Behind The Line: Recent Episodes
Lindsay Faas
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://www.my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.
Show Notes:
Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here
Have you ever felt like to do your job you are sacrificing parts of your soul? Like you have lost parts of your self and your belief in goodness? Front Line jobs demand a lot and expose you to some of the worst moments for people. Beyond the calls, the lack of support from the systems that “support” you can also undermine any sense of ok-ness. Retaining your sense of humanity and goodness and keeping your wholehearted desire for helping intact can be incredibly hard.
Bridging off of last week’s episode, I am honoured to be joined by Dr. Hillary McBride to continue the discussion on wholehearted helping.
Learn more about Hillary’s work here:
https://hillarylmcbride.com/ where you can learn more about her work as a therapist, speaker and the author of “Mothers, Daughters and Body Image”, “Embodiment and Eating Disorders”, and “The Wisdom of Your Body”.
Listen in to our conversation and share it with those you know.
Episode Challenge:
· Reflect on your experience of wholeheartedness in the work. What was the heart that brought you to the work at the start? How is it feeling now? How do you protect your heart? How do you keep being vulnerable with your helping heart?
· Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it’s worth it!), my online resilience training program.
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).
Check out some of our related episodes…
- Daring Leadership (Season 3, Episodes 34-41)
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here
Have you ever felt like to do your job you are sacrificing parts of your soul? Like you have lost parts of your self and your belief in goodness? Front Line jobs demand a lot and expose you to some of the worst moments for people. Beyond the calls, the lack of support from the systems that “support” you can also undermine any sense of ok-ness. Retaining your sense of humanity and goodness and keeping your wholehearted desire for helping intact can be incredibly hard.
Today I am joined by Jake Khym to talk about wholehearted helping. Jake is a Catholic leader with over 20 years experience in various religious and therapeutic settings. He has a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Theology with a concentration in Catechetics. Jake has worked in adult faith formation, seminarian and priestly formation, trauma therapy, and has had a private counseling practice for over 17 years. Currently, Jake offers human and pastoral formation to religious leaders, is a consultant to various ministries and organizations across North America, offers an annual Men's Retreat in British Columbia, Canada, accompanies male leaders on their journey of faith, and co-hosts two podcasts, Restore the Glory and Way of the Heart. With two children at university, Jake currently lives in Abbotsford, BC with his wife Heather and one of their three children.
Learn more about Jake’s work here:
Life Restoration Ministries - liferestoration.ca (Non-profit charity)
Restore the Glory Podcast - restoretheglorypodcast.com (podcast by two therapists sharing their personal and professional experiences)
Way of the Heart Podcast - wayoftheheartpodcast.com (podcast for men about living an intentional life with God)
Listen in to our conversation and share it.
Episode Challenge:
· Reflect on your experience of wholeheartedness in the work. What was the heart that brought you to the work at the start? How is it feeling now? How do you protect your heart? How do you keep being vulnerable with your helping heart?
· Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it’s worth it!), my online resilience training program.
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).
Check out some of our related episodes…
- Daring Leadership (Season 3, Episodes 34-41)
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are finishing re-sharing a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...
This episode included some time-based events that have now ended.
…And that’s a wrap! Today’s episode wraps up our series following Brené Brown’s work from her book, Dare to Lead. This episode includes the bits and pieces we skipped over along the way for the sake of time, as well as some thoughts to tie together the concepts from the book with the interviews with T.C. Randall and Jennifer Pound, as well as with general applications in a front line work pace and environment.
Some final thoughts and resources from Brené and Dare to Lead:
Armored Leadership vs. Daring Leadership – check out the list here.
Tools to Give & Receive Feedback – check out “The Engaged Feedback Checklist” here.
Concerns & Applications – I encourage you to listen to hear some of the feedback and concerns I’ve heard from listeners throughout this series and my thoughts on how we work to apply these conceptual level skills to the very real and challenging work on the front lines.
Episode Challenge:
Having listened to this series, what is one step you can take in our workplace to grow in your daring leadership? What are you willing to commit to and how does it align with your values and the leader you want to be? …Remember, “who you are is how you lead.”
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We have been on a journey this whole month, talking about early indicators to be watchful for and aware of as people who work in higher risk jobs. If you’ve been listening, you’ll know that we’ve been talking about the things that let us know that we are changing, being changed, and that we need to know what to look for so that we can intervene early and catch it before we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole.
We have touched on the heavy hitters – hypervigilance, dissociation, numbing and avoidance… which together make up the main criteria used to diagnose things like posttraumatic stress disorder. We have talked about how these show up, both early on as well as when we are moving deeper into traumatic stress and stress-related injuries. We have also talked about what we can do to catch them and meaningfully intervene in them to try to protect ourselves from spiralling further down.
Today, we are talking about the indicators our bodies give us when they are done, and we are going to talk about some of the early indicators that can give us a heads up that our body is crying out for us to do something before it’s too late.
For the purpose of our topic today I want to share a metaphor that I have used in an episode before but it was a long time ago now. I want you to imagine that your body is like a baby. When a baby wants or needs something, it usually starts by giving a couple little snorts or small vocalizations to try to get a caregivers attention. They might start moving around more or making facial expressions to denote that they have a need. An attentive and attuned caregiver might catch these early signs of need and join the baby in figuring out what the need is and seeking it meet it. And if that happens successfully, the baby settles and all is good with the world. But if the caregiver misses those initial efforts, the baby gets more restless and will up the ante. The baby will cry out louder to make sure its heard. Again, if a caregiver attends and attunes here, crisis can be averted by interacting with the baby and meeting the need. But if the caregiver fails to join the baby here, the baby will have to up the ante again. And this can go on and on until the baby wails to the point that even when the need is met, the baby is inconsolable and it take so much effort and energy for all involved to work at calming that baby back down. It gets dysregulated to the point that it’s whole nervous system is on fire and it can’t bring itself back down for an extended period of time.
Your body is like that baby.
When you experience stress over prolonged periods of time, your body will begin to send alerts to let you know that your nervous system is taking a hit and has some needs to balance back out. It will start by offering small indicators that something is up. A few headaches or digestive issues or feeling a bit off, like you’re coming down with something. An attentive and attuned caregiver to ourselves might notice these and see them for what they are – a way of my body communicating with me that it needs more care, less stress and some support to manage.
…But most of us (myself included!) will tend to ignore these, and worse yet, probably be annoyed by them and frustrated that they hold us back from doing all of the things we need to get done. We’ll push through and rationalize them away as changes in the weather or barometric pressure or food poisoning or that bug everyone says is going around…and on and on. And then you know what happens? The baby gets louder.
Your body learns that you aren’t listening. You can’t be trusted to be the attentive, attuned caregiver to your own self and it has to get louder to get your attention. So it does. You might notice new patterns and frequency and intensity of headaches, brain fog, dizziness, digestive issues, muscle pain, sensitivity to light and sound, immune issues and so on. You might need to take days off because of it. You might notice you are taking more sick days than usual. You might notice that you are feeling less well but others in your family don’t seem to be catching the same bugs.
Again, if we can be the attentive and attuned caregiver, we have an opportunity to interact with ourselves and build trust with our brain and body by being actively responsive to the needs we are hearing and picking up on. …It’s funny because I see parents do this all the time with kids – kid says they have a stomach ache every morning for a week, and parents know that while it might be a stomach bug, they are just as curious about what is going on at school that might have that kid feeling tight and tense and ill. We know stress shows up in kids bodies and we explore that with and for them. But with us, we have a tendency to gloss over it, push past it, shush it, demand that it shut the fuck up so we can keep functioning to the level we have demanded of ourselves, and if it doesn’t go away it’s probably cancer. …Ok, that might be a bit dramatic, but only a little – we for sure do have a tendency to assume that for us it is just an annoyance or something medically serious. We fail to account for how our bodies serve as a feedback and alert system for ALL that is going on with us, medically but also psychologically.
We know that our brains impact our mental health and wellness. Did you know that your gut is considered your second brain? That it has many of the same functional capacities as your brain to give orders and exert influence over your bodies systems including your immune function and nervous systems? Our bodies are these incredibly intricate interconnected systems – the design features are beautiful in their immense complexity. We were designed to have every part of us offer feedback to other parts of us – to have delicately nuanced interconnectivity. But all of this design is useless to us if we don’t stop to listen to it, and develop the capacity to know what to listen for. Again, like the baby, our bodies don’t speak a language we understand, there is some guesswork and trial and error involved – but if we join and attend and attune…ie, TRY and make an effort, we come to learn the language. We develop a parent-like knowing of what the specific grunts and gurgles mean, and we grow in our ability to be responsive to the needs.
Gabor Mate, in his fantastic book, When the Body Says No, writes this: “The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.”
We cannot act in self-preserving ways because we may no longer have the competence to recognize our body’s signals. That is what he identifies as he outlines a myriad of stories that demonstrate ways that our bodies will continue to get louder and louder and louder in an effort to make us listen and serve our own needs. In his book, he talks about a host of cases of significant medical disease that emerge in connection to longstanding stress exposure. He argues that when we ignore and ignore and ignore our bodies, they will eventually force us to meet the needs. Our bodies will force us to stop working by making it impossible to work. They will force us to stop meeting the needs and demands of others because they will take us out at the knees and make it impossible to continue doing what we once did. If we won’t be the caregiver and meet the needs, our bodies will impose it on us, but at tremendous cost.
Gabor Mate also says, “Learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded.” And this really does align with our baby metaphor. There is a message that is trying to be communicated, and for a reason that feels important to your body. It needs you to know something and it’s doing all it can to get you to listen. We need to be willing to examine symptoms not just as annoyances, inconveniences, medical illnesses that need treating – we need to be willing to be open to hearing what our bodies are trying to say and to show up as willing caregivers who can make efforts at interpreting and meeting the needs. Now, that doesn’t mean that we ignore medical illness and don’t intervene with treatments – I don’t mean for you to go to new extremes and chalk everything up to stress and never go see your doctor – what I am saying is that it is both. It can be both.
It can be that you are getting sick more often, catching every cold and flu bug that comes around, and you may need medicine or vitamins or immune boosting support to help overcome that – but we should just treat it without wondering why we are getting sick more often. What might be depleting your immune system and compromising your ability to fight off the things you used to be able to fight off? What might your body be telling you with the frequency and intensity with which you are getting sick? Could it be that your body is signalling to you that stress is costing your body so much that it is wearing down your immune reserves and compromising your bodies ability to fight off small bugs?
It can be that you are getting headaches more often, or feeling them more intensely. While you should talk to your doctor about that and use what you need to in order to manage pain, it isn’t enough to just treat it and then go on like all is fine. Why were you getting more frequent or intense headaches? Have you been clenching your jaw at night? Are you carrying more tension in your neck and shoulders? Are you holding your breath or breathing shallowly more often? Is stress impacting your blood pressure, oxygenation and other factors that can lead to headaches and migraines? When we think about what our body might be alerting us to, we can respond differently. Instead of just taking pain meds and deciding this is something we have to live with, we can look at reducing stress or intervening at levels that support our body – maybe massage, yoga, meditation and other tools could offer supports that allow me to mitigate the concerns and meet my body’s need to balance the demands on my nervous system.
When retired RCMP member, Jen Pound came on the show she shared about her experience of PTSD manifesting as a cold she just couldn’t shake. She shared finding it hard to get diagnosed properly and supported properly because this isn’t the typical presentation. It went on and on because she thought eventually she would get better – but she didn’t. And by the time it was identified for what it was, it required so much more effort to try to come back from it. She tried to push through for some time and the wear and tear took such a toll. I so valued her sharing her story because it’s incredibly valuable and instructive – we need to know what to watch for. We need to know how to be interpreters of what our bodies are trying to share with us. We need to know that our bodies are trying to communicate, not trying to be assholes who get in our way. We need to interact with our bodies and the feedback our bodies offer us in a way that gives space to make sense of it and work out the message together. We need to create space to be curious about how our body is doing, changes we notice in how it’s being, and aware of what it might be telling us about our own needs.
No one can do it for us. No one can listen to our bodies on our behalf. We can recruit helpers like counsellors, naturopaths, massage therapists and doctors who support us as we work to learn to interpret our bodies, but we have to do the work and put in the time. Like learning what a new babies grunts and gurgles mean, we have to spend time, pay attention and really tune in. We have some trial and error – we may hear the baby and try feeding it, changing its diaper and still find that it’s need has not been met. We try things out and see what the response is – does it sooth or not? And go from there. It is the same for us, we need to be willing to invest the time to pay attention, try things out, experiment and listen to the feedback – does this sooth my needs? Maybe a little, but it’s still there, what can I try next? Ignoring and hoping it will go away can’t and won’t work. Like the baby, your system will just continue to get louder and louder until it becomes so dysregulated that no amount of soothing will bring it back down.
Also just like a baby, your worth and value are defined not by what you do, how you perform, how much you give – but by who you are in your simple and glorious existence. You deserve to be treated with the same caring regard as you would treat a precious newborn. You deserve the same level of attentive attuned caring that we invest in small humans who will grow to be big someday. You deserve to continue to be invested in in the same ways you deserved to have been invested in when you were small, helpless and dependent on people to nurture you. Your needs haven’t changed, just your size has. You are no longer dependent on caregivers to meet your needs, you are now the capable and reliable caregiver who can show up for you and be trustworthy in being responsive to your needs. The power is in your hands, all you have to do is pause to listen to the feedback, learn over time and through experimentation to interpret the feedback, and consistently work to show up with efforts to meet the needs identified by that feedback.
Episode Challenge:
· What are some of the physical/physiological/medical symptoms you can identify noticing in your own life?
· What kind of needs might these symptoms be indicators of?
· How long has your body been working at alerting you with these symptoms?
· What are some ways you could work to meet the needs beyond just treating the symptoms?
· What are some ways you can set aside time and space to listen to feedback from your body to be able to hear it before it gets louder?
Additional Resources:
Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Check out some of our related episodes…
· S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skills
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are continuing in our series on the impacts of trauma, and we are really trying to focus on the early indicators that alert us that trauma is starting to take a toll. The goal we are working toward is to be able to notice these earlier so we can catch them and intervene earlier and prevent ourselves and others from landing in my office…or worse. Your job as a First Responder or Front Line Worker comes with risks – we know that. It isn’t new information. And no one is better than the risks. Like I have said SO many times on the show before, nobody comes out unscathed. Nobody.
So given that the risks are real and that the promise is that you will be scathed by it – how do we minimize the scathing, or the harm to you that results from it? That is really what we’re trying to tangle with here, is how to we contain the scope of the impact. How do we limit the extent to which your beautiful, meaningful life – along with those of the people you care about like your partner, kids and family – is detrimentally impacted by the toll the work exerts?
We have talked so far in this series about several early indicators including hypervigilance – being on hyper-alert and the resulting fatigue; dissociation – your bring tuning you out to manage the degree of stress it’s experiencing for too long; and nightmares and flashbacks – intrusive ways your brain works at making sense of what it’s been through. Today we are talking about yet another indicator, and total honesty, I think it is likely the most prevalent and most salient early indicator of the lot. I see this one showing up more in my own life and in the lives of those I work with in the early phases of burnout, occupational and traumatic stress than any other category. And here it is: numbing.
If you listened to the episode on dissociation from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that dissociation is kind of connected to numbing. Dissociation is a mechanism by which our brain overrides us and tunes us out so it can take a break from the immense stress response cycle and hypervigilance it was not meant to deal with on an ongoing basis. Similarly, numbing is a mechanism by which we choose to check ourselves out. It is also closely related to avoidance – the desire to not go near discomfort or sit in pain or suffering for any length of time.
I mentioned a moment ago that numbing is one of the most prevalent and significant of early indicators…the other thing I should mention is that it is also one of the most ignored, justified, denied, rationalized and otherwise inappropriately excused of the indicators. And why is that? …Well, because the things we tend to use to numb, tend to be largely socially acceptable tools for distraction, comfort, and/or “coping”. They are behaviours and activities that make us “feel better”. They “calm us”. …Except that they aren’t being used to strategically support us, rather they are being used to temporarily mitigate our discomfort, interrupt our ability to process in favor of something that feels good for the moment, and over the long term, they cut us off from ourselves by distancing us gradually from interacting with our own thoughts, feelings, needs, worries, and more.
So, what does numbing look like. Well – the easy to name ones that likely you would think of as obvious would include drinking and drug use. I would also include self-harming behaviours, and extreme type behaviours like constant partying, dangerous promiscuity and related activities. These types of behaviours tend to serve by temporarily chemically diluting our feelings of suffering, or temporarily chemically enhancing our feelings of elation in an effort to drown out our experiences of hardship that we feel ill-equipped to process effectively.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a glass of wine while I watch trashy chick flicks on a Friday night. I am not saying that drinking is bad, or that drugs and medication are bad, or that having a good time and enjoying sex are bad. What I am saying is that when these things are used in excess or used explicitly to avoid our own experience, they can rapidly become problematic coping and lead into addictions that can be incredibly difficult to break. And I think we all know and see in others around us, the tremendous catastrophic effect that addictions can have on peoples lives. People lose partners, access to their kids, relationships with loved ones, the ability to do their jobs safely, and so much more. The cost can get steep, quickly.
But beyond the obvious and extreme forms of numbing – there are a TON of other ways we numb, all the time. How much time do you spend scrolling on your phone? Does that time increase or decrease when your stress is higher or it’s been a tough day at work? How much TV have you been watching? Again, does this amount of time go up or down when it’s been a hard day? How much have you spent on online shopping? How many bags of chips have you eaten…or here’s a more timely one, how many candies have you stolen from your kids Halloween stash hoping they won’t notice??
The truth is, numbing can look like a lot of really common, normal behaviours. And more than that, they can look like behaviours that when used a very specific way can actually be a component of healthful coping…but when taken too far, become a new problem all their own.
Recently I had a chat with my daughters kindergarten teacher. My daughter is the oldest in the class and is a force of nature by personality, I’ve been told the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Her teacher told me that they have been working a lot on leadership. She strained when she said the word. I asked if that was a whole class thing – no. It was not a whole class thing. My daughter is working on leadership. I asked what that means, working on leadership, and I was told that my fiery girl possesses an incredible amount of power over her classroom dynamic, and that she could either use those powers for good, or for evil. Those were the teachers exact words. They, apparently, are learning to use her powers for good, by helping kids to listen and pay attention rather than get into silly moods that have every child bouncing off the walls. …Side note, I am SO grateful not to be a kindergarten teacher and believe every single one of them deserves a freaking parade. I could not do that job.
I share this story because, as I have mentioned in other episodes, adults are just children in tall bodies, and much like my 5 year old daughter, we have to decide if we will use our powers for good or for evil. Will we make choices that maximize the value something offers us, or will we take it to extremes where it suddenly has power over us? Can we work to use tools to serve us, or will we overuse them to the point that we are serving them?
Whether it is scrolling your phone or having a drink, these things can be nice, self-caring actions that can communicate to our brain and body that we acknowledge ourselves and acknowledge our need for a little bit of space or distance or distraction from what has felt hard, and welcoming of some chill, some enjoyment, some treating.
But when it goes too far and becomes habitual to the point that we don’t know how to cope without it; exclusive to the point that we don’t know how else to cope if not it; or excessive to the point that it absorbs us and leaves little else, we have a problem.
And this is where the tricky part lies. Defining where we move from decently healthful normal coping into problematic unhealthy addictive numbing. Because most of us start many of these activities in the normal healthy zone. They tend to be occasional and enjoyable. And then hard times hit, so we seek out more enjoyment to balance the hardship. And we find that it feels good to be engrossed in binge watching old tv reruns on Netflix, or that drinking a couple more glasses than normal feels like a nice buzz instead of the anxious feelings I came home with. The things feel like they take the edge off. But as with all things addictive and how our brains work, little by little we develop tolerance, and slowly but surely we need more and more to get the same or less of an effect. To feel more numb we need to do more of the numbing. And suddenly it has taken on a life of its own. What had been justifiable for a moment turns into a monster of our own making.
And that’s the thing – it becomes a monster not only because of the addictions that can ensue and the costs associated with those – but because it also keeps the problem churning. Whatever you were numbing from is still there. Sitting on a shelf in your body, screaming for your attention while you work to turn the volume up on the TV to drown it out. And then you go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, add more difficulty and stress and trauma in a job that is facing it all the time, adding to the shelf, and then going home and doing it all over again. It accumulates and accumulates and when the problem is so big it can no longer be ignored, it is also so much more complex and festering after being left so long and the work to recover and heal from it all is so much more difficult than it needed to be.
And it’s all to avoid. To not touch what aches in us. To not look at what is crying and hurting in us. To not deal with what we’re afraid of.
And not because we don’t know we should, or we don’t think it’s important…although those might be reasons that crop up for some. But most of the time, when I ask people why they didn’t interact with their pain the answer is that they didn’t know HOW. We are ill-equipped to navigate our own pain. We haven’t been taught practically what it LOOKS LIKE to process our experiences effectively. So we stuff it. And we numb it. And time passes, and we and the people in our lives suffer for it, and on and on it goes.
2 years ago, when I first started this podcast, I did a series on how to process, specifically related to how to process and make sense of the pandemic. Check out Season 1, episodes 15-18 for a recap. Really, at the heart of the idea of processing is the understanding that humans are wired for stories. We talked about this last week around nightmares. We are designed in such a way that our brains desperately want and need to make sense of things that happen to us and around us. We need stories that fill in the gaps and round out the edges. We can face all kinds of hard, scary, sad things, but if we can tell a story about us that feels like it makes sense and meaning of it all, we will tend to be able to let it settle over time and go on with life relatively unencumbered by the events.
But when we fail to tell a story, the story will try to tell itself, and it will always try to do so by putting us at the center. What I mean by that is that if we don’t take an active role in analyzing, writing and shaping the story, the default story will tend to be told by our greatest insecurities, fears and beliefs of personal inadequacy. And this is part of what contributes to many of our stories feeling traumatic for so so long after an experience. We can’t put it to bed, because it still feels like it says so much about how we failed, how we aren’t enough, how we can’t hack it… Our brain feels on the hook for keeping it alive in our heads so that we don’t fuck it up again, so we don’t make the same mistake, so we won’t blow it like we always do… And yet, I can say that of the multitude of stories I have heard over the years working in a job where I hear everyone’s internal storytelling – our default stories are almost never the most accurate version of the story. They are biased, and they need us to take an active role in sussing out the bias and retelling the story through a more accurate lens.
When we let default stories happen, and when we ignore them and let them build up over time, they start to build on eachother and serve as confirmation bias for one another. See, there’s another time you blew it. Oh look, there’s one more. Holy smokes, look at all these failures you’ve amassed! If that’s what is happening under the surface, is it any wonder you would want to numb out more and more and more?
This is exactly why we need to talk about this and catch it early – because this can be totally doable if we catch it early and intervene. What if every day after work you granted yourself permission to enjoy a glass of wine and a tv show, but then after that one episode, you set aside 20 minutes to reflect on the day and intentionally decide how to tell the story of the day to yourself. What went well? What didn’t? What did you do about what didn’t go well? How do you feel about the decision you made to handle it that way? Is there more you could have done or some learning you can take forward? What can you be grateful for? What can you acknowledge about yourself, your efforts and your value? Sit with these questions, let yourself mull through them, and let them build a story of who you are.
I bet if you do this you’ll find you’ll start to discover some theme about yourself. I’m someone who shows up. I am someone who doesn’t give up. I am someone who cares deeply. I am someone who…what? What will it be for you?
If you can engage in this consistently, beginning right now, you will be taking an action that invests significantly in your wellness and pays big dividends in reducing your risks for numbing that becomes problematic. The other piece I would encourage you to be reflective of is your needs – what do you feel like you need and why? What would serve that need best? If you need some time to numb, that can be ok, if it is intentional and strategic and caring. But it can’t be to avoid on an ongoing basis, that is a recipe for trouble. I certainly have days when I decide I need to numb out , and I may have a couple glasses of wine and watch more TV than I would usually allow myself, but it’s with the promise that I will circle back to myself tomorrow once I’ve taken this space to breathe. And I always keep that promise, it’s a key part of how I build relationship with myself to be trustworthy, reliable and keeping to my internal promises. One of my best indicators that I am struggling more and needing to be attentive and intervening is when I notice myself wanting to be on my phone more. When I feel irritated by people interrupting me when I am mindlessly scrolling. When I would rather be scrolling or watching a show than having the important conversation my husband or kids are trying to have with me. The desire to distance and numb out is an alert system that lets me know I’m not doing as ok as I could be, and it puts me into action looking at what I’ve let slide from my wellness plan, and what needs to get set back up or set up differently to meet my ever-evolving needs and the ever-evolving demands of life.
This isn’t a perfect science, it is for sure more of an art. There is an abb and flow and it asks us to be pausing, reflective and interpretive of what is happening for us, what we need in it, and how we can serve those needs most effectively. As in art, it asks us to confront and make sense of pain and suffering, but it also moves us to places of calm and beauty and joy.
Episode Challenge:
· What are some of the ways you numb?
· What are some of the pre-cursors that lead you to feeling like you need to engage in numbing?
· What helps you know the difference between when you are using a coping tool for good purposes, or overusing the same thing for numbing purposes?
· What are some ways you can help yourself ground and be present?
· How can you set aside time and space to make choices around how to do more consistent processing so that it doesn’t build and build and build to the point that numbing is the only strategy left?
· What might processing look like for you?
Additional Resources:
Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Check out some of our related episodes…
· S2E35-39 May Mini’s Series on calming and grounding strategies
· S2E22-25 Trigger Happy Series on identifying and managing trauma triggering
· S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skills
· S1E15-18: Processing in a Pandemic Series
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
You guys, we are back and talking some more about early indicators for trauma and stress-related injuries that are common to front line workers. We’ve been talking about how important it is to be familiar with what to look for in yourself and those around you, so you can catch things early and ensure your wellness. For your sake, for the sake of the job you love, and for the sake of those who love you. This is crucially important stuff you guys, believe me, I know – because it’s what every client who ends up in my office for stress-related injuries says they wish they had known and done more about sooner to prevent having to get so deeply caught in it, where the impacts are incredibly damaging to them, their families, their potential to continue in jobs they have loved, and so much more. I have these conversations every single day, and I don’t want you to end up in an office like mine having the same regret-filled conversation if you don’t have to.
We’ve talked about what to watch for around hypervigilance and dissociation and today we are talking about nightmares and flashbacks.
Now, many people who think about traumatic nightmare and PTSD-related flashbacks likely think of what we see in movies – really intense experiences that make you wake up in a cold sweat or knock the wind out of you while engaged in some totally mundane task. While this can be what nightmares and flashbacks look like when traumatic stress has really taken hold, they aren’t the early indicator presentation, and that’s what we really want to focus on for today.
Before nightmares ramp up to the level of cold sweats and screaming in your sleep, they begin with less intensity but should be an early alert that something is up for us. Let’s talk for a minute about what sleep and dreaming is all about, and that will help us to better understand why and how nightmares play a role as early indicators around our wellbeing.
When you sleep, your brain begins a really important task called consolidation. I tend to think of this process, kind of like the mail room in a busy law firm on TV shows like the Good Wife. When you go through the day, you have a constant stream of input – data that is coming into your brain. Some of it is important, a lot of it is pretty meaningless, but your brain won’t necessarily know what it what until time has passed. For example, your brain might be aware of tree branches blowing outside your window while you are talking to your spouse or kids – and generally that input of the branches blowing would be pretty meaningless and unimportant…unless one of those branches suddenly broke and blew through your window…suddenly that background noise peripheral input becomes vitally important data that your brain is able to bring to the forefront and use to enact action to duck out of the way. Think of each piece of data – noises, visual input, smells, and so on – as a piece of paper in that busy mail room. By the end of the day it has amassed and there is a ton of material to sort through.
Your brain doesn’t have time all day to deal with organizing and sorting all of that material, it’s too busy dealing with the next bit of input coming in and working to determine if, in that moment, it is background or foreground information that you need to interact with. So, in the quiet of night when your brain gets to tune out it’s high degree of perceptive awareness of things like sights and sounds, it goes to work dealing with the mass of material you collected that day. Again, think of the mail room and workers sorting through papers – deciding what goes where. Does this need to be kept? Do we need it soon, like a presentation I have to give tomorrow? That might go into our short-term memory stores. Or do we need it for sometime further in the future? That might get put into our long-term memory bank. Is it something that is related to our survival? That needs to be kept locked in an air tight safe in our trauma center. If it doesn’t need to be kept, maybe it can be shredded and forgotten.
During the night, while you sleep, your brain is busy working on this sorting and filing process, scrutinizing each piece of data. And your brain, wired as it is for imagery and stories, tends to create visual representations and narratives – like shadow puppets of the things it’s working on.
Imagine that your brain pulls up something about your day that was stressful with your partner, deciding what to do with it, while also pulling another file up of a movie you watched starring some hot actor or actress…suddenly in your dreams you are having an argument with Brad Pitt who is your husband but obviously Brad Pitt isn’t your husband. Your brain smushes the shadow puppets together and concocts stories that often make very little sense when we wake up, but while we’re in it feel like they make perfect sense.
Psychology has a long history of “interpreting” dreams. I will admit, this isn’t something I do, but the idea is that we process symbolically through our dreams. In some ways we have common symbols that tend to mean common things in what we are trying to make meaning of; but at the heart of it what’s happening is that our brain is combining symbols of various things it is processing and trying to sort through simultaneously and then working to tell a story with it…because that is what our brains love to do. Why do you think we love fiction books and fantasy films and TV shows with intricate plot lines? We are wired for stories. From the beginning of time, people have told stories to translate key information. We have documented stories in pictographs and then written word. It shouldn’t be surprising that our dreams would be marked by story-making.
The thing about early indications of stress, is that we might not be finding ourselves recalling explicit nightmares of detailed events that reflect what we’ve been through. At the early stage, it will likely be less obvious than that. It will show up as more restless sleep – you might get feedback about that from your partner or from your fitbit, or just feeling more fatigued in the mornings. It will show up in dreams that feel more active – not necessarily intense nightmares, but dreams that circle around themes like helplessness, powerlessness, being chased or chasing after something, or other distressing kinds of feelings in the midst of the dream. These might gradually rise to the level of nightmare – again, perhaps not specific nightmares that re-enact the exact details of a traumatic lived experience, but images and stories that reflect fear, helplessness and horror.
The difficulty of nightmares – whether on the mild end or the intense end, is that they happen when we feel powerless to do anything about them. We can feel the victim of what is happening in our sleep. And this can give rise to a totally new problem, which is that this then builds a relationship to sleep that feels victimizing. It can lead us to stay up later, feel more anxious about going to sleep, use things like leaving a light or TV or music on – intended to bring distraction and comfort but also adding a dimension of ongoing input your brain is having to wrestle with attending to while desperately needing to turn this off to be able to focus on its job of consolidation. It can become a vicious cycle, because as we delay, avoid and degrade the quality of our sleep, we also give our brain less room to work with to do the consolidation job it can ONLY do while you sleep. That means that over time, there will be a backlog. You brain won’t be able to get through a day of material during the night, so it will hold it over for tomorrow night, and so on and so on. Add to that that you are in a job where you are exposed to more material of significance that needs to be processed, and the reality is that you need every minute of sleep you can get to consolidate all you go through. It is critical.
So, how do we work at managing something that happens while we’re not conscious?
Probably not surprisingly, it starts when you are awake. The old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, totally fits here. While we may not be able to directly control whether or not we’ll have nightmares or disrupted sleep, we can do things that set us up in a direction for better success.
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Tell the story of your day before you go to sleep. Your brain will still have to walk through the consolidation process and navigate filing it all away, but you can help set it in the right direction. When you go to sleep with a whole bunch of stuff unprocessed, it is there stewing around while your brain tried to pull it apart and make sense of it. You can give it a head start AND offer it a lens to make sense of it through, by spending some time reflecting on your day – the highs and lows – and shaping a narrative of how you think about the day that feels like it fits. Try to tell the story of your day from a lens that acknowledges that you tried your best, that you gave what you could, that in even the hard things that are sitting with you that you leaned in in ways you can feel proud of or ok about. Don’t lie to yourself, but be fair with you – we tend to tell stories that are really hard on ourselves, but aren’t accurate. Try telling stories more in line with how you would help a kid tell a story of something hard in their lives – allow there to be grace and permission to not be perfect.
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Set the frame for sleep. Sleep is a vulnerable time for us. We are defenseless and need to have a very real sense of safety for our bodies and brains to be willing to risk turning off our alert system to rest up. Watching intense shows, having intense conversations with your partner, doing your banking and other stress-inducing kinds of things are not great in terms of setting us up for sleep. Equally, drinking and drug use, while they can feel numbing, tend to make your brain leery of going offline, uncertain if you have what you need to keep safe all night long. Setting aside a period of time, 30-60 minutes of routine that moves you toward bed can help set your sleep up for better success. Some of these pieces may be things you already do, like wash your face and brush your teeth. It may also include things like checking outside your home, locking doors and setting security to help your environment feel secure. Connecting with a person who feels safe, or comforting items or routines that promote a sense of being cared for can help your body wind down into a deep sense of safety and security. When we give our bodies and brains this kind of safe context to fall asleep within, they are carrying less activated unsafety into sleep with us, and tend to have less of a stirred up experience while we sleep.
