This group may be for you if:

Shared professional context

You want to talk with peers who share direct experience of shift work, exposure to critical incidents and police culture.
You would like to spend less time explaining the job, and more time on your mental health and the issues you bring to session.

Issues specific to women

You have experienced gender-based bias, or isolation on a male-dominated team.
You feel pressure to prove your competence.
You are managing the demands of the job alongside parenting, caregiving, relationships and time for yourself.

Trauma and operational stress

You are carrying the effects of critical incidents and cumulative stress.
You are experiencing moral distress or moral injury.
You want to recognize early signs of burnout, hypervigilance and sleep disruption.

Peer connection and support

You want to give and receive support, and speak openly in a confidential setting.
You want to learn practical grounding and regulation skills together, and to share your own strategies and insights to help others.
You want to build peer relationships that can continue beyond the group.

Issues often addressed in group

You work in policing or law enforcement and find that people outside the job rarely understand what the work involves.
You are one of only a few women on your team or shift, and have few opportunities to talk with peers who share that experience.
You have attended calls related to violence, death, incidents involving children or other traumatic events, and their effects have stayed with you longer than you expected.
Situations at work have conflicted with your own sense of what is right, and that has been difficult to set aside.
You have noticed stress building over time, whether as disrupted sleep, a sense of always being on alert, irritability, exhaustion or suicidal ideation.
You have experienced sexism, harassment or exclusion at work, or feel that you must continually prove your competence.
You find yourself caught between expectations to appear unaffected and criticism for seeming too hard.
You are trying to balance shift work alongside parenting, caregiving, relationships and time for yourself.
Your professional role has come to take up more of your identity than you would like.
You have hesitated to seek support because of stigma or concern about how it might affect your career.
You have found yourself relying more on alcohol, withdrawing from others or overworking as a way of coping.
You are weighing how to sustain your career over the long term, or whether a change may be right for you.

In the group, you will have the opportunity to…

Speak about your work with peers who already understand it.
Work through critical incidents and accumulated stress in a structured, confidential setting.
Share and learn grounding, emotional regulation and stress management skills with others.
Recognize early signs of burnout, compassion fatigue and hypervigilance, in yourself and in others.
Speak openly about difficult experiences in ways that can carry over into your relationships at home and in community.
Receive direct support from women in your profession, and learn from how they cope and set boundaries.
Build peer connections that can continue as a source of support after the group ends.

Benefits of the small group format

With four participants, you will have substantial time to speak in every session, and trust tends to develop more quickly than it does in larger groups. You benefit from the perspectives of several peers as well as the therapist. 2.5-hour sessions allow topics to be explored in depth within a single meeting, and because the group sets its own schedule, sessions can be arranged around shift rotations. A defined number of sessions provides a clear commitment from the outset, with the option to continue if the group wishes.

Confidential and independent

Group psychotherapy is provided from a private practice and is confidential and independent of your service, employer or EAP.

Fees

Sessions are billed at $180 per session, and receipts will be provided to you for reimbursement from your benefits provider.

How to register

To register, use the Register Now button below and complete your registration. Please indicate that you are interested in the Women in Law Enforcement group.

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