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The proclivity to run toward danger when everyone else is running away is NOT normal. We're pulling back the curtain on the ways that first response and front line work call us into NOT normal and the consequences this can have when we try to be in our "normal" lives outside of the work. Buckle up, we're getting real in this one!
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.
I am so glad you’re here, because today we are really pulling back the curtain on first response and front line work and naming the elephant in the room. You guys, I hate to be the one to tell you, but what you do is NOT normal. Ok, maybe that wasn’t totally revelatory…or maybe it was, who knows! Back in the fall I put out a request on social media and to those who follow me by subscribing to my email list, and I asked for you to tell me what you wanted to hear about on the show as I put together my plans for 2022 topics and interviews. And this topic was chosen by YOU. So today, as requested, I am launching this new series that I’m calling “Being Normal”. Over the coming weeks we are going to talk about the impacts the work has on our ability to be normal outside of the work in our friendships, in our intimate partnership relationships, in our relationships with our kiddos, and in our daily living activities. Not only will you be hearing from me, but I have lined up some fantastic guests to join me to share their experiences, wisdom and insights as we work at finding some normal in the very not-normal of the work you do.
For today we are setting the stage for this awesome series and really working to name the ways in which the work is not normal, and…here’s the harder part to swallow: Not only is your work NOT normal, but the longer YOU spend IN it, the more difficult it becomes to feel and be normal in your life outside the work AND the more uncomfortable you likely feel in spaces that are relatively normal. I know. My hunch is that truth feels yucky to acknowledge and yet totally true.
So – before we dive too far in today let me preface all of this by saying that I know normal is a word that comes with some judgements. When I use it for the purpose of our discussions throughout this series, I intend it to mean typical to the average adult person in everyday living and interactions. For instance, when someone sees something dangerous, crisis-related or chaotic unfolding before their eyes, the typical human response is wired to go AWAY from that scenario. Human beings are wired to limit exposure to risk, threat and potential for harm for the purpose of survival – that is how we’re built and would be reflective of the average response. Part of what is NOT normal about your work is that you are trained and eventually re-wired to run TOWARD the danger, crisis or chaos. Not only that, over time that re-wiring can become increasingly hardwired in to not only run toward danger, crisis or chaos but to actually feel more comfortable IN danger, crisis and chaos, leading us to seek out or even create situations that satiate this craving. Can we just acknowledge that that’s NOT normal? This is actually a piece I talk quite a bit about and work to breakdown in my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program where we talk about the adrenaline rollercoaster and the way it changes our brain’s pathways and responses over time. Neuro-physiologically you are changed by the work, we could map it, and normal-people jobs don’t generally have this kind of functional impact on their actual neuro-biology.
In preparation for today’s episode, I spent some time brainstorming a list of things that are not normal about the work you do, and that result in creating some not-normal problems for you in your daily life outside of the work. Fun, right? My guess is that you might think of some others, and feel free to shoot me a message because I might circle back to them in another episode.
Let’s start with the parts of your job that are not normal:
1. If you work shift-work, shift-work is NOT normal. There is not a human on earth who is wired to engage in rotating shifts flipping between days and nights on 12 hour shifts for a 4 day 4 off set. It’s not a thing. I get that emergencies happen 24 hours a day and that staffing needs to fairly distribute hours and all that jazz…but that doesn’t mean anyone is built to withstand the demand of it – particularly long term. The physical fuck-up that comes from this has consequences – we talked about some of that during our episode with sleep specialist Dr. Glenn Landry on Season 2 Episode 12 – and those are not consequences that the average joe-citizen faces. Circadian rhythm disorders can lead to significant health concerns, as well as mental health impacts.
2. Dark humor is NOT normal. I will be the first to say that dark humor is a requirement for survival in the work you do and there is no shame for using it. That said, it’s also important to identify that it’s not normal. Humour has always been a method of coping for humanity, regardless of what it’s connected to, but humour grounded in human suffering isn’t generally used by people in everyday life. We’ve likely all had those moments of exposing a dark humour moment in a room with people who don’t get it and having that moment of shocked silence – that’s a solid reflection of how not-normal this is.