Those are a couple of things you can do each day before you sleep. With consistency, they can make a big difference in the quantity and quality of your sleep. On the flip side, what do we do if we’ve woken from a tough dream or nightmare, or been woken up by a partner who sees us fitfully sleeping? How do we help ourselves go back to sleep after that?
Well, some great skills are ones we’ve talked about on the show a bunch of times before. When we wake up from a nightmare or in an activated state, what we need is to quickly help our body find a way back to a sense of safety and homeostasis – that sweet spot when we are calm and balanced. We can do that using grounding skills. These are things that help our brain move from whatever it was processing in our dream, whatever filing it was working on, to being present in this moment where I am totally safe and fine. Grounding tools like 5-4-3-2-1, the alphabet game, or other identification games help your brain re-orient to space and time and anchor back to your present moment, in the safety of your cozy bed and your secure home (See Season 2, Episode 37 when we did our May Mini’s series and covered these tools. For the video, check it out on youtube). If after 10-20 minutes you have not been able to fall back to sleep and still feel quite activated, move to another space to limit associating your bed with an activated, stressed awake state, and do a little bit of movement like stretching or some yoga poses. Your body may need to move some of the activation and release some of the muscle tension. Try to continue grounding and work to do some of the opposite actions we’ve talked about before – if your breathing is short and shallow, try to deepen and lengthen it. If you are hot and sweaty, try to cool off. If your heart is racing, try square breathing (breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, breathe out for a count of 4 and hold for a count of 4 – do this a few times and then resume breathing normally). Gentle work to bring your body back to safety. Listen to some calm music or nature sounds. Try a guided meditation. We don’t want you moving into alert things like watching TV or reading if we can help it, but allow yourself to anchor your body back to where you are and remind it that you are safe now. When you feel able, try to go back to sleep. Again, if you go more than 20 minute lying awake, move out of your bed to prevent associating bed with an awake state.
Now, let’s talk about flashbacks. Flashbacks are a little like nightmares in that they involve some visual imagery or sensory reminders of a traumatic event. For some people, especially in the early indicators of trauma exposure, will have a kind of mild reference. It won’t necessarily feel immersive, but more like a spike in heart rate or a quick flash of heat or some other strange but innocuous experience at the reminder of something. It may be something we can clearly connect, or it may be something that we can’t pin point what it is about. For others, particularly further down the spectrum of trauma and more deeply impacted, flashbacks can be extremely immersive, where we feel right back in a situation we were once in. They can feel very real, including all of the sensory input of the time – sights, sounds, smells, all of it. It can be incredibly disorienting and absolutely terrifying.
For a lot of people who I talk to, they will reflect back that before the flashbacks got really bad and intense, they had often had little niggles. Fleeting moments where suddenly it was hard to breathe, or a strange feeling of something being in their periphery and nothing being there when they turned to look. They often identify thinking and ruminating about events, like a call that went sideways or a conversation with a supervisor that felt hard. They bring that into other things, like a projected image cast on top of other moments in their day and week. And feelings connected to those events will cast themselves onto other moments too – the feeling of helplessness, powerlessness, anger… It can sometimes feel hard to explain or describe. We can know we feel inappropriately or disproportionately activated but struggle to moderate it. We’ll snap at people we care about from this heightened place, and struggle to feel like ourselves in moments where we would normally feel more tethered to who we are.
Regardless of the end of the spectrum your on, the job is the same. Bring it back to safety. We have to help our brains know the difference between now, an environment where I am fine, and then. We are working on coaching our brains to learn the difference between safety states and unsafety states. We need to teach and reteach our brains about what to look for to help us know when we are ok and when we’re not. And again, grounding becomes a key skill we can use here to help us really root in to the here and now, to help our brains know their time and place.
When I have clients in my office who experience flashbacks, I prompt them to help find things in the room. I’ll say, “tell me something here that is purple”, “tell me something in here that starts with the letter C”, “tell me something in here that is small”, “touch the chair, does it feel hard or soft?”, “touch the wall, does it feel warm or cool?”. The goal here is to help them orient back to the room we are in that is known and safe by having them interact with the room and describe aspects of it in detail. When we go into flashbacks, whether mild or severe, we disconnect from where we are and go into where we’ve been. Bringing ourselves back to the present and really anchoring to the safety we have right now is vital in helping our brains learn that the unsafety we experienced is not an ongoing and persistent state. It ended. It was hard, and awful, but it’s over.
When we can engage this consistently, we are teaching our brain that we are able to help control it’s felt sense of safety. We are showing our brain that we can show up for it, we can be dependable for it. We can be a reliable coach that it can trust and believe in to keep it safe. And in this way, we develop a new relationship with ourselves that puts us in the drivers seat of our safety.
Yes, bad things happen. They have happened, they may continue to happen. We can’t control everything. But when we do these pieces, we help our brain learn to trust that wherever we have the power to control safety, we will, and we’ll do a damn good job of it.
Episode Challenge:
· How often do you get nightmares? Has the frequency or intensity fluctuated?
· How is the quality of your sleep? Do you use a sleep tracker – maybe think about trying one out (heads up, it can be SUPER depressing for a bit! …But then it gives some helpful information to help you track and make changes)
· Where do you fall in the flashback spectrum?
· What are some strategies you have found helpful or would try out and experiment with to help ground and anchor back to safety?
Additional Resources:
Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Check out some of our related episodes…
· S2E35-39 May Mini’s Series on calming and grounding strategies
· S2E22-25 Trigger Happy Series on identifying and managing trauma triggering
· S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skills
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are continuing in a new series around what to look for and be aware of as professionals more exposed and more likely to suffer from things like PTSD and related occupational stress injuries. This comes after so much feedback that I hear about first responders and front line workers getting a lot of lip service advising to be on the lookout and conscientious about the risks for stress-related impacts of the job – but then aren’t given any information or tools to help know what the hell to actually be looking for that would let them know they aren’t ok…until they are SO not ok that the wheels have completely come off and course correcting is WAY more work than it needed to be.
Our goal in this is to help equip you with the warning signs. I want you to know the things to be noticing and on the lookout for. I also want you to have this resource to offer to your people – your spouse, close friends or family members – so they can know what to be on the lookout for – because they are often to ones who will see it first. And along with all that, I want you to be equipped to be an ambassador for change within your workplace, and to have what you need to help notice warning signs in others you work alongside to give them feedback and support them in seeking what they need before it is so much further down the rabbit hole.
We want to catch things early. Like any disease, the earlier we catch it, the more options we have to treat it and the less invasive the treatment needs to be. When we don’t know what to look for and let it persist way longer unchecked, the consequences can be so much more catastrophic and working back from it is so much more difficult. It doesn’t have to be that way. If we can help to catch it early and intervene when it’s not too far gone, the process is not so difficult. This is exactly why I built tools like the free downloadable Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide – which if you haven’t gotten it yet, go to our website (link above) and grab it. The checklist helps you to self-assess early indicators for things like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and occupational stress injuries. It is a really powerful tool if you use it on a semi-regular basis to track where you’re at and notice early on any changes in your wellness.
Among the indicators that the checklist tracks, one of the key symptoms associated with stress-related injuries is a phenomenon called dissociation.
If you are not familiar with the term dissociation, let’s take a minute to break down what it means. Dissociation is a neurophysiological tool your brain uses to distance itself from stress and overwhelm. It is adjacent to numbing – it’s our brain checking out for chunks of time or to varying degrees all of the time. The dictionary definition of dissociation is, “the disconnection or separation of something from something else or the state of being disconnected.”
Now, it’s important to know that everyone dissociates. Everyone has experiences where they check out mentally. Whether or not you dissociate is not in and of itself an indicator of a problem – it is a human mechanism to manage a world that can be inundating and it’s our brains way of managing the flow of energy it’s expected to dedicate to interpreting and interacting with it all. When we talk about dissociation we talk about it on a spectrum, from mild to severe and complex. On the mild end of the spectrum, and what is in keeping with normal human experience, is things like watching TV and zoning out to the point that you don’t know what’s happening in the plot and have to back track a bit to catch up with what’s going on. Another example is “highway hypnosis” and that feeling of getting to a destination but not really remembering the choice-points involved in doing the drive.
So, what are we looking for when dissociation is going beyond normal coping into problematic? What should we be looking for?
Well, one of the markers may be less about whether you miss the plot line in a show, and more about the frequency with which these normal level dissociative experiences are happening. To disconnect and zone out once in a while is one thing, but when it’s happening on a daily basis – that’s a sign of a problem. So one of the things to be looking for is normal, mild level dissociation happening at a frequency that is increased. Do you find yourself reading and re-reading, and re-reading again the same 3 sentences of a book when you used to be an avid reader? Do you have difficulty keeping track of steps in a process? Do you walk into a room and forget what you were there to do?
…Now some of these things can be associated with distractibility – like having a lot on our minds – as well as with aging, and true story, those can be legit reasons. But sometimes people mistakenly chalk up some of these early indicators as “getting older” when in actual fact they are symbols of stress taking up more space in our minds and our brains trying to quash the impact of that by tuning us out a bit, because we aren’t doing the shit to help make it better more actively.
If you used to be a decently present person and you are noticing, or getting feedback from others that you seem more checked out than you used to be, that’s some solid feedback to listen to.
More moderate-level indicators are struggling to be present in conversations with loved ones, needing to ask for people to repeat themselves multiple times to get what they are saying. Having people repeat your name multiple times to get your attention. Excessive mindless scrolling. Feeling like you lose time – minutes or hours where you can’t account for what you were doing or thinking. Some have difficulty FEELING present in moments – like they are there in body and can see their kids joy on Christmas morning, but can’t bring themselves to FEEL a part of it.
And on the severe end of the spectrum people will lose significant chunks of time that they can’t account for. Often people who end up in this end of the spectrum have experienced such severe trauma over such a prolonged period of time in their lives, that their brains have taught themselves to segment off into parts and this shows up as something called dissociative identity disorder, which is the terminology used to refer to what was once known as multiple personality disorder. A very real experience that I work with in my office on a regular basis, this degree of dissociation is virtually always in response to very early experiences of incredibly significant trauma that is frequent and unsupported. It is the brains only way to cope and function, to parse itself into segments that can exist in and face demands from different parts of life.
Now, DID is a bit beyond the scope of what we’re going to try to tackle today, but I bring up this end of the spectrum because I don’t think it gets enough attention, AND, because I think it is more prevalent in helping professionals than anyone actually knows about. While I can’t speak to this from a quantitative research perspective, anecdotally I will say that so far every single client I have ever worked with who has dissociative identity disorder works within first response and front line work. And it’s not that first response and front line work makes someone more at risk for DID, I actually theorize that the relationship goes the other way around. I tend to believe that people who experienced significant wounding in childhood develop into adults who want to make a difference and help to make the world a better, safer place. I also tend to think that kids who grew up in extreme trauma are extraordinarily well (unfortunately) equipped to exist in high stress and traumatizing jobs. It’s normal for them. The distress is a walk in the park to their nervous systems that have trained for this their whole lives – literally. So, if you are hearing this and see yourself in some of this, know that you are NOT alone, and likely are in better company than you might imagine. We will try to come back to this topic down the road, but I do want to say that if this is a piece for you, reach out to a really experienced trauma-trained therapist.
Ok, so for our purposes today we want to tackle early indicators of dissociation that is in the mild to moderate end of the spectrum, in an effort to catch it early on and intervene asap. Again, if you want a tool to help you assess – go get the free downloadable checklist. We’ve talked about what dissociation is and some examples of mild to moderate indicators – if you hear these and see yourself in them, then what comes next? What do we DO about it?
Well, first we need to acknowledge that this is a result of stress. We have to name the problem for what it is and stop treating it like aging or making excuses for it that keep it persisting unchecked.
If we are acknowledging that stress is playing a role in shaping this, we then need to explore what our brain and body is needing from us to help recalibrate our nervous system so that our brains don’t have to rely on dissociation so heavily to do the regulating for us. Essentially dissociation is our brains way of saying, you aren’t doing anything to help us manage all of this, so I guess we’ll have to take you offline for a bit to manage it for you. If you don’t want your brain checking out on your behalf, you need to be an active participant in intervening and supporting your nervous system so your brain doesn’t have to go to these measures to handle it for you.
So that brings us to how we support our nervous system. If you are a loyal listener, these won’t be shocking to you, we talk about them often. It really comes down to simplifying, creating and connecting to safety.
If stress is what builds us to this, we need to focus on simplifying what we have the capacity and control over simplifying to reduce additional stress where possible. Now, I get that life doesn’t make that easy. Stress is around every corner and adulting brings all kinds of unexpected demands and surprise curveballs. But it’s really about trying to help our nervous systems have a counterbalance to the up by giving it intentional, carved out and dedicated times for down. In times of particularly high stress where we have limited time and control, it can be as simple as feeding your body well and regularly – basic needs like nutrition and ensuring our bodies can be fueled predictably lets our body know it can trust us to do the basics to care for it – but when we skip meals and feed it junk, it learns it can’t even rely on you for the most basic of needs.
Beyond the basics, it can also be things like taking time to breathe and reduce muscle tension, getting to bed a bit earlier, activities like crafts or hobbies that feel engaging in a nice way, singing or listening to music you love, moving your body, and the very best one – play. Intentionally setting time to engage in these activities can help give your body what it needs so it doesn’t have to rely so heavily on dissociation to manage. Engaging in these routinely can be preventative to reduce risks for dissociation and can be responsive when dissociation is already cropping up.
In addition to these pieces, engaging in very active mindfulness is another important way we can help shift out of dissociation, especially if dissociation has been creeping up in frequency and going on for some time. As our brains use the tool of dissociation to cope, it becomes increasingly habitual. It becomes to go to skill set. To undermine this, it is going to take some effort and consistency – and the tool to use is grounding and mindfulness skills that force your brain back into conscious presence rather than permission to check out.
Mindfulness tools like 5-4-3-2-1 and the alphabet game can be great ones. If you don’t know about them, check out Season 2, Episode 37 when we did our May Mini’s series and covered these tools. For the video, check it out on youtube. Other ways of engaging in mindfulness include describing an activity you are doing in detail while you’re doing it – this forces your brain to be really IN the moment rather than checked out. In conversations with others, using active listening skills where you say back what they’ve said to you can be a helpful way to keep your brain in it rather than tuning out. Really, anything that is encouraging your brain to be connected and engaged with the moment you’re in helps to retrain your brain to stay rather than go off into la-la-land.
As we practice these skills, in combination with giving our nervous systems what they need to trust us with the capacity to help ourselves so our brains don’t have to intervene on our behalf, we can move from relying on dissociation to relying on our own awesome regulation skills to keep ourselves ok and in a zone that can interact with stress without needing to run away from it.
Episode Challenge:
· Where does dissociation show up in your life? Where on the spectrum do you think it falls for you?
· How often does it usually show up? Has the frequency increased or decreased?
· What helps you stay anchored and grounded to the moment you are in?
· What tools can you try out and experiment with to help support grounding to the present?
· How can you work at mitigating stress and supporting your nervous system? What does your nervous system need from you so your brain doesn’t have to work so hard to check you out?
Additional Resources:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Since starting this podcast, one of the most frustrating things I hear all too often is that as front line workers you are told to be aware of trauma. To be looking out for PTSD. To be on alert that you are at higher risk for stress-related mental health concerns. …But then never being told WHAT to look for. Not knowing what exactly PTSD looks like, feels like. How to know when there’s a problem, before it’s so bad that you can’t convince yourself to get out of bed and face the world.
That trend is so very concerning to me. While I know we have made gains in reducing the stigma of mental health concerns and that things like therapy are being made more accessible and are encouraged more by workplaces now than ever before in history – what does any of that matter if we aren’t equipping people with the basic knowledge of what the hell to look for? How can we expect people to get support and do the work to help themselves if they don’t even know there’s a problem?
This stood out to me most starkly a while back, and I have referenced it a number of times on the show since then, when Jenn Pound came on and talked about her PTSD symptoms manifesting physically. She felt sick, like she had a bad flu that she just couldn’t shake. No one told her what to look for. Despite posters from occupational health that said to be watchful for indicators of occupational stress injuries, no one clarified what exactly to be on watch for. So it went on and on and on, untreated, assumed to be some bug. Until it got so bad that it could no longer be chalked up to the flu. And by then, the damage was so severely done that it becomes a totally different kind of ballgame to try to play out.
I hate this. I hate that this is a thing. I hate that you are trained to identify markers of mental health concerns in those you serve, but aren’t trained to look for your own. Whose brilliant idea was that?!?
So during this series, we are going to talk about some of the hallmark concerns that show up in people who are exposed to trauma and high stress experiences. We will also talk about some of the less hallmark but equally need-to-know pieces to be aware of. Of all of the series’ I have done on this show, this one is among the most important and I hope that you will listen, use what we talk about, and please, please help others working alongside you by sharing it as far and wide as you possibly can. This is the stuff that can help us turn the tide on so much of what is plaguing front line workplaces. We can make it different guys, but I need your help.
Today I want us to talk about hypervigilance.
Hypervigilence is the word we use to describe the feeling of being on high alert. That feeling when your body feels tense and activated, ready to do what it needs to do to keep you or others safe. It’s an on edge feeling. A heightened feeling.
When we’re in vigilance, there are a number of changes that happen for our brains and bodies. This state is the readiness that would, in a stress inducing situation, give way to fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. When we feel it, muscle tension increases, blood flow changes, body temperature changes, breath rate and heart rate both change. Our senses will tend to feel heightened, looking and listening for indication of threat. Our brains will tend to get super focused, scanning and assessing.
That’s vigilance…but what about HYPERvigilance? Well, this is vigilance on speed. It is an activated state that carries with us, regardless of the scenario. It’s extra, beyond what we need and beyond when we need it. When nothing stressful or threatening is happening, it is energy directed to waiting for something that isn’t coming. More often than not, it’s wasted energy. And it’s ridiculously depleting.
Why would your brain want you to be on edge when you’re having a bubble bath, or trying to fall asleep under your comfy blankets, or when you are sipping your coffee in your favourite chair in the morning? …Well, because stress and trauma generalize.
What that means is that our brains expand stressful and traumatic experiences in an effort to protect us not just from bad things that have happened but also from any possibly affiliated things even in close proximity to a thing that’s happened. And they think a great way to serve you is by having you ready for anything, all the time.
Some people would talk about this as triggering. And they are connected. A trigger is exposure to something that our brain has associated with a traumatic experience (whether consciously or not), and when our brain picks up on that trigger, it elicits a hypervigilant response – an over-the-top protective activation even though there is nothing of particular importance to be activated by right this moment. For lots of people, vigilance will come up in very specific situations, when triggered by specific stimuli related to specific past events or experiences. For others, their vigilance will feel persistent and unabating.
The thing about hypervigilance is that number one, it’s not natural. And number two, it’s not helpful. What do I mean by not natural? Well, while vigilance is a natural protective response, HYPERvigilance does not work with what our bodies were intended to give us. Our bodies are meant to have a reactive, self-protective response to threat but it’s meant to be very time limited. It’s meant to come up, advise me to fight for my life or run as fast as my feet with take me or hold my breath and hope to God it’s over soon…and then it’s meant to subside gradually as our system finds itself in safety again. Our brains and bodies didn’t plan for being in persistent threat where safety is never known or felt. They aren’t meant to run in this state all the time – the energy cost is WAY too high and the depletion connected to it is immense. Which is why for many people who live in this state they struggle with fatigue, irritability, feeling like they have a short fuse. The vigilance burns the wick so short that there isn’t much left to work with. On top of that, hypervigilance is rarely helpful. Your brain is choosing to stay stuck in vigilance because it believes that despite not being made to do this, it’s better to stay here than lower your defenses and risk something happening you weren’t ready for. …It’s maybe not terrible in theory, but in actual practice the issue is that your body carries the toll – the cost of being in this activated state for a prolonged period of time. It actually becomes LESS responsive, LESS capable of thinking and problem solving and handling something if a threat did end up popping up. The cost is more than whatever benefit it generally offers and it can dramatically reduce our capacity to manage through a stressor or traumatic experience because we’re walking into it so very depleted rather than with our best skills and capacities intact. If fact, for some, the persistent extent of hypervigilance leads to a new problem we’ll be talking more about in another episode – dissociation. Quickly for today, dissociation is when our brain and body numbs out in an effort to cope with too much activation – it checks out because the cost is too high. And this happens often in connection to hypervigilance costing too much for too long.
Now, we’ve been naming that so much of this happens without feeling like there is a lot of conscious choice to it. Your brain and body are mapping these things without your vote, and often it feels like you’re just along for the ride. Worst ride ever.
So how do we take the reins and get off the ride? Well, two things…and one caveat.
First, opposite actions. At the start of this episode I described some physiological ways that your body reacts when it moves into vigilance. To train our bodies that they don’t need to be in that state right now, we have to help them go back to homeostasis – that place we’re in when we are safe and chill and fine. When you think about the things your body does when it becomes vigilant, your goal is to do the opposite. So, if you get tense, shake your muscles out. If your extremities get cold, squeeze your hands into fists to get blood moving back into them. Scrunch your toes in your shoes to do the same thing. If your breathing gets short and fast, challenge yourself to lengthen and deepen each breath. If you tense down into tight, closed off posture, try to stand with your feet firmly on the ground and stretch out to take up space. By putting your body in the opposite of what vigilance demands of it, you are making your brain think about whether it really needs the vigilance right now. You are coaxing it into the possibility that you are more safe than it thinks. And you are training your brain to gradually recognize the difference between threat and safety. The big trick here is consistency – when you do it consistently, you can train your brain to adjust how it interprets and interacts with stress and small triggers. If you aren’t consistent with it, your brain easily gets roped back into what it thinks is the safer option, which is to keep you hypervigilant and ready for anything…even as you try to fall asleep in your warm safe home.
Second, anchor to safety. Safety is a complicated thing, because often we have had it until suddenly we didn’t. Because of that, it can be hard to try to convince your brain you’re safe because it knows about times when you thought that and were wrong. Your job here is to look for evidence. Be like a detective – what is there to tell you that you ARE safe? And what calls into question the safety? If there is a hefty long list of evidence for safety, and virtually nothing on the list of evidence to suggest unsafe, then your brain and your body can anchor to that. They can rest easier in knowing that they have fully evaluated the situation to the extent they are able, and recognize that the evidence leans heavily toward this being a safe scenario.
Now, I said there were 2 ways to take the reins over hypervigilance, and one caveat – and here is the caveat. Looking at the evidence and building a case for safety, is actually a really important part of the process for people who experience severe and persistent hypervigilance, because safety can sometimes FEEL unsafe, even when it is totally there and present. This is most especially true for people with more complex trauma histories, where environments that were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren’t; where people who were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren’t. When this is our experience, especially from early in life, it wires our brain to link supposed safety with unsafety, and we have difficulty finding a feeling of safety almost anywhere. In these cases, our brains have been forced to strongly associate what should be safe with unsafety and they struggle to tease these apart later in life when we have more capacity to control situations and ensure our own safety. Because of this wiring, we will often have a FELT sense of unsafety even when situations are completely and perfectly safe. Even more than that, we might actually find ourselves with an INCREASED felt sense of unsafety when we are in the presence of safety, because we are actually more familiar and strangely comfortable with unsafe – it’s known and predictable…like the evil we know being better than the evil we don’t know. Safety can FEEL threatening, because we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to trust it. We don’t know who we are or how to be in it.
The problem in these situations is that we are relying on our feelings as the only source of viable information. While our feelings are an important source of information, and ones we should listen to and take into consideration, they are easily skewed given our wiring, and we need to make sure we check them against other sources of data. This is where evidence comes into play – my feelings are telling me I am unsafe, but all of the evidence suggests safe. I can be informed by the feeling, but also give weight to the evidence. I might then act from a cautious but more open place, and as I have more evidence I can then use this to train my emotions to know the difference between safety and unsafety.
Regardless of whether you have known safety and struggle with hypervigilance now in certain types of situations, or if you have always struggled with safety and experience hypervigilance in many spaces almost all of the time – the job is the same. Develop attunement to evidence for safety, and anchor to it. Notice it. Really pay attention to it. Examine the evidence, and let it build the case for your brain to take it down a couple of notches.
When you can combine these two skills – opposite actions to de-escalate hypervigilance, and using evidence to anchor back to safety, you will find yourself conquering hypervigilance so much more often than you are currently feeling conquered by it.
Episode Challenge:
· Where does vigilance (and possibly hypervigilance) show up in your life?
· How does it usually show up in your body?
· What would be opposite actions you could try out?
· What are hallmarks of safety for you? What evidence tells you that you are safe (even if you don’t feel safe)?
· How can you actively and intentionally use these pieces of evidence to anchor to safety? How can you remind yourself about them and prompt yourself to notice them in moments you might need to?
Additional Resources:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We have been talking about alignment for the last few weeks – the way we intentionally align ourselves with the kind of people we want to be. We’ve been talking about how to be the authors of our own stories, rather than bystanders while life writes our story for us. We’ve talked about how to be a scientist and use curiosity, experimentation and learning to craft alignment and tweak it to serve us and our goals for our own lives.
Today we are wrapping up our series on reclaiming self, and focusing on the one other key piece in creating a life we feel the authors of.
If you think about authors…and scientists, for that matter…they have a couple of things that we need to have too.
An author has a team. An editor, a publisher, a guild…people to bounce ideas off of and workshop with. They consult to ensure that their story is grounded and believable. They have others read their work to get feedback. They are not an island. While some writers can be reclusive, in the midst of it they are checked by others who support their vision and share their goals, to ensure the end product is a reflection of what they intended it to be.
A scientist as a team too. An ethics board who approves experiments, an academic body who guides the process, a funding organization, research assistants, academic mentors… Again, check points. People who are invested in the project, who want to see it do well and support keeping it on track. People who ask hard questions when things seem to be going off the rails or aren’t aligning with the plan. They are people to be accountable to, to keep the project honest and in integrity…most of the time anyway.
So, the part one takeaway is that we need a team. We need people in our corner who get our plan and intentions and support us in making that come alive. We need people we can be honest and vulnerable with who are willing to walk with us and check us and hold us accountable to who we say we’re going to be.
The other thing that authors have is a plan. Before they put pen to paper, or keyboard to blank word document, they create a plan. The identify the key characters, who they are and what their deal is. They outline the basic plot points and some of the anticipated twists and turns. They imagine and envision some of the substantial details and note them. Outlining all of these pieces helps a complex work of fiction to be broken down AND it acts as something for the author to anchor to. So when things get a bit off course, they can come back to the outline and re-hash things. It acts as a tether, to keep them honest to the vision for the project.
Similarly, a scientist has to have a plan before they can start running experiments. They have to have a breakdown of what they are curious about, what they think will happen, and how they plan to go about finding out the answer. They have to have a rationale for why they are doing what they are doing and convey how their actions steps will serve to advance what we know about a subject.
In both cases, these plans are what authors and scientists share with those in their circle. They disseminate the plan to the people in their respective spheres of influence and by knowing the plan, the people in their lives can better support the integrity of the work. They can see when things are going off the tracks and are equipped to call it out and name problems before they become so catastrophic that they undermine the quality of the end product, or lose a ton of time, money and energy for those invested in it.
Questions to Consider:
- Who are YOUR people?
- Who are the people who you can be honest and vulnerable with?
- Who can you communicate your plan to?
- Who can help you stay accountable in crafting the person you choose to be?
- Think about your plan - What would it look like to be the person you want to be? What would that person look like? How would they feel? What kinds of things would they do? What would be notable about them? And what needs to happen to move you from where you are right now in the direction of that vision of yourself?
- What is the story you want to tell about yourself?
- How would you like your story to be remembered?
- What do you hope you would be known for?
- And how to you take steps toward being more in alignment with that person?
- Who you might need to help you get there?
- What kinds of accountability would you need?
- Who do you know who has skills that would be helpful to your efforts?
- What would you need to communicate to them for them to support you well?
- What permissions might they need to be effective?
Episode Challenge:
Register now for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guideto help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. Register now for $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Register for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidefor $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
The process of considering alignment and experimentation involves asking questions about what might fill my bank account back up. What feeds my spirit? What brings energy? What replenishes? Or, at minimum, what limits the rate at which I get depleted?
Last episode I shared some examples from my own life and what felt noteworthy to me as I shared them was just how small and simple most of them were. Taking a multivitamin, experimenting with when I exercise and what kind of exercise I enjoy most, trying out something silly like crochet…none of it is big or particularly complicated or time consuming. It really is just slowing down enough and leaving my curiosity on that makes the difference. And honestly, what we’re talking about is learning.
The process of learning happens when we try something out, take information from that experience, and adapt that into what comes next. We learn whether we are conscious of it or not – our brains are constantly taking in information, recognizing patterns and adapting expectations to those patterns. For example, if I come home and am greeted by grumpy, snarky kids and a grumpy husband and a messy house, my brain over time learns to expect this and probably creates an adjusted mood of being grumpy too. If you are a brain and behaviour psychology geek like me you’ll know that this is basic conditioning and the model for how we learn pretty much everything.
Harnessing the power of learning gives us conscious level control over the factors and allows us to shape the outcomes. Let me say that again, because this is key – harnessing the power of learning gives us conscious level control over the factors and allows us to shape the outcomes.
The thing about scientists is they don’t just run one experiment, write the results and then stop. They ask new questions, better questions, more informed questions because of what they have learned so far. And they use it to keep on learning. They invest not in the specific outcome but in the process of curiosity and learning. They are in it for the growth, not the end result.
And the thing is, we need to keep that piece at the forefront because we aren’t ever going to be a finished product. The truth about life is that it keeps changing. And the truth about people is that we keep changing because of it and within it. What fit and aligned for you as a teenager probably doesn’t fit or align quite the same way today. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t align way back when…it just means that you’ve grown and need to have what supports you grow with you. It might look like aspects of what once fit for you, but it might have to be adapted to fit who you are now and what your life looks like now. And it might be brand new things you’ve never even considered before, because that might fit better and be more aligned than you ever could have suspected.
What I am saying is that you need to be willing to try, and when you feel like you’ve found a sweet spot enjoy that but don’t get complacent in it. Keep observing. Keep noticing. Keep being curious – because that sweet spot can be amazing but it won’t last forever and if you keep your curiosity on, you’ll notice when it’s not so sweet a lot quicker and be able to adapt more effectively than if you get complacent and fail to notice that things aren’t feeling like they fit for you quite the same way. To some extent I see this showing up for a lot of clients I work with who struggle with low-grade depression – they keep doing what used to work and fail to account for the fact that it’s not working anymore. They feel caught and have low energy and so trying new things, stepping out of the routine and comfort zone, feels so hard and uncomfortable that their depression just won’t let them do it…but then that continues to feed the depression…and it’s a downward spiral of stuck on top of stuck on top of stuck. If we can be open to curiosity, we can catch it earlier, adapt it and find a new sweet spot rather than getting caught in that spiral.
I know we talk about intention a lot, and it’s for good reason – being an engaged participant in our own lives really makes the difference between a life lived and a life well-lived. We need to have our eyes open, we need to be seeing and noticing what’s going on for us and around us, to be able to be active in shaping the story of our lives. Being passive to this allows everyone and everything else to tell our story, to decide who we are. If you want to be the author of your story, you have to own it. You have to sit down, look at your character and make choices that shape that character to be the fullest version of themselves. Life will try to convince you to put down the pen and just hang on for the ride, and it’s your job to do the hard work of sitting down each day, picking up the pen, and writing the story. Just like a book character, you’ll face bumps and hardship, it will test your character and shape you – but you can be active in that process and you can intervene on behalf of yourself to support an ending to the story you can feel proud of.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. Register now for $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!
Additional Resources:
Register for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidefor $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
The really cool but often uncomfortable thing about life changes is that they open up an opportunity, a potential, for learning and growth. They tend to push us into a place of HAVING to do something differently, and by extension, learning about ourselves, what fits for us and what doesn’t, and sorting our way through how we either contort ourselves or how we make things contort to fit us.
Like I said, it tends to be uncomfortable – because as people we crave routine, stability, predictability, and so on. We like to know what to expect and have a clear sense of what is coming next. Being pushed out of our comfort zone, out of our routine and predictable, and being forced into new and unknown terrain, is going to feel uncomfortable. And that’s ok. …But it is also what makes stage of life changes feel so overwhelming and daunting. If we aren’t accustomed to uncomfortable…if we aren’t open to discomfort for the sake of growing…then we’ll have a tendency to shut down, enter survival mode, hope to God the discomfort ends soon, and likely not take much from the opportunity other than negative self-perceptions and resentment toward the transition.
