Why “Just Shake It Off” Doesn’t Work

Right after I graduated from the police academy, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my dad. He had been a cop since 1975 and was passing along his wisdom about the job. I hung on every word because he had been a police leader for decades in Las Vegas and everyone I knew respected him.

We started talking about the hard things I was going to see and experience over my career. He told me that he simply did not think about them. He compartmentalized every trauma and never talked to my mom about it. At the time, it seemed like good advice. I tried to mirror that approach for years.

Looking back, I understand why he said it. For decades, law enforcement culture treated emotional distance as a survival tool. Officers were told to keep their guard up, stay mission-focused, and push through no matter what. Talking about how something affected you was often seen as weakness, or worse, as a sign that you were not cut out for the job.

The advice my dad gave me was the same advice he had been given by the generation before him. In that era, mental health was barely discussed in police work except in the context of extreme breakdowns. Even then, it was handled quietly and often behind closed doors. The working belief was that officers could protect themselves by refusing to think about the hard stuff.

The tricky thing about that approach is that it works, at least for a while. After a difficult call or critical incident, pushing it out of your mind can give you a sense of control. You feel like you are moving on. In the short term, the body’s adrenaline and the brain’s survival wiring help you avoid the emotional impact. But over time, with repeated exposure to trauma, those emotions start to pile up.

When we do not process what we have been through, our minds and bodies hold onto it. It can show up unexpectedly in the form of anxiety, irritability, difficulty sleeping, or even physical health issues. Sometimes, as I learned, it shows up in very specific ways.

I remember going to a Weezer concert about a year after the 1 October shooting in Las Vegas. The show was at Mandalay Bay, the same hotel where I breached the suspect’s door. As I walked in, my heart rate spiked. My body tensed. I felt the same physical rush I had felt during the incident. It caught me off guard, but it was a powerful reminder that my body remembered even when my brain did not want to.

That is the thing about trauma. It is not just a memory or a story. It is a physical imprint. Your nervous system remembers. Your body reacts to reminders of the event, even when you think you have “shaken it off.” This is why the “just don’t think about it” approach eventually breaks down. The more we try to avoid it, the more power it gains.

So how do we move forward?

We cannot erase the tough experiences in our lives. But we can process them, learn from them, and build resilience. Processing does not mean reliving every detail. It means creating space to acknowledge what happened, understand how it affected you, and give your mind and body a chance to work through it. That can happen in different ways: through peer support conversations, therapy, after-action debriefs that include emotional impact, and personal practices like journaling, exercise, or mindfulness.

For years, policing has relied on a culture of silence when it comes to trauma. That approach has left too many officers struggling in isolation. If we want healthier officers, better decision-making under pressure, and stronger communities, we have to change the conversation. That means making it normal to talk about the emotional toll of the job, providing training on how to handle it, and creating environments where asking for help is seen as a mark of professionalism, not weakness.

Strength in policing is not about how much you can suppress. It is about how well you can recover.

The officers who learn to face what they have been through, process it, and still show up ready to serve are the ones who last in this profession without losing themselves in the process. That is the future we should be building.