I Need Blue
I turned around to see a masked man pointing a gun at me. It was just the beginning of a series of events, including robbery and abduction, which changed my life forever. I Need Blue, hosted by Jen Lee, is a podcast series featuring lived-experiences from survivors of life events. I NEED BLUE creates space for survivors of trauma to feel they BELONG, are LOVED, UNDERSTOOD and EMPOWERED! I called 9-1-1 and they provided me with life-saving directions to help my customer who was having a medical emergency. Law enforcement rescued us and caught the robber. Our first-responders face unique traumas every day. I NEED BLUE provides space for them too!
I Need Blue
Jeff: A Badge, a Battle, a Breakthrough: The Real Story of a Florida Police Officer
A single ride-along changed Jeff Otis’s life, launching a 26-year law enforcement career marked by trauma, tragedy, and ultimately, healing. Early heartbreak struck when a fellow officer was killed while Jeff was still in training, setting the stage for years of hypervigilance, standoffs, and traumatic crime scenes. Through candid conversation, Jeff reveals the psychological cost of protection and the culture of “suck it up” over healing.
When PTSD symptoms—panic attacks, night terrors, headaches—surfaced, Jeff pushed through until a move to Vero Beach, Florida opened the door to real recovery. Through community policing and therapies like ketamine and ceremonial plant medicine, he found freedom from decades of silent suffering. His story challenges stereotypes, showing that seeking help is strength, and reminds us that behind every uniform is a human being with extraordinary experiences.
Contact Jeff: jefferyotis@hotmail.com
Resources discussed in this episode:
Bella Vida Chapel Sacrament Ceremonies in Melbourne Florida
https://www.bellavidachapel.com
Connect with Jen:
I Need Blue now has a new home at The Healing in Sharing! Visit thehealinginsharing.com to explore Round Chair Conversations, all relevant I Need Blue content, and ways to support the mission of sharing stories that inspire hope and resilience.
By sharing the hidden lines of our stories, we remind each other we are not alone — together, we step out of hiding and into healing.
Instagram: @ineedbluepodcast
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Apple Podcasts: Listen & Subscribe
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Memoir: Why I Survived, by Jennifer Lee on Amazon
Imagine when you share your darkest hours they become someone else's light. I'm Jennifer Lee, a global community storyteller, host, author and survivor, guiding you through genuine, unfiltered conversations. Together we break the silence, shatter stigma and amplify voices that need to be heard. Each episode stands as a testament to survival, healing and reclaiming your power. Listen to I Need Blue on Apple Podcasts, spotify, youtube or your favorite platform. Learn more at wwwineedbluenet. Trigger warning I Need Blue shares real-life stories of trauma, violence and abuse meant to empower and support. Please take care of yourself and ask for help if needed.
Speaker 1:Now let's begin today's story. It started with a ride-along. It started with a ride-along Just one college experience that flipped the switch and set Jeff on a lifelong mission to serve and protect. That ride happened over 26 years ago, but its impact still echoes today. Back then, in the heart of Connecticut, jeff entered the police academy A grueling, almost two-year journey filled with relentless testing, intense training and a single goal To select only the best Out of 2,500 applicants. Jeff was one of just eight chosen. That moment shaped the course of his life.
Speaker 1:Fast forward more than two decades and the landscape of law enforcement looks vastly different. In this raw and honest conversation, jeff gives us an unfiltered look into the evolution of policing from the inside out. We explore the ripple effects of defunding, the decline in applicants, and the deep emotional, mental and physical price paid by those in uniform Now serving in Vero Beach, florida. Jeff is a police officer assigned to a specialized unit as a community officer. Since coming to Vero Beach, jeff's story takes a surprising turn. What started as a professional shift became something deeply personal. The move became a turning point not just in his career but in his healing. Not just in his career, but in his healing.
Speaker 1:For years, jeff carried silent struggles he couldn't name and didn't know how to address. Until one day everything began to make sense. In this episode we go beyond the badge. Jeff opens up about his diagnosis, his journey toward treatment and the hard-earned wisdom he's gained. His words offer strength, validation and hope to every first responder quietly carrying the weight of the world. This one's for the warriors who never remove their armor, even when it's heavy. Who never remove their armor even when it's heavy. Jeff, thank you for all you do. Thank you for being my guest today and welcome to the I Need Blue podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Of course it's my honor. I'm so glad that we actually have had the opportunity to meet in chat a little, so I love that. You enthusiastically gave me your card and said I would love to come and share, even though this is something you have not done before Never. How are you feeling about it?