Certainly I can appreciate digging heels in and not wanting to enter a time of transition or change. I have had my fair share of metaphorically curling up into a ball and waiting for it all to be over, refusing to participate in the opportunity for growth. Often when the invitation intime of change felt unwanted and forced upon me with all the doom and gloom feelings of the world ending…Sometimes even in changes that were good and that I had a hand in choosing…because it felt big and hard and called me into discomfort I wasn’t fully prepared to face.
That said, out of these experiences I have learned a lot and have tried to adapt toward embracing these opportunities rather than trying to run and hide from them. And today I am sharing the number one trick I can offer around how to engage and embrace times of transition – whether happy and hopeful changes, or hard and unwanted ones. Here it is: Be a scientist.
Ok, here’s what I mean. Scientists, by nature, are curious. They are open to possibilities and interested not in any one specific agenda or outcome (or at least they aren’t supposed to be…) but rather interested in learning a little more and allowing that to lead to new questions and directions. Scientists make educated guesses, but go where the data takes them. They set a hypothesis and try to prove it wrong rather than prove it right. They are willing to try things out and when they don’t work out the way they expected, they take that as learning. And you guys, THIS is what we have to do in our lives.
So, let’s talk about experimentation and being a scientist. Now, we’re going to start in a place that will likely be familiar if you are a loyal listener of this show. Every good scientist starts by asking a question. That is where the process begins. And to ask the question to begin with, they need to have noticed a pattern or oddity that elicits the curiosity to say, “why?”. And that brings us back once again to the need for AWARENESS. We have talked about this SO many times before on the show – that we can’t take intentional steps in any direction if we don’t first have awareness of where we’re at and how it relates to where we imagine wanting to be or go. Scientists ask questions based on observations – they notice a thing and then get curious about it and ask more questions.
The first step in acting like a scientist in our lives is to have some carved out scientist time. To have time set aside where we can slow down and notice. When we are caught up in the survival mode moment-to-moment chaos of our days, or when we numb out or distract ourselves in every down-time moment, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to take stock and notice what is happening in us and around us. Having moments of quiet pause throughout a day and a week is what allows us to take note of patterns, oddities and other bits and pieces that can inform the questions we ask next.
Step two in being a scientist is to ask a question. We’ve taken time to pause, we’ve looked inward and outward, and there are some things we’re noticing. One of the insightful pieces that came up for me about a year ago was awareness that there is a craving for reconnecting with things I used to love and enjoy. I noticed feeling nostalgic in weird moments – a great example was watching Olympic rock climbing with my kids, and while I was never a great climber…or even a very good climber…I used to rock climb and really enjoyed this. It actually was a really meaningful life line for me at a particularly difficult time in my teens and continued to be an important part of my life in early adulthood. I kept saying to my kids, “mommy used to do rock climbing” and each time it felt sad and disconnected from anything they know about me now. So, I got to asking some questions: “why is sadness the feeling that comes up when I think about this?”, “what is it I miss about climbing”, “what would it look like to try to climb again?”, “what would get in my way from climbing again?” and so on.
Now let me be clear, I didn’t run out and buy a harness and throw myself into climbing. That’s not real life. But, it opened up thoughts that I hadn’t allowed to live there before and it has yielded some amazing moments for me and with my kids and family that I am so grateful for. It turns out, my son loves climbing too. He and I went for a mommy-son date last winter to a bouldering gym and it was the best bonding. As a family we hit up a kids climbing gym while on holidays and made some fantastic memories together. And while hiking around Squamish, one of our favourite places on earth, we would make climbing challenges and compete with each other and it brought endless laughs and some epic stories the kids will tell on repeat.
This brings us to step three of being a scientist…experimenting. When we have awareness and some questions, we can take time to formulate a plan. But the key to this plan is unlike most planning in our lives where we have a sense of certainty and a need to know how it will all turn out, we’re going to enter this planning with curiosity and openness to it going in unexpected ways and being ok with that. Rigidity is not our friend here, the goal is to try some things and learn from them. It might look like experimenting with things you have done before, or adapting things you’ve done before to fit into life now, or it might look like trying out totally new things.
I feel like what should be obvious to you is that none of this is rocket science, but when we treat it like science of some kind, we can become intentional about how we choose to engage in our lives and lean in to what we’re in rather than fighting against it or succumbing to the weight of it. During this episode I share that 2021 was a crappy year for us. It was incredibly hard and I wouldn’t want to do it again. But, I also learned a lot about myself. I learned that I am capable of more than I ever knew. And I learned how to care for myself ridiculously well in the midst of a really trying time – which gives me so much confidence in my ability to care for myself even better as we shift gears into a time where I don’t have to be all things to all people all of the time. Because of 2021, I feel equipped and battle-tested for what comes next. I don’t feel afraid of the process and experimenting now feels like second nature – an adventure to learn to adapt to the moment I’m in. My hope it that you will come to feel that way about it too, and I would love to hear about your adventures in experimenting and discovering alignment.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. This is also how you get on our email list to hear about new podcast episodes and to be the first to find out about our upcoming promotion!
Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!
Additional Resources:
Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
I’m not sure where you are at in your world right now – maybe you feel like you are totally killing it…maybe you feel like you’re drowning. Maybe you are somewhere in the in-between. As for me – I am in this weird and uncertain and beautiful stage of change and transition. I know that change can be scary for a lot of people, myself included, for sure. But this stage, I’m finding myself embracing it – reveling in it, actually. And as I have been working through this in my own life, I am aware that this is something we all go through and I thought we could spend the next few weeks talking about stages of life, adjusting to meet the changing moments, and working to re-align ourselves each and every time to work at being the people we want to be.
Stages of life are kind of funny to me. We all know they happen – that we ebb and flow between stages where we feel really capable and on top of things, to a time where we feel tired and lagging, to stages of insecurity and anxious uncertainty, back to stages of being our best selves. We have felt them. We see them clearly when we look back and recognize in hindsight that we were working through something challenging there, or were in a highlight phase of our lives back when… Yet, despite knowing about these ebbs and flows cognitively, we often struggle to own and recognize them for what they are in the moment. We fight them, or fall victim to them. We feel caught up and struggle to see the forest for the trees. In the thick of it, we feel like it’s about us – how we aren’t good enough, strong enough, on top of it enough, intentional enough…
During this episode, you’ll hear me share about some of my own present-day journey around stage of life transitions. About being aware and conscious in making the choices that support being in alignment with who I long to be as I see this shift happening in, under and around me. I think much of this is what we all face, and I hope we can share in it together.
Over the coming weeks, we are going to explore together some of the ways we can claim ourselves and seek to align and re-align ourselves with who we want to be when we face changes in our stage of life. The beginning of all of these efforts though will always be the same: AWARENESS. We can’t ask good questions or be intentional in enacting an action plan, or purposefully move to align ourselves, if we lack awareness of where we’re at and what needs to happen to move us where we want to go. We can’t get found if we don’t know we’re lost. And we can’t make the most of any given stage if we’re unaware that we’re in it.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!
Additional Resources:
Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today I am so excited to be joined by Michael Mariano, neurotherapy expert, and we are diving into the benefits of neurotherapy including neurofeedback, biofeedback and related tools. I am so grateful for this conversation including Michael’s show and tell with some of his equipment so you can get an idea of what it all looks like. You can listen to this episode, or watch and see the show and tell time on YouTube! Check out the links in the “Additional Resources” section below for more info on neurotherapy, and for Michael’s information if you would like to follow up with him.
Episode Challenge:
Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Neurotherapy Related Resources:
· Biofeedback Certification International Alliance
· International Society for Neuroregulation & Research
· The Association for Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback Inc
Michael Mariano Contact Info (Office in New Westminster, BC): michaelroymariano@gmail.com
Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
As we continue in our series on alternative approached to healing, today I am sharing about my background in using Observed Experiential Integration (OEI) as well as a related therapeutic approach called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Both of these therapies integrate neurological understandings of trauma/high stress experiences and the ways these experiences map themselves out into the brain and body. Both approaches rely very little on talking and much more of visual processing. Listen in to hear how they work and how they can be of tremendous benefit to First Responders and Front Line Workers struggling with posttraumatic stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, anxiety, panic, and other occupational stress injuries.
For Further Reading…
OEI:
https://sightpsych.com/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232561961_Observed_Experiential_Integration_OEI_Discovery_and_Development_of_a_New_Set_of_Trauma_Therapy_Techniques
https://thrive-life.ca/innovation-in-trauma-therapy-oei/
EMDR:
https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/eye-movement-reprocessing
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Complete our listener feedback survey and be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card as a thank you for helping us make Behind the Line even better! Jump here to complete the survey now.
Additional Resources:
Don’t forget to complete our listener feedback survey and be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card as a thank you for helping us make Behind the Line even better! Jump here to complete the survey now.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today I am joined by Registered Clinical Counsellor, Claire Weiss, who is sharing about her work is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Hear her story to brought her to this alternative treatment method as a client and a clinician, and learn about a non-traditional treatment intervention that has been shown to be helpful for many “treatment resistant” individuals. As a follow up to our interview, Claire provided a long list of resources (thanks Claire!!):
Videos
Talks given by some of the leaders in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy:
Mary Cosimano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt6ZpzByMs
Rick Doblin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9XD8yRPxc8&t=872s
Robin Carhart-Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIaTaNR3gk
Roland Griffiths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81-v8ePXPd4
Rosalind Watts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kfGaVAXeMY
Mendel Kaelen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehi0Cfm4DQM
Netflix Docuseries: How to Change Your Mind
Magic Medicine Documentary: https://youtu.be/6UX8HMXZVbA
Patient Experience Videos
https://vimeo.com/130995470
https://vimeo.com/51254785
https://youtu.be/xYhtXI4Prpo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyc7iM7ZNrA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sST7BvFfEGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVIfQaqVG4
More patient videos can be found here: https://www.heffter.org/media/
Podcasts
https://www.plantmedicine.org/podcast/psilocybin-scientific-research-dr-garcia-romeu
https://www.plantmedicine.org/podcast/psilocybin-patient-experience-dr-lynn-marie-morski
*The above podcast has episodes on every psychedelic and more!
https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/
https://tim.blog/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/
*Scroll down at the above webpages to locate the recording. Tim Ferris has a lot of content on psychedelics if you search his episodes
Books
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence – Michael Pollan
Consciousness Medicine – Francoise Bourzat
Research Hubs
John’s Hopkins: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/index/#research
Heffter: https://www.heffter.org/study-publications/
MAPS: https://maps.org/research/other-research (scroll down for psilocybin studies)
Episode Challenge:
Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!
Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
I’ve been trying to lean in to the openness to the not knowing more generally in life these last many months. It’s not my knee-jerk – I’m pretty hardwired toward planning, perseverating, anxiety and hyper-controlling. Settling in to the unknown and trusting that I’ll have what I need whenever I end up needing it – trusting that I have done what I can and allowing the rest to fall where it may – is not usually in my comfort zone. Yet, I’m finding it to be my saving grace lately. Curiosity and trust. Those are the muscles I am exercising a lot more regularly, and it’s been really cool to see how this allows me to relax into uncertain situations without sacrificing any of my capacity to be meaningfully involved or capable. I don’t think I’m alone in trying to micro-manage and control things in an effort to make everything be ok – my hunch is you might be in the same boat. Given that, you may also understand how uncomfortable it can be to try to shift from that mode to something less vigilant and “on top of things”. But it’s been simpler. Calmer. Nicer in a lot of ways. And it has allowed me to consider and explore ideas I wouldn’t normally have even allowed space to exist. Now, that has been true in my world and life generally but also as it relates to my work and the topic we’re kicking off with for Season 3 of Behind the Line.
A few months ago we had a guest on the show, you might remember, Kelsi Sheren from Brass & Unity. As a quick recap, Kelsi is a retired artillery gunner with the Canadian Armed Forces. She shared her story of experiencing PTSD and struggling with treatment resistance to traditional or conventional therapeutic interventions. I so valued this conversation and her calling out of the limitations of many conventional therapy models – because the truth is that they don’t work for everyone. And I really appreciated that she brought up a topic that in my profession is still pretty controversial, but I believe is really important, and that is the topic of psychedelics for PTSD treatment. When she brought it up I honestly had a moment of shock – not because of what she was sharing but because I realized that we had not yet spoken of this in a year and a half of this show existing. We did a whole series on therapy in the fall of 2021, and somehow I missed talking about some key pieces. As soon as I got off the interview with Kelsi, I reached out to 2 colleagues and asked them to schedule interviews for a new series I wanted to do to kick off season 3, and so here we are and we are jumping in talking about alternative treatment modalities for those who are struggling to find the right fit in conventional therapy.
Over the coming weeks I am going to introduce you to two amazing clinicians and the ways that they work outside of the conventions of traditional talk therapy to support healing and change. You’ll hear from my friend and colleague, Claire Weiss who specializes in Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as my colleague, Michael Mariano who specializes in neurotherapy. You’ll also hear from me about non-verbal trauma processing approaches like EMDR which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; and OEI which stands for Observed Experiential Integration.
For today, I want to start by talking about why talking doesn’t always work.
Let’s start with this. As a therapist, I may be biased, but I genuinely believe therapy works. I have witnessed time and time again the incredible power of the therapeutic process, including the influence of talk therapy in shaping or reshaping how we think, feel and engage in the world. I have had so many opportunities to watch people make substantial shifts and live lives more aligned with their core values. I have seen people re-write their internal narratives and discover freedom from the stories they were handed. I have myself been shaped by therapy, growing from the opportunity to look more closely and intentionally at myself, my choices, my ways of perceiving, and considering alternative ways to going about it to be more the person I want to be. I want to be clear that I am not saying that talk therapy isn’t helpful – on the contrary, it can be incredibly helpful and consequential in changing someone’s life. That said, it has it’s place and it has it’s limitations, and chief among it’s limitations is in the processing and healing from trauma.
We have talked on this show a number of times about how traumatic experiences get encoded into our brains. We’ve talked about how the regions of the brain associated with trauma memory as unique and struggle with things like time and context. One of the other things these regions struggle with is language. That’s right, when we store traumatic memories, we store them in a part of the brain that doesn’t have particularly keen access to our language center. Our brain has to work hard to connect the memory to words to describe it, and often when people share about their traumatic experiences they find that they stumble trying to find the right words, or randomly blank on words. The part of our brain that is awesome at language is our frontal lobe, which is also where we do our really good thinking, decision making, learning, and so on. As we’ve identified in many other episodes, the frontal lobe part of your brain essentially gets turned off when trauma happens, and this also occurs when we go into memory recall of traumatic events. Whenever we are putting demand on the part of our brain that manages stress and stores trauma, our brain recalibrates itself to give more resources to the stress center and less resources to other parts of the brain including our frontal lobe.
So think about that for a minute – if you are going for therapy to work on traumatic experiences or the impact of trauma over time, and you are being asked to recall or share about the impact trauma has had for you – the act of doing what needs to be done means that language is automatically reduced. Which means that talk therapy is going to have a MUCH harder time accessing what it needs to, and supporting you in navigating what you need to move through, in an effort to rewire how your brain has stored that traumatic information. Talk therapy for trauma can feel very slow and very difficult, as it leaves people sitting in their traumatic experiences with minimal equipping to move through and out of it. It rests heavily on talking being the tool that gets us through, but the part of the brain that connects with that isn’t likely to be online. Unfortunately when people have tried talk therapy and found it ineffective in helping them with their trauma and symptoms, they tend to scrap therapy altogether. But what if there are other ways at getting to your brain that don’t rely so heavily on a skill that isn’t online? What if we can find some workarounds that get us there through some sneaky back doors?
For decades now trauma therapists around the world have been searching for the back doors. We have been working to be creative and emerging brain science has helped move us forward in better understanding how we can access and reprogram trauma. I won’t say that we have all the answers, because man alive, the brain is a complex thing and I’m not sure we’ve even scratched the surface of all that there is to know about how it works. But I will say that we have learned a lot and that we’re taking what we’re learning and working really hard to find better ways to provide support to people who don’t find conventional therapy to be doing the trick.
I remember about 6 years ago I went to a training by one of my psychology idols, Bessel van der Kolk. Dr. van der Kolk is known as a trauma expert. He has been at the forefront of the most significant and consequential research related to trauma, he has acted in roles of leadership within the most significant bodies related to trauma work, and if you do what I do, you have read everything he has ever written and admire his dedication to serving people better. He shared during this training about his work before learning about EMDR. He talked about the limitations he kept running into and the “treatment resistance” he observed in so many trauma clients. He shared about the lack of outcomes in treatment research, or outcomes being really limited and hardly passing a level of significance. He shared about how he started hearing about this thing called EMDR and that he thought it sounded like nonsense. There’s no way anything could give the results EMDR had been found to offer. Then he shared about his experience with a specific client who he could not figure out what to do with. Nothing was working. All of his best work wasn’t touching this persons trauma. So he sent her to a colleague who did EMDR, and the gains this client made were so substantial that he couldn’t deny the efficacy of this intervention. He got trained in EMDR soon after and has since been one of the most considerable contributors to research related to EMDR and PTSD.
Now, we’ll get into the specifics of EMDR later in this series, and I’ll be clear that I don’t think EMDR is a universal answer to trauma either – but the point I’m trying to make is that we need to be open to the possibility that the problem isn’t that our trauma can’t be helped, but rather we need to get curious about whether the intervention that’s being used is the best way to work at helping our trauma. What if, instead of calling it quits after a few unsatisfying talk therapy sessions, and feeling like we aren’t fixable, we instead asked questions about other options, and sought out alternatives that could bring different relief?
Let me say really quick that this requires you as the consumer of a service to know that there are more options available. …And that kind of sucks. It shouldn’t have to be your responsibility to know and seek out alternatives – I think this should be made more easily available and accessible, but we live in a managed care system that does ask more of you than it should. Advocating for yourself and not giving up will fall to you. I hate that that’s true, because often when we’re struggling with something like PTSD we don’t have the sense of capacity to do more for ourselves, we just need help. Yet, this is where we’re at, and I hope that at minimum, episodes like this help you feel more aware and discerning as you seek support and equip you with questions to ask, things to watch for, and the ability to pull the plug on something that isn’t working to find something that will if you aren’t getting your needs met.
Over the coming weeks we will talk about three specific treatment interventions offered by specialized clinicians and practitioners. My hope is that you might hear something you gravitate towards and that you’ll be inspired to continue seeking support and ensuring your wellbeing. Your wellness is critical. We are living in a time where we need every person, every person who is able to contribute to making the world a better, safer place. We need you, and we need you well. We need you to keep helping, in whatever role or capacity that might be, because goodness knows the world has been in an increasingly tough spot. Investing in you can’t be optional, we need you too much for that. So I hope you’ll continue listening over the coming weeks and that you’ll take something away that will shape how you invest in you.
Episode Challenge:
Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
What an amazing summer it has been! It has been fun, challenging and inspiring to connect with so many incredible guests and get the chance to share their stories with you this summer. I hope that you have found something meaningful to take from our Voices From the Front Lines series.
This episode wraps up Season 2 of Behind the Line – 52 straight weeks of podcast episodes. We’re keeping it short and sweet today, as I work on bringing you a brand new and really exciting season of Behind the Line. We are nearing 2 years of this podcast being out in the world, and it has been such a rollercoaster ride! From the very beginning I wanted this podcast to focus on bringing you the tool and information you need as front line helpers to remain as sustainable as possible. I have always wanted and continue to focus on having this resource echo your needs and interests – so my invitation today is to use the link in the show notes to complete our podcast survey. The survey is short and only takes about 5 minutes to complete. It allows you the opportunity to share what you think would be most helpful to hear about on the show in our upcoming season. I take your feedback super seriously and will use it to shape upcoming episodes and series. If you complete the survey before September 30th, you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card. The survey will remain available after September 30th for those wanting to provide feedback after that time.
Survey Link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SF69WFW
Episode Challenge:
Complete our season wrap up listener feedback survey now and be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!! Jump here and take 5 minutes to help shape the future of Behind the Line.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
I love getting a chance to talk with veteran helping professionals – the wealth of insight and wisdom is invaluable. Today I am honoured to be joined by retired San Francisco Police Department Deputy Chief, Jim, who spent over 30 years working with the San Francisco PD in various capacities. He continues to be involved in law enforcement as an educator in the Criminal Justice Studies Department at San Francisco State University, a writer with police1.com, and as host of the Policing Matters podcast.
Jim and I spoke about the pieces that contributed to his sustainability in a 30+ year career in law enforcement. We talk about mental health, promoting resilience, and so much more.
During this episode I also mention the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide, an online program that works to fill the gaps in your training and offers you a comprehensive and personalized guide to promoting your wellness and sustainability, both on the job and off. Learn more about this program here.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
I so enjoyed today’s talk with Paramedic, Jeff. I heard Jeff’s story in a news article – you can find it here on CBC and here on CTV news. He shares bravely, openly and vulnerably about his experience of mental health decline and crisis as a result of his exposure within his work. He describes his intentions of taking his own life and shares about what helped him through this incredibly difficult time in his life. I am beyond grateful for this conversation, for the laughs we had a chance to share along with the willingness to talk about hard topics that need more air time.
Jeff now participates as one of the founding members of the Detachment Technique, a program designed to support those on the front lines with moving through shock and processing the immediate aftermath of trauma. You can learn more, here.
During this episode I also mention the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide, a free tool that allows you to check in (over and over again!!) and see where you are at as it relates to burnout, compassion fatigue, and related traumatic/stress exposure concerns. Don’t just use this tool as a one-and-done – it is designed to be something you reuse on a regular basis that can help mark changes in your mental wellness status and offer you some interventions to work your way back to steady ground. You can snag the tool for free on our website here.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Grab our free Workplace Suicide Risk Prevention infographic, used as a tool to promote education, understanding and tools for meaningful support by workplaces and teams.
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
I have known Shannon Brink for years, but always as an acquaintance who was a friend to other friends. It wasn’t until our interview today that I was left with the question – how were we not BEST friends?? Because, Lord help me, we had the BEST conversation and I am so grateful for it. I hope you enjoy it too.
Shannon began her nursing career here in British Columbia, Canada. She is a mom of 4 kids ages 6-12, and moved with her family to Malawi a few years ago (pre-COVID). We talk about the balance of parenting and career, the many iterations of adaptation required in this crazy thing called life, what coping has looked like and our shared thoughts on being intentional, and a ton of real talk on how freaking hard life can be. I SO appreciated how real Shannon is and that she brings a refreshing truth, honesty and vulnerability to how she engages in the topics we touched on today. You guys are going to LOVE her.
Learn more about Shannon’s blog and her upcoming children’s book on her website, https://www.shannonbrink.org/.
You can also follow her on Instagram, here.
During this episode I mentioned the CBT for the Family: Tools for Life online course by my good friend and phenomenal colleague, Child and Family Therapist, Karen Peters. To learn more about the program and her other awesome parenting resources (including her podcast, Parenting in the Trenches), click here.
Episode Challenge:
What are some ways you have had to adapt? What are some areas where you may need to do some adapting now – and what would that look like? How can you build in space/time to semi-regularly inventory and re-inventory areas that need some tweaking so you don’t get lost in the shuffle and monotony?? – we would love to hear your thoughts and you can share on my social media.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
During this episode I mentioned the CBT for the Family: Tools for Life online course by my good friend and phenomenal colleague, Child and Family Therapist, Karen Peters. To learn more about the program and her other awesome parenting resources (including her podcast, Parenting in the Trenches), click here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
After reading about this Fire Chief’s story in a CTV News article, I am so grateful to be joined today by Steve Serbic. Steve is also an author, speaker and mental health advocate who also hosts his own podcast. You can check out all the info below to learn more about Steve’s work. Today we chat about his journey through a career in fire service, including his own challenges with mental health, leaning into vulnerability, battling shame and stigma, and seeking to help others do the same. He name drops some of my favourite thinkers including Gabor Maté and Brené Brown (LOVE!) and shares a wealth of wisdom that anyone could benefit from.
Learn more about Steve on his website, here.
Check out Steve’s book, “The Unbroken: A Firefighter’s Memoir” here.
Take a listen to Steve’s podcast, “Undercover Mental Health” here.
Episode Challenge:
What are some ways you can be leaning in and supporting your mental health needs more effectively?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
I can hardly wait to share this episode with you! Today I am joined by retired Corrections Officer, Mike, who shares about his long and successful career working in prisons both at a state and federal level in the united States. He shares about the importance of support, the need for coping, the tools for sustainability and so much more. No matter what kind of First Response or Front Line Work you do, there are some awesome takeaways from this one that are applicable across the board.
Mike is the host of the Prison Officer Podcast – check it out here. You can also find him writing for CorrectionsOne.com, here(search Mike Cantrell).
Episode Challenge:
Who are your support people who keep you grounded? Who are your mentors and allies within the work? What helps you sustain an identity outside of the job you do?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes
I am honoured to be joined by Law Enforcement Officer, Sachin, who is working to create systems-level change in his own unique way…by running. Hear Sachin’s story and our conversation about discovering our unique gifts, exploring ways to use our gifts to serve the collective, shifting mindsets to step out of the monotony, and all kinds of other great and inspiring bits and pieces.
Learn more about Sachin and support his efforts to raise money for organizations supporting First Responders and Veterans through intense runs. Also, follow his incredible journey toward running across Canada in 2025 in support of mental health resources for those serving our communities on the front lines.
Follow Sachin on Instagram here.
The latest on Sachin’s website: https://www.sachinmotion.com/
Episode Challenge:
What gifts are uniquely yours? What do you bring to the table and how do you contribute to serving “the collective”? How do you imagine this will shift and change over time? What do you hope it will look like in the future?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today I am joined by physicist turned social worker, Ash, and we are getting into it. Ash shares his journey into helping professions, his passion for the work, and we talk about the many stumbling blocks and our great ideas around how to fix it and save the world…some highlights we dig into:
- connecting on a human level
- the temptation to use the professional hat to distance from the hard work of being with people and doing helping professions
- The BIG question about WHO is pushing people into the river? And thinking more proactively to reduce the pressures on the system.
- Managing burnout on a systems-wide scale and being the change we wish to see (for a refresher of our Dare to Lead series, check out S1E19 -S1E27!)
- Being harmed by witnessing harm to others and managing the hard days
- Processing through the hard things rather than pushing past or ignoring them
- What it looks like to find meaningful connection in the midst of the work
- The value of THERAPY (are we seeing a theme??)
- Not being mad at the rose, changing the soil
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Today I am joined by Steven. Steven is currently a licensed paramedic with Harris County Emergency Corps, a 911 EMS agency in Houston, Texas, his native home. With 15 years in healthcare, he lives by his fraternity’s motto of providing service without expectation. After his time as a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy, Steven went on to obtain undergraduate degrees in EMS, his master’s degree in healthcare administration and is currently working towards completing his doctorate. With a goal of creating health policies that helps everyone, Steven hopes to one day work alongside congressional leaders where his talents and abilities can really be helpful to those in the EMS field. His hobbies include research, bowling, mentoring, and traveling. Along with being a lifelong learner, Steven has also been known to pass along his knowledge with his passion for teaching in the field of EMS.
Steven and I are diving in to the expectations and surprises of entering front line work. We also touch on working as a member of the BIPOC community (check out his awesome article about being a black paramedic below!), the highs and lows of the work, and investing in making a difference in the future of the profession. Check out some of the highlights:
- Navy Corpsman, Paramedic, PhD student looking to impact policy and change the world
- Changing the world by rising the ranks, and exerting influence from a position of authority for good rather than evil/neutral – yep, we talk about Brené Brown and “Dare to Lead” (go back and check out S1E19 -S1E27 to hear all about the series we covered on the topic of changing Front Line Work from the inside out!)
- The difference between expectations entering the work (TV made me think…) vs the reality (turns out it’s not all trauma!) and community care.
- Being from the BIPOC community - working to build diversity in the profession and facing challenges in being seen.
- The joy of teaching and growing the profession. Being a gatekeeper and supporting next generations in being a better version of the profession. The benefits to the teacher of teaching – being made better by the experience of teaching.
- The big wins and the regrets.
- The tools to stay sustainable – heads up, the answer is THERAPY! …And self-care (shocking, right!?!).
- Top advice: Take some time off. Think about yourself, allow yourself to matter, you are a limited resource, do things that keep you ok.
- Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide – click here to grab it! Use it over and over, try it monthly-quarterly to help assess risks for burnout and catch it before it gets too big.
- Yes, we talk more about Brené Brown, because she’s worth it and her work is GOLD.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Check out Steven’s article, “My Experience as a Black Paramedic” here.
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:I am thrilled to be joined today by Canadian Armed Forces veteran, artillery gunner, Kelsi Sheren who is now the founder and CEO of Brass & Unity, a jewelry company on a mission to support mental health and wellness for veterans and first responders. Kelsi, a survivor of PTSD as a result of her service, had to shift gears in a big way and has done some incredible things in launching a business in the fashion industry, pivoting to meet the changing demands through a pandemic, all the while donating a percentage of all profits to organizations that support veterans and first responders. I have been waiting to have Kelsi on for the perfect episode, and this is it!
Check out Kelsi and Brass & Unity:
https://www.instagram.com/kelsie_sheren/
https://www.instagram.com/brassandunity/
https://brassandunity.com/
Brass & Unity book
Fashion Magazine Article
Episode Challenge:
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers. This will be the last time we run the Dare as a live 5 day challenge, so jump in while you still can. You'll get 5 days of video lessons that are quick but intensive guides through 5 key domains of self-care. We peel off all the fluff about self-care and dig into the heart of what it really means to care for your self with intention and consistency. From there, you'll also get a ton of worksheets and brainstorm prompts to help you map out your own personalized self-care plan that you can take and adapt as your life continues to evolve and change. And finally, you get access to a private facebook group where we will connect through all 5 days to deepen the learning, personalize insights and ensure that you carry what you learn along with you for the long haul. Previous students of the Dare have reached out months and even years later to share about how what they learned continues to make a difference in their lives TODAY...and that includes our incredible guest last week, Mariah. The dare is only $10 to join, you get lifetime access to the videos and materials, and I hope you will join me! Click here to register now. Registration closes at 11:59pm PST on Monday July 4th and the Dare kicks off for those who take the leap, bright and early on Tuesday July 5th. Invest in you, register now.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Check out Kelsi and Brass & Unity:
https://www.instagram.com/kelsie_sheren/
https://www.instagram.com/brassandunity/
https://brassandunity.com/
Brass & Unity book
Fashion Magazine Article
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:Today I am joined by Maria Pelletier, former Ambulance Communications Officer now working in dispatch at a Fire Department in Southwestern Ontario and acting as an Account Coordinator and Social Media Manager for CRACKYL Magazine (Firefighter lifestyle and health magazine that focuses on the individual rather than the industry). PTSD survivor and single mom of 2 girls. Juggling all the bits with determination and grace. Listen in as we talk about her learning and experience in needing an escape hatch and the ways in which she discovered prioritizing her wellness without continuing to sacrifice her self. Info about Maria is below under Additional Resources!
Episode Challenge:
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers. This will be the last time we run the Dare as a live 5 day challenge, so jump in while you still can. You'll get 5 days of video lessons that are quick but intensive guides through 5 key domains of self-care. We peel off all the fluff about self-care and dig into the heart of what it really means to care for your self with intention and consistency. From there, you'll also get a ton of worksheets and brainstorm prompts to help you map out your own personalized self-care plan that you can take and adapt as your life continues to evolve and change. And finally, you get access to a private facebook group where we will connect through all 5 days to deepen the learning, personalize insights and ensure that you carry what you learn along with you for the long haul. Previous students of the Dare have reached out months and even years later to share about how what they learned continues to make a difference in their lives TODAY...and that includes our incredible guest today, Mariah. The dare is only $10 to join, you get lifetime access to the videos and materials, and I hope you will join me! Click here to register now. Registration closes at 11:59pm PST on Monday July 4th and the Dare kicks off for those who take the leap, bright and early on Tuesday July 5th. Invest in you, register now.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Check our Maria's work with Crakyl magazine:
https://crackylmag.com
https://www.instagram.com/crackylmag/
https://www..twitter.com/crackylm
https://www.facebook.com/crackylmag/
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:Today I am joined by Mike Pertz, an American Firefighter and entrepreneur. Mike is the owner of firefighternow.com as well as the face of firefighternow on YouTube. His work focuses on supporting preparedness for prospective and new fire service members in starting out their careers.
Mike and I talk today about the challenges associated with front line work, the need for an escape hatch, and ways in which he has developed an escape hatch in his life. We talk about the bait of the pension, the need for reclaiming control, and practical ways to build out a personalized escape hatch plan. Check out Mike's blog post about great escape hatch ideas for firefighters, here.
