Former fire chief shares his story of trauma, healing, helping others
By STU CLAMPITT
Jeff Muszar has resigned as chief of the Jackson Township Fire Department and is now one of the owners of a company focusing on helping people of all ages deal with cumulative stress and PTSD.
Click here to read more about this new company, called The Mind Trek.
In an exclusive interview with The Reporter, Muszar reveals for the first time the origin of his own struggles with PTSD and the heavy price he has paid by not having the kind of resources he and co-owner Michelle Shepherd are offering.
Muszar served as a police officer in South Carolina and at the Fishers Police Department in the 1980s. He worked in the emergency room for Indiana Heart Hospital and St. Vincent, then in the St. Vincent trauma center. He started his firefighting career with Castleton Fire Department and segued into Lawrence Township Fire Department early in his career. While no longer in charge of Jackson Township Fire, he is still a Fire Lieutenant in Indianapolis.
“I have never talked to anyone about this in my life,” Muszar said as he began his story.
Muszar said he got into the fire service in 1984 was because of a man named David Edwards, who would become one if his best friends.
“I became a paramedic because of him,” Muszar said. “On Feb. 3, 1988, we were fighting a fire four years into my career. He fell through the floor. Three of us didn’t. He burned to death. A horrible death. I experienced that.”
After taking a moment to compose himself, he continued the story he has never told publicly.
“That was the first time in 19 years in the city of Indianapolis that anybody had been killed,” Muszar said. “It opened up a wound that nobody knew how to deal with. It opened up the introduction to what we now call PTSD that we didn’t know how to understand or deal with. That’s part of my background that started this.”
Every year since 1989, Muszar goes to Edwards’ grave on the date of his passing. He calls it, “A remembrance of how fragile life is.”
In the late 1980s, firemen didn’t get help dealing with trauma because, in Muszar’s words, “We didn’t know what help was. We turned it down or we were told ‘suck it up, buttercup.’ We turned down any critical incident stress or anything they wanted to give us because they weren’t trained. In our business as police and firefighters, ‘if you have not been there, done that, or have a T-shirt, don’t talk to me about it because you have not experienced it.’”
Muszar also went through other traumatic incidents in his career.
“I was shot at, at point-blank range on a fire run,” he told The Reporter. “The reason I am alive today is because the gun misfired. It was a man who was fleeing from the police and crashed through our fire scene. Through that and a couple other traumatic experiences that have built up over time, I watched my marriage fall apart, I watched my life fall apart, I watched my finances fall apart, my home was in foreclosure.”
According to Muszar, in the last few decades, the fire service has been looking into what effect the compounding of traumatic events has on first responders.
“They took the lead in that and began to develop employee assistance programs and counseling programs that didn’t require a disclosure to administration and allowed us access to that help confidentially,” Muszar said. “Now it is an open discussion through peer support, through the fire department administration and police department administration support – there’s a lot more openness to freely discuss what people go through.”
It is not one always one single event that triggers PTSD. It is a compounding of events over time.
Although he did not have the kinds of resources he and Shepherd are offering when he needed them, Muszar chose to live and survive and rebuild his life alone.
“I began to rebuild my life through asking people for help,” Muszar said. “They were eventually able to provide me some form of help through employee assistance, stress management counselors and people I could confide in who would not disclose my story. So that brought me back. But the sad part was that at that time I was still talking in confidence, afraid to ever tell my story. To this day, this is the first time I have ever shared my story publicly. Ever.”
He told The Reporter he is doing so in our pages because he wants to help others and hopefully prevent them going through what he did alone.
“I have suffered through PTSD for years,” Muszar said. “It’s a stigma that now we are not ashamed to admit, but years ago we were. We just suffered in silence. There was no help back then that we were willing to go get.”
Even though the culture is changing and talking about the weight of trauma is now more common among first responders, after a lifetime in the culture of “suck it up, buttercup,” Muszar had not planned to tell his story until after he retired.
“This came along and her [Shepherd’s] passion for what she offers and the ability to have preventative mental health and wellness – to actually have a chance to save a life before they go into crisis is the reason that I got involved with this,” Muszar said. “If I can help one firefighter or police officer and save his life – because I was ready to end mine – then I feel like it would be successful.”
Muszar said this is one of the reasons he chose to leave Jackson Fire.
“I felt like it was time for me to move on,” he said. “It’s an opportunity that I didn’t know would become available, but it did. Because this became available, I knew I had one chance and I didn’t want to miss out on it. This opportunity is once-in-a-lifetime to help other people. Perhaps it is cathartic for me as well.”