My Dark Companion: The long road back from PTSD, depression & the brink of suicide

By Shaun O'Gorman

The story of my 13 year Police Career that ended in PTSD, depression, my battle with suicide and the long road back. My hope is my story helps other people realize there is light at the end of the tunnel. If you are considering reading this book then I want you to know who I am and what I want to achieve in writing and publishing this work. I have faced many challenges in my life and the overwhelming reality was no one knew how much I was struggling and how close I came to ending my life. With the epidemic of Suicide in our society I want to help shine light on the issue of Mental Health and assist in dispelling the stigma that is attached. If you or someone you know is facing difficult times please don’t stay quiet. Reach out for help if it is you. Reach out to the other person and offer them your hand in support if it’s someone else. Don’t be afraid to ask someone if they are really OK. Ask yourself how you would feel if something happened to that person and you knew there was more you could have done. We are all so scared to talk about the issue of Mental Health, yet I believe we all have our struggles at different intensities and different times in our lives. When we can get to a point where we look at these conditions like we look at a disease like Cancer, we will begin to make a difference. This is where I want Mental Health to get to. They are NOT a sign of weakness. Mental Health is something that I believe can not only be treated, but also managed to a point where it no longer has a negative effect on your life. I went from lying in my bed with a Glock pistol in my hand, to living a life I love. I still have tough days, and life is not all fairies and rainbows, but with effort and commitment you can live a great life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: May 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925595697

Shaun O'Gorman

Shaun O’Gorman was a Police Officer for 13 years. The depravity, violence and trauma he saw people perpetrate against each other had a devastating affect on him. He found himself lying in bed, three nights in a row, with a Glock pistol at his head, trying to find a reason not to end his life. Shaun has just released his book “My Dark Companion” that journals his Police Career, his battle with PTSD, Depression and Suicide and the 15 year journey back to a happy life. He now helps other Police, Military and First Responders learn how to cope with the horror they see while still serving the community and doing their job.Shaun comes from a strong Police family, his father is a highly decorated officer who served in the Queensland Police for 42 years and his uncle an Assistant Commissioner of Police. His father was the Qld Police Union president and dedicated his life to serving his community. Shaun followed in his foot steps. Shaun spent most of his 13 year career in the Police Dog Squad where he was constantly involved in armed hold ups, sieges, vehicle pursuits, violent domestics and the like. The toll that this work took on him lead him to becoming an angry and violent individual but still he didn’t realise there was a problem.After being diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression, Shaun resigned from the Police, ashamed and a broken version of his former self. He was let down by the Police Department and has spent the last 15 years fighting PTSD and depression by educating himself on how to live a better life. This is the story contained in his book “My Dark Companion”. He now works with other Police, Military and First Responders to help them understand the impact their job will have on them and how to cope with the horror they see every day.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

My dark companion

Suicidal thoughts are my Dark Companion. They have been with me since I was quite young and they turn up at unexpected times and are often triggered by circumstances and environments that don’t make much sense to me. It can be quite an insignificant experience or situation that triggers thoughts of F#@K this! It would be easier not to be here!

When I was 7, I first heard my Dad say that if life got any harder, he would blow his head off. He didn’t say it to me, and I do not want anyone to judge him for this comment. I overheard him saying it to himself as I walked into the back shed of our house where he was working on cars, one of his hobbies. As an adult, I realize he was in a dark place in his life where his marriage wasn’t working, he had financial pressure, and I am positive all the self-worth, fear and insecurities I had in my life were also constant companions for him. After all, I am my father’s son. Couple this with what, no doubt, was severe PTSD from many violent incidents my Dad experienced as a Police Officer, and I am not surprised he was really struggling.

When I stand back unemotionally, I see where this has all come from. There is strong evidence that it may have been passed down through generations of my family, especially from male to male. I can see similarities in my family, where many of the men are extremely driven to make a difference, often to the detriment of their own happiness and success. My Dad was just a normal guy, simply trying to cope with life, and I have no doubt his experience was far worse than mine in his growing up, and that is where so much of this stems from. Dads can pass on to their sons what their Dads have passed on to them, and all of it is usually totally unconscious and unintentional. WE NEED TO STOP THIS HAPPENING. I believe there are many of you who struggle with these thoughts and have never spoken to anyone about it because you think it is a sign of weakness. I want to tell you that so many people I have spoken to over the years have these thoughts and they are very normal. The whole purpose of this book and telling my story is to help you realize that there is a way through the dark times into a much happier life.