3. Running toward the danger rather than away is NOT normal. Like I already mentioned, human beings are wired first and foremost for survival. We have a deeply rooted genetic code that comes with generational learning that has trained us to go away from scary, intense, risky situations to keep ourselves safe above all else. Now, this one tends to be a bit of a combination of two factors: personal pre-work training factors, and then professional training factors. We need to acknowledge that some people enter the work BECAUSE they already feel wired to run toward the danger. Often this comes from personal experiences with intensity and potentially trauma that have trained us in our personal lives to frame a role that feels more secure, valuable or otherwise capable in high-risk, high-stress situations. To be totally honest, in my work I have found a disproportionate number of my first response and front line work clients have histories of childhood abuse, neglect, or trauma that led them to feel passionately about helping while simultaneously uniquely equipped to be in danger, stress and chaos because it has been all-too-familiar for so very long. Now this isn’t everyone’s story, but it is a story I hear a LOT. For others, as well as for those who come into the work training with some degree of comfort in the risk, the training does the rest. The training forces our brains to re-wire and teaches us to shut down or shush our normal human responses in order to choose to go toward the risk. While this is what allows you to be awesome at what you do, I’m also going to tell you that it comes with a cost.
4. Being a part of everyone’s worst day is NOT normal. I can’t think of any other industry where every interaction is someone’s worst day. Where nearly every interaction has some degree of life or death. That’s NOT normal! Most other professions have measurable wins that show up on a semi-consistent basis that people can anchor to and feel reflective of their effort. There’s something they can point to and feel good about. Walking into situations knowing that this is someone’s worst day, over and over and over again, and experiencing the wins as few and far between and difficult to measure is not normal.
5. Living a constant cliff-hanger is NOT normal. The adrenaline response of being on a call or dealing with a situation is one thing, but the worst is not knowing what happens once your part to play is done. As the dispatcher you may not know what happens once you’re off the call, the fire fighter doesn’t know what happens once the ambulance pulls away, the medics don’t know what happens once they release to the hospital staff, the emerg staff don’t know what happens once they stabilize and send off to whichever unit…each interaction is a cliff-hanger. And if you don’t know, our brains don’t love cliff-hangers. It’s why we binge watch Netflix, to know what happens next and not feel left in the lurch.
6. Crisis being your Tuesday is NOT normal. While a lot of industries have aspects of work that can include some amount of crisis, chaos or intensity – this is usually outside the norm rather than the status quo. Being promised uncertainty as the staple of your day is NOT normal. Doing this day after day after day does this weird thing where it makes the NOT normal feel normalized. And do you know what this does? It perverts our perspective of what normal is to begin with. It skews our reference point and convinces our brain over time that the very NOT normal pace and intensity and uncertainty of the work is just so very normal because we’re in it and doing it all the time…and this makes ACTUAL normal things feel boring, bland, uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Talk about a topsy turvy upside-down world!
Ok, that’s my not-at-all-exhaustive list of ways your work is not normal…Now let’s talk about the impact that comes from living in so much “not normal”:
1. Lacking normal reference points. What do normal people talk about anyway? I hear that question on a near-daily basis. When your sense of normal is so obviously not normal, it’s hard to know how to make conversation with people who don’t share that version of reality. We can struggle in social situations to know how to connect because we feel limited in sharing about the day or how work is going. We can wrestle with the voyeuristic interests of others who want to hear about the work but in a way that is really about the excitement or strangeness of the stories rather than a genuine interest about you or your lived experience. And if we do find something to talk about, it can be hard to feel connected or invested in caring about the responses of others because…
2. Normal people and normal life feel boring. Have you ever found yourself feeling a lack-luster response to normal life? Like it’s boring, dull and lacking? Have you ever heard your friend or spouse or kid talk about a problem in their life and found yourself internally (or worse yet, outwardly) rolling your eyes at their concern about something so seemingly silly or insignificant relative to what you have seen or done or interacted with any given day of the week? Being exposed to the intensity of things you’re exposed to gradually skews your perception of what your brain is willing to deem as significant. Think about it like this – when you first start working out, you likely have a lower threshold for hitting a certain heart rate zone. Because your body isn’t used to working out, you’ll hit a higher heart rate with relatively little effort because your heart isn’t used to exercise and ramps up quickly. As you work out more, your heart strengthens and adapts and it will start to take more effort to reach a certain heart rate zone. The threshold for your heart rate is higher. Similarly, when you first start in the work your threshold for what it means to have a problem or feel stress will be relatively low. Over time, your system adapts and the threshold increases…but this means that lower level stresses won’t register the same way they used to. This can lead to having difficulty feeling empathy for others in our lives, difficulty experiencing interest in things that we once did, and a host of other challenges.
