Escaping The Debris Field
Understanding the emotional wreckage of trauma—and the quiet contract that can guide you back out.
There’s a term I’ve used for years—quietly, internally, and now publicly: The Debris Field.
It’s not clinical. It’s not poetic. But it’s accurate.
It’s the aftermath of something that blew your world apart.
Loss. Trauma. Betrayal. A phone call in the night. A gun going off. A door slamming shut forever. We’ve all been there. And if you haven’t, life hasn’t finished with you yet.
The debris field is where the soul lands when the engine fails mid-flight.
It’s what remains after you’ve absorbed the blast, when the smoke clears but your breath still hasn’t returned.
The pieces are everywhere: memory fragments, regrets, confusion, adrenaline still bleeding out.
Your mind replays the blast, but your body doesn’t know it’s a replay.
It releases that same emotional cocktail—the same biological storm we talked about last week—because to your nervous system, trauma has no timestamp.
Time slows, then fractures.
And here's the hard truth:
It’s okay to be there.
But it’s not okay to stay.
We All Crash
Over a long career that spanned policing violent streets, homicide investigations, war zones and plenty of personal tragedies, I learned something, not from a textbook or some expert on the news, but from hard repetition:
If you don’t make a conscious decision to recover, the debris field will become your home.
It’s seductive in a way.
The wreckage justifies your stagnation.
The pain becomes your narrative.
Before long, you’re not surviving trauma, you’re clinging to it.
A Silent Contract
Right after I left the Marine Corps, I was stepping into a new life, a more violent one. I was beginning my police career in Atlanta, and I had no illusions about what was ahead. I had a big brother who was already a veteran cop in the city. I knew the stakes. Plus, I’d seen enough of the world to know that darkness wasn’t rare, it was routine.
So I equipped myself.
In the Corps, I had learned a lot about my own mind, about mental rehearsals, stress inoculation and the quiet mechanics of the subconscious. I understood how critical it was to plant something deep—to program myself to endure. So I made a contract. Not written. Not notarized. Just a firm, internal truth:
If I ever found myself in a righteous gunfight—if I ever had to take a life in the line of duty—I would be allowed to recover. In fact, I would demand it. That moment eventually came. And when it did, I didn’t suffer. The contract had already done its job.
That wasn’t some motivational mantra.
It was prepping the mental battlefield.
Because if you’re going to carry a gun into chaos, day after day, you better have already decided who you are on the other side of it.
The mind doesn’t wait politely for closure. It operates in fragments, in patterns, in files. And if there’s no file labeled recovery, it’ll open something darker.
Whether you print the contract out and sign it or hold it silently in your mind, the contract works. Not just for gunfights, but whatever life throws at you.
It gives your subconscious something to grab onto when the bottom drops out.
A voice that says: You’re permitted to recover. You will enjoy life again. A voice that says: When this is over, you will get up.
Not because it’s easy. Not because you want to. But because you promised.
The debris field will always be part of the journey.
But it can’t be the destination.
Name It, Navigate It, Escape It
Starting today, I’m naming The Debris Field as a core pillar of Life Held Hostage.
Future posts will return to it often, because understanding the terrain is how we stop being trapped by it.
We’ll explore how to recognize it.
How to sit in it without shame.
And how to climb out without losing what you’ve learned.
But before we go further, I’d like to offer you the same quiet tool I gave myself.
It’s nothing fancy. Just a simple promise, written plainly.
A reminder you can fold into your back pocket—or your mind.
It’s a contract. Yours to keep. Yours to share.
If you’re in the kind of job where the day might go sideways—a cop, a medic, someone who wears armor for a living—you might find space for it behind your ballistic panel.
Tucked away, where it won’t get lost. Just close enough to your heart to be remembered.
Because sometimes, that’s all it takes:
One decision—made in advance—to walk out of the wreckage.
— C.K Redlinger
🗂 Free Download: The Contract to Recover
A one-page mental anchor you can print, carry, or sign as your own quiet commitment to get back up. Definitely share with friends and loved ones whose jobs thrust them into chaos.