Hi David,

Welcome to the forum. Which service, Police, Fire or Ambulance are you within? The answer to your main question of concern though, is that you prevent PTSD controlling you by learning effective management of your individual issues, with techniques that we must trial and error, adapt and modify to then suit ourselves. There is no reason a person cannot work with PTSD if fully healed, though some will never work again because of the severity of their PTSD, though the choice of job does certainly have a lot to do with whether you will be capable of managing PTSD or not. High stress jobs often do not work, actually I have never seen one work yet for any significant duration before the person relapsed and fell over worse than they knew what to do with. It is like having PTSD and returning to the military, it just doesn't mix with high stress jobs and exposure to violence, death and chaos. The effect it has on a person without PTSD is enough to throw many over the edge, let alone with this unique illness of PTSD floating on top our past trauma.