After Trauma: Lessons on Overcoming from a First Responder Turned Crisis Counselor

Praise for After Trauma: Lessons on Overcoming from a First Responder Turned Crisis Counselor

Rothrock skillfully weaves together insights from her experiences as a firefighter, educator, advocate, and counselor to present a thoughtful guide to overcoming self-blame, shame, and other common reactions to trauma. Part memoir and part practical self-help guide, featuring simple but powerful exercises, the book will inspire survivors to connect with their inner strength and resilience in order to reclaim control over their futures.

—Karla Vermeulen, PhD, deputy director, Institute for Disaster Mental Health at SUNY New Paltz

A riveting page-turner! Rothrock demonstrates the power of owning your own experiences.

—Adrianne Ziyad, trustee at Women in Fire

"After Trauma shines a light on the darkness that trauma leaves behind and guides survivors through the tunnel of recovery in a sensitive, supportive manner. Realizing I was not alone in my nonlinear journey of trauma recovery gave me a sense of peace and a feeling of solidarity with other survivors."

—Kelly Herron, co-founder of RunBuddy and featured in the Runner’s World documentary, Not Today

"This is an enlightening and special book. After Trauma is both a poignant memoir and an educational guide to resilience. By centering the light on the survivor experience and recovery, Ali Rothrock teaches us about our incredible capacity to create change, to heal from trauma, and to make our communities safer when we speak up against injustice and share our story."

—Kristina Froling, Virginia Tech shooting survivor, and founder of The Koshka Foundation for Safe Schools

Ali Rothrock provides a poignant and practical approach to dealing with trauma, seeing it as an opportunity for growth. She has found the balance of engagement and insight that reinforces the message that trauma is not the end of a journey but just the beginning.

—Sara Jahnke, director and senior scientist at the Center for Fire, Rescue & EMS Health Research, NDRI-USA, Inc.

"Rothrock weaves together the elements of trauma and triumph. After Trauma is a valuable resource for those who live forward with the aftereffects of trauma, as well as for those of us who support and join with them on their journey by holding space both for them and with them."

—Lisa Zoll, LCSW, founder of Grief Relief

Ali Rothrock rightly claims ‘a loud voice that speaks hard truths.’ Hers is a fierce, uncompromising voice for survivors, for surviving, for thriving. Listen to her voice and you will hear the echo of so many women and girls. Far too many. This book is a charge to men of conscience to find the courage to stand up. To speak up. To say, ‘No more.’ And a charge to women to believe in ourselves.

—jona olsson, fire and EMS chief, Latir Volunteer Fire Dept, Northern New Mexico, and founder of cultural bridges to justice

After Trauma

After Trauma

Lessons on Overcoming from a First Responder Turned Crisis Counselor

Ali W. Rothrock

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

AFTER TRAUMA

Lessons on Overcoming from a First Responder Turned Crisis Counselor

Copyright © 2022 Ali W. Rothrock. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

The author is represented by WordServeLiterary Group, www.wordserveliterary.com.

Cover image: kyoshino/istock.com

Cover design: James Kegley

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8063-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8064-0

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To the healers, space holders, and those who shine a light in the darkness.

Contents

Foreword

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part I

1 Forgive Yourself for Not Seeing It Coming

2 Work to Find Coherence in Your Life Story

3 Your Struggle Is a Tunnel, Not a Cave

4 Your Life Is Your Responsibility

5 There Is No One Right Way to Be a Survivor

Part II

6 Your Relationship to Your Story Will Change over Time

7 Don’t Play the Trauma Olympics

8 Forgiving Doesn’t Mean Forgetting

9 Tell Hard Truths

10 Recovery Has No Timeline

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Resources

Foreword

Before I was shot on April 12, 2013, I hadn’t experienced trauma. But that day, hiding in a closet inside the community college where I worked, with blood pouring out of my hand, I knew from that moment forward everything would be different. I understood even then that I was experiencing a clear delineation of time. There was before trauma, and now there would be after trauma.

In the aftermath of my recovery, I searched high and low for any resource I could find about trauma, grief, and healing. I bought any book I could find on the subject and stacked them up in a pile on the floor alongside my bed. The answers to my questions had to be in there. But as I poured over the books during the morning, the afternoon, and the middle of the night after a particularly horrible nightmare, I realized I wasn’t actually looking for answers. I didn’t even know what my questions were.

