SHARPENING THE MINDSET OF OUR FRONTLINES AND THE ORGANIZATIONS THEY DRIVE
No One Fights Alone
239-295-4655
Who We Are
Our Specialty
Dr. Nicole Navega has been treating post-traumatic stress and its related challenges for nearly three decades and has been specifically researching stress in first responders and veterans over the last seven years.
Frontline Solutions Group specializes in treating our frontline warriors: law enforcement, fire, EMS, emergency communications, veterans, corrections, emergency management, and healthcare.
Our Philosophy
We have the experience and expertise to understand that your occupational risks and exposures are unique, unlike any other profession on the planet. We also understand that your occupational culture makes it near impossible to acknowledge out loud that maybe you're feeling a little off or not quite yourself anymore. Not only do you have dozens, if not hundreds, of exposures to other people’s traumas, you see people on their very worst days and you see things that the average citizen could not even fathom. We get it.
Here's the most important thing: cumulative stress is insidious and destructive if we don't learn how to resolve it, release it and recalibrate our autonomic nervous system. We want to shift the conversation from this being a mental health issue to this being a neuro-physiological issue of a hijacked central nervous system. This stuff is extremely complex and yet also very simple when you understand the underlying physiology.
There's nothing wrong with you and you are not alone.
Dr. Navega
Nicole has nearly three decades of practice with individuals who have experienced acute stress, secondary trauma and post-traumatic stress injuries. She is an EMDR trained therapist. She completed her Master of Social Work from Boston University and her PhD from Barry University’s School of Social Work. Her dissertation is titled The Impact of Organizational Stressors: A Grounded Theory Approach to Exploring Stress Injuries in Police Workers’ Compensation Evaluations. She became passionate about researching and treating stress in first responders after several years working in acute care settings such as the ER and NICU.
Bearing witness to the vast amount of psychological trauma in acute care settings had her ruminating on this thought: I can’t possibly be the only one struggling with this. Subsequently, she and her colleague, while teaching research at a college in Boston, conducted a study in 2016 on stress and coping in helping professionals (police, fire, EMS, acute care medical and mental health professionals). They published a peer-reviewed journal article in Best Practices in Mental Health titled, Pivotal Events: I’m Not a Normal Person Anymore. Understanding the Impact of Stress among Helping Professionals (Howard & Navega, 2018).
She is currently employed full-time by Lee County Public Safety and spends most of her time with EMS, focusing on trauma exposure in EMTs and Paramedics. She helped initiate and serves as the Clinical Lead for Lee County Public Safety’s Peer Support Team. Nicole is also embedded inside Fort Myers Fire Department and Fort Myers Police Department part-time. She has consulted with Islamorada Fire Rescue for their training needs. She volunteers to serve as one of five Mental Health Professionals on the Southwest Florida Critical Incident Stress Management Team. Her own exposure to trauma, living with, loving first responders and being the daughter of a police officer has placed Nicole on this life path with a passion to shine a light on stress injuries, coping, resilience, regulating our hijacked nervous systems and post-traumatic growth in first responders. In her free time, she enjoys scuba diving, the beach and anything related to Jocko Willink, Kings of Leon and Gary Vaynerchuk.
She also enjoys editing, researching and managing social media for a prolific New York Times Best-selling author who is a former NBC Counterterrorism, Military and Intelligence Analyst.