Mike Peterson joins us to discuss his military service, career in law enforcement, and shares his personal journey through trauma and loss to wellness.

Mike is now a mindfulness coach, his passionate belief in the benefits of mindfulness was evident as he explained how the process can increase resiliency, performance, and well-being in first responders.

To learn more please visit: https://www.nemindfulnessandperformance.org/home

Sean Kilbreth joins us on the podcast and shares about his experiences in law enforcement, his path to wellness and continued service.

Sean has been a police officer for 26 years, he joins Linda and Jay to discuss his career - including his experience in an officer involved shooting. Sean shares how the job impacted his mental health, his family relationships, how stigma played a role in his life, how mindfulness and other recovery methods helped restore him to a state of well-being, and how he uses what he learned along the way to help others.

Kammie Juzwin, PsyD is a clinical psychologist and holds professional certification as a Police Psychologist. She is an embedded Psychologist Consultant for Bartlett Illinois Police Department, where her primary role is officer wellness and support. She provides wellness and officer-involved critical incident consultation to individual officers or to departments, participates actively as a volunteer on several crisis intervention and disaster response teams, and has published and presented on topics including first responder selection, critical incident response, understanding mental health issues, disaster mental health and line of duty death.

In this episode Dr Juzwin shares how she was drawn to work with the first responder culture, critical incident response, organizational wellness, officer buy in, and how long it took for her to gain the trust of officers within her organization, the importance of officers being able to reach out for help without incurring negative consequences, and how to structure departmental policy that ensures that.