Speaker 2:I feel good about it. I think that, uh, sometimes things play out the way they should. You know, never thought about doing anything like that, but from where I came from and where I am now, I think maybe sharing the story may help other people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I have no doubt that it will. I also do believe that God always picks the perfect time that we are supposed to connect Right Before we start. You have a special message for our audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if anybody would like to reach out to me law enforcement guys, folks like that, tend to be pretty private. You know my full name is Jeff Otis O-T-I-S. I work for Hero Beach PD. You can email me. I can even give you my contact information if you want to reach out and call. But I can say that you know if you're struggling, there is help and you can still. You can get that help and you can still stay on the job and be very effective, because if your mental health isn't there and you're not taking care of yourself, you're not going to be able to take care of anybody.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Thank you for providing that to them. Now, in your introduction, we talk about your ride-along, which I've had the pleasure of being on one or two of those. Tell me about this first ride-along that you were on.
Speaker 2:So when I was in the Army National Guard, one of my lieutenants was a Hartford police officer and we would talk all the time and I was initially going to go into the teaching program in college and be a school teacher and we would talk and you know, you should come on a ride along with me, you might like it. And I can still remember some of the calls that we were on. I mean, we were adrenaline kids and I was an outdoor kid. I call ourselves streetlight kids. We were always outside and doing some sort of activity sports, bmx, bikes, things like that and I noticed these guys were.
Speaker 2:They weren't confined to an office or a room and there was some action. But it wasn't necessarily just that. It was the way they handled themselves and how they handled people and how they interacted with you know their community. So some of the calls we were on were interesting, you know. I remember one specifically where they were trying to convince somebody to take their insulin for diabetes. It was just talking to them and treating them like a human being and not somebody that's beneath them. I liked that they were professionals. So that that is what did it for me. I well, I don't think it was a week later and I switched my major to the criminal justice program, and that's how it started for me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, and tell us a little bit about the hiring process, the training, things like that, because then we want to talk about how that is different today.
Speaker 2:Right. So back then, especially up in the northeast in New England where I came from, it was a very competitive process and a lot of people were looking to get that job. When I was in high school, you know, we were kind of rock and roll kids, gearhead kids, skateboarders and I remember being in class and two or three East Hartford police officers came into the classroom and they were looking for kids to be police explorers and I didn't raise my hand, you know, because, like I said, I would have no friends in high school, but I was interested even back then. That sounds cool. And I remember they said something to the effect of the job it's a good job and someday everybody's going to want it. And they were right.
Speaker 2:Because even when I was in college, you know, I took the test for East Hartford alone and I remember showing up at the East Hartford High School, which is where I went, and there was over 2000 people there taking the physical agility portion and then from there you were graded and if you pass that, you went to the written exam and I remember looking around thinking this is crazy, it's like playing the lottery. I never thought it was going to happen. I took the test anyway, and I hadn't even graduated college yet and this was probably in early spring of 1997. And it wouldn't be until August of 1998 where I would get the phone call to go through the rest of the testing process to get sworn in basically. So it was the polygraph, a psychological examination, a regular physical, a couple more interviews and then a final interview with the chief and his staff before you get the nod and kind of welcome to the club kind of thing. And I started the police academy in August of 98.
Speaker 1:Wow, you know and one of the things when I talk about I Need Blue and I share that I include our first responders in the conversation that's always followed up by. They witness things that you or I could not possibly imagine and they do this day in, day out, over and over again. Would you like to share some of the calls that you have been on to maybe give a little insight to our audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So one thing I didn't share with you is my career started with trauma. So while I was on FTO, which is field training, one of my friends who we were friends before we became police officers we took the same test. He happened to get hired about six months before I did, while on FTO. He responded to a noise complaint and he was shot and killed.
Speaker 2:So that's how my career started, with a funeral. We knew that those were the risks. We were probably a little naive, you know like no, it's my hometown, it's East Hartford, it's a busy enough city, but things like that weren't happening at that time and no police officer in East Hartford had been shot and killed before then and has not been shot and killed since then. So it started with the funeral. And you know I was still good friends with his brother John. That changed everything for me from the very beginning. Like I said, you're prepared for those things, but when it hits that close it's a friend of yours and you see what it does to the family Over the years it does change the way you operate out there very quickly.
Speaker 1:I mean essentially, you begin your career already having to have faced the worst case scenario of your job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a long week because the suspect was at large for a while. So we were all at work for days and days on end and it has maybe some positives to it because it did bring like the community together and it brings the police department closer, you know, and you put some of the petty differences aside, at least for a while. But if you work in an agency that's not sort of I don't want to say used to that, but the larger agencies where officers are shot more often, this changed the police department forever. It never goes back to the same.
Speaker 2:So my group of people that I started with, we had a very different perspective on the job. We never let our guard down. We were always hypervigilant, always hypervigilant. And I think that's sort of where that started for me is not processing some of that trauma, because you know, I was there, I saw him, I was part of it. So you don't really get to learn how to process those things the right way. You just get told basically, hold it in, suck it up, kid, and you debrief in a bar, and we did that for years.
Speaker 1:Are you comfortable saying his name, and we'll honor his memory.
Speaker 2:Brian Asselton. Yeah, Brian Asselton.
Speaker 1:Okay, so when we also honor him and his service while we speak today, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know I can say that there's not very many days that go by where I don't think about him because he was cut down early, 25 or 26 years old, even when I was going through my career there. I would think I wonder what he'd be doing. Would he be on SWAT team with me? Would he be here or there? Would he have gotten married and had a family? When you hit milestones in your life, I would think about that, but he never got to do any of that.
Speaker 1:Right, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2:So it affects you personally when something like that happens, and it wouldn't stop there. This would be a recurring theme for my career.
Speaker 1:It's remarkable that you still continued on and I know later on we'll talk about the mental health issues as well and what would you say is the most dangerous call that you have been on.
Speaker 2:There's a few. So I would say it was another officer down call and it was a Newington police officer, which is where Brian Azleton's's brother, john Asselton, worked. We get the call for mutual aid that there was a barricaded suspect in a house that had shot a Newington police officer. So mutual aid means multiple towns are going to come and assist. Newington was a smaller police department so they had a perimeter set and we had a command post and I could hear the gunshots up on top of the hill so I knew it was a very active scene. So as I'm going up the hill with another guy, the floodlights on the houses were lighting up and showing our locations. So I was taking my rifle and poking out all the lights so that they wouldn't backlight us as we were going up.
Speaker 2:And this is in the middle of winter and it was cold it was really cold that night and it just so happens that there was construction being done across the street and there was a big bulldozer across the street from this house and that's good cover, and I might have been now maybe 30 or 40 yards from the front of this house and this guy was in the basement with thousands of rounds of ammunition and he was shooting through the little concrete slits in the foundation. So in the north the foundations poke up out of the ground and there's usually these little windows, so he was shooting from those. So you really couldn't get a good shot. But he knew right where all of us were. So he was making sure that he put enough rounds in each direction so that if we tried to make an approach we would get hit.
Speaker 2:There were some snipers, some police snipers that were set up. There was a lot of shots, a lot of exchange of gunfire that night. The suspect was hit a few times in the extremities but it wasn't enough to stop him. This is hours going by. A SWAT team actually tried to make entry. They couldn't make the entry because he shot through the floor. As the night went on, we had a robot come and drag a fire hose and stuff the fire hose into the concrete slit and we turned it on and flooded the basement and as the basement was filling with water like a swimming pool, he shot and killed himself.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yes. So Pete Lavery Officer. Pete Lavery was in the basement as well. We knew that he was diseased because we had the robot and we could see that there was no signs of life there. So we knew that it was going to be a recovery and not a rescue. So that gave us the opportunity to end it. So we did, we flooded it and he killed himself.