There is a theme that runs through a lot of books about trauma, be it memoirs or nonfiction, that if you approach your circumstances with a positive mindset and a determined spirit, everything will turn out okay—the ribbons of your story will be tied nicely into a bow once you reach the end. This is the theme I came across over and over again in my reading. I would read a story about someone who overcame something horrible and was living a great and fulfilling life, and instead of coming away inspired and encouraged, I felt even more angry and even more alone. How nice for them, I would think to myself, admittedly in a very sarcastic tone. Reading books written by or about people on the other side of their trauma wasn’t helpful like I thought it would be. Because I wasn’t on the other side of mine. It was impossible for me to see a world in which my days weren’t marked by which doctor’s appointment I needed to go to and how much pain medicine I needed to take. Imagining the rest of my life was a feat I suddenly couldn’t accomplish when making it through the day was the best I could do.

It turns out that what I was looking for when I bought all those books, which I assume are all perfectly wonderful books, was just company in my grief. I simply wanted to read someone else’s story and feel less alone. In the days following the shooting I was never alone, not physically anyway. There were always people around—loving me, supporting me, tending to my needs. But none of them had experienced what I had. None of them had a bullet wound in their body; and that separated us from one another. They couldn’t know what I had been through. They couldn’t feel what I was feeling no matter how hard they tried. So the stories from the other side just rang hollow. I wanted to read about trauma from someone sitting in it, someone who was willing to let it be without trying to cover it up or fix it. Someone who knew that it might not end nice and clean.

Turns out, this is hard to find. Mainly because people don’t typically start writing their books about trauma from the very start. We write when we begin to process what happened, when we feel we have something to say about it, some wisdom to impart. Still, though, there are people who have the ability to write about their trauma from a strong and powerful place without feeling the need to pretend that you’ll be able to go back to who you were before. That’s what most of us want.

When I came across Ali’s work a handful of years ago, I knew she was the real deal. I had that feeling in my bones reading her words about living through crises and experiencing horrific events, that I had found one of those people.

This book, After Trauma, is the book I needed to read back in 2013 during some of the darkest times of my life. Ali does something powerful in this book. In retelling her own personal story, she pulls up a chair next to us and makes sure we don’t feel alone. In sharing her professional experiences as a first responder and her wisdom as a crisis counselor, she confidently assures us that she is the person to help guide us along our healing path, holding our stories gently in her hands.

Over the last nine years I have learned to be selective in who I let into my trauma, and the voices I allow to speak into my life and my healing. It’s too tender and too important to let just anyone that close. It’s too fragile to let just anyone have access to those parts of you. I wish now that I could have replaced that giant stack of books along the wall in my room with this one.

Since you’ve picked up this book, I am guessing you are in the midst of something difficult yourself, or maybe you are close to someone else who is, and you want to know how best to support them. Maybe you’re feeling a little trepidation about opening yourself up to more words, more advice, more shoulds or to-dos. What you’ll find within these pages is a friend, an advisor, a gentle yet empowering voice speaking into your life. No shame, criticism, or annoyingly pretty bows await you. You can trust this book you hold in your hands, and you can trust Ali as she walks with you through the pages.

—Taylor S. Schumann, author of When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence

Author’s Note

Content warning: This book contains descriptions of traumatic events, including domestic violence and sexual assault.

This book reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

Introduction

On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber detonated a homemade explosive device just after an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. When the news alert lit up my phone that night, I was sitting at my dining room table in Philadelphia, pen poised over a blank notebook page, eyes closed. Gabe Dixon’s song Disappear played loudly in my headphones, a song from the album I play on an endless loop while writing. I’d been writing what would become this book for seven years by that point, but on that day, I’d felt I was on the verge of finding out what this book was truly supposed to be.

My newlywed husband turned on the news to see the preliminary reports of the terrorist attack. Cell phone footage of girls with cat-ear headbands running from the arena played on a loop as ambulances rushed toward the crowds. As girls continued to stream from the blast site, I watched them take their first steps as survivors away from immediate trauma and into their After. I wondered about who those girls would be a week after that day, a month, a year, about how that night would sit in their minds in some form forever. Who would they be when the concert stadium stopped smelling like firecrackers, when the last survivor left the hospital, when everyone else in their lives moved on? Who would they choose to be in the face of such a violent and unexpected disruption?

I thought of the choices I’d made about who I was going to be after trauma. Some choices I made consciously and took sustained effort; some I made in order to just survive and make it to the next day. What determined those choices? What would affect these brand-new survivors while making theirs? These questions hung in my brain like the smoke that still lingered among the arena seats in Manchester. That’s when I knew I’d found the answer to what this book was meant to be.