3. Engaging in adrenaline seeking and shit-disturbing. Connected to normal life feeling boring, a tendency can emerge that provokes us to seek out more action. The work has you living in an adrenaline rollercoaster, which is equal parts awful and inviting. When normal life feels dull and we feel disconnected or not engaged, we’ll tend to seek out connection and engagement. The problem is that this will often require some kind of adrenaline activation, so we can start causing problems in an effort to feel SOMETHING. In my practice I see this show up in all kinds of ways – risk-taking behaviours like new hobbies with an element of danger; novelty seeking behaviours like trying something new every other day and not sticking with anything; and what I call “poking the bear” behaviours where we’ll cause problems or provoke arguments just for the sake of stimulation.
4. The yo-yo. On the flip side of the adrenaline rush is often numb. Feeling disconnected and finding it difficult to be present can lead to missing out on moments, cues or connection to good and normal things in life. I hear so often about feeling disconnected from joy as I watch my kid graduate; missing conversations that might have been significant connect points but I just couldn’t connect to it; feeling like I’m in a room with fun things going on but struggling to make myself be a part of it… We can know we want to be connected but struggle to make it happen. And this is where the real damage lives, because it’s where we grow distance from the people we care most about, and often where we’ll experience regret later in our lives that can be hard to reconcile or recover from.
5. Life on eggshells. Beyond some of the daily living and relational impacts of the work, it is also not normal to go places in your daily life and feel triggered. Having difficulty going to a party in a neighbourhood where I responded to that call; or going to the grocery store where I know x, y or z happened; or bumping into that patient at the pharmacy who I had to… The world if filled with reminders of times you had to show up and act, and daily life will put you in positions where confronting these are not optional. Most people do not have to face these kinds of triggers on such a regular basis or have them so pervasively spattered across their communities. For most people, work stays at work. Among the difficulties for First Responders and Front Line Workers is that it doesn’t – it can’t – and it leaves you walking through your life on eggshells waiting for the next thing to hit in whatever random, unexpected moment.
This is not an exhaustive list. I’m sure that there are a host of other ways in which you might identify being impacted by the not-normal of your work that make your everyday life feel not-normal. If you hear yourself in some of the pieces I’ve mentioned today, I hope you stick with me through this series. I also hope you’ll invite others you know to listen, because I can promise, it isn’t just you that feels this and needs this.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be talking to some fantastic guests about how we work toward building back to some normal in our lives as it relates to friendships, intimate partner relationships, relationships with kids, and in our general everyday lives. We’re going to try to be really practical to give you tangible tools to bridge into your daily life.
As we walk this series together, I also want to say that the Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program takes these principles into depth and gives a step-by-step plan for supporting resilience and our capacity to carve out some normal within the not-normal of the work you do. If you don’t know a lot about the program, you can check it out by clicking the link in the show notes. The program was built based on my experience working with those on the front lines and seeing the gaps in your training that set you up for major blows to resilience and sustainability, and I packed in everything that is most important for you to know, along with tons of tools to develop a personalized resilience action plan. Those who have gone through the training have given really positive feedback and we’ve seen the program used by full staffs in an effort to promote resilience and wellness broadly within organizations. While this program is normally priced at $229 Canadian, we are offering a $100 off coupon code from now until 11:59PM on Thursday March 10th. If you are ready to take your investment in your wellness to the next level, I think you’ll gain a lot from this program. Use the link in the show notes and use code BTBP100OFF to snag this deal before it ends.
As we wrap up today I want to remind you to please reach out and connect if you have any questions or feedback. You know I love hearing from you and shaping this podcast to echo your needs and interests. I love hearing about what you’re working on and how you are using what we talk about on the show. You can find me on facebook and Instagram, @lindsayafaas, where you can follow me or tag me, or you can email me at support@thrive-life.ca.
I am grateful that many of you are keen to share about Behind the Line and spread the word to others on the front lines. We’ve watched listenership explode the last few months, and it’s because of YOU. Thank you so much for sharing with those you know. Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. Click subscribe to get alerts about our latest episodes, or subscribe to our email list to hear from me about all the exciting things we have going on and coming up – you’ll find all the details you need in the show notes, along with links to our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help facilitate self-assessing burnout and related concerns. We make all of this 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.
Until next time, stay safe.