Speaker 2:So those circumstances would follow me around for a couple more calls. There was another one not too long after that where a suspect called he called 911 on himself for a sexual assault warrant. We thought that was kind of odd. This is in the middle of a blizzard, so as we get there we can hear screaming on the inside of the house. So as a canine officer and a few others go in, I happen to be in front on perimeter and the guy came at the canine officer and the canine stabbed. The canine came at our canine officer with the knife and they shot the suspect and then in the exchange of gunfire our canine officer was shot in the leg or his femur in half. So the canine was injured and retreated and I saw the canine run by me and they'll go to where they're comfortable after they're wounded like that. The canine ran by me and they had those sort of like a latch on the door where they could flip it with their nose and he went into the cruiser and was all all cut up. So we got an officer down and we got the canine down.
Speaker 2:So I ended up taking the canine vehicle and the canine to a 24-hour vet in the in the. I remember the blizzard like the. I was trying to go code out there but the lights were just bouncing off the snow and I couldn't see anything. So I get the dog out there, we pull him out, they shave him down. He's got a bunch of wounds all over his, his head and his neck. They patched him up pretty quick. He did survive, and so did the canine officer, but it wasn't without, I think, a year of recovery for him to recover. His leg ended up being, I think, about two inches shorter and he had to have a boot manufactured so that his gait would be even so. So, as good friends do, we called him Kiss Boot, like the rock and roll band. So we made a little joke out of it. That was a wild night. And again you know, it was about a millimeter from his femoral artery. If that bullet had hit the femoral artery, he'd have bled out.
Speaker 1:I'm glad they made it through. I was holding my breath. I was like, please don't tell me they died.
Speaker 2:No, they didn't, they didn't. Well, there's others. I've been involved with an officer involved shooting myself. It was a robbery that the suspect was running police officers over with a vehicle and we shot him. We had another armed hostage incident where an officer got shot. That was a mutual aid call in Manchester and we were being shot at. But once again he knew right where we were and he was laying rounds all over the neighborhood and it was one of our police snipers that took a shot, a headshot, and shot him when he stuck his head out the window. So all of those things and there's others over the years where I did all right with it. For many years I held up pretty good. It wasn't until years later where I started getting some of those symptoms that we'll talk about. And then all the other things in between working homicides, you know, rape, child death, things like that.
Speaker 1:How often did you have to make in-the-moment decisions?
Speaker 2:All the time, yeah, all the time. East Hartford was just. I don't think there was a weekend that would go by where we weren't using, you know, a taser or pepper spray or some sort of less lethal option to end an incident. It wasn't a quiet town and I kind of liked that at the time. I liked that we were caught. We really did the job, and so did all the people that I worked with. I didn't realize the toll that it was taking over time. I just didn't see it.
Speaker 1:Right. Can you talk about then how the defund the police movement also changed things for you?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it did a lot. So toward the end of my career I was running the training division, which was all the firearms, all the use of force, taser, certifications, pistol rifle, heavily involved with SWAT operations, things like that and the defunding was real. We ended up getting involved with a military surplus program. You could get a lot of equipment like everything that you can think of from the military surplus, whether it was weapons vehicles. Some departments in Connecticut had helicopters and airplanes and things like that. So when the defunding started, I was told you got to give everything back. So we were giving back our guns and I had close to a hundred guns, weapon systems and other things that we were using from the military. So that's where it started. The budgets were being cut. I watched my budget shrink. So you're trying to kind of piece these things together so that guys can stay at the top of their game.
Speaker 2:Our training program was pretty good and it came from a long line of people that did it before me, that passed it on to me. So when you take something like that over, it's your job to take it to the next level and push it even harder. We did a lot, a lot of training to very little, and it wasn't long after that where qualified immunity came into question and the state legislatures in Connecticut voted for us to have it removed. And that was a big deal, because that means that law enforcement police officers can be sued personally and there was a mass exodus up there in Connecticut. There's only a couple of states in the United States that don't have qualified immunity. I think Colorado is one of them, and Connecticut now, and that was in the fall of 2020.
Speaker 2:I remember asking my chief. I said you know, if something goes wrong and one of these kids gets jammed up, you know, do I get in trouble with them? I'm one of the firearms instructors there. We ended up reaching out to an attorney and the attorney said yeah, you guys are all going to be liable. So that didn't work for me.