After Trauma is not about focusing on suffering but on what comes next; it’s about how ordinary people find the strength to keep going after all sorts of trauma. We’ve all heard about large-scale events like mass shootings or acts of terrorism. We are both fascinated and horrified by the fact that violence and tragedy can touch our lives at any time and in any number of ways. We learn the names of those lost and injured, and we might even follow their stories of recovery for a while.

But then that day fades, we forget the date it happened, and we move on. We are captivated by the next significantly tragic day and those lives lost and those injured . . . and so the cycle continues. We remember the number of those killed, maybe some bits and pieces of their lives, and the way they died. But we often forget that for those people who became famous in the worst way, their lives don’t move on as quickly as ours do. Their overcoming is not complete when we forget about them. And what about the stories that never make the news, the stories we hold inside of us that aren’t for public consumption? The moments of overcoming that are unknown and unwitnessed but just as significant? What about those whose job it is to respond to and witness moments of trauma?

As a little girl, I was carefree and cherished. I was taught that my ideas mattered and that the world would always work in favor of those who are striving for good. For the first sixteen years of my life, I trusted the adults around me and I trusted myself. But there was a moment many years ago when I sent that little girl away. She was too trusting, too innocent. She was too free. I sent her running out of a fire station while the rest of me stayed behind. I imagined her running through the parking lot, past the darkened churches, out of the crumbling graveyard, and up the hill toward home. I thought that when it was safe, I could just call her back to me. But the longer she stayed away, the more I felt the absence of what she took: my ability to trust and my ability to feel safe. That girl’s homecoming was more than a decade in the making, and it happened without fanfare. It was only fitting that her homecoming would be surrounded by a fire truck’s flashing lights. She came back to me after years of searching for her, after walking the cavernous valleys of my mind to bring her home.

For me and for most, the process of reconnecting to our lost selves was not linear, but it was cumulative. I had no rulebook or specific steps to follow to make sure I was all better in the end, but every step forward counted. I had to learn that I alone was responsible for the quality of my life, and I had to keep continuously choosing a path that propelled me toward the wholeness I sought. External changes contributed to finding this wholeness, but learning that I already had all that I needed to make a change is what got me there. I learned that dismissing the depths of pain didn’t quicken this process but instead prolonged it. I eventually sought professional help because the trauma I’d experienced became the biggest part of me and was something I could no longer see around on my own. I needed company while doing the work necessary to move forward with the rest of my life. This journey was fueled by a simple desire to know who I could be if I could find a way to climb out of the mental valley I’d become stuck in. I wanted to know what the view from the summit would look like. This process was also fueled by a desire to regain my autonomy and voice and the hope that putting in that work would carve out a path others could follow.

I learned that trauma separates by design. It leaves us divided into our before and after—a split that demands to be noticed. Our hurt demands to be acknowledged. I also learned that the place of trauma, the literal or figurative place of that disconnection, can be the place where we come back to our past selves and reemerge. It can be the new foundation we stand on. A reconciliation. A rebirth. We can come home to ourselves and find our Afters. I did, eventually.

This book came in intentional spurts, a purposeful unfolding of an entire decade of growth and reclaiming what had been taken from me. Some seasons are for overcoming and some seasons are for becoming the person who will overcome. This book details both.

This book is for you, a survivor, especially those of you whose experiences do not fit the expected or accepted narrative of survivorship. This book is for you who are carrying dreams, for you who have had to fight against broken systems, and for you who have had to endlessly rally and rise to keep your fire lit. It’s for you who have struggled with your mental health as a result of trauma from on-the-job first responder experiences, at-home experiences, childhood adversity, a onetime trauma, cumulative trauma, genetics, or a combination of these factors. This book is for you who are raging against societal expectations and for you who are in all stages of overcoming a variety of life’s injuries. For you who are trying every day to reclaim and redefine your life. And this book is for you who are trying to understand how to help a loved one who is struggling.

My dad had a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage in 2008 that left him semicomatose in the neurological ICU for twelve days. As my family grappled with the visceral panic of potentially losing him, he was knocked out on morphine in a helicopter, having no awareness of the indescribable fear we were experiencing. Miraculously, he recovered with no deficits or long-term impacts. Recently, I asked him about his After.

It was a reset, he told me. You don’t need trauma to grow or make changes. But if you are recovering from a difficult experience, you do have a choice, even if you didn’t choose what happened to you. You can decide to grow.

That concept became the point of this story: