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Show Notes:
I recently had a listener reach out and share about an experience where she was sharing that she had suffered a hard critical incident to a close friend, and the friends response was, “well, that’s what you signed up for.” …And my response may not have been all the therapeutic, helpful, responsive pieces it could/would/should have been…it may have sounded more like, “just go fuck right off”.
Admittedly, perhaps not my kindest response…but not without some reasons, and I’m sharing them with you today. If you have ever had this response of “this is what you signed up for” as a way of blowing off the validity and significance of what you have faced – this episode is for you. Not only is it for you, it is also for you to share with the ones you love so they know why that line is NOT ok and why it puts you at RISK.
This is probably one of my more rant-y episodes ever, and I will frontload that I swear, so be mindful of listening with child ears present. I will be putting together a follow-up episode that I will try to keep a bit cleaner and will work to offer some alternative ways loved ones can offer support and ways that First Responders & Front Line Helpers can communicate your needs to the people in your life.
Episode Challenge:
· What comes up for you when you hear, “well that’s what you signed up for”? What is your reaction? Do you believe that’s true? What would you say to someone in your life if they said that to you?
· Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it’s worth it!). Learn more here, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students.
Additional Resources:
Register for Beating the Breaking Point, our top-rated self-paced resilience training program tailor made for First Responders and Front Line Workers to protect against (and recover from) Burnout and related concerns (eg. Organizational Stress, Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma).
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Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.
Creators & Guests
What is Behind The Line?
Created for First Responders and Front Line Workers to tackle the challenges of working on the front lines. Dig into topics on burnout, workplace dynamics, managing mental health, balancing family life...and so much more. Created and hosted by Lindsay Faas, clinical counsellor and trauma therapist. View the show notes, and access bonus resources at https://my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.
Hey there and welcome back to Behind the Line.
I’m your host Lindsay Faas. If you are new to Behind the Line, what you should know about me is that I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and after over a decade working with First Responders and Front Line Workers around issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and related OSI’s, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for those who sacrifice so much for our communities out on the front lines. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off.
While you are listening, please take a moment and rate and review Behind the Line on apple podcast. Your support and feedback goes a long way in making this resource more visible to others who work in First Response and Front Line Work. Thanks so much for your help and support!
So, one of my favourite things about doing this podcast is receiving messages from you guys. I love hearing about your wins, the ways you are integrating the learning from our discussions, the ways you feel seen and reflected in the stories we share…and I also love hearing about the challenges you face, the things that are hard, and the ways you are needing support in the struggle. Admittedly, those latter pieces are not as much fun to receive, but I value them deeply. It means a lot to me that you entrust me with these hard things, and give me permission to try to broach them here. And sharing this is the backdrop to our topic because the topic we are covering today and this month, came from one of you.
I received a message to my social media inbox in response to an invitation I had posted seeking thoughts about what would be helpful to cover on the podcast this season. It was from a wonderful and loyal listener who has followed along with my work for a number of years now and has kept in touch to celebrate and commiserate – both of which I have felt honoured to be a part of. The message I received reflected on a recent interaction with their best friend who, in hearing about this person’s difficult time managing a critical incident at work, said, “well, that’s what you signed up for.”
I will acknowledge that my internal reaction to that story was not kind…and I will also acknowledge that I shared that with this listener…that my knee jerk response to their friends comment wants to be “just go fuck right off”. …I also acknowledge that that is not a particularly helpful response and I promised that I would spend some time digging into this and covering it on the podcast. So, welcome!
Before I continue, I want to ask you – what was your internal response to the comment from the friend? Have you had people say things like that to you? Do you sometimes say things like that to yourself or believe it internally? When it comes up, how have you felt and reacted? I want to invite you to sit with it a minute and examine what comes up in you. And I also want to invite you to let me know – I would love to hear your reflections. You can send me a DM on social media or an email to support@thrive-life.ca.
I will own that my personal response comes from a place of righteous indignation. A hoity toitier version of anger. It comes up quick and hits hard and is there out of a place of wanting to protect and defend. You see, as someone who works with first responders and front line workers in some of the most vulnerable stuff, I know how hard it already is to own and sit with the hard days. The job on it’s own is already hard. The nature of dealing with everyone else’s worst day is exhausting. Being exposed to bad thing after bad thing happening to your fellow humanity is simultaneously beautiful in being the person able to show up, and depleting in being the person who always has to show up. You go and bring yourself to people who really need you – they need you to hold it, they need you to keep it together, they need you to provide comfort and care and service. And you do. And then, often, you go back to a system that tends to fails to care for you and just keeps asking you to do more. And so, when you go home to the part of your life that should be a safe reprieve, the spaces and people who should be filling you up and showing up for you – it breaks my heart that you may not be able to expect just the most basic empathy and compassion to care for you in the midst of it. And in that space of knowing all you give, and all that is asked of and taken from you as you seek to care for others – it really does just make me want to scream that those you entrust yourself to leave you feeling misunderstood, unsafe to be real, and further alone. And that is where my “just go fuck right off” response comes from.
As a society, we can’t keep asking people to give so much of themselves and then not give anything back to keep them going. We can’t expect to keep putting people in these positions, leaving them unsupported, and then standing back shocked at the suicide rates. We can’t be upset at the short staffing and wait times and breaking down of the system – because the system is built on the backs of people, and those people lack some of the most basic support they need when their best of friends blow them off with phrases that clarify that they are alone. It makes these amazing givers isolated, withdrawn, and gradually this will lead to mental health concerns, stress-related health impacts, and a degradation that leaves no choice but to exit the work – whether on a stress leave, medical leave, or career change altogether. We can’t keep asking helpers to show up for us, and then not show back up for them. We just can’t.
So, here is what I have to say in an effort to educate the public around what you need to know about first response and front line work…and I invite you to share this episode and the next episode in this series with your friends and family members to help them better understand what your experience is like and how they can better help you. …Although maybe best to start it from here so they don’t hear me telling them to f-off… I’ll leave that up to you.
1. No one should have ever had to sign up for this. While the jobs of enforcing our society’s rules, caring for our society’s most vulnerable and responding to the health needs of our populace are integral roles – the reality is that there has been few times in history that we have placed the kind of demand on helping professionals that we do today. Populations are living in more densely constricted areas, placing a volume of demand on helpers that staffing can’t keep up to. In addition, as a society, at least here in North America and many other individualistic valuing societies, we have divorced ourselves from the value of community and the ways in which ownership and mutual accountability to the collective whole supports the system. In collectivistic cultures, enforcing law, for example, doesn’t rest solely on police – it is a burden carried by the entire community. I think of Rwanda following the genocide, a place I have had the absolute gift of visiting, and the way in which they served justice to those who participated in atrocities during the genocide through community Gacaca courts. The people within communities were given opportunities to bring complaints, the community elders would host community based trials, and the dealing out of justice was often community based as well, requiring service back to the community for recompense. While not totally perfect, it is a great display of sharing in participation, ownership and accountability for the needs of a society as a society. Not shoving everyone off to an unseen prison system, making it someone else’s problem so we don’t have to interact with the discomfort of what is happening in and around us. These systems also embrace the community’s influence on raising next generations and supporting families. These cultures honour the way our human biology was built – we were built for connection. And their systems reflect not leaving one person, one job description, to fulfill the entirety of a role – rather, they are in it together. So while, yes, you signed up to do a job, and a job that is highly needed and necessary for public safety and health…it also shouldn’t be a job that exists the way we have structured it for you. And that is the failing of society.
2. No one is built to do this. As a practical matter, there is no human on earth or in history who was neurobiologically built to do the kind of work you are tasked with, without being in some way changed or damaged by it. It is actually an impossibility. I have talked about this on the show a number of times before, so I won’t belabour this, but I need for you and people in your life to hear and know that what we ask of you is above and beyond what any human is actually wired to do, and as a result, that we ask you to do it and that you choose to say yes to the call our society has put out to you, is a promise that you will never be the same ever again. It is not because you are weak or insufficiently strong, it is not because you are incapable or ill-equipped – it is simply because humans are wired for compassion and humanity and connection and meaning-making, and these innate ways we operate are confronted, repeatedly, in all of the stark, abrasive, unrelenting and unapologetic ways. Certainly there are ways to curb the degree of impact, to limit the scope of it and the deterioration that can result – that is exactly why I created this podcast and my signature resilience training program and other resources – but as I have said so many times on this show and in other spaces before, no matter what, no one comes out of this work unscathed.