Episode Challenge:
During this episode we talk about the need for "pause points" - intentional times that we set aside on a semi-regular basis to do a self-check in and make efforts to adjust and adapt our approach in an effort to ensure we're moving in the direction we want to go. Take some time to sit with your calendar and plan in a time to do this quarterly for the coming year. PUT IT IN YOUR CALENDAR! And when it comes around, allocate and hour or so to review where you're at, consider where you hope to be and what needs to happen to get from where you are to where you're going. Use our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guideto help assess your mental health status and guide decisions to promote your wellness. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In your line of work, you are trained to be prepared for the worst. You train for the worst case scenarios, you anticipate and plan for these, so that anything short of this will be easy peasy. All I’m asking us to do is the same as it relates to your career plan. When people go into front line work with the conscious, or not-so-conscious expectation that they are going to stay in it until they retire, they tend to get caught in a stuck place when they discover that their mental health, their physical health, their relationships and their lives are increasingly suffering as a result. I’m not saying that everyone ends up here and that it’s impossible to make it to retirement age working in this field, but what I AM saying is that putting all your eggs into this one basket is treacherous when we know the stats.
During this series you will be hearing from some fantastic guests who are sharing their individual paths to creating their own escape hatches. Some of them have pulled the rip cord and exited the work, opting to shift gears into other passions; and others remain in the work and seek to balance out the weight of the work by having some side-hustles that give them an exit for if or when they might need it. For today, I want to open the topic and make the argument for why we need to be considering our own personal escape hatch. I also want to offer a few suggestions for what you can be thinking about to help apply this in your own world.
When I talk with First Responders and Front Line Workers in my daily life – whether it’s clients in my office, or friends in my personal life – I tend to hear about a few major stumbling blocks when it comes to the work. These are the things that suck us into the work and can keep us stuck, even when we’re noticing that it’s coming at a significant personal cost.
- The benefits tend to be pretty good. While never ideal or perfect, many front line professions benefit from pretty decent extended medical plans that feel hard to turn down or walk away from, especially if you have kids in braces!
- The vacation time. Most front line professions operate under a seniority system, so the more hours you’ve put in the more prioritized you are when selecting vacation days. It is hard to imagine giving this up to start back at 1 in a different career or with a different employer.
- The pension. The ever-present yet elusive carrot dangled to keep you in for as long as possible. I hear about this one a LOT. If I just put in 5 more, 7 more, 12 more years, then I’ll get that sweet, sweet pension and I will be able to live my dreams…travel, spend time with my kids and grandkids, do fun activities… Someday.
Now let me say that none of these are bad things to anchor to or bad reasons to stay in whatever kind of work you do. These are legitimate factors that absolutely need to play into your decision making. That said, so does your health and wellness. Because none of these things are going to matter much if you aren’t well enough to benefit from them.
This is the thing that really gets to me: how often I hear front line workers who were a couple of years away from retirement how have had to go off due to PTSD or related OSI’s, share that they realize now that while they will have the pension (or close to what they planned for), their ability to enjoy it will be compromised due to their symptoms and related limitations. Their plans to travel feel tripped up by their acquired panic related to being in enclosed spaces. Their interest in connecting more with family is compromised by their persistent triggering in social situations. Their desire to do more activities feels turned on its head thanks to chronic agitation, hypervigilance and tension that limits enjoyment of most pursuits. I also hear, all to often, about reflections of others in their professions – how so and so retired and then was almost immediately diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal illness; or how such and such co-worker retired and three months later died of a heart attack. The amount of time I spend in a week hearing stories of feeling baited by the dangled carrot of the pension will never cease to amaze me…because somehow it continues to lure and trick people into sacrificing so much of their lives in hopes that they will be the exception.
So, when we talk about considering what it looks like to craft your own personal escape hatch, we’re talking about finding ways to lean more intentionally and strategically into your values in an effort to reap the payoff that helps to balance out your life and energy more effectively and sustainably. I think there are three primary reasons to consider an escape hatch:
- Your mental and physical health. We have talked SO many times on this show about the impacts of persistent stress, both on your mental health as well as on your physical wellbeing. In addition to stress and high degrees of exposure risking things like PTSD, you are also in a line of work that is more exposed to actual physical threat and are more likely to suffer from work-related illnesses or pain concerns. Investing in an escape hatch, whether you ever pull the rip cord and really make the leap from your front line work all the way into something else, or not, allows you to consider what matters to you and to invest intentionally into aspects of you that can support more global health.
- Your financial health. I often see people off work and on reduced income due to being on WorkSafe or Long Term Disability. They never expected to be faced with this limit on their income earning ability. They are used to picking up overtime whenever something breaks down and needs fixing. And suddenly, they are in a big pickle. Now the pressure is even higher to get back to work and stay in the work at all cost, because the losses of a time off work have been so high. Having alternatives and investing in other areas of your life that have some kind of financial reward can be huge in supporting you through a time where your income is reduced. Not only that, having interests that aren’t necessarily paid (for example, coaching a sports team or volunteering with an organization) can again contribute as a buffer to the impact of the work you do, keeping you more balanced and less likely to need to go off work.
- To be a legitimate plan B. I hope you never need it. My wish for you is to have a long and rewarding, fulfilling career… But just in case you need it, it would be good to have an alternative you could jump to if you really needed to. And it would be great to have it there and ready to go instead of being in a desperate moment of realizing that you have put all your eggs in a basket that is tumbling down and crashing.
With all of that in mind, let’s talk about how you can start considering what an escape hatch might look like for you. There are 3 steps you can start taking right now that can help set you in the right direction.
- Talk with a financial advisor. Every person on earth, no matter how much or how little they make, should speak with a financial advisor. I don’t care if you invest or don’t, if you have a lot in your bank account or just a little – the reality is that financial advisors are able to help you anticipate and make reasonable guesstimates better than you are likely trained to do on your own. I have heard many stories of people believing they had to work another 10 years to be able to retire, only to speak with a qualified advisor and learn that all of their goals would be possible in 2-3 years if they made a couple strategic choices. Don’t get stuck in the pension carrot trap – talk with someone who can help you project and forecast your future, and support you in making some really strategic decisions to move you toward your long-term goals. You may find that they aren’t as far off as you believed.
- Spend some time inventorying your values and skill sets. What matters to you? What are you good at? What are you naturally inclined toward? What brings you joy? What makes you feel meaningful and productive? If you could spend a day anywhere doing anything, what would it be?
- Get curious about side-hustles or ways to pour into some of your interests, skill sets and values. Look for things that would feel life-giving or would bring out a side of you that is awesome and isn’t otherwise pulled out much in your day to day life. Do some research to see if there are ways to monetize this, even if it’s just a little, so that investing in it feels like it gives back to you in lots of ways.
Over the coming weeks we are going to spend time talking with some incredible guests talking about how they stepped out from behind the carrot and got creative in considering how to align their time and energy with the kind of life they wanted to choose for themselves. I am so excited to share their stories with you, and I hope that in them you might find some inspiration and the courage to consider investing in a plan B for you and your life.
Episode Challenge:
- If you don’t have a financial advisor, seek one out. Ask for recommendations from people in your life who you trust, and book an appointment!
- Start working on inventorying your values, skills and interests. What brings you joy? What feels life-giving? What could you do for hours without it feeling like “work”? Get curious and really let loose with this exercise. Don’t poo-poo any ideas, just free-flow brainstorm. Then take a look at what you’ve identified and get curious about next steps.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Signing up for this resource is also how you can jump on our email list where we’ll send you reminders up new podcast episodes and bonus resources.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show NotesOur brains are made up of 2 hemispheres - right and left - which operate relatively separately from one another. These two halves are connected by a bundle of nerves (the corpus collosum) which acts as a relay station, passing information back and forth and helping your brain to organize and be responsive to information. Like any relay station, your corpus collosum can get bombarded with too much data and this can cause it to slow down and overload. To help it we can do a couple of quick and easy exercises that can support it in getting information flowing more efficiently and effectively, meaning your brain can get back to giving you its best. Known as bi-lateral stimulation, these couple of skills are used commonly in trauma therapy and have been incorporated into protocols for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing), a well-known and highly effective therapeutic treatment intervention for trauma processing along with other mental health treatment and benefits. While it looks "stupidly simple", it can do a ton to help our brains give back to us -- try it!!
Episode Challenge:Try using these bi-lateral stimulation exercises whenever your stress, anxiety or reactive responses (ie. triggering, etc.) starts to ramp up. If you were to put your stress/anxiety/etc. on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is no stress and 10 is the worst most devastating degree of stress, these tools do best in the 4-7 range, although can also be useful at the higher end along with other grounding skills (refer to previous May Mini's episodes).
Struggling with emotions, mood and dysregulation? Feeling not yourself and having a hard time snapping out of it?? Use our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guideto self-assess your risks for burnout and to make some adjustments to support resilience, wellness and sustainability.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. This program was painstakingly developed to fill the gaps in your training and shows you how to invest strategically in YOU, so that you can continue to invest so much into others and your community. We make registering for this program as risk free as possible, and offer group pricing for 10+ participant staff training. Click the link above to learn more and register, or reach out to support@thrive-life.ca with any questions and for group rates.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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. Please share to those you know and help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
Show NotesOur brains and bodies operate on a feedback loop. When something stressful happens, our brain knows about it because our bodies give a cascade of responses that alert that something's up - and when our brain believes we're in stress, it tells our bodies to be on high alert. When we are in persistent stress, this feedback loop starts to have a hard time knowing what safety, calm and ok feel like. We can help teach our system to regulate and find a way back to ok, not in the BIG sweeping choices we make day to day, but in the little in-between moments. Today we're talking about ways to use our 5 senses to promote regulation for our bodies AND brains and use this feedback system to our advantage in giving ourselves an out from the stress cycle.
I mentioned "binaural beats" in this episode - check out your preferred app store and search binaural beats to try this out. Works best with headphones/earbuds!
Episode Challenge:Get curious about what senses your body values and start EXPERIMENTING with different tools to see what helps. Here are the ground rules: you have to try something more than once to find out if it helps or hinders! These are small adjustments so you need to try for a bit before you can tell if it's making a difference. Compare it to eating salad one time and hoping you drop 10 pounds...it's not going to happen, but if you make that adjustment every day for several days and weeks, it will add up to getting you to your goal. This is the same deal, use these skills throughout the day and you'll see the pay off.
Struggling with emotions, mood and dysregulation? Feeling not yourself and having a hard time snapping out of it?? Use our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guideto self-assess your risks for burnout and to make some adjustments to support resilience, wellness and sustainability.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. This program was painstakingly developed to fill the gaps in your training and shows you how to invest strategically in YOU, so that you can continue to invest so much into others and your community. We make registering for this program as risk free as possible, and offer group pricing for 10+ participant staff training. Click the link above to learn more and register, or reach out to support@thrive-life.ca with any questions and for group rates.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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. Please share to those you know and help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
Show NotesTwo more tools to add to your growing toolkit for stress management, emotion regulation and mental health support. Today we are covering 2 skills used for grounding and helping our brains to be more present. These are super useful when struggling with panic, anxiety, high stress or difficulty regulating emotions. These two exercises help turn your prefrontal cortex ON which helps to counter-balance your stress center. They are also AWESOME to try with kids when they are struggling to regulate - I swear by these at my house!
5-4-3-2-1Name 5 things you see, 5 things you hear, 5 things you feel (tactile touch, NOT emotional feelings)...
...then 4 of each ...then 3 of each ...then 2 of each ...then 1 of each.
Alphabet GameChoose a category (eg. fruits and vegetables; movie titles; actors/actresses; song titles; singers/bands; countries; etc.) and work through that category from A-Z trying to find one word within that category for each letter of the alphabet. If you get stuck, skip and move on -- no one is judging your ability to find a word for each and every letter, we're just trying to get your prefrontal cortex to activate, so if you are stuck on a letter and it's ADDING stress, skip it!
Episode Challenge:Try one or both of these exercises when you feel like your emotions or mood are getting the better of you. The more consistent you are in using them, the better they'll work, so try to notice when you tend to feel more dysregulated and work to bridge these activities into these times/spaces/situations. It might be helpful to write them down on some sticky notes and put them in key places where you would see them when feeling dysregulated - like on your dashboard if you get stressed while driving, or on your shopping list if you struggle in stores, etc. You can also tell a loved one about this so they can help prompt you to initiate the activity and you can turn it into a game together!
Struggling with emotions, mood and dysregulation? Use our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guideto self-assess your risks for burnout and to make some adjustments to support resilience, wellness and sustainability.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. This program was painstakingly developed to fill the gaps in your training and shows you how to invest strategically in YOU, so that you can continue to invest so much into others and your community. We make registering for this program as risk free as possible, and offer group pricing for 10+ participant staff training. Click the link above to learn more and register, or reach out to support@thrive-life.ca with any questions and for group rates.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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. Please share to those you know and help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
Show NotesCheck out this weeks mini episode - a quick coping tool you can use TODAY! Try this progressive muscle relaxation exercise and allow the tension to melt away. This episode is best enjoyed from the comfort of a cozy chair, or another quiet and comfy spot - probably not great while driving or operating other heavy machinery!!
Episode Challenge:Try this exercise 2-3 times this week and notice how you feel before, during, and after the exercise. Tweak and adapt any parts that you feel aren't working for you, but try to keep this up for at least 2 weeks and see how you feel. Try to be strategic about when you might put this activity into your day (great as part of a work wind-down routine before walking into your house, or as part of a bedtime routine!), and be considerate about where you set yourself up to ensure that you have the quiet and calm environment that will help this exercise give you the most bang for your buck.
Struggling with a LOT of tension? Use our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guideto self-assess your risks for burnout and to make some adjustments to support resilience, wellness and sustainability.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. This program was painstakingly developed to fill the gaps in your training and shows you how to invest strategically in YOU, so that you can continue to invest so much into others and your community. We make registering for this program as risk free as possible, and offer group pricing for 10+ participant staff training. Click the link above to learn more and register, or reach out to support@thrive-life.ca with any questions and for group rates.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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. Please share to those you know and help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.
Show Notes:Your turn! Watch the video, listen to the audio and then put it into practice. Choose 10-20 minutes ideally daily, but at least 2-3 times in a week, and try the worry jar activity described in today's episode. You can use scrap paper ripped into strips and a tupperware container, or fancy it up and make it special with some pretty or fun coloured paper and a nice mason jar or a cool box from the hobby store. Spend some time identifying the things you are worried about (externalize them outside of your head), and then spend some dedicated time worrying about them without other distractions. Give your brain the chance to get it's worries out, so it doesn't try to force your worries on you in the quiet hours of the evening as you try to get to sleep! Try this exercise consistently for at least 2 weeks and notice what benefits come from it - are you falling asleep a bit quicker? A little less easily agitated with people around you? A bit more calm? Does your fitbit show that your resting heart rate has gone down a bit? Less tension in your neck and shoulders or stomach? The more consistent you are, the more you'll stand to gain.
Episode Challenge:Do the damn thing!! See the show notes above and take the challenge!
Self-assess your risks for burnout and get some pointers to help prevent/reduce the impacts of burnout by clicking here to download our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a personalized plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. If you like Behind the Line, you are going to LOVE Beating the Breaking Point!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are finishing up our On Leave series – we are going to focus on managing guilt and other tough feelings that tend to come up when we’re away from the work we have loved and been committed to doing. Whether we’re off work due to injury, illness, mental health concern or some other reason, being off often comes with a host of emotions – big and small, obvious and more innocuous, that can disrupt our ability to focus on recovering and can force us to struggle more when we’re trying so hard to pick ourselves up.
When I first sat down to outline the On Leave series, I intended for this episode to be a conversation about self-care and how this needs to adapt when we’re off work. But as I started getting into the details of the series and this episode, I realized that while self-care is a piece, what we actually need to talk about is bigger – deeper. We need to talk about the yucky stuff that lives underneath that tends to make the time off really tricky, and can prevent us from being able to utilize self-care strategies and adapt them to our needs. What is the dark underbelly I’m referring to? Well… guilt, shame, neglect, abandonment, loneliness, identity… these are the heavy hitters on the list.
Let’s take these one at a time and talk about how they tend to show up most commonly in being off work, and then we’ll work at talking about how we try to move through them and make our way to something more recovery-oriented.
Guilt. Guilt is a feeling whose job it is to let us know that we have done something wrong. Appropriate guilt shows up when we have violated someone else’s boundary and behaved in a way that is contradictory to our own values. It’s the emotion that causes us sufficient discomfort to move us toward apologizing, making amends and being accountable. It is what helps us drive change within ourselves in order to live more in alignment with who we see ourselves as being and how we wish for others to experience us. Guilt, when appropriate, is actually a really helpful emotion that allows us to have morality and ethic – it guides us in engaging in ways that are principled and grants us the capacity to have a relatively functioning society.
Now, you may have noticed that I used the word “appropriate” a couple of times in there to describe guilt that is meaningful and helpful. The challenge with guilt is that we can have a tendency to inappropriately generalize it to situations where it doesn’t belong. We can “feel badly” for what we perceive to be a problem, even if it’s not – or if it’s not our problem to feel badly about. Here’s an example: I often hear people who are in First Response and Front Line Work roles share that they feel guilty for going off work when they are fully aware of the staffing crisis their specific workplace and profession are facing. The guilt weighs heavy on them and the wrestle to use the time off to focus on their own wellness and recovery because they are wracked with the emotional burden of guilt surrounding removing themselves from the staffing rotation. The problem with this is that going off work isn’t violating anyone’s boundary. Feeling guilt for going off work doesn’t serve anyone in terms of having accountability and amends and repair and moving forward with changed behaviours. The guilt for this is not yours – it belongs with the system that fails to staff appropriately, or under recruits; it belongs with the upper-level directors and managers who have failed to offer more support and manage staff retention; it belongs to the professions that have limited access to entering the field; it belongs to the government level funding limitations… guilt for the staffing shortages belongs in a lot of places, but it doesn’t belong with you.
Look, I get it. It’s hard to be off work and hear from co-workers about how they are drowning. It’s hard to not be emotionally connected to that. We’re empathic and we feel a sense of awareness of what it feels like to be in their shoes. Yet we, as one singular person, are not going to be the difference between drowning and thriving. And we can’t help others if we’re not ok.
The trickiest thing about guilt is that we have culturally tied it in many ways to another feeling: shame. If you haven’t read Brené Brown’s work yet, do it. This is her wheelhouse. She and others who research shame have identified over and over again that shame is the one feeling that offers nothing. Guilt communicates something to us, it says that that thing I said or did was hurtful and not ok, and I need to work to repair that. Shame says that because I said or did that thing that was hurtful, that there must be something wrong with me, that I am bad. Guilt gives us the discomfort to move us toward repair. Shame just undermines our sense of self, and it can rob us of feeling like we have worth. Guilt has the power to move us toward an outcome that is connective and healing. Shame serves zero positive function, it only erodes.
I often find myself drawing the difference between guilt and shame for clients, and it frequently feels revelatory to consider that guilt – an uncomfortable emotion – serves a meaningful function; and that shame – an all-too-familiar and even more uncomfortable emotion – only serves to harm us and others. When I allow shame to have a voice in my head, it not only undermines my internal sense of worth, value and meaning, but from that place it impacts how I am likely to show up in my world – which vicariously robs others of what I might otherwise bring to the table. Shame makes us play small and fearfully. It makes us worried about how others will see us and terrified that they might see what I fear is true of me. It makes us pull back and hide in the shadows for fear of being fully seen and exposed. This feels simultaneously protective of my shame and totally isolating and lonely.
When I talk with people who are off work, especially from helping professions, there is a lot of pride that comes with the work they do. It feels like it means something about them that they do the job they do. And that’s cool…mostly…but then it also feels like it means something about them when they CAN’T do what they did for a period of time, or perhaps ever again. This has a tendency to elicit self-judgements and a shit ton of shame. It means I can’ hack it, I’m not strong enough, I failed, and so on. When we think about sitting in these feelings and self-thoughts, it doesn’t seem like the greatest place from which to experience healing and recovery, does it?
On top of guilt and shame connected to being off work and how we make meaning of ourselves for being off work; we can also face another set of emotional challenges: neglect, abandonment and loneliness. All too often I hear people who are off work share about how they wrestle with the discrepancy between what their work team meant to them when they were working, versus how that same team ghosted once they went off. Unfortunately this is a really common experience. First response and front line workplaces tend to language concepts like “brotherhood” and “family” into their workplace identities. They focus heavily on “having each others backs”. They are often professions where we spend a disproportionate amount of time together compared to other kinds of job, and we spend it entrenched in stress where it is an “us against the world” approach to interacting with whatever comes our way today. While all of this can contribute to really bonded workplace teams, it can also feel really difficult for those who exit this dynamic to take a leave from work. We can feel out of the loop, not included and forgotten. Some workplaces are good at following up and checking in, but others allow their on leave staff to essentially fall off the face of the earth.
For those off work, it can feel like the family that they invested so heavily into for so long has neglected or abandoned them. This is more than just words, it is actually a deep felt sense of attachment loss. We get a sense of who we are and how we matter by receiving feedback from the world around us. When the people we trusted and relied on to give us feedback that we are good and meaningful and whatever else, stop connecting and reaching out, we have difficulty making sense of that in any way other than I must not be worth it or good enough and so on. That doesn’t make it the true or accurate answer, just the story we’re most likely to tell ourselves to make sense of how the family seems to have forgotten about me.
If we have failed to cultivate relationships outside of our work, this can be especially negatively impactful, because not only are we facing what is experienced as rejection or abandonment, but we’re also experiencing isolation and loneliness because without these relationships and the routine of being at work day to day, I lack access to other people who can be part of my community of support – which, heads up, is pretty invaluable while working at recovering. This is one of the reasons I harp on your guys so much about building a diverse community of support for yourselves, so that if one piece of your community is compromised or the dynamic changes significantly, as it can with work relationships when off work, you have other pieces to fall back on to support you.
The final heavy emotion-laden piece I want us to talk about today is around identity. Now, identity isn’t so much an emotion as it is a set of perceptions. But we have a lot of feelings about our identity and a lot of feelings that come up when it feels like my sense of identity is compromised. We’ve talked a number of times on the show in the past about how identity and First Response and Front Line work tends to get very tightly woven together. It’s in part a cultural feature that western culture tends to over-value profession as a signifier of who a person is; as well as the “family” or “brotherhood” pieces that invite us to feel tightly bound to the work we do; as well as finding a deep sense of personal meaning in the profession we find ourselves serving in. When we layer these pieces together we find that who we are as people, how we know ourselves, feels inextricably intertwined with the jobs we do. While facets of this can feel good at times, it can be extremely challenging when we find ourselves in a period of being off work – because I am not only faced with the difficulty of being away from something I like doing or feel good at, but I actually feel cut off from a sense of myself. I don’t know who I am or how to be me if I’m not at work doing the job I have done for so long. I don’t feel stable or can’t find my footing without this thing that defines me so heavily.
Again, this is why we have talked quite a bit about identity on the show before and I have really pushed that we need to challenge this approach to entering this kind of profession, because it makes it so much harder when we discover the truth that no one is built for this work. No one is wired to do it indefinitely. And no one comes out unscathed. If we don’t learn to detangle our sense of self from the work we do, we are going to be faced with more significant losses when we take time off work or eventually retire, because we will lose ourselves. We need to have a reference point for who we are and why we matter that has nothing to do with the job that pays my bills. Without that, facing a time of being off work will feel like an internal battle beyond recovery from injury, illness or mental health concern. It will up the ante a thousand-fold at a time where you already feel vulnerable and under resourced.
I recently was holding interviews for interns that our clinic is recruiting to work with us for the coming year. During one of the interviews the student said something profound and I want to share it with you. She said, you know how in other professions they have tools they use to do a job? Like a plumber has wrenches and a carpenter has hammers and saws, and a surgeon has scalpels… Each of these professionals are required to maintain their tools in order for them to function well, to be useful when they are needed. They have to invest time and energy and expense not just in using the tools but in keeping them tuned up, serviced and maintained. Then she said, what I am realizing as a therapist is that I am the tool. It’s me. I am the tool that does the work, and I need to invest time, energy and expense into regular tune ups and maintenance to ensure that I can use me to do the work when I need to. I loved this so much and it really does connect to all of you. As helping professionals, we are fundamentally the tool. It would be hard to replace you with a robot – you being a person, your personhood, it a significant part of what makes you an asset in the work you do.
Meanwhile, our personhood is also what makes us vulnerable in the work we do, and what makes us vulnerable to the various feelings we’ve mentioned here today. If we recognize that we are the tool and we account for maintaining this tool so it serves us well in the places it’s needed, then we find ourselves circling back once again to the inherent and inescapable value of self-care.
Engaging in self-care is one of the most significant ways we can buffer ourselves from the impacts of the work. It is also among the most significant interventions we can use when whatever buffer we may have had has dissolved and we feel completely depleted, burnout out and on the verge of collapse.
Now let me remind you that when I talk about self-care I am not talking about bubble baths and spa days. Nor am I talking about you sitting alone in a room doing something nice for yourself but still feeling lonely, isolated and detached from connection. Self-care has gotten a bit of a bad rap in our heavily commercialized world, and I’m going to ask you to suspend whatever notions you have about self-care for a moment to hear me out.
Self-care is the act of showing ourselves value in an effort to train our brains to experience valuing. We can do this by taking a bath if we love baths and find them to be very relaxing and refreshing, but it can also be things like choosing not to spend time with people who feel toxic or bring out the worst in me; or stepping into discomfort to cultivate new relationships that may or may not pan out to be great friendships someday. Self-care is not just tasks done from myself for myself, it is an invitation for me to think OF myself. To consider myself, my needs and value these. It’s a willingness to being open to considering my feelings, what they are saying about my needs and engaging in this.
An example of a self-caring action you may not traditionally consider self-caring is noticing guilt felt about something I said or did, and allowing myself to step into the discomfort of apologizing and making repair because it allows me to gift myself with being back in alignment with the person I want and choose to be. It also allows me to gift myself with relief from feeling a continued state of guilt while I ignore what it’s trying to tell me.
Another example of a self-caring action may be to reach out to personal connections I haven’t connected with in awhile. I might feel some guilt for not having better maintained these relationships, but the self-care is to know my need for connection and seek it out despite the discomfort of confronting that guilt and gifting myself with the opportunity to have my need for connection met if we can work to invest in rebuilding a closer relationship.
Self-care is a piece we’ve talked about on the show many times and I would encourage you to take a look back to some of those episodes if you want more about what this should, could, would look like. I will say that a common dynamic for those off work is an added sense of guilt that comes with focusing on themselves and engaging self-care. It can feel hard to adapt to a skill set when it’s unfamiliar. If I haven’t made the time and space to engage self-care much, or strategically, before, it will be uncomfortable to try it on and practice it. We can be especially critical of what we deserve while we’re off work, like not working somehow defines what we are entitled to enjoying or experiencing. We can place limits on caring for ourselves while off work, deciding that it’s too uncomfortable or feels incongruous with being hurt or sick. Meanwhile, if you think of caring for someone else while they are hurt or sick, would you tell them that they aren’t worth it? They don’t deserve it? My hunch is no. My guess is that you are probably the first person to set up a meal train for them or recruit friends to pitch in for a cleaning service or something like that. At the heart of it, self-care is about treating us with the same care that we would tend to extend to others and believing that our worth and deserving is fundamental and no different than anyone else. It’s about investing in us the way we do others, and building us up because when we are our most cared for selves, we tend to offer and extend the best to other people in our lives…which is what we all deserve.
If you want to dig in deeper around self-care, check out season one, episodes 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. You can also poke through our series on Back to Basics where we cover some fundamental aspects of self-care – look for season two, episodes 9 through 17.
Episode Challenge:
What are the big deep feelings that trip you up around being off work or considering the possibility of having to go off work? How can you work at being proactive to buffer the impact of these? What self-care strategies do you need to work at developing and refining to help care for these areas of need more effectively?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are talking about self-advocacy. We’re going to dig in to the difficulties people tend to have with self-advocating, the need for it in time off work, and how to go about refining these skills to implement them on behalf of ourselves well.
So let’s open with what it means to self-advocate. Self-advocacy means clearly identifying our needs and clearly expressing those needs to others in an effort to have them met.
Here are some of the major stumbling blocks to self-advocacy:
- We are bad at knowing our needs.
- We are bad at serving our needs.
- We aren’t great at communicating and expressing our needs effectively to others.
Ok, so when it comes to self-advocacy, step one is to know what you need. To be able to clearly identify your needs does not just magically happen. Despite the fact that we spend all day with ourselves, we are not great at taking the time and space to slow our rolls and get to know ourselves.
The thing about knowing needs is that it takes time and investment. Think about how you’ve learned what any person in your life has ever needed ever. Likely you have taken the time to notice or ask or walk alongside their journey to observe and recognize their needs. You recognize feedback from when you’ve stumbled into doing something that serves their needs well, and the feedback that comes from when we fudged it up. We take that and track it so that we can offer the best we can to the people we care about and reduce the things that really don’t work for them.
It is the same for us. We need to carve out time and space to explore and examine our own needs. We need to enter this time and space with curiosity and openness. This is not a one and done – needs change and evolve as we do – so we need to check in with ourselves on a semi-regular basis to see what new needs have developed, what old needs are no longer feeling necessary, and adjusting our meeting of needs to adapt to how they flex. When it comes to examining and identifying needs I have a few tips:
- Start with basics. If this process feels big and overwhelming, start with the most basic building blocks first and grow from there. Think about your basic needs like sleep, nutrition, movement, hydration, and connection.
- Notice others. We tend to be better at noticing the needs of others than our own, so take some time to observe others in your life. What needs to they indicate having? Ones that they serve for themselves or that they ask others to serve with them? What needs bring out a sense of “oh man that sounds SO good!” when you hear about them or cause a reflection of “goodness, I really should be doing that.”?
- Observe yourself. Notice where you feel disappointed by others for not mind-reading your needs. Observe when you feel let down by yourself or those around you. Take notice of times where your mood shifts and be curious about what need this might be indicating. A quick tip is that many emotions serve the function of highlighting unmet needs, so recognizing moments where emotions feel disproportionate to a situation or more intense than they would normally are some solid prompts to alert you to some needs that require more attention.
- Remain curious. Needing is a fact of living as a human in this world. Being needless isn’t a thing, it’s not possible. Allow yourself to enter this process with ongoing curiosity and try to manage any self-judgement that comes up along the way. I know that in my life I can get critical of the amount of down-time I need, and yet when I don’t meet this need it negatively impacts everyone in my life. I get curious about variations of down-time that work for me and I experiment with this as this evolves over time, but I know that I need it and try to find acceptance that this is my need given all that I am asking myself to do the rest of the time.
Once we identify our needs, the next step is to DO something with them. That’s right, it is not enough to name it, we have to serve it – otherwise it remains a need crying out for attention, which will tend to show up in less and less convenient ways in various parts of our lives. I mean, that’s the real thing about needs, they aren’t wants, they are NEEDS. Our bodies and minds are demanding them and will take action against us to emphasize their demands if we fail to pay attention or actively ignore for too long. This can look like increased irritability, volatile emotions and mood swings, extreme overwhelm or extreme numbing or disconnection, and a whole lot more.
When it comes to prioritizing and engaging with our needs, here are my suggestions:
- Brainstorm. Let’s say that I need to get more sleep, that’s the need I’ve identified. The reality is there are lots of ways to meet that need, and I may need to do one or some or all of them to satiate the need I have. I might need to go to bed earlier which might mean changing some of my evening routine to work toward settling down to bedtime at a different time. I may need to work on the quality of my sleep rather than the quantity and this might mean exploring melatonin or medical sleep aids. I may need to shift my morning routine to sleep a little longer if that’s when my best sleep happens is in the morning. I may need to track my sleep to get a better sense of where the struggle is. I may need to ask for help and seek out a sleep expert to get a handle on my sleep. I may need to do some trauma therapy work to reduce nightmares and panic waking… There are a ton of interventions to work at meeting the very general need of getting more sleep. Brainstorming these, actually writing them down and coming up with more than just one version of how it looks to meet a need can be really helpful in making our starting point feel more accessible. Once I have a solid list of ideas, I get to pick and choose one or a couple to start with, and like we’ve already discussed, I can check in and review and then add or make adjustments where needed.2. Start somewhere and build from there. Let’s use an example like recognizing that I need to drink more water in a day. How much water? How can I know where my sweet spot is? Well, let’s start by making some specific rituals like drinking a full glass of water when I wake up in the morning, taking a large water bottle with me and finishing it by the end of my work day, and drinking one full glass of water with each meal. This would be a pretty solid starting point and likely some of these are times I’m already having a glass of water. From here, I’m going to agree to doing this for a couple of weeks or a month and then checking in with myself to see how I’m feeling and if I need to adapt this further. This is really anchored to the idea that something is better than nothing and taking small steps in a direction matters as it accrues over time.