It is my strongest belief that if we can continue to bring depression and suicide out of the shadows and treat them like any other illness or condition, then we can all make a difference and give those of us who struggle with these afflictions, the support, and hope that will enable us to live happier and more fulfilled lives. We all want to be the best parents we can be to our children, but we also need to be having an open conversation about what is hurting us in our lives, the depression, the desperation and the suicidal thoughts. We are all so scared that people will think we are weak. As a result, we hide our demons from the world and the only people who see it are the ones closest to us … our families. THIS HAS GOT TO STOP. We need to be talking about all of this, so everyone knows that it’s OK to have struggled … IT IS ABSOLUTELY NORMAL.

At different times during my life, I have heard my Dad refer to suicide as an option, and this is something we have spoken openly about at different times in my adult years. Even though I didn’t really understand the impact of overhearing my Dad’s earlier comment, I certainly see that, for me, this planted the seed that suicide was a viable option if I needed an escape plan. This is why I call it my Dark Companion as it is always with me, to this day, and I suspect always will be. The difference is that these days I am behind the wheel, not ‘him.’

I believe that some people are more susceptible to depression and suicide than others just like some people are more vulnerable to cancer, diabetes, or other illnesses. The difference is that if someone contracts physical diseases, it normally elicits a supportive and positive response from the people around them. In the case of depression, people seem to freak out and not know what to do, often resulting in their withdrawing from the person who is struggling and therefore exacerbating their feelings of loneliness and isolation.

All through my High School years, this suicide option was always there, and ironically, I believe this is what kept me from taking my life, because there was a safety and security in knowing there was always a parachute if I needed it. Because I felt so alone, there was a weird comfort in being aware that if it all became too hard, I had a way out. IT became my default way of thinking when the world got too much for me, and I was exhausted with trying to make life different and feel happy.

It is my belief that many people have this Dark Companion, but because of the stigma and the shame that surrounds it, we don’t talk about it. If I had known from a young age that these were normal thoughts that a lot of people have, then I would not have struggled anywhere near as much in my life. As far as I was concerned, my Dad and I were the only people in the world who had this affliction and that again just confirmed my belief that I was different and didn’t fit in.

You must remember there was no internet, no Facebook, no open conversations on television about depression or suicide. It was a topic that was taboo and only a couple of decades or so before, was still a criminal offence in Australia. That is why I am writing this book because I want people out there today to know they are not the only ones experiencing this and that it is normal. There is nothing wrong with them. They are merely more susceptible to this insidious affliction. So, like any other disease or condition you are pre-disposed to, you can monitor and treat it and work out ways to move past it, or at least to cope with it in your life. If you had a strong family history of colon cancer, you would be hyper vigilant about it. Depression and suicidal thoughts are no different.

Although I don’t believe that everyone has suicidal thoughts in their life, I certainly believe it is common, and if we talk about it, then we can deal with it. I also know from experience that many lifestyle factors have a huge impact on my mental wellbeing. Things like exercise, diet, balanced sleep (to name a few), have positive effects while alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation are examples of the negative impacts.

As a society, we need to realize that depression is very much a result of a chemical imbalance, not a fault in your mind. If you have epilepsy, you develop a lifestyle to help manage it positively. Depression is the same. I now know what makes me feel amazing and what makes me feel terrible. I do more of the former and a hell of a lot less of the latter. I used to do the opposite. It’s called being self-destructive.

My Dark Companion gained strength over the next 20 years and culminated with me lying in bed for three nights in a row with a Glock pistol in my hand trying to find a reason not to take my life. It also led to me sitting on the outside of a balcony, many flights up, crying my eyes out trying to find the courage to jump. It haunted me for so many years.

CHAPTER 2

Why don’t they like me????

I grew up in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood in Australia as the older of 2 kids. I have a sister who is two years younger than me. My Mum was a stay at home Mum, and my Dad was a Police Officer. I was raised a Catholic and attended a Catholic primary school. My Dad was always my hero, and I idolized him from a very young age. He was a copper, and every one of his friends I met would tell me what a brave and courageous man he was and he had the reputation as being a Copper’s Copper.

