but to be able to get right down to the nitty gritty right away.” Keith Groeneweg For those who still aren’t sold on visiting a professional, she said, there are techniques they can do on their own. That includes things like grounding themselves in a particular space, breathing exercises or even just listening to bilateral music, which can be found for free across most streaming platforms.  “Use it with earbuds,” she said. “That bilateral music is like flossing your brain, okay? It stimulates left brain, right brain, and it calms your limbic system.” An outside perspective Neuman’s candor and straightforwardness put first responders at ease, according to Keith Groeneweg. She speaks their language, he said.  Groeneweg worked with the Wyoming Highway Patrol for 30 years and is now working with the Rocky Mountain Information Network to bring more mental health solutions to Wyoming. He’s also a client of Neuman’s. “We don’t need somebody who is going to beat around the bush or soft-talk issues, but to be able to get right down to the nitty gritty right away,” he said. “Stephanie has that knack, and she puts people in law enforcement, especially, at ease … I trust her completely.” Neuman has a huge heart, he added, and loves getting outdoors to hunt and fish and be with her husband and son.  “Those are the things that she’s passionate about,” he said. “Her husband, her son and the outdoors.” Stephanie Neuman and her therapy dog Bridger. (Sandra Brausch) Sandra Brausch said Neuman is a great shot, too. Brausch works as a therapist in the same building as Neuman and they’re good friends. So are their dogs. Neuman brings her dog in as a therapy aid, Brausch said, and the pup helps visitors feel more at ease.  “Having her dog there can help a lot, because people can distract themselves while petting the dog,” Brausch said. “But [Neuman] just has this natural knack to get people to talk.” But it’s not just clients and dog fans who connect with Neuman, Brausch said: It’s just about everyone. Brausch recalled all the times she’s watched Neuman strike up conversations with total strangers like employees of a trampoline park or flight attendants. “How do you summarize somebody?” Brausch said. “It’s so hard to do because [Neuman] is such a visionary … She just instinctively knows what people need.” Even though Brausch has experience working with veterans who have acute trauma and individuals facing death, she said Neuman taught her how to better serve police and other first responders outside the military. “You cannot classify one person’s traumatic event as being the same as the next,” she said. “[Neuman] was able to clue me in more on the political climate and the administrative climate in the departments here, and that was very helpful.” Neuman’s work is a major benefit to other therapists and clients alike, Brausch said. “She is definitely in the top five therapists I’ve ever worked with,” Brausch said. “She’s amazing, and I’m just fortunate to be such good friends with her and to work with her.” Past and future Neuman didn’t leave law enforcement voluntarily to become a mental health professional. She became disgruntled around 10 years in and didn’t feel supported, she said. She pushed back against some of the higher-ups, and said that ended in her firing. “I now call it a blessing, because it’s the best thing I ever did,” she said. Neuman now talks to first responders and other mental health providers about what EMTs, paramedics, cops and firefighters need.  Stephanie Neuman is a therapist in Cheyenne who specializes in working with first responder trauma patients. (Stephanie Neuman) “I do a lot of trainings for therapists who work with first responders because there’s a lot of therapists that don’t understand how to sit with that hard personality,” she said. “The client comes in and they’re all therapeutic and lovey dovey and huggy and the client, the first responder, is like: ‘Go fuck yourself.’” Pretty much all of them have PTSD to some extent, she said, and that tends to foster a dark humor during even the most extreme circumstances. They don’t need coddling, she said, they need treatment. She’s even working on a subscription platform for law enforcement who may just want to pay a small fee to access her videos, talking about mental health and what they need to get out of their job and be healthier. For those who need help, Neuman said they’re free to contact her via email at [email protected]. But outside of herself, she hopes more mental health providers learn what this group of hard-working, traumatized people need so there’s more assistance to go around.  First responders can also seek out specific treatments, she said, including EMDR and brainspotting. She also recommends books like “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk and “Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement” by Kevin Gilmartin.  Ultimately, she just wants to help the people who she knows need it most.  “I try to be 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, sometimes you just say the things no one else will say.” BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to WyoFile. Our work is funded by readers like you who are committed to unbiased journalism that works for you, not for the algorithms. The post She served as a first responder. Now she helps them with their mental health. appeared first on WyoFile .