- Incremental steps. Research has shown repeatedly that incremental steps are more effective at sustaining behavioural change than big sweeping ones. Do NOT try to change your sleep, your diet, your exercise, your friendships, and a whole bunch of other things all at once. It’s tempting, I know, to feel overwhelmed by the degree to which your needs have gone unmet when you start really looking at them. Seeing how far we feel we have to go from where we are if we haven’t paid close attention to our needs can feel staggering and impossible. That said, I promise it’s not impossible, but there is a version of reality that is likely to be more possible and one that’s is likely to be less possible. Trying to make big sweeping changes to our lives feels important but it’s not sustainable. We have to choose actions that we can engage in consistently. Sometimes we need to advocate with ourselves to slow down the process and allow ourselves to catch up before moving the target further ahead.
- The hills to die on. Ok, dying on the hills might be a smidge dramatic, but follow me here. In a second we’re going to talk about bringing our needs to others and expressing them to the people in our life. Before we do this, we need to be able to know which needs require serving by others versus which ones belong with me to serve. We also need to know which needs have highest value or priority in our lives to be served by the people we’re going to take them to, and the specifics of what it would look like for these people to successfully meet the need. We need to know which needs we really need to push for and which ones we can settle for some compromise around. Again, these may change over time so don’t think this is a one-and-done kind of assessment process. You need to consistently be evaluating how you’re doing, what alerts you’re getting about the needs you have that are going unmet or are not being met in a way that feels sufficient, and then determine the next steps in how we escalate these to make them actionable for ourselves and others.
Ok, so we have some strategies to help identify our needs, and some tools to help us value and prioritize those needs…now how do we tell everyone else about them? How do we go about setting ourselves up for success when it comes to communicating with others about our needs. Well, first things first, we need to acknowledge one fundamental truth before we can say anything else, and it’s this: even if we do all the right things, we can’t expect that communicating will necessarily result in what we want or hope for. I know, it’s a bummer, and I wish I could tell you that if you walk through all of these steps you will absolutely get the outcome you’re hoping for…but that would be a lie…and honestly, it would be manipulative. If we could walk 10 easy steps to always get our way, that would likely get misused at some point along the way. The reality is that just like we are human, so too are the people in our lives, and how they receive what we share with them is as much up to them and how they hear us as it is up to us in how we shape what we’re sharing and how we go about sharing it. Now, with that truth in mind, I will say that walking these steps certainly sets interactions up for better chances of success and outcomes we can live with, but I can’t offer it as an absolute money-back guarantee. As we head into communicating about our needs and advocating for ourselves with others, here are some tips to keep in mind:
- Have a clear goal. Before the interaction, have clarity on your goal. What are you wanting this person to know? Why is it important that they know about it? How can you make it abundantly clear and remove friction for them to be able to be successful in meeting whatever need you are presenting? All too often we advocate for ourselves without clarity but rather a lot of unclear emotion. We get riled up and open something without a clear sense of where we hope to end up and that rarely goes well. We can also tend to bring things up with the wrong person, seeking needs to be met from someone who can’t or isn’t in a position to serve that need. Before advocating, slow your roll and make sure you feel really clear on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and that the person you are approaching is the right person for what you’re bringing.
- Think about what it’s like to receive. That whole idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is something to keep in mind. Before we bring something to someone else, it can be helpful to consider what we know about that person, as well as what we imagine it might be like to receive the kind of information you’re hoping to share. For example, if I need to contact my worker’s compensation case manager about a concern, it can be helpful to keep in mind that they are often overloaded and quite busy. Given that knowledge I might email first to set up a time rather than randomly calling and hoping I catch them between other calls and meetings. When I email to set up the call I might identify that I need 20 minutes of their time to be sure they have time set aside to really be dedicated to our conversation rather than itching to end the call to race off to something else. I might know that I need to share some fears and worries I have and that this might be something they have to listen to a lot of. Given that, I might open the conversation with something that recognizes this, “I imagine that you might frequently hear concerns like this given what you do, but for me this isn’t what I’m used to and is concerning to me, I hope you can take the time to hear me out.” Naming things like this on the front end helps the person receiving what you’re sharing to be more open and receptive.
- Focus. When we’re emotionally activated (which we usually are when we feel moved to self-advocacy), and in a more fragile space (which we also often are when off work for some kind of injury, illness or mental health concern), we can have difficulty remaining focused as we speak with others. We can get tangential, rambling, feel emotionally driven, and so on. This is why it’s important to have clear goals for the conversation, because we can bring our focus back to those goals whenever we or the person we’re speaking to starts to go astray. Orienting and re-orienting the conversation to keep it on the path you set and not getting distracted by other information or being re-directed by the other persons responses can help keep the advocating clear, which tends to result in better success getting needs heard and, as a result, met. I’ll also say that remaining focused is really important if you are participating in a claim where things have been more adversarial, as offering too much information can have negative consequences in these scenarios. Staying on task, keeping communication to the point and remaining focused on your goal is a really valuable skill set.
- Have an escape plan. Not every interaction goes to plan, and we should have an escape hatch if we need it. Being able to recognize when an interaction isn’t going well or isn’t staying on course allows us to intervene. We can be prepared with statements like, “I feel like this isn’t going in a direction either of us are going to be happy with, let’s pause here and come back to it tomorrow after we’ve both had some time to sit with it.” Or, in cases where we don’t feel able to name it so clearly, we can have some kind of out like, “I’m so sorry but I need to wrap this up, I have an important call coming in / kids walking in the door / an appointment I need to get to…” The idea is to plan to help things go well, but also anticipate how we protect ourselves and the relationship to whomever I’m speaking with by having the ability to strategically shift gears if need be.
- No matter what. Recognize that no matter how it goes when you engage in self-advocacy, you are WORTH advocating for. Your needs matter. You matter. Regardless of whether the person hearing you out really hears you or responds how you hope, your advocacy isn’t just about getting what you want, it’s also about caring enough about yourself to try. When you are engaging in self-advocacy, it can be helpful to have an after-care plan – whether the interaction goes well or not the way we hoped, we can plan to have some time following the call to do some things to value our effort and appreciate our willingness to go to bat for ourselves out there in the big wide world. It might mean trying to be strategic about planning a call or meeting at a time that gives me some down time following the interaction before I have to be on to the next must-do thing. I might plan for that down time to go for a walk and get some fresh air to clear my head, or to take myself for my favourite coffee and read a book or journal for a bit. It’s about holding grace and care for myself no matter what happened and how the interaction went.
We’ve covered a lot today, friends. Before we end, let me also say that these skills can take some practice, and it can be best to start in easier places with people we trust will respond well to us as we build our confidence. Let me also say that it’s ok if it feels hard when people don’t respond well. While we can work at preparing ourselves for this and valuing our worth, it’s still disappointing and sometimes hurtful when people fail to meet our needs or live up to our hopes. Give yourself permission to be human.
Episode Challenge:
What do you find to be the big stumbling blocks for you when it comes to advocating for your needs? Do you know what you need? Do you know how to serve those needs? Are you able to communicate about your needs effectively? Where are you strong and what areas need some work to help refine this for you?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. It even includes pieces about setting boundaries and advocating for our needs, all within the context of what life is like as a First Responder or Front Line Worker!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are continuing our series around being on leave and how we can support ourselves in recovering well while off work. Whether we’re off work for a physical injury or a work-related mental health concern, we discussed last week that the experience of being off work can be trying and difficult. Without a plan and intention to ensure the best outcomes possible, we can be left floundering and this can either create or exacerbate things like depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and/or uncertainty and can magnify things like sleep concerns, meeting basic needs like nutrition and movement, isolating from relationships, and feeling detached from interests, hobbies and activities. Total honesty, without a plan, going off work can be a recipe for disaster – not because it needs to be, but because no one guides us through it. No one lays out for us the challenges we’re likely to face and the tricks for circumnavigating these with the least amount of friction possible. That is, until now. I hope that this series gives you tools that allow you to feel like whether you are in a time off work or considering going off or concerned that someday you may have to go off, that you will have the ability to walk that journey with awareness, foresight and capacity. I hope you’ll feel prepared for the stumbling blocks to watch for and feel equipped with tools to side step them or reduce their degree of impact, allowing you to use a time off work to focus on your actual job, which is to recover, and that you would have what you need to do that WELL.
On last week’s episode I named the most common concerns I hear about from the many clients I have served over the past many years who have been off work due to various injuries and mental health concerns. The very first challenge I called out in the episode was the difficulty we as people face with self-motivation/self-directed decisions. And that’s what we’re diving deeper today.
I shared last week that most of us have been trained from very young to experience motivation from external sources. The amount of time we are left in a day to do self-directed things is pretty limited. We’ll be picking up some pieces from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. Find the link to the book and his Ted Talk in the “Additional Resources” section below.
· The Backward Myth of Motivation: Here’s the backward myth about motivation. We have been taught to believe that motivation is a magical unicorn that spontaneously shows up one day. We treat it the same as inspiration. It is this random thing that strikes and is awesome but then leaves and we sink. Here’s the backward part: motivation does not come before action. Motivation comes as the result of action. As we do a damn thing, we feel increasingly motivated to continue doing the damn thing. But it starts with the doing, not with the magical feeling of being motivated to do. And here’s the myth part: that we need motivation in order to take action. That we are somehow reliant on feeling this magical unicorn feeling as a prerequisite to taking an action.
· Benchmarks: You have likely always had some benchmarks that marked the course of your day. When you wake up, when you eat meals, when you do certain activities, when you go to sleep. Likely these have, to some extent, been dictated by outside factors. At one time in life your parents told you when to do these things, then an employer told you when you had to be at work and you made the other pieces fall around that. While off work, the benchmarks often quickly fall to the wayside. Sleeping in until random times, having nowhere to go and nothing specific to do any given day, not participating in regular routines like getting dressed, brushing teeth and hair and preparing for the day within certain time parameters all become tempting.
· Incentives: We are most likely to have successful outcomes when we experience small rewards that keep us in the game. Especially as we work to develop, implement and maintain new routines, it is important that we experience some incentives. Human brains are wired to engage with things that feel rewarding – which is part of why we tend to fall off of the bandwagon around routines and other kinds of personal growth changes pretty quickly – they feel hard and if they don’t come with some immediate and ongoing wins our brains struggle to stay in it. When off work and trying to develop an internal drive to do the things that are good for us, it takes effort and intention and just straight up work. It can be tiring and lack any sense of immediate reward or value. If we want to be able to do this well, we’re going to need to stack the deck in our own favor and this means coming up with ideas of what feel rewarding to you – big and small things – and finding ways to sprinkle these into your days and weeks.
· Make it easy: James talks about making new habits easy for ourselves. He gives an example of wanting to develop a habit of playing guitar. In this example he suggests that you leave your guitar in the middle of your living room, making it something you are more likely to stumble upon several times in a day. If we take this idea and extrapolate it, really he’s talking about removing friction. It’s about reducing the barriers to doing the damn thing, and elevating our chances of being successful
· Limit the numbing: Too often I hear things like video games and TV to be the answer to this question. I also hear about alcohol, smoking, and other substance dependence use as means to pass the time. While these things can have some value here and there, these are not activities that should be occupying the vast majority of our time when we’re off work. Now, let me say that I totally get why they are the go-to things. They are easy, they can feel rewarding, we tie them to our impressions of relaxation and that feels good for a bit. They are accessible, and given the kind of work you do they are also delightfully mind-numbing, which is often the thing we crave when our brains have felt overstimulated from the work and just want to disconnect from life. Again, in small doses a lot of this is fair and fine – but when we have a lot of time on our hands, these pieces do not tend to help us, they tend to sink us.
· Find Productive/Meaningful Interests: Productivity and a sense of being contributory and meaningfully engaged in our own lives and our family’s life is actually a significant human need. We crave feeling a sense of purpose, clarity of expectations, and a path from where we are to where we want to be. Work likely filled this for you and without that thing we go to every day, we can struggle to identify other areas that can bring this out in us. So, we get a bit lackadaisical and veer towards activities that ask little of us, but also give little back to us.
This is actually one of the reasons I so strongly encourage you guys to work at developing interests and activities that bring you a sense of meaning outside of your work even when you’re working – because these are the things that can float you if you are ever off work. It’s so much easier to just keep doing or do more of things you already have in place. It is so much harder to explore and consider what you might do when you are in the thick of it and needing access to something that brings a sense of purpose and meaning quickly. Having hobbies and interests can give us something to focus on that can be not only a great way to fill the time off work, but can actually be therapeutic for us in our healing and recovery. Rekindling our love for gardening, playing guitar, writing short stories, colouring, yoga, or whatever else you have enjoyed, or exploring and developing entirely new activities that bring something out in us, can be so valuable to our spirits. It can bring joy and calm and a sense of controlling something.
· Reframe the daily tasks: Mixed in to the basic benchmarks and the hobbies and interests will be a whole bunch of other stuff. This might include family responsibilities like chauffeuring kids around town, grocery shopping and doing laundry; it can also include the various appointments with doctors and counsellors and occupational therapists involved in your claim. These things can feel tiring and overwhelming depending on your injury, but are also hard to avoid. My suggestion around these pieces is two-fold:
o First, focus on what these things give you rather than just on what they take away.
o Second, plan them strategically.
To recap – we are working on growing our underdeveloped capacity for self-directed decisions. When off work, we need to focus on identifying and giving timelines to benchmark activities, and then implementing these activities. We need to identify some rewards and plan in how we will use these strategically to incentivize the sustainability of our benchmarks. We need to identify and implement activities that bring some enjoyment (ie. hobbies and interests) to help fill out the day so we’re not sitting on our butts watching TV all day. And we need to do the everyday life tasks but in ways that are strategic and set us up for success. At the heart of it, this all boils down to intention. We need to look at being off work as something that will require our intention to shape and direct. If we go into it kind of hanging on by the seat of our pants, we are highly likely to feel like victims of this time rather than the authors of it. While there will still be much that will feel not in your control in this kind of off work situation, you get to claim with intention the parts that you do have control over. And if you walk into the process with all of this in mind and a plan in place, I promise that puts you a thousand steps ahead.
Episode Challenge:
What hobbies, interests and activities are you investing in to be a backup if you were to ever go off work? Where could you/would you pour your time and energy if you went off work? How prepared would you be to activate a self-imposed daily routine without work to guide your time and direct your energy around?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Atomic Habits by James Clear, check it out on Indigo, here.
Atomic Habits Ted Talk by James Clear on YouTube, here.
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are kicking off a new month with a new series and we’re focusing on how to survive and support sanity while off work. This is a topic that I have become very familiar with thanks to my extensive work as part of the WorkSafeBC provider network for almost a decade, as well as my work with clients through ICBC and other long term disability groups. I have walked alongside so many clients who have struggled with the experience of being off work, and I know that some of you listening may have taken leaves from work in the past, are on a leave right now, or are considering taking a leave. I know that many are struggling to stay at work right now given the ongoing degree of pressure and demand along with short staffing and high exposure, so this topic feels particularly relevant right now. I’m going to try to make this series applicable to any off work experiences – whether that’s for a mental health concern, or a physical injury, or even a maternity leave. You know I love practical, so my goal is to make this as practical and useful as possible. We’re going to call out the stumbling blocks that commonly show up when people are off work, especially when it’s for an extended period of time, and we’re going to talk about what to focus on and prioritize in an effort to keep your sanity and use the time off to recover well.
Our focus for this episode is to call out the common challenges facing those who are off work. I have seen these be fairly consistent regardless of the type of injury or reason for being off work, although certainly exacerbated by mental health concerns or injuries that restrict motivation or limit access to supports.
· Self-motivation or internal-motivation. The truth is, our culture and society have been shaped to drive external motivation. We have been trained from really young to be up at a certain time to get to school, where an adult directs our time and attention, and tells us when we get to eat and play and even go to the bathroom. We come home to adults who tend to direct our steps – put your shoes away, do your homework, eat your dinner, get ready for bed… Our experience of self-directed time through a significant part of our lives is really contained to a handful of hours spread throughout the day where we get to make some autonomous choices based on our interests. Even as adults, our time is directed by when I need to be at work, the expectations of my workplace which are externally determined and directed, and the obligations of home and adult life impose some amount of demand on our “off time” which continues to restrict our self-determined time to a pretty limited span. So, to be off work tends to shine a light on how we have failed to train ourselves to choose, direct and motivate our own time. Without an imposed routine carved out FOR us by work schedules and adult life demands, we can be left feeling like we’re floundering.
· Everything takes longer than expected. The reality is that the process of working with insurance providers is SLOW. Sometimes painfully slow. The layers of bureaucracy are heavily present and people are often surprised by the delays and the complexities in decision making and access to needed assessments, services and supports. Many people find that the pace further degrades their symptoms, leaving them suffering and lacking the support they need when they need it most. The truth is this is the nature of the beast, and only so much can be done about it. There are shortages in health and limited specialists and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The key here is knowing that the pace is slow. If you can walk in knowing that this is likely to be the case, it will hopefully shape more reasonable expectations. Talking with others you know about their experiences can help shape your expectations and help you get a sense of what “normal” looks like where you live. I will also say that this is a really good reason to be somewhat pro-active about the decision to go off work if it is for mental health related concerns. Often those struggling with depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and so on, wait and waffle in the uncertainty of whether they really NEED to go off for some time before making the decision when things feel REALLY bad. Believe me, I get that it’s not an easy decision to make, but if we leave it until we are at our very lowest low and then the process takes time and ADDS stress, it is going to feel further harmful rather than helpful. If we can give ourselves permission to put the process in motion a little sooner, we may not be in such dire straights and desperation for support from a system that has difficulty meeting that degree of need quickly enough. Many of those I work with reflect this and share that they wish they had gone off sooner – both in terms of having a bit more left in the tank to face the challenges of the system when going off, as well as having a little less cumulative impact to work through to come out the other side.
· Confusion, uncertainty and fear of the big bad insurance company. The reality is that entering this kind of system puts a lot of power into the hands of people who don’t know you – and that can be terrifying. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this is absolutely a legitimate feeling and concern. Decisions around diagnoses, approved limitations and restrictions and determinations around return to work can be huge, life-altering decisions – and in this process many of these are out of your hands. The system is broken in a lot of different places, and so there are often challenges with clear communication, clarity of expectations, and a sense of next steps. This would be hard for anyone, regardless of the type of injury, but for those off for mental health related concerns or injuries impacting cognitive function such as head injuries, this can feel completely overwhelming. I see this a lot in my work – a client who is wrestling with severe anxiety or posttraumatic stress being left waiting with little information or communication is a situation that is going to obviously lead to worsened symptoms. The nature of the process can, in its own right, undermine the wellness of the person who is supposed to be focused on recovery.
I wish I had some quick-fix tips to make this particular piece easier. I don’t, unfortunately, but I can offer a couple of reflections. My experience working in insurance-affiliated care for a little over a decade is that I have seen more humanity in decisions than I expected to. I have connected with many claim managers who have shown tremendous empathy, who have worked diligently to advocate for workers, and I have even seen some bend the rules to benefit workers who really need that bit of extra support. I wish I could say this is a universal expectation you can have, but while it may not be universal I have seen it be far more common than I think most people expect when they are dealing with an insurance company. I have also seen a lot of growth in understanding within these companies. More and more of them are implementing mental health departments with staff getting specialized training in understanding and working to support people through mental health work-related concerns. As this has expanded I have seen the result of this being better care for those experiencing mental health related injuries. I have also seen greater understanding of what healing and recovery look like. For example, back in the day, it was somewhat frowned on for workers who were off work to participate in hobbies and activities – because if you can do that, why can’t you go to work?! But over the last several years, and I think through education and advocacy that clinicians including myself have engaged in over the years, I’ve seen the system recognize that being off work shouldn’t mean shutting down life. There is research that demonstrates and supports that recovery needs to happen in a context that requires people to participate in things that feel fun and connective and so on. While the big bad insurance company has a pretty solid reputation for being adversarial and sometimes actively aggressive – and I won’t deny that it can be – I have also seen moves toward growth and change that bring me hope and I recognize that these systems are improving in a lot of really meaningful ways that stand to benefit workers a lot of the time.
· Severe lack of communication between parties and stakeholders. To some extent this is not the workers compensation or insurance providers explicit fault – it’s the result of a higher level broken system. Each care provider has their own records, their own process and their specific role. They are each responsible to their own professional regulations and ethical expectations. They are independent and isolated from one another. Meanwhile the person, the worker, is one person. One WHOLE person. Not sub-dividable into itty bitty convenient parts suitable to each specific care provider offering service. The concept of collaborative care is a fun idea – I don’t mean that to sound flippant, collaborative care is a really valuable and meaningful term that is really difficult to play out in real life. In an ideal world, practitioners and insurance representatives and whatever other stakeholders involved in a claim to be off work would have time and space to connect, share resources, and offer wraparound care that prioritizes the success of the person we’re tasked with serving. We would identify problems early, anticipate potential problems before they even show up, and work collaboratively to solve the problems or reduce the risks quickly. We would support one another’s work and build it up for the benefit of the person we’re working with. We would facilitate clarity and communication to reduce demands on the worker to act as a middle-man cross-communicating between 7 different providers and professionals. Unfortunately this ideal is extraordinarily challenging to achieve in a managed care system where time is really limited and resources are stretched thin. That said, when asked to communicate I think professionals will often agree to reach out and connect. When my client tells me that they would find it really helpful for me to talk with their case manager or to share some pieces with their OT, I will make the time to fit that in. I know it’s not ideal, and I hate that it leaves people who are already doing the hard work of recovering from an injury in the position of having to do more, but it is a piece we can try to promote by asking and…this bring me to my next challenge: The need to self-advocate.
· Self-Advocacy. Advocating for our needs tends to be difficult for lots of people, but especially for those in helping professions. We tend to be wired to do for everyone else and not particularly for ourselves. …To some extent this tendency may be a factor in what lands us off work to begin with. It may be that we have difficulty knowing and naming our needs, having disconnected from them for a long time; we may have difficulty feeling worthy of support; we may struggle to justify our needs to others or communicate about our needs clearly; perhaps we’ve lacked clear modelling for setting boundaries and enforcing them which is a part of advocacy; maybe we’re shy or introverted or struggle to ask of others fearing that we might be “burdening” them. There are a ton of reasons why self-advocacy can be really hard. Meanwhile, entering into being off work, particularly when it involves insurance companies and decisions being made that will effect your life on an ongoing, this skill set is going to be a need. What is really challenging is that if this skill set is already hard, it doesn’t get any easier when we feel like our internal resources and reserves are depleted as a result of the injury we’re recovering from. When we’re hurt, exhausted, possibly highly medicated, struggling to do day to day life activities due to the impact of an injury or mental health concern, the last thing we want to have to do is fight. We may not feel like there’s any fight left in us. And yet, as we face decisions that can change the course of the life I’ve worked so hard to build, the fight might be really important to the trajectory of where my life goes from here. Again, I can’t say there’s an easy fix to this one, but we will spend some time tackling some tools to develop capacity for self-advocacy later in this series.
· Money. Facing a reduced income while being asked to recover is not easy. For many, pay from insurance providers can be variable and inconsistent, causing confusion and difficulty budgeting for the reduced income. We know that money is one of the most significant stressors in peoples lives, so when we’re working to reduce stress and recover, it’s so unfair that we add financial stress to the mix. It’s a bit like asking you to feel better while slapping you across the face. The financial limitations can reduce our access to things that might benefit our recovery, like activities, interests and hobbies. It can also, unfortunately, act as a bit of a lure to rushing the return to work before we’re really ready. This is an important piece to be aware of. If I had the ability to front load this for newbies in first response and front line work, I would say that you need to know that this is an occupational hazard and prepare for it. It’s kind of like a race car driver taking out a solid life insurance policy – the risks of the job are real, the consequences are real, and there’s value in being pro-active in taking action to protect financially from the possible consequences. In front line work life, while I recognize this can be difficult, it may mean pro-actively buffering savings early in your career that is earmarked for supporting you or being a financial buffer in the possible case where you face an extended period of time off work with reduced income. As someone who is self-employed and the sole income earner for my family, I have had to do this in my own life to be able to take each of my maternity leaves. It’s not easy and involves sacrifice in the short term to set aside a little bit each month but to have it there when you need it can be a significant relief and offer different room – emotionally and mentally – for recovery to happen.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:Today I am delighted to be joined once again by TC Randall. He brings his wealth of wisdom as an emergency room nurse of 14 years, as well as his experiences of having gone off work with PTSD, all of which he details in his fantastic book, The View From The Wrong Side of The Day that you can check out here. Today we are talking about the impact of first response and front line work on our daily living activities. Hear us chat about... - The impact of the adrenaline highs and lows on our capacity to engage in life outside of work
- Developing awareness, recognizing our own limits and keeping boundaries to protect ourselves
- Finding outlets and thinking back to what we used to connect with. Using close approximations to develop interests and outlets.
- How we tell stories shapes our reality; using empathy to contextualize people and balance the negative skew
- Acknowledging the systemic limitations that keep us stuck and the need to be rebels on the inside
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Check out TC's book here.
Check out the book recommendation TC offered during this episode (We're All Perfectly Fine, by Jillian Horton), here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
I am joined again today by an amazing guest who I am thrilled to get to explore the topic of "being normal" with our kiddos alongside. Child and Family Therapist, Registered Clinical Counsellor, Heather Toews is with me today. Heather has worked as a social worker doing child protection work, experienced her own burnout, transitioned to supporting adoptive families, and then transitioned to counselling with Child & Youth Mental Health as well as in private practice. Heather works from an attachment focus and has bravely ventured into creating a course to support parents who are striving to care for a child who has experienced trauma. I would invite you to check out the Trauma Attuned Parent Program if you, someone you know, or populations you work with, are caring for a child impacted by traumatic lived experiences. Her course is phenomenal and has been used by group homes for staff training as well as many families working to develop the skills to be therapeutic intervenors in the lives of their children. She has created two versions of this program, a standard version as well as a specialized version tailored to the unique needs of Foster & Adoptive families. Her work is beautiful and passion-filled and I am so grateful to know her.
Today Heath and I are talking about the challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers in "being normal" in their relationships with their kiddos. We highlight the challenges in coming down of the day, the tendencies to be revved up or numbed out, the impacts to our kids and our relationships with our kids over time, and tools to try to get this in check so we can develop healthful, attached and attuned relationships with our mini-me's.
In this episode we talk about:
- Common challenges faced by front line parents
- What happens when hyper-vigilance leads our parenting choices
- The tendency to numb and the complications to "present parenting"
- Finding value in the mundane (this is where the magic is - we promise!!)
- The good, bad and ugly of how our work impacts our families
- The need to focus on small windows of connection
- Considerations around child-led and parent-led play
Check out Heather's Trauma Attuned Parent Program here. I honestly can't say enough about this program. I find myself recommending it as a fantastic adjunct to therapy to support parents in being able to be real change-makers and meaningful support providers to their kids while working through the process and healing alongside their child. Every play therapist who knows me has heard me preach about this program, because it equips parents to not just "try" or "do the best they can" to help their kids, but to actually show up in evidence-based therapeutic ways to intervene meaningfully, and I hope you will go check it out!
Check out my previous episode with Heather (S1E29 - "Front Line Families & Parenting") here, where we talk about creating rituals of disconnection and some other really practical tools to work at being more present at home and with our kids.
Episode Challenge:
What are some parent-led play ideas that would fit for you with your kiddo(s)? If you're kids are older, what are conversation topics or activities you can engage in together? Can you commit to working at being present for 10-30 minutes alongside them doing this activity a couple of times each week?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Check out Heather's Trauma Attuned Parent Program here. If you are a parent of a child who has been impacted by trauma, I would highly recommend this. Also, if you work with populations where this resource might be of value, I would invite you to research it (feel free to follow up and ask questions) and recommend it to those you serve. Touch base with me at support@thrive-life.ca and I can put you in touch with Heather.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
I am honoured to be joined by my friend and colleague, Chelsea Beyer. Chelsea is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, PhD Candidate, and university instructor in the Department of Psychology. She is trained as a sex therapist, and works with people who are struggling with a range of mental health and relational challenges, and has been practicing in the Lower Mainland for five years. Her Doctoral research focuses on the intersection of women’s embodiment and sexual satisfaction. The heart of her clinical work and research is the desire to help people feel more at home in their own bodies.
Today Chelsea is joining me in a conversation working to highlight the challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers in "being normal" in their intimate partner relationships. We are diving into everything from the daily monotony of life together over time, to arguing over what matters to us, to talking about our needs and values, to finding what we need for spicy sex. We would highly encourage couples to listen to this one together.
In this episode we talk about:
- The physiology of stress and trauma and the ways this impacts our ability to do relationship (hyper-arousal and hypo-arousal)
- The difficulty of finding empathy for the silly monotonous things in life when what I've done today is SO big
- The need to acknowledge what we're bringing to the table
- Identifying our internal and external context and using this language to facilitate connection
- Recognizing needs to facilitate moving toward closeness and intimacy, including sex
Chelsea also shares about a great research and author, Emily Nagoski. Check out the books we talk about in this episode:
Come As You Are (book) here on Indigo.
The Come As You Are Workbook (companion workbook) here on Indigo.
Burnout (book) here on Indigo.
Episode Challenge:
Listen to this episode alongside your partner. Be open to hearing their thoughts on how your work shapes your relationship, and talk about ways to apply some of the pieces raised in this episode that seem most pertinent to YOUR relationship.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Check out the books we talk about in this episode:
Come As You Are (book) here on Indigo.
The Come As You Are Workbook (companion workbook) here on Indigo.
Burnout (book) here on Indigo.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
It is always one of the fun joys of this podcasting thing that I get to invite on some of the people I love most in the world to talk with all of you. Meredith Luipasco is a pediatric nurse working in southern Alberta. She is also married to a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, and is the daughter of a paramedic and a nurse. She GETS the first responder thing. She has also been one of my best friends since the first grade. As we walk this Being Normal series, we wanted to dive into the ways in which front line work changes our ability to be "normal" in friendships and some of the ways both Meredith and I have learned to cultivate some normal within the not-normal of the work. Through this conversation there are some really valuable pieces that emerged, including things like:
- Valuing how our experiences shape us, and that we're coming from different places that inform us differently
- Managing our own self-importance and being careful about comparative suffering
- Protecting our own energy
- Naming our needs & "taking the cake" as Meredith so eloquently puts it
- Honouring that our needs change over time
- Identifying needs and looking for "close approximations" to find some fulfillment even if it's not the most ideal version all the time
- Communicating clearly, honestly and vulnerably with people in our lives
- Being flexible and adaptable to evolving life circumstances, needs and abilities
Episode Challenge:
Invest in your wellness and sustainability – for you and for those who care about you. Use coupon code BTBP100Off to get access to my Beating the Breaking Pointresilience training program. This reduced rate is available until 11:59pm on Thursday March 10th. Click here to jump right to the registration page.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point resilience program, including our no-risk money-back guarantee. If you are ready to take your resilience to the next level, register now using code BTBP100OFF now.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
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…
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”:
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 is 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.
Episode Challenge:
Invest in your wellness and sustainability – for you and for those who care about you. Use coupon code BTBP100Off to get access to my Beating the Breaking Pointresilience training program. This reduced rate is available until 11:59pm on Thursday March 10th. Click here to jump right to the registration page.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point resilience program, including our no-risk money-back guarantee. If you are ready to take your resilience to the next level, register now using code BTBP100OFF now.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
On today’s episode we are wrapping up our Trigger Happy series by talking about trigger prevention. Let me be really clear that when I say trigger prevention, I do NOT mean AVOIDANCE. Preventing triggers is an active state, it means being engaged and working to reduce the likelihood that something potentially or actually triggering will yield a strong stress reaction. It is a pre-emptive effort at unpairing or limiting the extent to which a stress or trauma-related pairing produces all of the survival responses we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Avoidance on the other hand, is about just not coming into contact with triggers at all. Avoidance is a passive state…although it doesn’t always feel passive when you’re driving way out of your way to avoid driving by that one intersection or have to find an entirely new place to shop to avoid that one grocery store, or whatever the case may be. Avoidance is trying to let your brain off the hook to not have to do the big reaction, but as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, it actually creates a whole new set of problems. You see, as we avoid something our brain thinks, yep, this is a great idea, and it will work harder and harder to continue avoiding that trigger…and it will start to generalize that trigger to other pieces kind of like it…and as we avoid more we actually create increased anxiety and reaction to the trigger. Not so off the hook then, are we?
For our purposes, I am going to break trigger prevention down into two major categories that I’m going to call Personal Resilience Strategies, and Event-Related Resilience Strategies.
Let’s start with personal resilience strategies. Have you ever noticed the difference between doing something challenging on a day when you have had lots of rest, feel calm, feel meaningfully connected to others, and so on; versus on a day when you’ve barely slept, feel frazzled and find yourself feeling lonely and adrift?