3. No amount of training fully prepares you for this. While the training you have undergone has a ton of value, there is absolutely nothing that can train you out of being human. If we learned nothing from even the fantasy imaginings of a Jason Bourne-like character existing – someone trained to be all of the compartmentalized, detached from humanness things – even he can’t completely divorce himself from his basest humanity and urge for authentic care and genuine connection. We can train for preparation, we can train for skill development, we can train for scenarios and probabilities, we can train to reduce risks and limit the scope…we can’t train ourselves out of being the humans we are wired to be. Your investment in training serves you and prepares you and to some extent protects you – but it is not an impervious blast shield against all the shit that comes with this kind of work. And it’s important to know that the impact of the work is not strictly limited to the bad calls or critical incidents. As we’ve discussed on the show many times, it is more often than not the additional feature of existing within systems – whether workplaces or government systems or otherwise – that are not only unsupportive but at times actively adversarial or aggressive toward their own. These systems are often not only not helpful, they are actively harmful in their own right. And these are the pieces the public, your friends and family, may not understand about the job – that it’s so much more than the parts they think they know from watching TV shows. And because these systems are often involved in shaping the training you receive, they also tend to under-advertise how innately broken and toxic they are, meaning that you are not trained for a huge segment of what ends up being your time at work.
4. Discounting these points, gets people killed. Here is the biggest take-away I want you and your people to have today. When we minimize people’s lived experiences – I don’t care who they are or what they do – when we do this to anyone about anything, we shut them down. We teach them that we are not safe people to open up to. And more than that, we teach them that maybe others will think similarly and so we should keep it quiet. This way of engaging isolates people who do hard things with the thoughts in their heads and no outside insight or perspective or hope or connection. And as someone who hears the thoughts we don’t tend to say out loud to anyone, I know how terrifying that can be. If we get this, “well, it’s what you signed up for” response and we get it from various people and places a handful of times, we learn to hold it in. That no one can or is willing to show up for us in the same ways we show up for others all the time. We feel like a whiner, or a burden. We question what it means about us that we can’t seem to manage what we signed up for, or that people we care about can’t seem to care for us well in these moments when we need them to show up. And over time, this can degrade our sense of ok-ness. Our stability. Our sense of self. And as this erodes, and more exposure comes in, we are at higher and higher risk of so many problems but most significantly, suicide. Minimizing our helpers, blowing them off, discounting their experience, while they are literally killing themselves to help others, is, without a doubt, killing amazing helping professionals. People who worked hard, cared hard, tried hard. We are losing them. And while it isn’t as simple as saying that one good friend would have saved any one given life lost to helper suicide, I will say that it wouldn’t do any harm and it could very well be the difference maker in someone’s life.
Ok. As we get ready to wrap up this episode, I need to say to the people out there listening who are friends or family or loved ones of a first responder or front line helper – I know you want good things for your people. I know that you are wanting to be a support and a carer. The fact that you are sticking by listening to me tirade, tells me about your investment and willingness to care well for the person or people in your life who are working on the front lines. That is amazing, and I want you to know how much I appreciate and value you in that effort. I believe that the best friend who responded to the listener I shared about at the start of this episode likely didn’t mean to be harmful in saying what they said. I believe in their heart they may not have known what else to say or how to help, and perhaps they didn’t realize the kind of damage these words do.
In our next episode, I am going to offer some thoughts on ways loved ones can help to support more effectively. Words you can say, ways to connect through the hard without dismissing or damaging. And to all of you out there who are working the front lines, I’ll offer some strategies that you can kindly call out when your people let you down and help them know what you need instead. Because I think in their hearts they want to do right by you, but they haven’t been trained either. So please, join me here for the next one. If you want to get an email to your inbox letting you know when the next episode drops, please go to the podcast website and sign up for our email list or subscribe to the podcast on your favourite podcast platform.
As we wrap up today, let me remind you that if you value this podcast and want to help us in our mission to support front line wellness, there are 4 ways you can do just that:
1. Rate and review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast, or wherever you are listening
2. Follow me on social media, @lindsayafaas, and engage with me and this amazing little community we are building there. Every time you like, comment and share our posts you help us spread like wildfire thanks to the magic of the algorithm.
3. Share this resource and our other resources with those you know. If you would like a poster or info cards about the podcast for your workplace, send me an email to support@thrive-life.ca
4. Last but not least, consider joining Beating the Breaking Point, my resilience training program that seeks to fill the gaps in your training and support you in limiting the degree to which the job takes a toll. This program serves to sponsor all of the free supports and resources we make available, and is available for individuals to sign up for as well as workplace teams. Go to the show notes for a link to learn more.
Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. We make all of our resources available to you because the work you do matters, but more than that, YOU matter and we want to make sure you have what you need to keep up the good work at work, as well as in your real life outside of work. So use it, and share it, and until next time, stay safe.