Today’s guest is Officer Matt Jenatscheck, an Iowa police officer with nearly three decades on the job who currently serves with the Cedar Rapids Police Department’s Police Community Action Team, or PCA; a unit focused on reducing gun violence and gang activity in some of the city’s most challenging areas.
Over the course of his career, Matt has served in a wide variety of roles, including as a DEA Task Force Officer, Homeland Security Investigations Task Force Officer, detective, Field Training Officer, patrol sergeant, and much more.
But today’s conversation isn’t really about assignments, titles, or arrests.
It’s about what almost 30 years of this profession can do to the person wearing the uniform.
Matt describes accumulated trauma as a Rolodex filled with index cards. Every difficult call adds another card. For years, those cards keep flipping around until eventually they become tangled on the spool.
And like many of us who came up around an older generation of cops, Matt learned to deal with those experiences by pushing them down, moving on to the next call, and, as he puts it, rubbing some dirt on it and getting back to work.
Eventually, that stopped working.
Today, Matt is willing to speak openly about his own struggles, his resistance to getting help, substance use, suicide, finally admitting that something wasn’t right, and what happened when he allowed people to help him.
This isn’t a conversation about weakness. It’s a conversation about what can happen when years of exposure to trauma accumulate, and why sometimes the hardest words for a first responder to say are simply, “I need help.”
If you want to reach out to Matt, you can find him at: Code4mindsetllc@gmail.com
Matt requested that his friend’s Instagram also get a tag.
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