When we face triggers, it is energy depleting and a resource suck. If we enter those moments already depleted, there is only so much we can draw from, and once that is tapped out it becomes a LOT harder to cope with the trigger and manage it. This opens up a window for the trigger to feel so much more intense and to hijack you so much further into your stress reactions, further entrenching the trigger as an association with negative and stress-related experiences. So, when we talk about personal resilience strategies, we’re talking about the pieces that help us build a buffer so that when we interact with triggering we are entering the moment with the fullness of our energy and resources in place. If we can focus on building our personal resilience by investing in intentionally attending to and growing our buffer, we are more likely to prevent, or at least, reduce the intensity of impact from a triggering experience.
Like I said before, this isn’t an avoidance strategy – it’s an active strategy that requires that you invest in your buffer continuously and consistently. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but if I could promise you that investing here was guaranteed to yield less frequent or intense triggering, wouldn’t it feel worth it?
When we talk about personal resilience strategies, the focus is on strengthening the parts of our brain that help us feel calm, collected, and anchored – buffered from or quickly responsive to the random things that come up and try to knock us over. Working to enhance things like sleep, fitness, nutrition, hydration, being grounded and mindful, feeling nurtured, connected and cared for by self and others, and limiting exposure to counter-productive pieces like screens, substances, and other mindless numbing or counter-productive distraction. These are the focal points of personal resilience.
Now, I know that covers a lot of ground and might feel a bit overwhelming to tackle. Don’t get stressed out, the goal is not to go from depleted and struggling to do any of these pieces to jumping all in to all of them. That won’t be sustainable and sets us up to fail. For now, focus on just a couple of tweaks and then build off of it.
Need some ideas? Choose two of these suggestions and work on them for a week or two, and then try adding in one or two more. Slowly but surely, you will grow your personal resilience and it will invariably have an effect in supporting your capacity to navigate triggering. And side-benefit, they have a bunch of other advantages too! Try going to bed 10-20 minutes earlier than you might normally. Drink one full glass of water first thing after you get out of bed in the morning. Take a quality B complex supplement daily. Turn off screens 30 minutes before going to bed. Stretch for 5 minutes before going to sleep or stretch for 5 minutes on your lunch break. Delay alcohol or substance consumption by drinking one full glass of water first. Talk or text with a friend or loved one. Connect with someone who makes you laugh. Spend 5-10 minutes outside in the fresh air at some point during your day.
If you’ll notice, none of these things are big things. They are all small and do-able. If you incrementally work to bridge some of these pieces into your daily routine, the additive effect will be consequential in helping to grow your buffer and support your personal resilience as you face challenging days and triggering moments.
If you want to level-up your personal resilience beyond the starter suggestions I’ve listed here today – I’m going to suggest two things. First off, go to episodes 9-14 of season 2 where we did our Back to Basics Brain Health series and covered topics like sleep, fitness, nutrition, screens, mindfulness and so on, in detail with experts within each field. You’ll get additional suggestions to grow your personal resilience repertoire from those episodes. The other suggestion I would make is to check out my Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers. 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 everything that is most important for you to know, along with tons of tools to develop a personalized resilience action plan, into the program. 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. You can learn more by clicking the link in the show notes. Just as a quick heads up, we will be running a promotional reduced rate coupon code for this program starting next week if you want to snag the course for $100 off. Listen in next week for details or keep your eyes peeled for those of you who are on our email list or follow me on social media, we’ll post about it there as well.
Ok, let’s move on to Event-Related Resilience Strategies. There are two parts to this category – the first is about risk reduction, and the second is about harm reduction. Risk reduction is a front-end prevention strategy. It’s about trying to minimize or reduce the risk that stressful or traumatic things will happen in the first place. Let me clarify again that this is NOT the same as avoidance. An example of avoidance might be avoiding an intersection because I was in an accident there and I find it triggering. An example of risk reduction is to be strategic about when I go to this intersection; practicing safe and defensive driving practices while I drive, particularly in this intersection; reducing distractions like the radio or other ambient noise while I go through this intersection, and so on. In terms of work-related stress or trauma, risk reduction might look like capping the number of shifts I put in for or limiting how much overtime I choose to take. It might look like being picky about which shifts I work or who I work alongside in an effort to promote my wellness and reduce the risk that I’m left as the only experienced worker with a crew of rookies, for example. It might look like setting really firm boundaries around taking my breaks to step away from the intensity; or being firm with protocols to prevent demands from coming in through backchannels and overwhelming my workload. The goal with risk reduction when it comes to event-related resilience is to reduce the chances of being thrown into high stress quite so frequently. It gives our brain the sense that we are actively working to protect it and safeguard it from an excess of damage. And when we do this in coordination with personal resilience strategies, we give our brains their best chance of being able to manage through stressful or triggering experiences when they have to with the greatest capacity possible – which means that our brains are then more likely to be able to utilize our trigger management tools to help us navigate through triggers rather than getting sunk by them.
On the flip side of risk reduction, which is a front-end effort at preventing exposure to bad things; harm reduction is a back-end effort to reduce the degree of impact that an event has when something bad has happened. When an event happens, we have some choices about how we choose to hold it. How we tell the story, even just in our own heads, matters in terms of how our brains will connect meaning and significance to the event. If you have a call that is just catastrophic in terms of facing human suffering, the story you tell is likely to focus on the overwhelming intensity of what took place. And that’s ok – it’s honest and accurate…but it may not be complete. Our tendency is to really focus in on HOW awful that thing was that happened, and how we feel like that’s a representation of the world around us on a larger scale. But we can lose track of recognizing or giving any air time to who we were within the situation. How we did the best we could. How we followed the training to the letter. How we could only take actions with the information we had at the time. How we survived a hard thing rather than telling the story from a position of victimhood. Seeing the others who helped and knowing there is good in the world in the form of the helpers. Recognizing that while we didn’t shape the event that happened, we stepped in to shape the outcome it would have for those involved, and that that matters.
When we tell a story of the value we brought, the effort we brought and the meaning that has to the story, we hold the story differently. Now let me again be careful in clarifying that I don’t mean “spin” the story to be all positive and sunshine and roses – I mean offer yourself a more complete and accurate narrative of the events that unfolded that include the good along with the hard. Because neither exists in isolation. I am asking you to put intention into holding the tension.
Interestingly, what we know about trauma is that how we tell the story of a traumatic event, dictates in significant ways the likelihood that we will experience longer-term consequences of that experience including PTSD. If we want to reduce the harm that an event might have on our lives, we need to be conscientious about how we are telling ourselves the story of what took place, and we need to get intentional at shaping that story, not to lie to ourselves, but to hold a more accurate and full portrayal of what took place that balances what was terrible with what we can be proud of or know we tried, and so on.
When it comes to triggering, harm reduction event-related resilience looks like how I tell the story of my interaction with a trigger. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. But I also stayed in my body while I was triggered, and that felt different than kind of numbing out or reacting without conscious awareness. I also used my trigger management tools and was able to regulate my reaction quicker than I have been able to in the past, that’s cool. I know that it sucks to be triggered, but I also know that I did things differently this time and that if I keep it up, the trigger won’t stay so strong. I can be proud of me to trying and facing something uncomfortable, that says something cool about me that I’m the kind of person who can face hard things. And from there, I am going to further invest in my personal resilience strategies to continue to refine and grow my buffer to give me what I need when inevitably I face additional triggering. I might brainstorm additional ways to engage in risk-reduction event-related resilience strategies around this trigger to be proactive for the next time, and I’m going to trust the science that tells me that if I keep this up consistently my brain will gradually unpair this connection and I won’t have to work so hard to mitigate my reactions to this random trigger forever.
Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers is OPEN for registration until 11:59pm on Monday February 28th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, here’s the quick run down: It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. If you are ready to be a dare devil, jump here to register, and make sure to register early as we are capping registrations.
Episode Challenge:
What two Personal Resilience Strategies will you be trying out over the coming week?? – Willing to share?? I would LOVE to hear from you, give a shout out on social media or shoot me an email and tell me what you’re working on!
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers WorkbookSelf-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– Registration is open! We are capping registration, so register early, it’s only $10! Sign up here.
Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point resilience program, including our no-risk money-back guarantee. If you are ready to take your resilience to the next level, get ready to register – we’ll be sending out a reduced rate coupon code next week so you can score this program for $100 off!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are getting really practical as we get further into our Trigger Happy series and talk about tools and strategies for trigger management. If you’ve missed the last two episodes, make sure you go back and check them out. Today’s topic really builds on what we’ve been learning about the last two weeks, and references pieces from the last two episodes that may not make the same amount of sense if you haven’t been following along, so I would encourage you to go back and start at Season 2 Episode 22 so that you get all you can out of this. Through this series, we’ve been talking about triggering – the experience that happens when we have a knee-jerk, psychological and physiological reaction in the present to something that reminds us of a stress-inducing or traumatic event that happened in the past. We’ve talked about how triggers can be really sneaky, subconscious and nuanced. We’ve also identified that the reactions they evoke in us can feel really automatic and outside of our control. And last week we talked about how the discomfort of triggering can lead us to get really crafty at avoiding triggers, but that this can create a series of new problems and that what we really need to do is tackle our triggers head on, but in a way that keeps safety intact. And that’s where we’re picking up today. When we face a trigger, we need some tools in our toolbelt to help us hold on to safety, and to support our brain in keeping the prefrontal cortex online. Today’s topic is going to equip you with the tools you need in that toolbelt.
So let’s jump right in. We’re going to talk about two main types of trigger management categories and I’m breaking them down based on the part of the brain we’re trying to help. So, we’re going to talk about limbic system regulatory tools and we’re going to talk about pre-frontal cortex activating tools. Again, if you skipped the first couple of episodes from this series, you’ll want to go back and start there so you know what I’m talking about here. As a super quick recap for those who have a memory like mine and need it – let’s remember that triggering is what happens when our stress/trauma centre is provoked by a reminder to something it has previously encoded and identified as a warning connected to a prior lived experience. When this happens, your brain thinks that this trigger represents the possibility that the bad thing that happened before COULD be happening again and activates your stress centre in order to get you ready to deal with it and prevent it from being like it was before. Your limbic system is the part of your brain most responsible for your stress survival responses and it gets all fired up really quickly. As we identified at the start of this series, your limbic system is also a fuel hog and it shuts down many of the other systems in your brain in an effort to give it all of your resources to help it do its job. When we’re triggered in a situation where a survival response is not needed to keep us safe, we need to regulate the limbic system to help is slow its roll; and we need to get the other parts of our brain back online to keep us present and anchored to our higher-level resources and capacities.
Alright, so let’s start with limbic system regulatory tools. If you remember back to the first episode in this series, two weeks ago, I told you that your stress centre has a huge influence on your physiology. It can change your heart rate, breathing, circulation, and so much more and all in an instant once something threatening is perceived. Fascinatingly, your body is among the most incredible feedback loop and this is no different when it comes to your stress response. What do I mean by feedback loop? Well, think about it like this. I’m laying in my bed relaxed and ready to fall asleep when I hear a startling noise. My limbic system quickly interprets that noise as a potential threat and starts having an effects on my physiology to prepare me for what might come next. Part of the physiological changes my stress centre is putting in place allows me to have heightened awareness, a highly attuned sensory system helping me to be extra-on guard and able to perceive additional indicators of risk. So I get out of bed and I creep down the stairs and I see something move from the corner of my eye, and that new information gets fed into my system acting as confirmation that yes, something’s up. As I move toward what I saw, my brain now has me even more highly aware of what is around me in preparation for how I might need to be able to grab something to fight with or know where an escape route is if I need to run away. As additional bits of information get fed into my system, it offers feedback to my brain that either confirms or denies the need for this stress response; and as my brain receives that feedback, it determines whether and how to amp up or slow my response. That’s the loop. And that’s what we need to take advantage of.
How, you might ask? Well, first, we need to get intentional to feed the loop SOMETHING. Once the stress centre has been provoked, your brain is itching to find confirmation of risk and threat. To help it detach from the sense of intense need to engage in risk scanning and threat assessment, we need to give it something that offers the opposite kind of feedback. So instead of giving it data that enhances its sense of confirmation around risk, we need to feed it pieces that strongly indicate the opposite of threat: safety. I’ll get to what that looks like in just a sec, but I want to make it really clear that when we get triggered and the stress centre gets activated and cascades into all of the physiological responses connected to this, it’s a bit like hitting the gas on a train going full steam ahead. To stop it, we can’t just let it coast its way to a stop, we need to actively pump the breaks. What this means is that we shouldn’t just ride out our stress reaction, because of a piece we identified last week, which is that it leaves the connection between the trigger and the reaction as is. So, for example, let’s imagine that I have been exposed to some stress-inducing situations that have involved loud noises before, and then I have this experience of a startling noise as I am trying to fall asleep. The noise is startling in its own right, but it’s also triggering times that have previously felt unsafe for me. The noise yields a disproportionate reaction in me. If I just leave that as is and try to ride it out, I am further conditioning this response that loud noise yields uncontrollable, disproportionate stress reactions, and the feeling of powerlessness that goes with it. Every time we are confronted with a trigger, we are being given an opportunity to teach our bodies something different, and we need to get really intentional in using these opportunities for all they’re worth.
Ok, so what do we feed into the feedback loop? Well, we’ve already talked about how the limbic system exerts a lot of influence over your physiology, and that it is keenly attuned to feedback from your physiological sensory systems to help it in doing its job of assessing and reacting, so we’re going to get crafty and use this to our advantage. Sensory input is a key way we can work to regulate the limbic system and help bridge our brain to a new potential connection. Smell, sight, sound, taste, touch…I know it might sound simple, but that’s exactly why it works. Here’s what you’re going to do – when triggering happens in situations where your risk of actual harm is low but your brain and body are having a hard time agreeing with you, you are going to input sensory pieces that affirm your safety or act as reminders of good, fine, ok, calm times. Here are some ideas:
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Smell something. A candle, some essential oil, soap, your shampoo, some lip chap… Seek out scents that are helpful to you. Some people find calming scents like vanilla to feel helpful, while others need stronger scents like eucalyptus or peppermint. Find something you like and find ways to keep it nearby if you tend to get triggered while on the go. My favourite trick is scented lip chaps and hand lotions as these are relatively socially acceptable so you can use them without looking weird if you’re triggered in public or around people. Some people also use essential oil jewellery which is essentially a locket with a felt pad clipped inside that you put a few drops of your favourite essential oil onto and it vents the scent.
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See something. Notice markers of where you are in space and time. Look at something that feels comforting like a family photo or pictures of your pet. Look for your favourite colour or something that feels visually pleasing and focus in on it.
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Hear something. If you can, listen to music or soundscapes that help you feel calm or safe. You can pre-emptively make some trigger friendly playlists that are accessible when you need them. Alternatively, listen to the sound of your breathing and try to make it longer and slower every few breaths; or listen to the sound of your heart beat and try to slow it down.
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Taste something. Keep mints in your pocket, or dark chocolate or something that has a taste your can focus in on. Make it something you like, maybe even something that feels connected to positive memories like a childhood candy you loved or the mints your grandma kept at her house growing up, so that your brain connects to those good pieces as an offset to the triggering feeling.
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Touch something. Find textures that feel helpful to you, and if you can keep them nearby. Do you respond well to something firm and cool? Keep a small rock in your pocket. Do you prefer warm and soft? Keep a small piece of felt fabric with you. Focus on the sensation of touching your hair or stroking your own arm in a soothing way.
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And I know that this last one is a bit of an add-on category, but the other thing that helps your limbic system is MOVEMENT. Shake your arms and legs out. Squeeze your hand or arm tight with the other hand. Stretch your hands high above your head. Sway. Walk or run on the spot. Do some wall push ups. Let your body exert some of the stress energy that builds up in preparation to be responsive to the perceived sense of risk. Give that energy somewhere to go and help it to dissipate. If your stress response comes with a fight reaction, wall push ups can be a great way to get the feeling of pushing something away to satisfy that part of my brain that I took an action. If your stress response comes with a flee reaction, running on the spot or swaying can give a feeling of completion to what your brain thinks it might need to do. And if your stress response comes with a freeze reaction, gentle stretching, taking up a little space, or swaying can help too.
Ok, so we’ve got some tools to help regulate our limbic system when it perceives threat and hijacks your brain. Now, we need to divert resources that your limbic system has swiped and redistribute them to the parts of our brain that help us really anchor and know that we’re safe and ok and that the time we’re in right now when we’re triggered is not the same as actual threat or doom. That means we need to build some strategies for pre-frontal cortex activation. If we think back to our first episode in this series, we talked about how the pre-frontal cortex is responsible for all of our higher-order thinking. This is the part of the brain that really only humans have and it’s what gives us the abilities that are unique to people. This part of our brain loves language, identification, sequencing, making use of trivia type knowledge, math, description, and so on. Employing these kinds of skills creates a demand on your brain that forces redistribution of resources. While your limbic system is hogging energy, your brain is knocking and saying, “hey limbic system, we need a little fuel to figure out what 17x3 is, share the love a little please!” The more we place demand on the prefrontal cortexes skill set, the more it will need to demand of your limbic system to share some resources, which means your limbic system has reduced capacity to run on high gear because it has less and less to work with, helping it diffuse and eventually shifting out of hijack mode.
So, here are 5 activities you can do to help activate your prefrontal cortex:
1. Alphabet game. We’ve talked about this one before, it’s a great little tool and you can change it up if you start to get bored with it to level up the challenge. Choose a category – foods, song titles, movie titles, street names, cities…really anything, and then work it through from A to Z. Don’t get tripped up or stressed out if you can’t find a word for each letter within the category, the point of the activity is not actually to find a word for each letter – it’s just a prompt to activate your prefrontal cortexes love for language and identification. No one will know or judge you if you skip one, but don’t give up too easy, it’s supposed to be a bit challenging for your brain – that’s what helps it draw resource away from your limbic system to make your prefrontal cortex work.
2. Sequencing. Count to 100 or 1000 by 3’s. Or describe what you did yesterday in detail and work to keep it in sequential chronological order. Or describe an everyday kind of task in detail and be sure to make it in the sequential order of tasks. For example, washing the dishes: first I empty the sink. Then I put in the plug. Then I run the hot water. Then I add the dish soap. Then I turn off the water. Then I scrub the least dirty dishes. Then I stack them on the drip tray. Then I move on to the dirtier dishes. Then I stack them in the sink. Then I scrub the dirtiest dishes. Then I drain the sink. Then I wipe the sink and counters. And so on, and so on. One of my favourite tools is my sudoku app which is sequencing as well, and the timer on the app makes my brain feel like it needs to really focus.
3. Get mathy. Addition, subtraction, multiplication… Whether you work on a few problems in your head, or on some scrap paper, or you download a math games app – working on problem solving, particularly for those of us, myself included, who are not naturally math-inclined, is a great way to force your brain to redistribute resources and activate your prefrontal cortex.
4. Describe the room. Look around you. Notice and describe the colours you see, the textures, the lighting differences. Really root yourself in the room you are in and notice all the things you might not normally. Again, our goal is to use language to describe and to anchor to what is present and now.
5. Tell a story or some jokes. Your limbic system isn’t awesome at creativity or silliness. Its job, survival, is serious business. Using language skills that are prefrontal cortexes domain, along with some creativity and imagination or finding our funny bone, can be great ways of shifting energy away from our limbic system to help redistribute resources and get my whole brain online again. Tell a story about something real or imagined. Make up a joke. If you think about kids in your life, you probably do something like this with them. If a kid in your life tells you they are afraid of a monster in their closet, we usually do the things to show them that reasonably this isn’t true, but then to help them shift their thinking we’ll tell a happy or silly story to help their brain anchor to something good rather than scary in hopes of setting them up for a better nights sleep. You can do the same for you, because don’t forget, grown ups are just children in tall bodies.
Alright, there you have it. You are now equipped for trigger management. You know what you need to do, why you need to do it and now the big trick is remembering to use the tools you have when it’s time to use them. AND, using them as consistently as possible to help unpair conditioned connections, and extinguish triggering reactions. My best tip for remembering to use these tools is twofold. First, make some prompts. Whether it’s a list you keep on your phone and know to look at for reference when you’re triggered, or post-it notes in key places where triggering tends to happen, or alarm reminders that go off at times when triggering might be more likely – find ways to present yourself with these pieces until they become a more routine part of your life that come to mind. And second, tell key people in your life about these tools and when you need to use them so that they can help prompt. You can even shape how they share this with you, when you might need them to support that prompting and how you want that to look. By and large the people in our lives want us to be ok and successful, and they are usually pretty happy to help and often feel pretty awesome to have something clearly defined that they can do to help rather than feeling usure how best to support.
Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers is OPEN for registration until 11:59pm on Monday February 28th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, here’s the quick run down: It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. If you are ready to be a dare devil, jump here to register, and make sure to register early as we are capping registrations.
Episode Challenge:
What are some ways you can prompt reminders to use the skills outlined in today’s episode? Who can you invite to help prompt and remind you? And which tools will you try out first? – Willing to share?? I would LOVE to hear from you, give a shout out on social media or shoot me an email and tell me what you’re working on!
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– Registration is open! We are capping registration, so register early, it’s only $10! Sign up here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
As we open today’s topic on the avoidance dance, I want to acknowledge that avoidance is a totally normal reaction to things that are uncomfortable or actively painful. We avoid all kinds of things that we’ve had previous experience with or exposure to that has taught us that we don’t want to do it again. Avoidance is a stress reaction that comes from having learned something. We talked about this last week – if we think back to caveman times, and I go down a path and am confronted with a bear, my brain is going to take a multisensory movie that remembers the smell of sweet berries and the sound of a gurgling stream and the next time I head down a path with the same scent and sound my brain is going to be triggered in an effort to help me avoid another close call with big jaws and sharp claws. In that kind of a context, it can be a really good thing that we learn from our exposure to stressful stimuli in an effort to support our actual survival.
The challenge is that these avoidance prompts can become bigger or more generalized than is helpful to us, and if we’re not careful we can fall into the trap of learned helplessness.
For those who haven’t taken a psych class in a long time, let’s do a quick review. Back in the 1960’s Martin Seligman did research involving dogs. PETA would have a field day with this research, but at the time it was common practice. Seligman’s research was on classical conditioning, which is about the relationship that forms between two stimuli when they are consistently presented together. In this case, when a bell would ring, the dog would get a mild electric shock. After a short time of being presented together, the dogs would show a reaction as if they were being shocked whenever the bell would ring, even if the shock wasn’t administered. The bell became such a strong warning sign of the impending shock that the dogs came to assume and physiologically respond as if the shock happened simply because the bell rang. The researchers then took this one step further. They built a cage with two sections divided by a low fence that could easily be jumped by the dogs. One side of the cage was able to administer a mild electric shock, and the other side was electricity free. The dogs were placed on the side with the shock, and for any dogs who had not previously been in the bell experiment, they would quickly jump the fence and be free from the shock. Meanwhile, the ones who had been a part of the bell part of the experiment just laid down and didn’t even bother trying to find out if they could get away from the shock. This is what Seligman termed Learned Helplessness. The dogs had learned that they couldn’t escape or evade their fate…even though in this case they could have. The learning became so deeply held that they gave up trying and just stayed in it.
Now, here’s where the research becomes interesting for our purposes. After they completed this phase of the research they asked a new question – can we break associations once they’ve been made? Essentially can we reverse learned helplessness…and the answer, is YES. In the case of the dogs, the researchers tried a number of things, including demonstrations of them stepping over the fence, bribery with reward as well as punishment to try to get the dogs to jump over to the non-electrified side of the cage. But the thing that worked was when the researchers physically picked up the dogs and moved them - when the dogs were forcibly given the opportunity to see for themselves that this side would be different. After two times of being carried over, the dogs started to regain their capacity for curiosity and were able to direct this toward their self-preservation rather than trying to conserve energy by lying down and waiting out the pain. Similarly, the researchers would ring the bell and NOT administer the shock, and while the dogs continued to have a physiological reaction as if they were being shocked for a little while, after several repetitions, the dogs learned that the bell was no longer associated with the shock. This process of unlearning a conditioned association is called extinction. We’re extinguishing the connection and the related reaction.
Ok, so what does this mean for us as humans almost 80 years later? Well, there are three key learnings I think we can draw from this that relates to stress exposure and the question of avoidance as a coping tool for dealing with triggering.
First, triggering is simply a more nuanced version of conditioning. In the Seligman studies, the conditioned stimuli are easily identifiable. Bell, shock, fear. Put those three together enough times and bell will yield fear even in the absence of shock. In life, we rarely get such a clean example. While facets of a stress-inducing or traumatic event can feel clear or obvious, others can feel far more difficult to identify. For example, in a car accident it might seem obvious that the survivor might develop a triggering reaction to driving, driving in conditions similar to the accident, like at night or in the rain, and maybe even to just being in a car or thinking about being in a car. Those are the easy ones. But there are far more subtle connections that can be made as well. For example, if the accident happened after leaving the house following an argument with a parent or spouse, the feeling of being angry can become a trigger because it was present at the time of the incident and serves as a connection to what happened. If the accident happened in a rural area with the smell of farms and manure; or near a fast food joint in all its greasy glory…these prompts can be so subtle that they are not even consciously in our awareness…but then we go to grab a burger and experience a flurry of flashbacks and feel totally insane. Remember last week we talked about why triggering exists – that it’s intention within your brain is for survival purposes, which is your brains absolute top priority and objective. While it can be extremely uncomfortable, inconvenient, and sometimes even newly dangerous (having panic attacks while driving is not safe for anyone on the road), it’s for a reason and it’s trying to do the important job of keeping you safe.
The second thing we can take from Seligman’s research is that avoiding exposure on the front end is a good idea. If we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli, we can reduce the power of the connection and the degree of damage we suffer as a result. This is where trigger prevention measures come into play. If we can work to provide ourselves with a buffer, a protective layer that helps us to keep our prefrontal cortex active during stressful events, we can reduce the consistency with which triggers are paired with events that feel significantly negative. What if, in the dog studies, the bell were paired with the shock sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting delicious food sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting pets and cuddles sometimes but not all the time, AND it was paired with getting a bath sometimes but not all the time – if the stimuli (the bell) were presented in a host of situations that evoked positive, negative and neutral feelings, it would likely become background noise. Not specifically becoming a hallmark of anything in particular. Similarly, if we can build experiences that evoke a variety of feelings with the things that could otherwise become triggers, we can be proactive at nipping triggering in the bud.
Another way we can prevent the consistency of exposure to the pairing of stimuli is by reducing our exposure more generally. I’m not saying avoid triggering here – I’m saying limit exposure to the stress and trauma to begin with. Limiting how much overtime you take on, how many additional projects you commit to and so on can help to reduce the likelihood that you will be put in positions to have the affiliations created from the get go. We’ll be talking more about trigger prevention strategies in a couple of weeks, so know that we’ll circle back to this if you are keen to have some tangible tools to support this.
The third thing we can take from Seligman’s study is that we need to step over our own proverbial fences and put in the reps to achieve extinction. …Carefully. The thing about triggers is that they aren’t actually harbingers of traumatic events. Our brain has paired the triggering stimuli with the series of events that played out and was felt as stressful or traumatizing, but this random smell or image or feeling does not in and of itself bring terrible, awful traumatic things along with it. The bell in the case of the dogs, is not dangerous on its own.
This is the problem with avoidance. When we avoid triggers we leave that pairing as is. If the researchers hadn’t rung the bell without administering the shock a bunch of times, the dogs might have gone home and peed the floor whenever the doorbell rang, because the connection was still intact. Out of a dislike for peed-on rugs, the owners might have disconnected the doorbell to save everyone the stress and trouble, but this further entrenches the connection as long-standing and doesn’t give it a chance to unpair. The key with extinction is that the stimuli that was paired to the stressful event (ie. the trigger) needs to be experienced multiple times within a context that is SAFE. That’s right, as we’ve often identified on the show, SAFETY IS KEY.
And this is essentially the working theory behind exposure therapy as a primary approach to trauma processing and trigger reduction. By exposing ourselves to triggers within contexts that are felt and experienced as safe, we give ourselves the opportunity to unlearn helplessness and extinguish conditioned connections. Now there are a few very important pieces that I want you to hear before you go out and start throwing yourself into your worst trigger-provoking experiences in an effort to clear them. Number one, for exposure to work it has to happen with safety intact. You brain needs to be able to keep the pre-frontal cortex on throughout the exposure – if it can’t then you are re-traumatizing rather than extinguishing. Number two, the best way to help our brain keep safety and the pre-frontal cortex online is by making exposure GRADUAL. Don’t start with the worst of the worst, scale it WAY back and as each step toward the harder triggering gets easier and feels safer, you can up the ante a bit. And number three, there are no shortcuts. Extinguishing through exposure can take time…sometimes a long time. If you have been exposed to certain traumatic events repeatedly, where the triggers connected to it have overlap, then it will likely take longer to get your brain on board with believing that maybe this trigger doesn’t mean bad things are coming. This will also be a longer process if any of the triggering is connected to events that were from childhood, or were interpersonal harm as opposed to random accident or other non-interpersonal events. Our brain stores childhood stress and trauma experiences as well as interpersonal ones with more sensitivity than events we experience in adulthood or that are non-interpersonal.
So let’s nail down a conclusion about the avoidance dance. While avoidance is a natural response provoked by our brain to try to reduce our experience of distress, and is used by your brain to try to remove you from situations that it perceives as being possibly related to something bad that could happen again given previous experiences, choosing avoidance doesn’t tend to solve any problems long-term. In fact, it can enhance them. If we continually avoid, we grow our perception of fear – we further entrench a story of fear in connection to the triggering thing. And as we do this, the fear will inevitably generalize – it will go from being triggered by driving the car to thinking about driving the car. And as it generalizes, our world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we continue to be exposed to new stress or trauma provoking events in a line of work where it’s never-ending, the risks of more triggers is ever-present. And this is how we move into the gradual accumulation of traumatic exposure, triggering and dysregulation of the nervous system that leads us into bigger issues like PTSD. That said, while avoidance isn’t going to solve problems and can make them worse, we also need to be careful to not go to extremes in the other direction. Throwing ourselves into traumatic reminders without skills and the intention to keep our prefrontal cortex online runs the risk of re-traumatization, so we need to tread carefully, and THIS is why it’s an avoidance DANCE. It’s nuanced and careful. It also calls for some skills to bring to the party.
That’s where we’re headed next week, into the skills for trigger management and the steps you can practice to master the dance.
Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers will be launching registration ONE week from today on February 15th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, let me give you a really quick run down. It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. So keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be posting about it on our social media, and to our email list, so if you haven’t already, follow me on social media and/or sign up for the self-care dare waitliston our podcast webpage to get notified of when registration goes live. I will add that we are planning to cap registrations this time around, so be sure to register early to claim your spot. I hope you’ll join me for it and kick off 2022 with this investment in you and your wellness, and vicariously the wellness of those who care about you. …Because as we say often during the dare, “taking care of me, let’s me take better care of others.” Ensuring your own wellness is a win for everybody.
Episode Challenge:
Are there triggers that you have tended to avoid? Are there triggers where you could be more intentional about bringing skills to keep your pre-frontal cortex online and your nervous system regulated?
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– jump on the waitlist to be notified when registration goes live. We plan to cap registration this time, so register early, it’s only $10!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are getting trigger happy and we’re kicking off a new series for the month of February all about triggering.
What exactly is triggering? At the most foundational level, triggering is an emotional, psychological, and/or physiological reaction to stimuli that is outside of our control. Triggering usually feels unexpected, automatic, and like it takes over. It can feel unconscious, and difficult to consciously override and regain control of ourselves. It can be a feeling, like sadness or fear; it can be psychological, like flashbacks or intrusive thoughts; it can be physiological, like racing heart or difficulty breathing; and it can be, and more often than not is, a combination of these things all rolled together.
Being triggered is more than just getting worked up about something. I was watching something on the news recently and the commentator used the word triggered to describe someone who was worked up about a topic, and while I can appreciate that the term can feel useful to mark the significance of someone’s reaction – it’s not quite the same thing. What the newscaster was identifying was someone taking offense to something and expressing their sense of being bothered. While it can be reactionary to get offended, it is usually connected to our beliefs and values, which we have some ability to look at, choose, and change if we want to.
Meanwhile, triggering – true triggering – doesn’t feel optional. It is connected not to beliefs or values that we have some say in developing or altering, but to how our brains have interpreted, internalized, and held onto events that we didn’t get a vote in choosing. Triggering isn’t about getting upset by something or someone – it’s more like being held hostage to a brain that had to face something hard and continues to feel subjected to that experience.
What’s worse is that for many who experience triggering, they don’t always know what they are triggered by or even what experience that trigger connects back to. And this is where it really feels like being held hostage – because we can feel swept up in reactions that take our bodies over, turn our day upside down, impact our ability to focus or function effectively, and we might not be able to even really know why.
