Resilience Development in Action: First Responder Mental Health
Discover practical resilience strategies that transform lives. Join Steve Bisson, licensed mental health counselor, as he guides first responders, leaders, and trauma survivors through actionable insights for mental wellness and professional growth. Each week, dive deep into real conversations about grief processing, trauma recovery, and leadership development. Whether you're a first responder facing daily challenges, a leader navigating high-pressure situations, or someone on their healing journey, this podcast delivers the tools and strategies you need to build lasting resilience. With over 20 years of mental health counseling experience, Steve brings authentic, professional expertise to every episode, making complex mental health concepts accessible and applicable to real-world situations. Featured topics include: • Practical resilience building strategies • First responder mental wellness • Trauma recovery and healing • Leadership development • Grief processing • Professional growth • Mental health insights • Help you on your healing journey Each week, join our community towards better mental health and turn your challenges into opportunities for growth with Resilience Development in Action.
Episodes
A single phone call can split your life into “before” and “after” and for police families, that split often happens in public. We sit down with Susan Snow, author of The Other Side of the Gun: My Journey from Trauma to Resiliency, to talk about what it meant to lose her father, an LAPD robbery-homicide detective, in a planned assassination on Halloween night in 1985. Susan takes us back to th...
A retired police K9 can survive ten thousand searches and still be taken down by one ordinary day. Chris joins me to tell the story of Tambo, the working dog who powered through years of wear and tear, only to face a sudden medical emergency that no handler is ever ready for: a ruptured spleen mass, internal bleeding, and the terrifying words “he might not make it.” We unpack what that moment looks like ...
A dog that “can’t bond with anyone” sits in a kennel, passed over by handler after handler, until one leader recognizes something painfully familiar in those guarded eyes. We’re joined by Chris Bingham, a veteran law enforcement officer and longtime K9 handler, to talk about the kind of first responder mental health story that doesn’t get enough airtime: abandonment, mentorship, grief, ...
The hardest part of first responder mental health is not admitting trauma exists, it is admitting it counts when it happens to you. In part 2 of the interview, Steve Bisson sits down with Dana DeLorenzo to talk about the pressure points that quietly push police officers, dispatchers, and other first responders toward PTSD, burnout, and early retirement, especially when the culture still rewards silence.
A police officer who becomes a therapist sounds like a plot twist, but it’s also a rare window into what first responder mental health really needs. We’re joined by Dana DeLorenzo, a retired transit police officer and now licensed mental health counselor, and we get honest about how the work changes you. Not the dramatic moments the public sees, but the daily accumulation: the stress, the cynicism that c...
The calls that keep coming back aren’t always “police problems” they’re often people problems that never got solved. I’m joined by Amanda Rizzoli, clinical program coordinator with Milford Police Department in Massachusetts’ Family Services Unit and Community Impact, plus Detective Cody Carneiro, to pull back the curtain on what a Family Services Unit actually does day to day and ...
The hardest part of getting help in public safety is not finding resources, it’s knowing who you can trust when the stakes are your career, your reputation, and your sanity. We pick up part two with employment attorney Bridget Truxillo to talk candidly about where union support shines, where conflicts of interest can quietly derail you, and why an outside employment law perspective can be the difference betwee...
A career can end without a single bad call. Sometimes it’s the station politics, the paper trail, and the quiet retaliation that do the damage and it can hit your mental health just as hard as anything on the street. I sit down with Bridget Truxillo, an attorney, former deputy sheriff, and former SWAT team member, to talk about what happens when the workplace becomes the stressor you can’t escape. Her st...
The fastest way to miss someone in pain is to only believe the “approved” version of distress. We sit down with Liana Lucine, a former UK London Met police officer and trainer, to unpack how stereotypes shape everything from mental health calls to workplace culture and even how we label victims. When anxiety, depression, grief, or trauma don’t match the mental picture we expect, the response can tu...
If you’ve ever wondered why some calls escalate fast while others calm down in minutes, the answer usually isn’t “more force” or “better scripts.” It’s the human skill that gets trained the least and judged the most: how we talk to people when they’re at their worst.
I’m joined by Liana Lucine, a former Metropolitan Police officer in London with 18 years o...
Your body can hit full panic speeds while your brain has to make courtroom-clean decisions. That tension sits at the center of my conversation with Eric Robinson, a former pastor turned FBI agent who spent 24 years in the Bureau and served on SWAT. We get real about what it means to approach a door knowing you might meet violence, and why true calm is not bravado, it is competence built through training, repetition,...
He walked away from the pulpit because the stress would not let his body rest, then spent the next two decades staring straight at humanity’s darkest corners. I’m joined by Eric Robinson, newly retired after 24 years in the FBI, to talk about resilience that’s earned, not posted. Eric shares how carrying other people’s pain as a solo pastor led to daily headaches, and why choosing a new path ...
If peer support is supposed to be a safe place, why do so many first responders avoid it because they’re afraid their story will end up in the station, the briefing room, or the chief’s office? Stephanie Conn get blunt about the real problem behind “peer support doesn’t work” and it’s usually not the idea, it’s trust, confidentiality, and what happens when one person treats ...
The job trains you to scan for danger, move fast, and stay ready, but nobody hands you a clean off-switch when you walk back through your front door. We sit down with Dr Stephanie Conn, a former dispatcher and police officer turned first responder psychologist, to get real about what actually helps police, fire, EMS, dispatch, and corrections stay steady over the long haul.
We talk about resilience as a pract...
One small action can change a whole community, and sometimes even rewrite what the next generation learns in school. We sit down with Brad and Kira Newberry to unpack the idea behind their book, The Saved Effect, and why a single rescue rarely ends when the ambulance doors close. Using the butterfly effect as a guide, we explore how “micro moments” of courage and care can ripple outward into families, ca...
You can work a cardiac arrest, get pulses back, hand the patient off, and never learn what happened next. That missing chapter messes with how we measure success, how we carry trauma, and how we stay resilient over a long career in EMS and emergency medicine.
We sit down with Brad Newberry, a captain paramedic with more than 40 years in fire and EMS and the founder of a major EMS education and training center...
You can build the best peer support team on paper, fund the best wellness initiatives, and still miss the people who are hurting the most. That’s where this conversation with Dr. Stacey Raymond goes, and we don’t stay polite about it. We talk about why first responder mental health needs to start at the academy level, with a clear warning: the job will expose you to traumatic events, and it will change y...
A call can end, the scene can clear, and your body can still be on the call months later. We sit down with clinical psychologist Dr. Stacy Raymond to talk about what actually works for first responder mental health when the job leaves you with nightmares, intrusive images, a short fuse, and sleep that never fully comes back. We also dig into why the “tough it out” culture quietly pushes people toward avo...
A lot of first responders can talk anyone through a crisis, then go home and quietly self-destruct. That tension sits at the center of my conversation with Joe Smarro, a former cop known for crisis work who’s also honest about the parts of his life that didn’t look “resilient” at all: shame, compulsive numbing, relationship fallout, and the kind of hopelessness that puts a gun belt in the roo...
A “mental health call” rarely looks like a calm conversation in a quiet office. It looks like uncertainty, pressure, split-second decisions, and a room full of risk factors that do not fit neatly into a checklist. I sit down with Joe Smarro, former Marine and former San Antonio Police Department officer who spent 11 years full-time on a mental health unit, to unpack what actually works when the goal is s...
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