Speaker 2:January of 2021, I retired from East Harvard and that was it for Connecticut and that was it for a lot of people up there that I knew that if they could leave, they left. There's a mass exodus up there. So you end up with a shortage. You end up with a retention problem when you're trying to fill those positions and keep the street staff. Keep your minimum staffing requirements, your recruiting requirements start to change. Maybe you don't need a two-year degree anymore, or all you really need is a high school diploma. They were taking, in my opinion, people that don't belong out there, and DEI is a very real thing and we hear about it a lot in politics and on the news channels, but you saw it yourself when they tried to assassinate President Trump. I mean, those folks had no business being out there. None, there's other people in law enforcement that are just like that no business being out there.
Speaker 1:Were you ever in a situation where you witnessed one of your officers and you were like oh, that's, that's not cool, how he's handling that.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it was any one person in specific. I just noticed that, and it might be an age thing too, combined with lowering the standards and I'm not saying this is all but 20, 21, 22-year-old kids that just put down the Xbox controller and decided to go to the police academy might not be your best candidate. They have no life experience. They don't know how to handle themselves, never mind trying to handle somebody else. I see it in their behavior when they're working at a scene or at a call for service, and not all, not all, but more than I saw when I was a young officer If you weren't at the top of the list the top you were not even getting looked at to go out there. And that has changed. I'm not saying all of them, but a lot.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Let's talk about Vero Beach. This was a very pivotal moment for you personally and professionally, so I want to dig into that, because this is a really important part of the episode that I know you really wanted to talk about. So let's get right into that.
Speaker 2:So, vero, when we came down here from Connecticut I didn't really have much thought of doing the job again. But my wife works at the airport for the city here, works at the airport for the city here, and I got to talking to one of our lieutenants. You know we had talked a couple of times and I was like, eh, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't know, I don't feel like I want to do it. So it was, I think at one of the air shows of the Blue Angels were here and we got to talking a little bit more. And you know he says it's not like that here and we get to talking a little bit more. And you know it's not like that here. You know different down here and I did miss the job. I cut it short and that's really what I enjoy doing. It's my profession, it's in my blood. So I did, I went for it and I had all my stuff transferred down from Connecticut, all my certifications, and they went down to the academy here in Fort Pierce. So I had to do a few things. We did some shooting for certification stuff purposes. You take a state exam and then you're certified. I like the idea of our governor, ron DeSantis, who is very pro-law enforcement, and I know that he has our back. He also gave me a hell of a sign-on bonus too, so that helped.
Speaker 2:And then I went quickly through the process here in Vero. I interviewed with them. I think they were happy to have somebody that had that kind of background. Some of them don't know like if anybody ever hears this, but to a lot of the younger kids I'm just some old guy from Connecticut and they're not wrong, I am an old guy from Connecticut but I've been around and I've had a few things happen. So I thought that I could bring something to let them see how the older generation did it, and I think they they like it. I think the younger guys, now that they know me, I think they appreciate what we're doing out there.
Speaker 2:So I spent some time out on the street. I did about a year or so on nights and they were forming the community policing unit. I saw the job posting and I forming the community policing unit. I saw the job posting and I had done community policing in my last career, but it was in the housing project. It's a little bit different than Ocean Drive here in Vero Beach.
Speaker 2:I had also learned that nobody put in for it. Nobody wanted to do it. So I called up the deputy chief, I think, at the time and I said well, what are you guys going to do? He goes well, we're going to order somebody to do it. I said, no, no, you're going to get a terrible product. So I said I'll do it for you. I'll do it if you want.
Speaker 2:So that's how that started for me and it worked out so good. It was such a big hit with the community that they wanted to add a second officer. So I had been talking with one of the guys that I rode with when I first started here in Vero, richie. I said you know you like this. You're at the perfect spot in your career and in your life to, you know, take a break from the road and try something a little different. So that was last February a little over a year that Richie joined me and we've been doing the community policing thing since between the beach, ocean Drive and downtown main street. So that's how it started for me here in Vera. It just kind of happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love it and that's how we connected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and we love the 14, we love.