So let’s break down the mechanics of what is happening when triggering occurs. Your brain, while highly complex and interconnected, is also segmented into regions and areas that do different kinds of jobs. For example, we’ve talked a lot on the show before about the pre-frontal cortex which is the part of the brain just behind your eyes and forehead, and how this part of the brain is responsible for things like language and executive functioning which really means our ability to make decisions, problem solve and manage complex information. The pre-frontal cortex is essentially the manager of your brain. It takes information from other areas, like memory and values and so on, and funnels these pieces into how we want to choose to engage, respond or interact with things that are happening in our lives now and into the future. Being in your pre-frontal cortex, having this part of your brain actively turned on and working, is pretty much the opposite of being in triggered mode. This part of our brain helps us to feel grounded, present and in control. It feels regulated and capable.
So where does triggering live in your brain? Well, it’s pretty interesting actually. There are studies, and I actually had the chance to do my master’s thesis research on just such a study, where researchers use EEG or other brain-scan data to see what happens in the brain when we trigger the crap out of someone. How do we do this, well, depending on the population we’re studying, we might use images of something scary or associated with a traumatic event they’ve experienced, or we can use something called script-driven trauma provocation where the participants actually write the story of a traumatic event, which gets narrated and turned into an audio that they listen back to while hooked up to whatever brain-scan tech is being used. I know it sounds cruel, but it has been a significant tool in understanding exactly what happens inside the brain when people get triggered and the results are genuinely fascinating and informative in terms of how we go about thinking about triggering as well as how we go about trying to treat triggering.
When a brain is exposed to a trigger – something that your brain feels is in some way directly or vaguely tied to a traumatic or stress-inducing event that left a mark – your brain perceives this trigger as a threat, just like the event that your brain believes it represents. Essentially your brain has this background system running all the time that is scanning for risk and threat and looks for it through the lens of what it has already known to be fear inducing. When it picks up on any small reference to something that aligns with its previous experiences, it sets off an alert system in an effort to batten down the hatches to self-protect from anything even remotely like your previous experiences from ever happening again. When your brain perceives something that seems affiliated to risk, it quickly activates your limbic system. What is the limbic system? It’s a region in your brain that is near the back of the brain tucked up right above your brain stem at the base of your head and top of your neck. Your limbic system is the area of your brain responsible for your stress response including fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn response.
Before we keep going, I’m going to pause here for a moment because there are some really important things to know about your limbic system.
First off, your limbic system is highly connected to a ton of your physiological responses. You know how your heart beats without you consciously thinking about it? Same with your breathing, your temperature regulation like sweating or shivering, your blood pressure and other unconscious moment-to-moment physiological basics? Your limbic system, when it perceives stress or a need to protect, automatically exerts influence over all of these systems. It’s why your heart will speed up, your breathing will become more shallow, it even shifts blood flow away from your extremities and into your core. It does all of this to prepare you to be able to fight back, run away, or manage the risk in whatever way best leads to survival.
Second, your limbic system has its own version of memory storage. Because it is so highly responsible for altering your physiological state, it tracks events and stores memory like a muti-sensory movie. It believes that it needs to recall all aspects of a traumatic or stress-inducing event in order to be able to effectively prevent it from recurring in the future. So it takes note of additional information that regular memories, non-traumatic memories, wouldn’t normally care to remember. Things like smells, body positioning, vague sounds, lighting…all kinds of things that are way over and above what normal memory systems care to give strong attention to.
Third, your limbic system doesn’t own a watch. While other parts of your brain have access to a clock that lets it know whether something was past, present or future, your limbic system only deals in the now. It doesn’t care if your heart beat 10 seconds ago, or frankly whether it will beat 10 seconds from now, it only cares that it is beating. The tricky thing about this is that memories connected to this area and stored as a multi-sensory movie, aren’t stored as memories from something that happened (past-tense) but rather as something that is continuing to be happening whenever it gets…you guessed it…triggered.
We’re going to circle back to that in a second but really quickly I also want to let you know the fourth thing about your limbic system, and that is that it is not particularly well connected to your pre-frontal cortex – meaning that it tends to operate in isolation and without a lot of input from the part of your brain that is able to problem solve, make decisions, and feel present and capable. On top of that, not only does it not have great connection to your pre-frontal cortex, your limbic system is also a fuel hog. What this means is that in order to prioritize survival, which your brain deems to be the highest priority, when risk is perceived your brain will divert resources from other parts of the brain to your limbic system in an effort to give it it’s best chance at helping you to survive. We see this in brain scan data where the limbic system will become red hot while other regions of the brain, including the pre-frontal cortex, essentially go offline. What this means is that the best part of your brain, that does it’s best thinking, planning and responding, isn’t made available to you as a resource when triggering happens. And that’s a big problem and part of why we feel held hostage by these automatic responses that feel outside of our control.
So, now that you are a brain expert on all things limbic system, let’s talk about what this has to do with triggering and how we use this information meaningfully.
When a trigger happens, your brain sees it as somehow having some kind of clear or vague reference to an event that it has stored as traumatic or highly stressful. Now, triggering can be obvious and actually risky things like being in the same room as a person who perpetrated something dangerous in a setting that feels risky or not controlled – like seeing someone who has caused harm in a casual setting where there is nothing stopping them from causing harm again. These are the moments triggers are made for – to keep us on high alert to protect ourselves from re-experiencing similar risk of harm. Meanwhile, triggering can also show up when presented with something like a person who caused harm but in a totally different and more controlled environment - like being triggered going to court to testify and seeing the perpetrator in the room. The space is relatively safe-ish, but triggering is still alerting us that something here has been unsafe before. Then, there is another category of triggering that is far less clear or obvious and it tends to be connected to sensory information. An example is feeling triggered while walking through the mall past the cologne counter of one of the big box stores because one of the colognes smells like what someone was wearing when something bad happened. The mall isn’t particularly unsafe, the person who caused harm isn’t present – by all standards I should be pretty fine right now, but my body is losing it’s mind and feeling the need to kick up it’s fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses because it associates the smell to that multi-sensory movie. Remember, our limbic system, once activated, doesn’t have access to a clock AND reduces the capacity for my pre-frontal cortex to intervene and help out – so when I’m triggered by something like a smell in an otherwise totally safe situation, my brain has difficulty knowing that I’m safe because it’s focused on the data that says “unsafe”
The terms triggering is used really commonly when we’re talking about PTSD or PSTI – but did you know that triggering can happen on a spectrum? While triggering can be connected to flashbacks and panic attacks, somewhat characteristic features of posttraumatic stress concerns, it can also happen for those who wouldn’t meet the diagnosable criteria for PTSD. Its function is simply to be an alert system that, at the heart of it, is working to keep me safe and protected from reliving things that didn’t feel ok the first time around. I bet you’ve probably had some kind of experience like this. For example, triggering is really common for people who have been in a car accident. Following an accident, getting in a car again can feel really uncomfortable and distressing. In most cases, the triggering will reduce and eventually wane as my body re-establishes a sense of security driving again. But in some cases, the body doesn’t seem to find that sense of security, and instead it grows the significance of the event to make super sure it NEVER EVER happens again. Suddenly triggering won’t just be when I’m driving, but also when I’m the passenger. It won’t just be driving in nighttime or slippery conditions, but in broad daylight in dry weather. It can also start to grow from being triggered just in relationship to being in a car to thinking about having to drive, or to other forms of travel. And it can grow from feeling agitated or “off” to experiencing full blown panic that completely shuts you down. When triggering goes from survival protective to dysfunctional is when it becomes disproportionate, overgeneralized and so auto-pilot that we feel overcome by it and not in control of our own responses.
I know at this point you are likely chomping at the bit with, “Lindsay, that’s all super interested but what the hell do I DO with my triggering?” And I’m sorry to leave you hanging but I promise we’ll get there. We are going to be talking about what to DO with triggering over the next few weeks, so be sure to click the subscribe button wherever you’re listening to this, or sign up for our weekly emails that link to new weekly episodes of the podcast.
Reminder: The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers will be launching registration 2 weeks from today on February 15th. If you are a new listener and you don’t know about the dare, let me give you a really quick run down. It is a 5 day challenge that invites participants to build a killer self-care plan to help protect and support sustainability both at work and in your life. You get daily videos that cover 5 key domains of self-care, along with worksheets and guides to help you develop and implement your own personalized self-care plan. You also get access to a private Facebook group where we connect, discuss challenges, problem solve and celebrate successes together…and I love giving away a few prizes along the way to keep you engaged and motivated – because investing in yourself in this kind of way is so important and I want to make sure that you see it all the way through. You’re worth it. So keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be posting about it on our social media, and to our email list, so if you haven’t already, follow me on social media and/or sign up for the self-care dare waitliston our podcast webpage to get notified of when registration goes live. I will add that we are planning to cap registrations this time around, so be sure to register early to claim your spot. I hope you’ll join me for it and kick off 2022 with this investment in you and your wellness, and vicariously the wellness of those who care about you. …Because as we say often during the dare, “taking care of me, let’s me take better care of others.” Ensuring your own wellness is a win for everybody.
Episode Challenge:
I want you to consider where triggering happens for you, and where it lives on the spectrum discussed in this episode. What triggers are logical warning systems that seem proportionate to the events you’ve faced and help advise your safety? And what triggers have gotten bigger than that – edging towards the disproportionate, overgeneralized and totally auto-pilot?
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Access our free downloadable Managing Trauma Triggers Workbook
Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers– jump on the waitlist to be notified when registration goes live. We plan to cap registration this time, so register early, it’s only $10!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today I am joined by one of my favourite people to have on the show, Jenn Pound. Jenn is a retired RCMP staff sergeant and has been a guest on the show a number of times. Today we’re also joined by a friend of Jenn’s, Greg Scollon. Now, if you don’t already know, we’ve been working through a series on detangling identity and we’ve been talking about the need to protect our sense of self, our identities, from becoming entangled and enmeshed with the work roles we serve in. We have, throughout the series, talked about the risks of over-identifying with the job, particularly when the work you do is so crisis driven and out of your control. We have also talked about practical tools for supporting greater protections around our identity, including building balance and crafting control. Today we are talking about cultivating connection and I am so pleased that we get to talk about this and related topics with two people who have been there, done that, and got the T shirt.
Jenn retired from the RCMP after discovering that she was facing post traumatic stress injuries from her time working with the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team in Vancouver. She has shared in previous episodes about the impact of the work, and the lack of support she received when she most needed it. The systemic dysfunction and lack of support was career ending for this incredible woman who is a legacy member – married to an RCMP member, the daughter and sister to RCMP member’s – she was all in. But when push came to shove, they weren’t all in for her.
When I asked Jenn if she would be interested in joining me for an episode during this series, she offered connection to a friend, Greg, and when I heard his story I was thrilled to have them both on. Greg worked for Shaw. That’s right, he’s not a first responder, but his experience being suddenly let go from work he had poured himself into is relevant and I think that his insights from going through the process of loss and reinventing himself are significantly meaningful for you to hear.
Listen in on our conversation and gain insight from the wisdom of our guests.
Episode Challenge:
How are you cultivating connection? How can you make this a continual area of investment?
Sign up for the Self-Care Dare waitlisttoday to be the first to find out when registration opens and secure one of the limited spots in this cohort of the dare.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Check out Jenn’s blog,Fuel For First Responders.
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off. Signing up for this free tool also gives you access to our regular emails with new podcast episodes and other special resources designed just for you on the front lines.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are continuing our series on detangling identity and we’re focusing this episode on crafting control.
The challenge with the kind of work you do, is that while it draws people who enjoy feeling in control – it is an unending stream of out-of-control mess. Whether it’s the calls or the work-related risks or the organizational dynamics, there is SO much that happens that is not in our control.
So, what do you think that means when we’ve enmeshed our sense of identity, our sense of self, with our work? US Marine Corps veteran and behavioural scientist, Dr. Kevin Gilmartin wrote the book “Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement” and summarizes this so well. He says, “If the job becomes your life, and you don’t control your job, then you don’t control your life.”
Nailed it.
I said during last week’s episode that your work is a really important part of who you are. But the KEY is remembering and being intentional about keeping it a PART. A portion. Just a piece. Think of it like a pie chart. Work is a valuable piece of who you are – it says something about you that you do what you do. But if the piece of the pie chart your work occupies is the biggest slice of the pie, or outweighs the amalgamation of several other slices of the pie, then your balance is out of whack and you need to go back to last week’s episode to take a look at how you rebalance. If your work piece of the pie is dictating too much about who you are, how you feel, and how you value yourself in your world or experience value in the world, then you are running some serious risks and Dr. Gilmartin is hitting it on the head. Our work is so often outside of our control. The job is literally responding to crisis. The defining nature of crisis is NOT in control. And while we’re trained to enter into the chaos and intervene to help, the truth is that we can only ever do so much, and it is almost always REACTIVE which feels much less in control than preventative or responsive. On top of that, even within the organizational framework, we can often feel at risk of an adversarial or blatantly aggressive or hostile workplace dynamic that further undermines our sense of stability or control. Decisions that affect us are made without consultation and we are left to hold the repercussions.
If this is what we are using to define us, no wonder so many are burning out, experiencing mental health concerns and struggling to continue. When I make my identity tied to something that is so unstable, it is internally de-stabilizing. As we internalize an identity that defines us based on an environment and experience that can be so tumultuous, we internalize the chaos and the helplessness and the lack of control. And these features start to increasingly take hold inside of us and dictate how we feel, how we think and how we engage in our lives.
THIS is why it is so deeply risky to make work our life.
Now, I’m going to say, AGAIN, that work is of course an important part of your life. Yes, you have to work to pay the bills. And yes, you are allowed to love your work, feel passionately about the work you do, and invest deeply into the work you care about. Just not exclusively, or mindlessly.
I’m not asking you to not do your job. Really, what I want it the opposite of that – I want you, with all of the amazing skill, training and experience you’ve acquired, to be a kickass contributor to the work for a long, long time to come. Our communities need you. They need skilled, experienced people who ARE passionate about the work and committed to being in the thick of it. But we are losing really great people – veteran skilled staff – because the job got too big and swallowed them whole. What I want for you is to be mindful and intentional about keeping the job in its place – as a piece of the pie. And in so doing, I want you to craft something that is far more sustainable. Something that keeps you able to remain in the work for as long as you choose to be in it.
Last week we talked about balance and distributing our interests and sense of self across multiple “pillars”. An important piece of this process is anchoring to building aspects of my life that I have control over.
When we spend a significant proportion of our time in a workplace that really lacks control, we need to build a life outside of that that really enhances our connection to control, even in seemingly small ways. It is also really valuable to work at implementing pieces within your work day that give some amount of control back wherever you can find it. There are two specific aspects to crafting control that I want to encourage you to focus on.
The first is refining your values and the second is drawing your boundaries.
When it comes to refining your values, it’s really a matter of taking the time to step back from the auto-pilot nature of life to really dig in and be intentional in thinking about what matters to you most. Life has a tendency to get us caught up in the moment-to-moment of the daily grind. We can get hung up in some of the survival mode that life calls us into. We’re busy. Work life, home life, fixing the leak in my house or taking my car in for the weird noise it’s been making, visiting that ailing family member, getting that call out of the blue that says my pet needs surgery or someone I care about is leaving their spouse… Life doesn’t stop life-ing. The pace is high and we get caught in the current of it. It’s not that we intentionally fall out of living into our values, it’s that we lose track of time. But then, before you know it we have lived a life of reaction to whatever has come at us any given minute – feeling out of control and left with that funeral question but without the time left to cast a different kind of vote for how people will talk about and remember us. When we can make the time, prioritize the space, to get clear about our values – and to re-clarify them on a semi-regular basis – we are more likely to shape choices that allow us to live into our values even when life keeps life-ing.
When you are working to refine your values, I want you to think about where in your life you have experienced a sense of control. Think back – as a child or teen, as a young adult all the way to this time in your life – when have you felt like your best self? What kinds of activities or interests brought this out in you? Where did you feel like you were owning life? What are your greatest skills? Where do you shine? Who are the people who bring out the best in you?
Inventory the answers to these questions, along with that most central question – what would you hope that people would remember about you or say about you at your funeral? What characteristics about who you are and how you are in your life do you hope make the greatest impact on the world and those in your life?
These are your values. These are the spheres of control for you.
Identifying these, and taking time on a semi-regular basis to re-evaluate your values and how you are going about living into them, is the single most important thing you can do to help build a sense of control in your life. And in crafting an increased sense of control, we help protect ourselves from the impact of the areas in our lives where we experience reduced control.
As you identify your values, try to get creative in thinking about how you can connect to these. It may not be the same and it may not be perfect, but aim for close approximations. For example, one of the areas in my life where I have experienced a high degree of control and feeling in my element has been while dancing. As a kid I was a highly competitive dancer and later taught highly competitive dancers to pay my way through university. As a child, I didn’t feel good at much, but dance was easy for me. It felt natural. It felt like the only place I really belonged. And for much of my life it has been a central aspect of my coping. That said, my life is no longer conducive to being at a studio for 4 hours of classes 6 days a week, and I’m pretty sure my body would break in half if I tried to attempt the splits right now. Dance can’t occupy the same space in my life as it used to, and while I wish it looked a certain way, even my wish isn’t really an option right now. So, my version of close approximations looks like taking the parts of dance I cared about most and putting them into my daily life. I love the music – the heavy bass, strong beat, and having it on so loud you could feel it in your bones. So, when I exercise in the evenings once my kids are in bed, I do it to my favourite playlist with our good speaker system. I also loved the spontaneity of it. Making things up, moving for the sake of the movement – that “dance like no one is watching” kind of feeling I guess – so my kids and I crank some ridiculous song and bust out our most fantastic moves and just let go for a few minutes…and it’s wonderful. Someday I might get back into a class, and when I do I know it will feel great, but until then, close approximations give me the chance to feel aspects of that best version of myself at least a little bit. I get to hold that feeling of being in control of SOMETHING. Being in control of my body, in control of the music I choose, in control of the mood I have as I choose to do something I love, in control of the choice to choose something for me. Yes it’s temporary, but it also carries with me, and it’s better than nothing.
This brings us to boundaries. Boundaries are the other vital aspect of crafting control because they help us protect what we value and protect us from what lives outside of our values. But this is why it’s important that we know and name our values first, because without that it’s hard to protect something we can’t identify. Now, we’ve talked about boundaries on the show before and I’ve shared about the idea of internal and external boundaries. If you have done the Beating the Breaking Point online program, you’ll know that I also talk quite a bit about this same topic in more depth there. For today we’re going to focus this same concept on the idea of crafting control. So, as a refresher – external boundaries are the ones we set with other people. These are the things we say out loud, like “no I won’t be able to get to that email until I’m back on Monday, I don’t check my work email outside of work time.” …Wouldn’t that be crazy?! External boundaries clarify your values to others so they know what to reasonably expect of you. It sets everyone up for success because it is clear and allows people to be on the same page. On the flip side, internal boundaries are boundaries we have in our own heads. We may never say them out loud to anyone ever. They are the lines and limits we acknowledge within ourselves. Where how and when I spend my time and energy; my commitment to be in bed at a certain time each night because it allows me to be my best self the next day; my line of limiting screens; my choice to commit to connecting with a person or the people who bring out the best in me, and so on. The combination of internal and external boundaries should be working toward helping me focus in on what I can control, and those spaces where I feel like my best version of myself.
So, what about when we have to be in spaces that we can’t control, or where it’s hard to be a version of ourselves we feel good about. Well, that’s going to happen. It’s the reality of this life. But even in the things we can’t control, we can find bits of control. I remember a time a number of years ago when my husband signed us up for a co-ed slow pitch team. I almost killed him. Let me clarify that while I have always been a fairly athletic person thanks to my intense dance background, I was never someone who participated in group sports outside of gym class. Dance was a heavy commitment and there was never time for anything else. So at this point in history I hadn’t played baseball since junior high. I didn’t even own a glove. So, feeling VERY not in control of this, I took control of the things I could. I went out and bought the pinkest pink glove I could find. Right or wrong, I figured it would shape people’s perceptions of me walking on the field. I figured the girl with the hot pink glove likely wouldn’t be taken too seriously. Open with low expectations. It totally worked too. I worked hard and practiced and improved…although I was never particularly good, I could do what needed doing. I controlled what I could. I controlled my actions in practicing and trying my best, I controlled shaping expectations placed on my right from the get-go, and I controlled my mindset – choosing to own that I’m not good at this but I value being someone who tries and who puts in the work even when it’s hard. I don’t value baseball, but I do value being seen as someone who is willing to risk and try things. While the activity was not something where I shone, some of my values really got to shine. My character, of being a good sport no matter what and trying hard, that did shine, and I was proud of that.
When you think about your work, and the ways it invites you to over-identify with it. Try to work at detangling the job title from your identity, but allow yourself to connect to the characteristics about you that you love and value in you that your profession highlights or allows to shine. And as you do that, look for places in your life outside of the job where those characteristics can ALSO shine, so that you are building a life that includes your job but not exclusively your job as defining of you.
Keep asking, who am I? Keep connecting with the question of how you want to be remembered. And keep working to craft a life that moves you in the direction toward that being a reality.
Episode Challenge:
Spend time reflecting on the questions outlined in this episode to determine your values, and then work to identify boundaries that would help protect these values. Choose one or two places to start implementing your values and boundaries to craft an increased sense of control.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, here.
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off. Signing up for this free tool also gives you access to our regular emails with new podcast episodes and other special resources designed just for you on the front lines.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are into our latest series on detangling identity and we’re going to talk today about building balance.
Here is the thing about balance: life balance is not a fixed point. Life, and people within life, are never fixed points. We are always changing and adapting. Life is always moving and flexing. Ebbing and flowing. Think of it a bit more like balancing on a stand up paddle board on ocean waves. You might find a balance at one moment when the waves are calmer and the water is more still, but then the wind picks up, the waves hit a bit harder and each moment is effort to find and re-find balance under the fluctuating conditions. The tricky thing about building balance in our lives is we won’t ever be done with it. It isn’t a one and done. We won’t find this wonderful balance point and be able to just ride that out indefinitely. Life will come along and give us some waves, and we’ll need to re-adjust and re-discover balance all over again.
I know that likely sounds a bit daunting, and I’m not going to lie, it can be. But here’s the good news – once you build balance that feels good to you, most of the adjustments will be tweaking. Like the stand up paddle board – it’s starting that’s the hard part. It is learning to find your centre and strengthening your body to remain centred in moving conditions that is difficult. Once you get used to it, get good at it, the adjustments are pretty small tweaks moment-to-moment to respond to fluctuations in the water conditions.
As we look at detangling our identities from our profession, we need to focus on building balance so our identities are an amalgamation of who I see myself to be in various diverse parts of my life. Last week I suggested thinking about this like investment banking. When we build our identities in exclusive ways, like into our profession, or another common one is into our role as parents, and tie them to things that invariably come to an end or can be pulled out from under us, we put all of our eggs into one very janky basket. So then, if I’m off work, or I retire, or my kids leave home, my sense of self feels jeopardized because that basket just got yanked and my whole self is tanked without it.
In investing they talk about diversifying your portfolio. Financially is isn’t wise to take your hard earned money and put it all in one company’s stocks. Because if that company takes a hit, you are along for that ride in a very deep way. The recommendation is to spread what you want to invest into a few areas so that if one takes a bit of a hit, it’s likely counterbalanced by something else that’s doing well, and over time you can better ride the ebbs and flows that are a natural part of the market, coming out ahead overall. The same theory is true for us as people. We need to conscientiously and intentionally diversify our personal portfolios. We need to invest our sense of self into differing areas so that if I’m off work for a stretch of time, the part of me that feels tied to that is supported by other things that also and equally meaningfully define me.
So, where do we invest ourselves to be able to achieve a greater return on our investment? How do we do this whole diversified portfolio thing for our own personal balancing act?
It starts by cultivating interests and prioritizing time to be versions of ourselves that feel good, affirming, meaningful, and so on. Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, who literally wrote the book on emotional survival for law enforcement and whose work extends into most first response and front line work experiences, talks about “I usta syndrome”. That before the job officers tend to have a lot of friends, hobbies, interests, activities, and so on. But then, as they pour into the job and start spending more time with work-mates doing work-related things, they invest more and more into their work lives and less and less into their personal life roles outside of t he work. So it becomes, “I usta fish, I usta go out with friends, I usta go camping” and so on. What did you usta do? What used to mean something to you? What used to feel fulfilling or interesting to you? What have you always been curious about trying but never done? What was your favourite thing to do as a child? What do your friends like to do that you could get into with them? What does your partner or your kids like to do that you would be up for participating in?
I was reading an article written by psychologist Dr. Rachelle Zemlok (link below), and in it she shares this story:, “Joel Fay (Retired police officer, founding member of First Responder Support Network and lead clinician at West Coast Post Trauma Retreat) was quoted stating ‘As I stood there an image came to mind, that of a roof being supported by a single pillar. If that one pillar were removed the entire roof would collapse. But I had a lot of pillars in my life besides work. I had friends, family, volunteer work, sports, and many other interests. I could afford to lose this one pillar. At that moment I knew I was going to be OK.’”
That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to be intentional about building up other pillars to support the weight of life. Work is a pillar. It is an awesome pillar. We can get a lot out of our work and it does get to be a facet of our identities. But that’s where we need to be conscientious – am I allowing it to be a facet or have I defaulted into making it the whole shebang?
If we are identifying that we need some additional pillars and that we need to work at building in some more balance, there is going to be a temptation, and it’s the tendency to go to extremes. As we recognize the risk we’re at by making work the fullness of who we are, we are likely to try to swing to the other extreme and try to build 5 new pillars at the same time. That won’t work, and here’s why – people suck at sustaining extremes. So yes, you’ll join a gym and you’ll book a camping trip and you’ll buy some fishing gear and you’ll pick up knitting, and , and , and…and then you’ll likely fall off of doing all of it because it’s too much too fast. Start small, make it incremental, and recognize that building things…anything…doesn’t happen overnight. Like we said at the start, balance is not a one and done fixed and move on kind of issue. If we pile on too much too quickly, it will feel like that huge wave that came out of nowhere and rocks us off balance and tosses us into the ocean. If we can do it a little at a time, it’s like the smaller waves that our bodies can have a chance to be responsive to adapting to a little bit and a little bit. If you want to start working out more, don’t sign up for a marathon – start by going for a walk on your lunch break a couple times a week. If you want to volunteer don’t sign up to some kind of weekly commitment, but maybe agree to help out occasionally here and there. And don’t commit to things in diverse areas all at the same time. Space it out, see how it feels to add in a thing then another thing and let yourself notice the balance before adding anything more.
When you are considering what pieces to add in, focus on your values. Many of us commit to the work because we value helping and caring for people and making the world a better place. That’s a cool value, but one that can also get draining if we’re not careful. Get curious and creative about ways to lean into this value without depleting yourself. For example, my grandma knits mittens, toques and scarves for homeless people. She does it at her own pace while she watches the news and sips her coffee. It is a hobby she enjoys that she is able to turn into something that contributes toward a value and that she feels passionate about. If we value time with our families and friends, consider ways to structure activities that reflect this. Maybe it’s a family bike ride or a regular family activity or game day where each family member gets to rotate choosing the activity we do or board game we play.
Another way of thinking about this is to consider what you hope people say about you at your funeral. Do you really care if people say, he was a great firefighter, or she was an amazing social worker, or he was a solid nurse, or she was a phenomenal police officer? While it would be nice for our professional contributions to be noticed, it likely isn’t the stuff we would care to hear the most. We’re more likely interested in things like, “they were a great friend, really there whenever you needed them.” “they really cared about people, you could tell that they were really genuine.” “they were real, you felt like you could be yourself with them because you knew you could be real with them” These are the pieces that will help you know what you really value, and I would encourage you to lean into activities that then give space to highlight these aspects of who you are. If you want to be remembered as a good friend, what kinds of activities and ways of engaging would reflect this? How can you invest now and on an ongoing into having that be what people remember about you down the road? How do we contribute to shaping today what we hope our legacy will be in the future?
Now, as I said at the outset, balance isn’t fixed. It won’t be static. It is an always shifting thing that we need to stay continuously engaged with or it will tend to get away from us. That means that we also need to be checking in on our balance on a regular basis. We need to be self-aware and we have to carve out time to intentionally pause, reflect, and adjust.
For example, I may have found a pretty solid balance of things that help me feel pretty good. But then I get injured and I’m off work for a bit. Not only that, my injuries also mean I can’t do my workouts which were another part of my balance strategy. Suddenly, I’m having to re-balance and potentially interject new pillars to support the weight left from those that have, at least temporarily, collapsed. I may have to turn to other pieces that were more background kinds of strategies and make them front and center to get through this time, or I may need to cultivate some new strategies to offset the weight. What I can’t rely on is for life to magically rebalance itself for me. It won’t. If I don’t spend the time and energy to be engaged in the process, and work to make it balance, it will not just magically happen.
My invitation is to be committed to being intentional, reflective and actively engaged. Balance exists, but not haphazardly. It is work. It is effort. But I swear it’s worth it. And when we invest in this on an ongoing, we are investing in ourselves – it means that part of our identity is being someone who gives a shit about ourselves, allowing us to do a better job being present for those we care about. We invest in being a person who is a WHOLE person, not just a professional hat. And when life comes along and we are off work for a stretch, or can’t return to the job, or we retire – we will reap the reward of having invested in a diversified portfolio. We will have a life we have built that we get to continue in. The loss of work will feel like a loss, but it won’t feel like I’M lost.
Episode Challenge:
What needs to shift to build more balance in your life? What gets in the way? How can you work to build a life that will lead to the kind of things you hope will be said of you at your funeral?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
In this episode I cite a couple of books and articles – check them out here:
Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, here.
4 Reasons First Responders Need to Expand Their Identity Beyond Their Jobs by Dr. Rachelle Zemlock, here.
Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipske, here.
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today’s episode we are kicking off a new series on de-tangling identity from the work we do. In this episode we talk about the commonness of enmeshed identity with work, cultural norms that support this kind of enmeshment, as well as the risks involved. In coming weeks we will tackle skills to work at de-tangling our identities from the work we do.
In this episode I cite a couple of articles – check them out here:
The Atlantic article by Derek Thompson, here.
Psychology Today article, “You are not your work”, here.
BBC article, “Why we define ourselves by our jobs” with quotes from Anne Wilson, here.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
In this episode I cite a couple of articles – check them out here:
The Atlantic article by Derek Thompson, here.
Psychology Today article, “You are not your work”, here.
BBC article, “Why we define ourselves by our jobs” with quotes from Anne Wilson, here.
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
These last couple of weeks we’ve talked about physical grounding to help anchor our bodies to the present. We have also talked about mental grounding to help our brains turn on the prefrontal cortex and offer counterbalancing support to the stress centre in an effort to approach times of stress with our whole brains working to solve problems rather than just our survival mode working on overdrive. Today we are going to talk about emotional grounding – another term for which is “self-soothing”. And when we use these three forms of grounding together, consistently and intentionally, we gift ourselves with an increased capacity to notice and honour our needs, as well as the needs of others, and we allow ourselves the opportunity to make strategic choices about how we respond in situations rather than feeling knee-jerk reactive to them.
Now, if “self-soothing” sounds like “baby-ish,” know this: I often tell my clients that adults are just children in tall bodies. While our brains have matured just a little bit more than the brains of our kids, we still share much of the needs, wants, hopes and wishes of our child selves. We gained reason and logic, but we didn’t outgrow the need for support, care, nurturing and soothing. That’s not how brains work. Somewhere along the way, though, we decided that needing care and soothing was a “baby thing” or “weak” and we made it a cultural no-no to model what it looks like to do adulthood self-soothing. So we developed new habits to manage this gap – drinking, drug use, self-harm, binge eating, binge watching TV, endless social media scrolling – these are all our version of semi-socially acceptable self-soothing in adulthood. Notice how many of these things are not particularly healthy?
To be clear: the goal of emotional grounding is not to remove emotion, it’s to support our emotions to keep them within a range that seems ok given the conditions we’re facing, and that allows us to be in the present moment feeling appropriately about the thing we’re doing without undue influence from past or future.
Healthful emotional grounding aka self-soothing looks like and how we implement this in adulthood:
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Find faces you can trust. Try imagining the face or voice of someone you know and trust and care about, or look at photos of someone you care about, and imagine what comforting thing they might say to you in this moment.
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Practice kind self-talk. When you are watching a kid try something and they mess up, would you say, “oh my god, you’re such a screwup, you’re terrible at everything!” …I sure hope not! When we’re talking to kids, we tend to have this ability to hold a lot of grace and be gentle and kind, compassionate and coaching. But with ourselves, if we don’t meet our own standards we rake ourselves over the coals. As previously mentioned, adults are just kids in tall bodies. You brain hasn’t stopped needing that kindness and grace just because you got bigger. We need to work at speaking to ourselves the way a good parent or teacher would speak to a child. “You are working really hard at this, it’s ok that you’re not perfect at it” or “This is tough, but I have done tough things before, I know I am capable of facing this” or “I’ve been struggling with this on my own for long enough, it’s ok to ask for help.” These are all examples of kind self-talk that we can work at implementing in lieu of our harsher self-criticisms, which don’t tend to help us make positive change and keep us stuck in feeling shitty.
