PTSD and other stress-related conditions are of significant importance to large segments of the population, including and perhaps especially law enforcement officers, other professionals in the emergency first response services, and military veterans of combat. Effective treatment for stress and for PTSD is extremely important, and is likely to become even more important in the future.
Among the most crucial factors in dealing well with stress, including the extraordinary stress presented occupationally to law enforcement and emergency workers, and the post-combat stress experienced by many veterans, lies in the development of resiliency (Price-Sharps & Sharps, 2025). There are of course individual differences in resiliency that contribute to an individual’s ability to deal with stress, even the extraordinary stress of emergency situations or battle. However, it is crucial to understand that there are a variety of specific skills involved in resiliency, and in the development of better resiliency than we have at the moment; and just as is the case with virtually any other skills in any walk of life, these skills can be trained (Price-Sharps & Sharps, 2025).
Mental health professionals are well-suited to assist in this training, but it’s important for everyone involved to understand major aspects of what goes into any effective resiliency training program. A brief synopsis of some of the major facets of such resiliency training, especially for combat veterans, emergency workers, and law enforcement officers, is given below (see Price-Sharps & Sharps, 2025, for more detailed discussion).
Central to any training, including training in resiliency, is the establishment of effective, accurate frameworks for understanding. Research has established that the most effective frameworks for understanding are those which are established prior to their utilization, and which are then used to guide the relevant practice as relevant skills are perfected. In other words, it’s very important for patients, clients, or trainees, as many first response and military personnel prefer to be called, to understand the bases of what they’re learning and exactly why they are learning it.
For trainees who have been subject to high levels of chronic stress (which of course includes many people in the general population, but especially includes combat veterans and first responders, including law enforcement officers) it is important that resiliency training be conducted with a full awareness, on the part of trainees and mental health professionals, of the given high-stress context. It’s critical to acknowledge the special effects of high levels of arousal on the brain, including the effects of chronic long-term arousal, and how those effects may manifest in our mental functioning. We have met many veterans, emergency personnel, and law enforcement officers who are initially unwilling to talk about the normal stress responses they have experienced in the face of extreme challenges, believing that their perfectly normal responses to the stresses they experienced were somehow abnormal. A reasonable knowledge of the human “fight or flight” response and how it works can be enormously helpful in such cases, allowing the trainee to frame his or her responses in terms of the normal activity of the human nervous system, rather than in unfounded beliefs in atypical responses which they are frequently unwilling to share. It is very important for mental health professionals involved in resiliency training to have a sufficient knowledge of the dynamics of the human stress response, and of the specific professional demands experienced by their particular trainee populations, that they can provide this training in accessible, accurate terms.
Mental health professionals can be enormously helpful in guiding and facilitating the necessary specific learning processes. In this type of resiliency training, trainees are learning a particular set of skills which will enable them to “pilot” their own minds in ways which will move the activity of their brains toward more salutary conditions. Such training should include aspects of mental activity which may need to be altered or corrected. These include (but of course are not limited to) negative or self-denigratory self-talk; the tendency to perseverate or ruminate on past events that can’t be changed; increased proclivity for “self-medication” with alcohol or other mind-altering drugs; and the tendency to isolate themselves from family, friends, and colleagues. This training should always be provided together with specific resiliency techniques by which these negative aspects of stress responses can be ameliorated.
Specific instruction on clinically proven ways to avoid and correct these and other responses to stress and symptoms of PTSD can of course be provided by informed mental health professionals, but it’s also important to realize that the same professionals can encourage and guide trainees in essential practice of the relevant skills, until these new proficiencies become habitual. Self-damaging behaviors can be replaced with new cognitive and behavioral patterns, which are healthier and which can turn the challenges of the stress response away from negativity and more in the direction of personal growth.
It’s important for the clinician to recognize that this training is best provided explicitly, rather than implicitly; the individual trainee is more likely to benefit from explicit stepwise instructions than from more implicit exhortations. This is especially true for trained first responders and military veterans, who are used to training environments which rely on explicit prior frameworks for understanding. Furthermore, the training needs to be feature-intensive rather than Gestalt in nature; in other words, specific features of behaviors to be avoided or to be practiced need to be made clear, again in a stepwise manner, rather than implied in broad or unclear terms.
Specific recommendations for the provision of this type of resiliency training, together with examples of practical application in actual cases, are provided in depth elsewhere (Price-Sharps & Sharps, 2025). Properly conducted resiliency training, based on our current knowledge of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, can serve as a very effective prevention and treatment modality in dealing with the high levels of stress-related conditions, incipient PTSD, and PTSD encountered by psychologists and other mental health professionals today.