Speaker 1:I'm going to shout out to the 1420 coffee house too, because we love those guys yes, that is where we met and I love seeing you all over the community as well on your bikes. You all are always very smiling and chit-chatting with people and and it's also policing, but it's relationship building and being present and there's so much good on so many levels that comes from this community policing unit. Can I ask you, then, what was the moment or the experience that occurred when you realized something's going on in me? I can't fix it, it's not right. I don't know how to fix it. Where do I go? Can you share that with us?
Speaker 2:Sure, that actually started before I came here. It was toward the end of my career up north, where I was having these different type of symptoms, particularly these incapacitating panic attacks where I thought I was having some sort of stroke or heart attack. And cops are so, yeah, we are. We're so thick headed sometimes I didn't want to call an ambulance. So I drove myself to the ER up in Connecticut and I get in there and I tell the doc, you know I'm having a heart attack. So he plugs me into all this stuff, takes blood. He goes Jeff, you're fine, I mean, it's you're, you're fine. And I started telling him some of these other symptoms I was having Out of nowhere headaches, headaches, night terrors, night sweats, waking up, fighting, punching, ticking the wall, breaking things all kinds of things that I couldn't account for and I couldn't make them stop. I guess you want to call it that. It was just boiling over. All those things were in there and I never did anything to process them anything. And it was coming out particularly when I would be sleeping and then if I was awake it would be these waves of these panic attacks. I couldn't account for them, massive headaches. I wouldn't be able to leave the house. I thought at the time well, retirement will be a good idea, I'll go forward and decompress. It did subside a little when I left the job but I was still having them. It was all still happening and it was getting worse.
Speaker 2:I'm an avid runner so I've run long distance. I do a lot of marathon running. I stay pretty healthy. But to sort of pacify it, I was using alcohol. I was drinking, probably a little too much, and I remember going to my doctor here and I was telling her all the symptoms that were continuing. And she says you have every single symptom of post-traumatic stress. I don't have like the suicide part of it. I don't have that. I'm too high on life, I like being alive. I'm that kid that from a very young age I was always excited to be doing something. But these other symptoms and these other things, I just couldn't make it stop. It wouldn't stop.
Speaker 2:She wanted to give me Lexapro or something like that and I'm like I really want to take something for it. So she wrote me the prescription. I took it for about six months. I didn't like it. It's too many side effects, it's just not for me. So an email came out at the police department at Vero Beach PD and it was a sheepdog program through Emerald Health here in Vero Beach and I remember seeing it and thinking I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2:But it wasn't too much longer after that where I mentioned it to Richie, the guy I work with, and he's kind of looking at me and I said, well, he goes, well, I'm doing it. I said, well, what are you doing? So he starts telling me about this treatment that's out there Now it's new, it's actually brand new type of treatment that's out there and it's called ketamine therapy. And he's telling me about it and I'm thinking I'm very careful about what I put in my body, like I didn't never heard of anything like this. I just know ketamine is like a fashion drug or something. I didn't know much about it.
Speaker 2:So I thought about it for a few months and the symptoms persisted. I made the move to go sit and talk with them over at Emerald Health. I sat with the doctor there, chris, and he brought a service dog in and the service dog kind of sniffs me and then kind of walks away. And I look at the doc, he goes yeah, you have post-traumatic stress. I guess the dog can sniff it. I'm not really sure how the dog knew, but the dog knew and we set it up. It's six sessions of intravenous ketamine treatment in a controlled setting in the doctor's office and then it's followed by six sessions of like talk therapy with a counselor. They're great. They're doing God's work. I'm telling you that is a life-changing great. They're doing God's work. I'm telling you that is a life-changing life-changing experiment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for me that's awesome. I love when somebody can find the healing modality that works for them. You are actually my second guest on the podcast who uses ketamine as their healing go-to as well and, like you said, it's in a very controlled environment administered by a doctor, yada, yada. So where are your symptoms now between the ketamine and going to therapy?
Speaker 2:They're gone Wow, it's. And Richie, I asked him specifically. I said did it work? Did it help you? And I talked to his wife about it also, and it was him that convinced me to do it, because he's not the kind of person who's just going to do it. And I would notice him. How's he so good? How's he been got 20 years doing this stuff? And he's, and he's so happy and jolly. Now I know why he went and got help.