My Mum was quiet and loving. She looked after us well and never caused a fuss over anything. My little sister deserves a medal as I was not a great brother who teased and tormented her unmercifully. This is something that I wish now I could have changed.

My family was the first place I felt like I didn’t really belong. As the son of a brave Police Officer, I couldn’t understand how I could be so scared and unsure of myself when I had a Dad who spent his life saving people and fighting criminals. These days I realize that he was extremely confident in policing but in the areas of his life where he was unsure, Dad struggled as much as the rest of us, including me.

I remember from the youngest age being insecure in myself and being self-conscious with everything about me. I was a nervous, dorky, skinny little kid and I hoped for something to happen to change my life and make me more confident and stronger. I was so concerned about what other people thought of me. All I wanted was to be normal, whatever that was. When I went to school, I was so nervous and scared. It wasn’t something I wanted to do at all. I would have done anything to stay home, where I felt the safest, as the big bad world of school was terrifying to me. I was quite good at school when I was young, and as I became more comfortable, it became less scary but I never really enjoyed it. Again, it was a situation where I wasn’t sure what I should be doing to be like everyone else. Fitting in was still a struggle, and the nervousness and anxiety of being around new people and situations impacted me badly.

From my earliest memory, I remember being terrified that the other kids would see through my already developing mask of confidence and realize I was a scared, insecure and insignificant kid. I never really liked who I was because I felt so different from all the other kids around me. All I wanted to do was blend in, never be noticed and get by until something magical happened to change my situation. This was the first brick in the wall. I never talked about this to anyone, as I was sure that if people realized who I really was, they wouldn’t like me and I would end up on my own – ironic really, because this decision had me build an isolated life for myself, where for many years I felt extremely alone.

There were many times as a primary school kid that the world would confirm for me that I was a loser and I spent so much of the time pretending to be someone who I didn’t really believe I was and this made me feel even worse. My fear around trying new things was immense. I remember Mum trying to get me to do swimming lessons and me being terrified of getting in the water and trying to swim because I didn’t know how to do it. The fear was real for me. I don’t know whether it was the fear of drowning or something else, but it terrified me. This was a feeling that came up often around many things in my life.

Now I want to be really clear on something here. This was nobody’s fault – not my Mum’s or Dad’s, not my teachers, not anyone’s. I was merely a kid with no confidence and a belief that life was hard. I had a super sensitive nature that I took to be an absolute weakness. I wished, and I tried to be more brave, strong and tough like the other boys my age, but it just never happened. I felt like such a sook, and my fear of the unknown held me back from so many opportunities in my life that even until this day there are things I experience that remind me of this time and the feeling of dread that often was my companion.

We lived on a quiet dead end street, and I spent a lot of my time riding my bike around with other kids. Sometimes I would forget the fear because I was in my environment where I felt comfortable, I would be happy and have fun riding around being a kid and generally having a great time. However, there was always the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that at any moment I would be found out to be the fraud that I felt myself to be. There was always this nagging fear in the back of my mind about something going wrong and me being hurt. I now see it was the fear of emotional hurt and vulnerability, but as a kid, I didn’t work this out.

There were three brothers who lived two doors down from us and they were the epitome of boys’ boys. The two older boys would sometimes fight, and the fists would fly, and I used to be terrified that somehow, I would end up in that fight and be totally pulverized because I was the skinny, weak kid who couldn’t possibly hold my own. This sense was something that I came to carry with me for many years and even though I hated that feeling it came to be one of the things that later in my life turned me into a crusader for the bullied and picked on. I have always had a really strong social justice belief and this is something that I see runs through my Dad’s family.

Our family life was pretty normal to me, as every kid thinks their life is normal, I guess. Dad used to work a lot, and I spent hours and hours looking out the front window of our house waiting for him to drive down the street from a shift in the Police. It was very rare that he came home before we went to bed because he was so dedicated to his job and I now realize the drive I had to help others and make a difference is something that came from my Dad. His unwavering commitment to helping others and stand between the decent people and the criminals came to cost him a lot in his life and to this day still does, I believe. However, I know that to him it was impossible to do it any other way as this was his calling and one of the only things in his life that made him truly happy and where he felt the most appreciated and valued.

My Mum was the unsung hero, looking after my sister and me, mostly on her own. She was the consummate Mum who cooked for us, cleaned, helped at school and was always there to greet us when we got home. I now see that I worshiped my Dad but didn’t see what my Mum was doing as that important. She wasn’t on the news like my Dad; she wasn’t getting Bravery Awards as he was. She was just a Mum. How wrong I was!

