The Truth About First Responder Mental Health | Angry Viking TherapistThe Truth About First Responder Mental Health | Angry Viking Therapist
No One Fights Alone
Former state trooper Dr. Trevor Wilkins shares how his life and career fell apart, how he rebuilt himself as the “Angry Viking Therapist”, and why self-deception and lost leadership of self can be more painful than trauma itself. The conversation blends raw stories with REBT, EMDR and Arbinger concepts to offer first responders practical ways to stop white-knuckling and start healing.
1:25:13•9 Apr 2026
Angry Viking Therapist on Trauma, Self-Deception and Taking Your Life Back
Episode Overview
- Trauma isn’t just about what happened; it’s about how the brain reacts, the beliefs built around it, and then giving up control to emotion and chaos.
- Self-deception – knowing you’re not the person you’re meant to be – often hurts more than the original trauma itself.
- Tools like EMDR can calm the nervous system, but long-term change also needs work on beliefs and mindset, such as through REBT.
- Seeing people as objects may be useful in brief tactical moments, but living that way long term destroys relationships and fuels burnout.
- Reclaiming leadership of yourself means doing hard things daily, facing your avoidance, and refusing to keep white-knuckling through life.
“"There's nothing worse than that self-deception – going from being a strong leader to handing your life over to emotion and chaos."”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction? This conversation on **No One Fights Alone** goes straight at the hard stuff first responders rarely say out loud. Host **Brad Shepherd** sits down with **Dr. Trevor Wilkins**, better known as the *Angry Viking Therapist*, a former EMT, firefighter and state trooper who lost his career, pension and family life before rebuilding himself as a trauma specialist.
With humour, blunt language and zero fluff, he talks about what actually breaks people in public safety work – and what genuinely helps them get better. Trevor lays out his "triad" of what goes wrong: the brain’s trauma response, the beliefs we build around those events, and then the quiet moment where, as he puts it, we hand over control of our life to emotion and chaos.
He links this to ideas from Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), EMDR, and Arbinger’s concept of *self-deception* – that deep pain of not being the man or woman you know you’re supposed to be. You’ll hear real stories from the job: white-knuckling through shifts, hating everyone by the end of a career, and turning family members into "objects" instead of people.
Trevor talks openly about feeling like he’d gone from being a strong leader to being, in his words, the opposite of that – and how reclaiming leadership of himself became more important than any badge.
For first responders, peer supporters and anyone who loves someone in uniform, this chat cuts through clichés about "resilience" and gets into practical, boots-on-the-ground change: naming what’s really happening, using targeted trauma work like EMDR when it’s needed, and rebuilding a mindset where you stop just surviving and start leading your own life again. If you’re holding it together on the outside and falling apart on the inside, what would it look like to stop white-knuckling and take command back?
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