Speaker 2:It takes you to a place. It's a space. It's like a reset. It allows you to sort of like file things away and see things in a different perspective. And it is a space when you're there. It is a spot, it's a place that you go and you get to. I'd like to say you actually see, God takes you to a place and it allows you to sort of drains it all out. It feels like it's being taken out of you. Anybody who's been through any traumatic experiences, whether it's public safety guys or military veterans, yourself this is very effective. Yourself, this is very effective, very effective therapy. I recommend it.
Speaker 1:So you went from dealing with something that had like complete control of you right these PTSD symptoms and basically through your ketamine treatment you took control of them and you let them go.
Speaker 2:Is that a good way to describe that? Let them go? Is that a good way to describe that? Yes, it does. It allows you to do that. And I didn't stop there. Adrian was part of a church and at this church they have a sacrament there it's called ayahuasca and if you're part of the church you can participate in the sacrament. So he has suggested that to me also. Both of those guys, adrian and Chris, the doctor and the therapist that run everything they're former special forces guys, so they've got a lot of different trauma that they've got all packaged up. He had suggested I go to this retreat so I also did that as well.
Speaker 2:The ayahuasca treatment that is an experience for sure, very healing. It was right on the beach, it looks like a little cup of gravy and it's got ayahuasca root in it and it's been used for thousands of years to treat warriors for post-traumatic stress. I guess they didn't call it that back then. But the problem with us is we don't process it the right way. We teach these guys how to fight and warriors how to kill and things like that, but what we don't do is we don't teach them how to work through it. So this helps even further in healing from it and processing the things that you've been through or had to do that sort of thing. Ketamine and the ayahuasca they're two very different treatments, but I found that the ayahuasca is really healing. It definitely takes you to a place in almost like your subconscious to help you heal and sort things out.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of veterans there. There were some airline pilots there, a lot of medical professionals there. There's a limited number of people, but that was the majority of the people that were in this. I guess you call it retreat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is fascinating. It's like oh, I guess you call it retreat. Yeah, that is fascinating. It's like oh, I want to try that myself. It sounds amazing. So it sounds like you have a new lease on life.
Speaker 2:It's definitely. I don't want to say it's a magic button, but if there's somebody out there that's struggling, whether it's somebody in law enforcement anywhere in public safety, whether it's police law enforcement anywhere in public safety, whether it's police, fire dispatchers anywhere, veterans and I don't get any money from these guys either. I'm just saying this is what's out there. Whether you decide to use it or take a look at it, depending on how bad you're hurting, I found it to be life-changing. You do have to get the diagnosis, you have to sit in there and if you don't get the diagnosis, then I'm not going to give you a ketamine treatment. Somebody's struggling. You know the stigma that has been around the profession since I started. It shouldn't be like that anymore. If you're involved with a critical incident and you're not debriefing and handling it right away, or you're just bottling it up and going on to the next thing, it's going to catch up. It does. It might take time, it might take years, even decades for me, but it does show its face at some point.
Speaker 1:Well, your testament shows that it's never too late.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and it's not. It's not. I know there's people out there that have had it way harder than I had, especially the guys that are there at Emerald Health Now. These guys went through some, some wild things and they're all doing. They're all doing. Well, I'm not saying it's not a work in progress because you know you do have to stay at it and they'll have you come in every maybe six months or so, if you want to, for like a booster. It kind of resets you with the therapy, with the medicine.
Speaker 1:Do they take insurance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they do If you're part of a. I forget which ones they take, but we're working on trying to get them to take our insurance here in Vero Beach. I don't think we're quite there yet, like the city taking Emerald Health, but the sheepdog program allowed me to do it through donations that came in at no cost to me and I believe that that is out there still for others. There's still funding there for others to go in. The hardest part is just convincing yourself that you're going to go do it. We don't like to admit that we're struggling, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the first step is admitting hey, there's something wrong. Right, that is definitely the first step. Jeff, thank you for being my guest today on the I Need Blue podcast.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I'll see you around town too.
Speaker 1:Sounds great. I look forward to it. This is Jen Lee, host of the I Need Blue podcast. Survivor author. Thank you for joining us today. If you want to learn anything and everything about the I Need Blue podcast, please visit my website, wwwineedbluenet. And remember you are stronger than you think. Until next time.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