I now see that Mum and Dad struggled with many of their own demons in their lives, as we all do, but at that time I didn’t see it and perhaps if I did I might have begun to realize that living with these fears, doubts, and insecurities is totally normal. It’s something that we all live with, in different forms. It’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others are, and they go on pretending everything’s great. I want to point something out at this juncture. This was the early 1970’s, and this was the life of many families. It was for me where I began to learn that life was hard and you never really got what you wanted; you had to make do with whatever was given to you. Being from a strong Irish Catholic background, the poverty mentality and the lack of belief in what was possible had been dutifully handed down from generation to generation. I gratefully accepted this as fact and never questioned that there was another way. I thought that RICH PEOPLE were rare and that happiness was a dream that sometimes people got a whiff of, but it never really lasted. This generational belief played into my feeling of unhappiness and fear of the future because it didn’t seem to matter what you did, everything was hard.

Both Mum and Dad came from very humble families. Mum was the middle child of 3. Her Dad was a traveling salesman who was home only on weekends and her Mum, as much as I loved her, was a critical, negative mother, very much a product of the difficult 1930’s and 40’s. My Dad comes from a family of 15 children, 4 of whom were fostered. His Mum was raised in boarding school, and later by a foster family, after being born out of wedlock. His Dad was a World War 2 veteran, who, like so many others, had to find basic work, not only to survive but also to support a growing family, so he eventually became a bus driver. My Pop dealt with alcoholism, and I suspect fairly serious PTSD and depression as he had served in World War 2. He stopped drinking not long after my Dad was born.

So, the reality was that neither of my parents came from privileged backgrounds and I would suggest that both of their backgrounds had them in the mindset that life was hard and full of struggle and there was pretty damning evidence that this was correct.

My parents did their absolute best for us when we were growing up. We were always looked after, with a roof over our heads and food on the table. The difficult part for them, I now realize as a parent myself is that we are such a product of where we grow up. Therefore, a lot of the poor Irish Catholic mentality certainly flowed through into their adult lives and therefore how they parented us. They were never encouraged to be confident, outspoken and emotionally aware people because for their generation it was about survival. Their parents grew up during The Great Depression, and there were far greater priorities, like putting food on the table, than worrying about how little Johnny’s confidence and self-worth was developing. They both loved us immensely and did the absolute best that they knew how. It is easy to sit in judgment of some of their decisions etc. but it was a very different world in the 1970’s and 80’s. There was no Internet, so no instantaneous access to unlimited parenting advice as there is now. The way my Mum and Dad raised us was very much normal for that time, and they certainly did a far better job than their parents did and the parents before them, etc., etc. It’s called evolution. It does explain how much we are influenced by what we are taught as kids through observations of our environments.

We live in an amazing time now, where there is no excuse, in my opinion, not to be very well educated and aware of how to raise kids in an emotionally nurturing way. This is the key to changing our futures and those of our children and ultimately of the world. We are all products of the way we are raised. Therefore the fears, doubts, and insecurities that our parents experienced will inevitably become ingrained into our way of thinking. I believe the great majority of parents want the best for their kids. The problem is that they are often teaching their children what they were taught, and the flaw is that a lot of what was believed to be the best way forward, a few decades ago, is being proven these days not to be as great as previously thought. For example, not that long ago we thought the world was flat, and when this belief was challenged by the likes of Christopher Columbus, people thought he was insane. This is how we approach anything that challenges popular thinking, like parenting.

As I went through my earlier education years, it became more and more apparent to me that the best way to get along was to conform. I still felt really different from everyone else and never fitted into the cool crowd. It wasn’t enough that I did well academically, or that I didn’t get into trouble (other than for minor normal kids’ misdemeanors). My main desire during this time was to be accepted and to feel confident, but I didn’t know how to make this happen. I thought that people were born either self-assured or not and I must have been in the ‘not department.’ A lot of my time was spent doubting the decisions and opinions I had, and wanting to be told and affirmed that I was a good person who was doing the right thing. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of my reliance on other people’s opinions for my self-worth … problematic at best, destructive in reality. I don’t remember a whole lot from this time in my life, and I think partially that is because it was a time of high anxiety for me around many things. I now