I was in the middle of itlong before I studied it.
Twenty years in uniformed public safety, then the doctorate to understand what it actually does to a man. I work with the agencies that protect people, and privately with a small number of leaders who carry weight of their own.
Most peer support teams exist on paper.
Critical incident response, peer support program development, ICISF CISM training, and the clinical authority to stand behind all of it.
See what I build →Everyone around you is paid to agree.
Private retainer counsel for founders and senior leaders. Not therapy, not coaching. A small number of men at a time.
See how it works →Why peer teams fail
Almost every agency I walk into already has a peer support team. Most were built the same way, and most break for the same three reasons.
Built after a bad one
The team gets stood up in the weeks after an incident, when leadership wants to act. Urgency picks the members instead of criteria, and the wrong people end up carrying the load.
Trained once
A few days of coursework, a certificate, then nothing. No refresher, no supervision, no case consultation. Skills decay and the team quietly stops being used.
No program behind it
No activation criteria, no documentation standard, no confidentiality policy, no rotation to keep the peers themselves from burning out. Training without a program is a liability, not a resource.
Sheriff’s Offices · Municipal Fire Departments · County EMS · Police Departments · Faith-Based Trafficking and Disaster Recovery Ministries
Currently contracted with public safety agencies serving over 900 sworn and civilian personnel.
Without a documented program, your people have no privilege.
Many states — Kentucky among them — protect peer support communications for law enforcement, firefighters, telecommunicators, and EMS, and extend that privilege into disciplinary, civil, and criminal proceedings. That protection is the single biggest reason a first responder will, or will not, walk through the door.
But it is not automatic. The privilege attaches to communications made through a program the agency has formally established, with designated peers who hold documented training in peer support and in supporting personnel exposed to traumatic events. Informal peer support gets none of it.
Most agencies I meet believe they are covered. Building the program correctly is what makes that true — and it is where the work starts.
Statutory language and requirements vary by state. I build to your jurisdiction’s standard.
What I deliver
A licensed clinician who spent two decades in uniform, who trains the team, runs the debriefs, and stays on as the clinical authority behind the program. Most vendors do one of those three.
Critical incident response
Support for line-of-duty deaths, officer- and responder-involved shootings, pediatric and mass-casualty calls, and the loss of a member to suicide — delivered to the ICISF model.
Regional (Kentucky and surrounding). On-scene, time-critical response and defusings in the first hours after an incident.
National. Formal debriefings, suicide postvention, response consultation, and follow-up, available through scheduled travel. For agencies outside driving range, the goal is to build and train your own team so they are the immediate response, with me as the clinical backstop.
Peer support program development
The program around the training. This is the piece agencies almost always skip, and the reason most teams stop functioning within two years.
- Selection criteria and designation process for peer supporters
- Written policy: activation, documentation, confidentiality, records
- Supervision structure, rotation, and burnout protection for the team itself
- Built to published national standards so it survives legal and budget review
ICISF CISM & CISD training
Core crisis-intervention coursework for peer teams, chaplains, supervisors, and command — delivered by certified ICISF instructors on our team, alongside a clinician who has worked the calls your people work.
- Assisting Individuals in Crisis and Group Crisis Intervention
- Refresher and continuing training so the team stays current
- Training records that document the standard-of-care requirement
Clinical direction & consultation
Ongoing clinical authority behind the team. Peers should never operate without a licensed clinician attached, and most agencies struggle to fill that seat.
- Case consultation and supervision for the peer team
- Referral pathway into clinical care that understands the work
- Annual program review and utilization reporting for leadership
Speaking & instruction
Departments, conferences, and training academies bring me in nationally to teach their people and their leaders how to actually understand trauma, crisis, and resilience in high-risk work.
Not all who suffer are traumatized.
Most training on responder mental health is delivered by people who have never done the job, and it fails the same two ways: it either pathologizes tough professionals as broken, or it hands them soft material that does not hold under load. Your people are not fragile. Treating them like victims insults them, and it does not work. They need to be equipped, not coddled.
Keynotes and department training cover cumulative operational stress, moral injury, hypervigilance and the family, and building resilience that holds — from someone who carried it in uniform for twenty years and then earned the doctorate to treat it.
Your people will know in five minutes.
Twenty years in uniformed public safety — law enforcement, fire, EMS, and dispatch — working specialized high-risk assignments. I left the job on a medical separation, and I know exactly what the back end of this career looks like from the inside.
Then I went and got the education to do something about it. I am a licensed clinician, an Associate Fellow of the Albert Ellis Institute (a distinction held by few worldwide), and EMDR certified under the late Dr. E.C. Hurley, who did foundational work on combat trauma with operators and veterans.
What that combination buys your agency is simple. Your people can tell in about five minutes whether the person in front of them has been where they have been. I have — and I can back it with the clinical training to do the work properly instead of just relating to it.
The Citation Challenge™
The core clinical disputation tool used across all Dr. Trevor Wilkins services.
The Citation Challenge™ is the proprietary clinical disputation methodology developed by Dr. Trevor Wilkins over fifteen years of clinical work with public safety populations. It asks the operator to test their own beliefs against the standard of evidence: Where is the proof? Who told you that? Would it hold up in court? The methodology integrates Albert Ellis’s foundational REBT framework with Stoic philosophical inquiry, translated into the operational vocabulary of the men who carry weight.
- Command Advisory retainers with executives, founders, and senior leaders
- One-on-one trauma therapy sessions with Dr. Wilkins
- The EMDR Intensive program for accelerated trauma resolution
- Speaking and training engagements with agencies and conferences
Start with a call.
Tell me what your agency has now and what happened recently. If a peer team already exists, I’ll tell you honestly whether it needs rebuilding or just needs support. The first conversation costs nothing.
Or reach the office directly at office@thinlinecounseling.com · 800-464-1958