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Snuggle. A pet, a kid, a partner, a pillow, a stuffed animal – find something and cuddle. We are wired from birth for cuddling. Cuddling is what helped us regulate as infants, to feel safe and cared for by our caregivers, and we never lose that innate longing for close connection and emotional reassurance. Research has shown that our “cuddle hormones” help to regulate stress, relax our bodies, and regulate our systems.
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Play. Sometimes when we are feeling big feelings that are hard, we can work to regulate them by doing the opposite. When my mood is sinking, going to the park and swinging or playing tag can be an instant mood shifter. You can do this with a pet, kids, a partner, friends – go be playful or silly or spontaneous. Do something you used to enjoy, or try something new. Be a goof. Look silly. Be ridiculous. Give the child inside your tall body a chance to run wild for a beat, and notice how it feels different.
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Focus on favourites. Some people like to list things they are grateful for, others list their favourites of things – food, music, movies, places, books, etc. Whatever it is for you, catalog the good, the likes, the meaningful things in your life. Doing this helps us remember to see the forest for the trees and helps us step back from the immediacy and intensity of what we may be struggling with to see that our lives are bigger and have lots of good too.
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Find a safe place. Whether it’s a real place you have been, or an imaginary place you wish existed, choose a place that you can visualize and go to. Try to imagine yourself there with all your senses – what would you see in this place? Trees, ocean, stream, …? What would you feel in this place? A breeze, cool water, warm sunshine…? What would you smell in this place? Fresh cut grass, salt water, sweet flower scents…? What would you hear in this place? Crashing waves, chirping birds, stillness…? Try to fill the visualization out to make it as real as possible. Make this a safe place you can come to in your mind any time you like. Meditating on a safe place, focusing in on visualization like this, has been shown to reduce stress activation and support capacity for regulation.
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Listen to music. Music can be so evocative. It can elicit emotions in us we weren’t having 5 seconds ago. It can be tied to memory and nostalgia, good, bad and otherwise. Find some music that feels comforting, soothing, or evokes emotions that feel good to you. Have a playlist saved that you can jump to whenever you might need it.
When it comes to us doing these pieces for ourselves, our major stumbling block is likely to be stigma. Not just stigma from others, like I don’t want people to see or know what I’m doing for fear of being judged; but also stigma from within ourselves that judges ourselves critically as weak or something for needing these things. Here’s what I want to make really clear: EVERYONE needs these things. It is literally how brains are wired, and you are not magically the one unique brain in the world that doesn’t need these things or is better than this. While our culture like to praise independence and self-sufficiency and a bunch of other bullshit, it is also a culture that has increasing mental health challenges. What that tells us is that how we are setting up expectations is NOT in alignment with how we’re wired, and we need to do it differently. So yes, this might be uncomfortable, and it might feel counter-cultural, but good! The culture is breaking us, so let’s be counter-cultural. Let’s declare a new direction for our culture and value supporting ourselves so that we can sustainably support and value others without breaking ourselves for it. Let’s recognize our own needs, be attuned to meeting them, and create more effective wellness so that we’re not on the verge of burnout every minute of the day. Let’s make new expectations and take ourselves off the hook for having to be everything to everybody all of the time. Let’s nurture ourselves so we can refill our cup in an effort to be able to pour from it again tomorrow.
Episode Challenge:
Choose 2 of the activities outlined in today’s episode and find some time to practice them this week. What did you notice? Which actions will you take from this series into your new year to continue building on?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are back talking about grounding skills and ways to strengthen and resource our brain so that our brain can do it’s best, allowing us to be OUR best. Last week we talked about some basics around what grounding is and how it works. We also focused on practical and applicable strategies for physical grounding, which uses our bodies to help turn on parts of our brain that help to counterbalance our stress centre and regulate our system. Today we are going to be taking it one step further and we’re talking about mental grounding activities.
Before we go into the practical skills, let’s pause for a minute and make sure we feel really clear on what we’re doing and why it matters – because feeling really tethered to it mattering is what will help us engage the skills rather than stay in our default patterns.
I want you to think of your brain like a muscle. I know it’s not technically a muscle, but let’s pretend for a minute because in a lot of ways it has some parallels in how it operates. The more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets. When we need a muscle or muscle group to work for us in significant ways, we can benefit from taking time to stretch it, strengthen it, and so on. We also stand to benefit from strengthening surrounding and supportive muscle groups to help facilitate the success and sustainability of the muscle or muscle group that we demand a lot from. If we don’t carefully attend to caring for these muscle groups that we rely on, we risk injury.
Your brain, if we can use the muscle analogy, has areas that tend to get worked out at a far higher rate than others. Our lives, from quite young, train us to be very conscientious about the future – thinking, planning, anticipating, worrying, about what comes next. We also train our brains to be highly aware of the past – reflective, learning, ruminating about what has happened so we can try to recreate what’s gone well and deflect from reliving things that haven’t gone great. These pieces of our experience, past and future, tend to activate the areas of our brain connected to our stress centre, giving it a pretty consistent workout. Add to that being in a job that is high stress and demanding, along with being in a daily life that tends to be pretty demanding in its own right, your stress centre has learned to be a pretty dominant force in your brain because it is the muscle you use most.
Meanwhile, using it so often and asking it to lift so much of the weight of life, can lead it to being exerted to exhaustion. We risk injury, ie. mental illness and related concerns, if we don’t offer it some support.
This is where grounding comes into play. Grounding activities, particularly mental grounding activities, help to activate your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that is responsible for all your higher-order characteristically human capacities, like language, problem solving, rational thinking, and so on. Our prefrontal cortex is where our executive functioning lives – this is the part of us that can assess, make decisions and determine next steps. When your prefrontal cortex is working, it acts as a support system to your stress centre – when your stress centre says “time to freak out”, your prefrontal cortex, if sufficiently strong, will jump in and say, “hang on a sec, let’s assess and go from there.” The problem is that our stress centre is connected to a very long evolutionary history of keeping us safe – it jumps to conclusions and acts without consulting your prefrontal cortex. Because we have trained our stress centre to be really strong, it dominates the conversation in our mind. It calls the shots without consultation. This is why we have to train our prefrontal cortex – the more intentional we can be about working out our prefrontal cortex, the stronger a voice it will have to demand that our stress centre take a breath before reacting and allow a more balanced conversation to unfold.
Again, if we anchor to the muscle analogy – think of your stress centre as your abs. You do a ton of crunches and sit ups and bicycles – you do this every single day and over time you get some killer abs. Now, think of your prefrontal cortex as your back muscles. If you don’t equally work to strengthen your back, having killer abs will be largely ornamental and not super functional. Strong abs without a strong back sets off your alignment, weakens your posture, and limits your ability to engage in activities with the full strength that your abs have to offer. When you value the supportive muscle groups, you support your whole self and that’s what we’re aiming for. You’ve done a great job working out your stress centre. I’m sure it is really strong – but is it helping you? Is it capable of doing what you need it to do, when you need it to do it, in a way that benefits you? My hunch is that the answer is no. My guess is that your stress centre leads you to overreact or underreact in certain situations. That it might lead you to freeze in some situations, and go overboard, exhausting it’s own reserves, in other scenarios. I would bet that it often leaves you feeling regret about how you handled something, or uncertain about what to do next. And I bet it costs you a lot of energy. Energy you likely don’t feel you have to spare.
So, if we are going to train our brain to strengthen the prefrontal cortex to help balance out our stress centre, let’s get to it. Today we’re going to talk about 7 totally practical activities you can do, anywhere, anytime, to help with mental grounding – and yes, you’ll find these in the show notes as a quick reference if you need them after you’re done listening. Let me state that these work best when practiced and can be used whenever as a training tool. That said, these can also be fantastic tools to pull out in moments of high stress, particularly if you’ve practiced them in times of lower stress, to help turn your prefrontal cortex on and give it a vote in the decisions your stress centre is making. When people do therapy for anxiety, panic attacks, and things like that, grounding activities are some of the first things we cover as they can be really effective ways to help the brain regulate fairly quickly.
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Use short term recall. Your prefrontal cortex loves to notice differences and distinctions, track things and make use of short-term recall. Try a memory game – google “spot the difference pictures” and you’ll find an endless collection of images where your brain can work to find the distinctions. Similarly, playing memory with the flip cards, or playing that game with your kids where you line up items and take a few away to see which ones are missing, can be great fun ways of strengthening your prefrontal cortex…and theirs! Also games like bop-it or simon where you have to keep track of an order can be easy to do solo or with others.
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Play a categories game. I often suggest to my clients that they play the alphabet game. Choose a category – fruits and veggies; singers; song titles; movie titles; Disney characters; dog breeds…legitimately it could be virtually anything, and work the category through from A-Z. Try to find at least one thing for each letter. If you get stuck, remember that the point of the activity is not to actually find something for each letter, it’s to turn on your prefrontal cortex and regulate your stress centre, so if you’re starting to get stressed that you can find a fruit or veggie that starts with x, skip it and move on. No one will ever know, you are not being tested.
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Use math. Your prefrontal cortex is heavily involved in all things numbers, sequencing and related skills, so engaging in anything math-related will give this part of your brain a workout. Try doing random arithmetic equations, or google “mad minutes” and work through the equations with a timer. Things like counting by 3’s or counting backwards from 100 can be great too.
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Recall and Recite. Try to memorize a phrase from a poem, the lyrics to a song, or some other bit of information. Then work to recall it and recite it. Remember, your prefrontal cortex is really highly involved in all things language, so accessing verbal information and speaking it out loud makes this task an extra intense workout for this part of your brain.
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Repeat a grounding phrase. Choose some basic information that you can identify and repeat that helps you know when and where you are. Something like your name, your age, todays’ date, your location, and that you are safe. Again, using language and data-based information like dates, locations, times, etc. really help our prefrontal cortex turn on, allowing us to counter-balance stress and it’s related feeling, fear.
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Get graphic. Nope, I don’t mean that kind of graphic. I mean descriptive. You can use this one in a lot of way, here are a few. Try describing your immediate environment in detail – the colours, the textures, the sounds, the temperature, all of it. Another version is describing a task you are doing, or an everyday task, in detail. Break it down like you are describing it to an alien who has no idea what you’re talking about. Again, the prefrontal cortex loves language, sequencing and identification – so when we look around and identify our environment or the pieces of a task, the order in which things happen, and the descriptive traits of these pieces, our prefrontal cortex is being highly activated and strengthened.
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Meditation. As discussed in our episode with Olivia from Yoga for First Responders a couple of weeks ago, meditation is a powerful tool that people tend to have a lot of weird stigma around. Mindfulness does not have to take a long time and it does not mean turning your brain off. It does mean focusing our attention, and this uses our prefrontal cortex. Choose something to focus on – something in the room, a specific sound or tone, counting your own breaths, or a mantra or phrase that you can either say out loud or in your mind a number of times.
There you have it – 7 skills for turning on your prefrontal cortex, training it to be strong and have a voice, so it can kick in and help your stress centre respond rather than react. Just like with physical strength training, it takes time and repetition. The more consistently you activate this muscle group, the stronger you’ll get. As with most things, it means being intentional – remembering to fit this into your day and not getting caught in your default patterns. If you have trouble thinking to do these things, I would suggest setting a reminder on your phone that notifies you to do one of these activities once or more each day. As you use them more, they will come to mind more in times when you might need them or have free time to throw a bonus one in to your day. You can also try prompt like having a post-it note on your bathroom mirror, fridge, car dashboard, or work computer to remind you to do a grounding activity. Being prompted in certain spaces can help us connect the activity to the environment, making it more likely that my brain will think to use the activity again if it needed to when in that same environment – so if work tends to be a stress-filled place where accessing grounding and your prefrontal cortex would be really helpful, set up as many prompts in that space as you are able and make use of them when you see them so that your brain builds up a connection between practicing these skills and being in this space.
Episode Challenge:
Choose 2 of the activities outlined in today’s episode and find some time to practice them this week. What did you notice? Think about how you can prompt yourself to do the activities to make sure you stay consistent.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In today’s episode we are continuing to work on back to basics for brain health and we are finishing this series by address grounding. What exactly is grounding? Grounding is a term we use to describe various activities that help people to feel anchored to present time, space and capacity. So often in the busy-ness of our lives, we get caught up in thinking about the past, or focused on the future. Thinking of that next place I need to be or reflecting on that time way back when… When we are spending time in past or future, ruminating about things that have happened or anxious about the next thing to happen, we activate our stress center. Our stress center's job is to help us manage significant stressors – but when we’re talking about past or future, there’s not a lot we can do about those stressors right now – so our body just sits in the distress of having our stress center running without anywhere to put that energy that meaningfully changes or supports the past or future scenario. The role of grounding is to help us anchor back to the present moment, in our present space, in our present day selves.
When we engage in grounding activities, we help to quiet the stress center of our brain AND we help to resource it by strengthening connections to the best thinking parts of our brains (the pre-frontal cortex). The benefits of strengthening these connections between your stress center brain and your awesome thinking brain is that when stress comes, you will have enhanced capacities to navigate the stress from a place that utilizes some of your best thinking resources. If we don’t work to build these connections, we’ll be more likely to feel overwhelmed or shut down by stress, unable to find a way to navigate it, or being reactive to stressors rather than thoughtfully responsive to them.
For today we’re going to focus on physical grounding activities, and in coming weeks we’ll talk about mental grounding and emotional grounding. Blending activities related to all three together will give you the most bang for your buck in supporting your brain, so it can give back to you in big ways. So do be sure to listen to all three episodes and pick out some action items that you are going to try out sometime during your week.
Alright, Lindsay’s list of physical grounding activities:
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Interact with hot and cold. Using temperatures to help our bodies anchor can be really useful. One version of this is holding an ice cube, or putting an ice pack on your neck, or submerging your hands in cold water; and then if you want, try alternating this with a heating pad or submerging in warm water. The sensory feedback of more extreme hot and cold is something our brain will tend to focus in on and prioritize over other kinds of fleeting thoughts, so using temperature can be a great way to help your body connect to present and anchor here.
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Actually get grounded. A few weeks ago Dr. Catherine Multari, the naturopathic doctor who joined us for our episode on nutrition and supplementation and the brain shared a suggestion to go out into your yard, take your shoes off and spend some time with your feet in the grass. Plant yourself. Root yourself. There is something that ties us to the earth and connecting to nature is a part of who we are. Another version of this is putting bare feet into sand or digging with bare hands in the garden. It is the tactile connection between us and the earth.
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Use sensory objects. Have you seen those fidget spinners or those silicon poppers that they make for kids to manage ADHD or tendencies for stimulation? Having some kind of object that encourages tactile connection can be super helpful for adults too and can be extra useful in stressful situations. For example, I often suggest that clients going to court choose a tactile object – a particularly smooth rock that feels soft and calming to the touch, a pendant necklace or bracelet that has some bumps on it that they can touch, or similar kinds of things. This tactile feedback when practiced can help remind our brain to ground, calm and regulate even in more stressful situations. I have some stress balls I love the feel of, and a necklace that has some pointy parts that are helpful to ground me, and a rock I carry in my purse at all times that is a bit bumpy. They are objects that I can draw attention to, that give my brain sensory feedback and move it into interpreting that sensory information – when I use them regularly in calm moments, they build a connection to being calm – so when I use them in more stressful moments they prompt my brain to associate with calm and bridge me back to the part of my brain that has access to calm, logical, capable, and so on.
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Breathe. Obviously we are breathing all the time and that should be a no brainer, but most of the time, particularly in higher stress, we are breathing wrong. Most people, whether they know it or not, breathe relatively shallow a significant amount of the time, and hold their breath more often than they realize. Taking deep intentional breaths, and building breathing activities into your daily life can make a big difference to your general health and wellbeing, benefit your brain, and support more effective stress management. We’ve talked on the show before about box breathing as an easy example of a breathing technique you can try out – as a reminder in box breathing you breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4 and hold for a count of 4. Do this for a few rounds, and then resume normal breathing.
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Savour something. Choose a flavour or a scent and savor it. Draw awareness to it and allow yourself to really soak it in. Find a mint you love, a gum you love, a small candy you really enjoy and focus on the flavour. Alternatively, find scents that make you feel calm or give you a big breath and find ways to access that scent wherever you can. I do this in all kinds of ways. I keep mints I like at my office, lip chaps I love the smell of in my purse, a roll on essential oil that helps me breathe more deeply and feel more energized, and other essential oils that I diffuse at my home, at my office and in my car that make me feel calm and connected to good things. Be in the moment with the smell or the flavour and really focus on enjoying it. What I love about this is that these pieces tend to be able to fit into small moments and be portable, so they can be easily accessible in a lot of workplaces or on quick breaks.
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Move your body. I think we’ve heard a lot between our episode on fitness and our episode on mind-body connection, about how movement is good for us. When we are moving our bodies we need to have some amount of connection to where we are and how we’re moving so we don’t bump into someone or knock something over. Being in movement means having some amount of present moment conscious awareness. You can also use moments of movement to build your grounding skills – for example, while you’re out for a walk, really focus on your breathing. Try breathing in for 3 steps, hold for 1, breathe out for 5 steps, hold for 1. Play around with the count, but use this as a time to focus. Another alternative is being out for a walk and really paying attention to what you hear around you.
Keep in mind, the more you practice the better grounding works – don’t give up and do lots of repetition. Simple is better – don’t make it complicated. And last but not least, get creative and find ways to bring grounding into every part of your day – at home on your own, at the park with your kids, at work, on your commute… find ways to make it portable.
Episode Challenge:
Choose 2 of the activities outlined in today’s episode and find some time to practice them this week. What did you notice?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Additional Resources:
Use (and re-use!!) our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check in with yourself around indicators for burnout and make sure you are being preventative or intervening when you need to in order to curb burnout’s impact on your life, both on the job and off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we continue our series on Back to Basics for Brain Health and we are diving into the digital era’s great controversy – screens and brain health.
Let’s start with talking about the common challenges that come up around digital health for First Responders and Front Line Workers. Some of the most common ones I hear in my office include feeling tired and finding social media scrolling, video games or TV to be easy, passive ways of feeling like they are “doing” something without actually having to “do” much of anything. Another concern is that engaging with screens becomes addictive – we seek the stimulation, the noise, the comfort of the busy-ness around us. There is significant reward to scrolling and stumbling on that hilarious cat video, or hearing an alert that let’s us know someone has liked something we’ve posted, or watching just one more episode of whatever the latest show is… Another challenge is that so much of what we once did is now on our devices. My husband criticized me awhile back for being on my phone a lot while the kids were in the room, and at first I agreed that it was likely more than I wanted to model – but I also realized that when I was a kid my parents ignored us for lengths of time to read the newspaper, call their families, read a book, read the mail, and so on – and now ALL of that is on my devices. So no wonder we’re spending so much time in front of screens! It’s also true that screens are just a very significant and unavoidable part of our day – interacting with screens and technology has become a central aspect of many workplaces, schools, and other public venues. It is also a part of our home lives as we help kids navigate homework or seek to connect with friends for a game or online chat. It is so embedded into our tasks and needed actions that even if we restricted use for pleasure, we would still find ourselves spending a lot of time in front of a screen.
Recognizing that there are some trip wires that get us hung up in a ton of screen time – let’s talk about the impacts. The research has largely focused on the impacts for kids and I think a lot of parents feel concerned about their kids screen time and work to manage that as well as they can given whatever factors are at play for their family. For adults, the difficulty is we don’t have our own adult to censor and help us manage our behaviour. We have to self-impose restrictions or guidelines that serve us well as people in relationship with tech. And that’s tricky, because one thing most people struggle with is some version of self-control.
The thing about self-control is that it’s not fun. The reward isn’t obvious or direct – it isn’t as rewarding as finding that hilarious goat yoga meme that makes you giggle every time you think of it. So doing self-control feels like it means depriving ourselves of something rewarding for some long-term benefit we don’t feel a clear sense of achieving that feels too far into the future to really hang our hats on. Which is why, even when we try really hard to reduce screens or regulate other parts of our lives, we will tend to inevitably fall back into old patterns.
We talked about this concept a bit with Zam in the episode on fitness and brain health. We talked about how the long term reward of fitness is worth it but feels hard to wade through the uncomfortable parts early on where there are fewer short-term rewards to keep us motivated. He talked about the intangible rewards and anchoring to these, and we also talked a lot about having to really anchor to WHY it matters.
We’re going to have to take a similar approach when it comes to talking about screens, self-control, and working to side-step the tendency to fall back into old patterns.
Before we start talking about how we’re going to shift and shape our relationship with our devices, let’s first acknowledge some of the significant impacts our existing relationships with tech have on our brain and our wellness. I want us to feel grounded in the WHY for wanting to take a step back from our coveted devices. And trust me, I’m talking to myself as much as I am to the rest of you!
Let’s start with this one – the advent of tech the way we experience it today has meant that we never get to turn OFF. The whole entire world is literally CONSTANTLY at our fingertips. Yes that means cat memes, but it also means that email from your boss, and news about bombings in Syria, and text messages from your mom guilting you for missing Thanksgiving, and, and, and… It is never ending and can become inescapable. It gives people who used to have more concrete boundaries in place, like your boss or co-workers, a level of access to you that they likely shouldn’t have – and it can feel suffocating. This has meaning for our poor brains that are holding way more than they were ever meant to, and not granting our brains a break from stimulation, expectation, demands, and information overload. There is some indication that this degree of connectivity is related with increasing anxiety rates. I can appreciate that the access to be connected to feels meaningful for us – but the reality of what it means to be “on” all the time has real consequences in terms of our wellness. For example, one study found that adults exposed to more than 6 hours a day of screens (including TV and computers) were significantly more likely to suffer from depression.
One of the pieces cited in studies linking devices to mental health concerns like depression is not just to do with the information overload, but also with the sedentary nature of engaging in device use. We are finding ourselves to be an increasingly sedentary culture. I hear from a lot of First Responders and Front Line Workers this echo of “I was run off my feet my whole set, when I’m on my days off I don’t want to move.” And I get it – although I likely have the opposite problem as someone who is literally paid to sit all day. But this circles us back to that interview with Zam a few weeks ago – movement is one of the pieces that benefits our brain and our bodies in such meaningful ways, and the problem with devices is that they tend to really trip us up from getting the movement we need. They keep us engaged but stuck all at the same time, and that can be a contributing factor to mental health declines into depression.
Alright, we also have to call out the impact of screens on sleep and we’ve already talked about sleep’s impact on your brain. We touched on this one a bit in our episode two weeks ago with Dr. Glenn Landry. The problem with screens and sleep is primarily two-fold. First, the blue light wave emitted by screens and other lights mess with our brains ability to produce melatonin at the right time when it’s time to feel sleepy. This can make it harder for your brain to fall asleep and can mess with your sleep cycle – which then has negative consequences for your ability to feel regulated and capable when it’s time to wake up and face another day…especially when this adds up on an ongoing. Aside from the blue light issue, we also face the challenge of “revenge bedtime procrastination” which we also touched on with Glenn in our episode on sleep. We didn’t go far into it, so let me take a second here. Revenge bedtime procrastination is identified as a tendency to feel like we’ve earned some time to ourselves at the end of a long hard day. Work is finally done, dinner’s been made, the kitchen is clean, the kids are in bed, I FINALLY have some time to do something for ME. So we put on a show, that turns into 2, 3, 4 episodes; or we open a social media platform and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll – and suddenly 3 hours have gone by and I should have been in bed 2 hours ago and…well…since I’m already so late I might as well keep scrolling. We’ve all been there, right? It’s like we’re trying to get back at the day by having this time for us, but the only one is punishes, is US! We put off sleep and put off sleep, yet the best thing we could likely do for our tomorrow-selves, is go the F to sleep. …Side note, there’s a book for parents that is written as a children’s book called “Go the Fuck to Sleep” and it’s the greatest thing ever.
The other major way that screens impact our brains is by messing with our self-esteem. Social media in particular has been shown to have consequences for negative self-image, but this has also been shown in other media exposure. While social media is a great way to connect with people who are far away or support connections with those we’re close to, it can also expose us to ideas of who were are supposed to be, what we’re supposed to look like, and what it means to appear “happy” or “successful” or some other metric of winning life. Engaging with this kind of comparative input for hours on a daily basis can’t help but have an impact on how our brain makes sense of us, others, and the world around us.
Let me give an example. I am never more dissatisfied with my home than when I watch a lot of HGTV. When I’m exposed to everyone else renovating, cleaning, organizing and making their homes beautiful, I look around and kinda just want to burn mine to the ground. Ok, that might be a bit extreme…but really only a bit. Seeing their happy faces, their excitement and joy – it makes me want that. It makes me feel crummy about my home, even though my home is lovely, and it makes me feel like I need to chase after something that I didn’t even really care about until I was exposed to what those people seemed to have. The same is true for other types of comparative exposures – it makes us feel bad about ourselves, our lives, and makes us feel a need to chase after some version of completion we unconsciously believe lives out there somewhere. It can make us lose out on the joy right there in front of us, because we’re too busy looking for the bad and looking ahead to the version of better we have planted in our minds as the ultimate goal we now need to achieve to experience joy.
Ok – so we have some clarity now on the ways in which our relationship with tech impacts our brains, our bodies and our lives. So now what?
Now, I tell you to go grab all of your devices, put them in a pile, and light them on fire. …no, just kidding, don’t do that. Look, I know we’re hitting on the doomsday stuff connected with digital life, but it’s not all bad and it is important that we highlight the ways that tech actually serves us. It can simplify a lot of our lives, it can free up time allowing us to use the time in ways that are better for us, and it can bridge connection to people we care about who are distant. It’s not all bad, the trick is finding this elusive thing called BALANCE and finding the skills to self-regulate our exposure to keep ourselves within that balanced window.
So what does balance look like – well unfortunately the answer is that it’s going to look a bit different for everyone. There isn’t a hard and fast rule that will be effective or even possible for every single person. A solid guideline is to try to limit your combined screen exposure to around the 6 hour mark per day – this is the line where research has indicated more likelihood towards mood disorders. That said, I would suggest that it has less to do with the number and more to do with the quality and emotional experience of the interactions with our devices. For example, if I am spending 5 hours in front of a screen for work, and then an hour mindlessly scrolling social media or viewing catastrophic news – that will likely lead to a certain emotional experience at the end of all of that. Whereas if I spend 5 hours on my computer for work and then spend a couple of hours video chatting with a close friend or family member, and then gaming online with some friends while we laugh and connect, and then watch a funny youtube video that cracks me up…this will likely lead to a different type of emotional experience at the end of the day.
Take home number one is to focus on the quality of your interactions with tech. Take time to notice HOW YOU FEEL as you interact with your devices and the various tasks, platforms and tools you engage with. Do you feel calm and connected or tense and jittery or low and lonely… Take pause and observe yourself, your body and your emotions, and consider which aspects of tech are serving you well, and which ones aren’t; then work from there to set some limits around exposure to the pieces that feel like they take away from you while anchoring to the ones that feel life-giving.
Take home number two that I hope you walk away with is that tech is not life. While it IS unavoidable in this day and age, as with anything, it is best in MODERATION and we need to create boundaries and spaces to be in our real life without distraction. Carving out screen free time in your daily life and being an active participant in finding or seeking out activities that feel engaging and connective without devices is vital – and if we’re not careful it’s going to become a lost art. In some homes, there are set times, like dinner time, where devices are put away, or areas of the home like bedrooms or the kitchen table, where devices are not welcome to be. Naming screen free times or spaces identifies our valuing of being in our actual skin, making eye contact with those who surround us, or even just valuing being with ourselves undistracted to value what other needs we might have. Beyond the time and the space, setting our devices down also gives us the opportunity to pick up a hobby, notice what’s around us, and engage on a level we can’t achieve digitally. Whether it’s taking up knitting (all the cool millennial kids are doing it), learning some new recipes, creating a family board game night tradition, trying a new sport, or goofing off with home repairs – there is a ton to do that isn’t living vicariously through other peoples lives on tiktok, or numbing out while playing candy crush…is that still a thing?
Take away number three, is to focus on building a life you feel good about, so that comparisons don’t feel so tempting or overwhelming. Scrolling social media can lead us into a never ending trap that often only ends in us feeling badly – but it doesn’t tend to lead us toward taking action to remedy anything that we’re feeling badly about. We just get stuck and feel helpless and miserable. Taking a step back from the temptation to scroll and instead invest our time and energy into building the life we long for is the only way out of the trap. Claiming our lives as our own, declaring them and pouring ourselves into them, is the only way to feel really good about where we’re at. So often the digital trap is to backburner our own actual lives. We miss the moments our kids invite us to play, while watching some other mom nail imaginary play time with their perfectly coiffed child in their perfectly adorable playroom that looks neat and tidy with white carpets to boot. We miss the moments of working on our own projects and feeling our own sense of accomplishment and completion while watching endless videos of someone else redoing their home or working on a project we can only imagine hoping for someday. We do this to the detriment of our sleep, of our bodies, of our self-esteem, and then connected to all of these, to the detriment of our mental health. Because as our sleep sinks to keep scrolling or playing or watching, our bodies feel the effect of that. Our bodies are also feeling the effect of the lack of movement, as well as other physiological issues like worsening vision, tendonitis and other hand/wrist concerns, neck and back pain from poor posture and so much more. Then tack on the comparison pieces that mess with our self-esteem and the combination is a perfect storm for depression, anxiety and other mental health concerns. Mix that in with being in work that already puts you at higher risk for mood disorders, PTSD and related mental illnesses as well as higher risk for stress-related physiological concerns like heart disease, diabetes, and so on…can you see how it all adds up?
I get that self-regulating our choices is hard. Trust me, I get it. But if we don’t do it, no one else will do it for us – and we will find ourselves looking back and regretting that we didn’t protect ourselves better when we had the chance. An author I really value, James Clear, the author of the book “Atomic Habits” (also check out this video!) talking about our present day choices as casting a vote for the person we want to be. I love this – it’s uncomfortable but it challenges me to consider how the behaviour I’m choosing right now is either contributing positively or negatively toward the version of myself I hope to be a year from now, or 10 years from now. When I think about who I want to be, I want to be vivacious and full of energy to keep up with my kids as they age and my grandkids someday. I want to be attuned and aware of what’s up for them – I don’t want to miss things because I wasn’t paying attention. I want to be present and remember the moments, to be able to look back and reflect on the best times of my life without it feeling like a blur. And the choices I make today dictate whether I will get to have those things. The choice to play a game with my kids is far more likely to lead to special memories and moments than me ignoring them while I do one more thing on my phone. Spending time going for a walk will lead me to my goal far better than sitting to watch another episode of whatever show I won’t remember in a day let alone years from now. Anchoring to what matters is how we go about making change that feels meaningful for the long haul.
Episode Challenge:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. If you’ve used this tool before, remember to re-use it every 3 months or so to regularly check in with yourself and notice any changes – this is how we stay engaged and active in doing prevention and early intervention!
Additional Resources:
“Go the Fuck to Sleep” by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes (note from Lindsay: It’s less than $10 and the BEST gift for a struggling parent in your life – one of the best laugh/cries I have ever had came from when I was gifted this book when my son didn’t sleep!)
“Atomic Habits” by James Clear (note from Lindsay: read it and love it, has some great stories and tips)
I also love this video that James did a number of years ago – check it out here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thanks so much to Olivia Mead from Yoga for First Responders – check out YFFR and learn more here.
I am grateful for our conversation and the chance to dig into the brain science behind yoga and insights into training our brains to offer their best back to us. I so value Olivia’s background and deep-rootedness in the research as well as her commitment to supporting our community heroes who serve and sacrifice.
We talk in this episode about taking yoga out of the chic studios and getting back to gritty training that we can use in real life. We talk about the essential aspects of mind-body connection and use of breath work and related yoga tools to support life in high stress. We also dig into the research and rant a bit about the system…you’ll love it!
Olivia Mead is the Founder and CEO of the non-profit organization YogaShield® Yoga For First Responders® (YFFR). Olivia is a life-long yoga practitioner and has studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Human Performance, and Trauma-Sensitive Yoga for Veterans. She has taught yoga since 2003 and has focused primarily on public safety since 2013 starting at Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Police Department. Since then Olivia has taught thousands of first responders and military personnel around the country and has spoken at several trade conferences, events, and public safety agencies. Olivia is a member of the Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association and the International Society of Fire Service Instructors.
Olivia shares about YFFR’s app which you can find by clicking here or by searching for YogaShield (YFFR) in google play or app stores.
You can also find YFFR on social media @yogaforfirstresponders on Facebook, and Instagram.
Episode Challenge:
Choose at least one takeaway from today’s episode and work on applying in your life! And if you’re brave enough, tell us about it – reach out on Facebook and Instagram (@lindsayafaas), or email me at support@thrive-life.ca and share what you’re up to, how you’re making use of what you are learning during our Back to Basics for Brain Health Series and how it’s going.
Additional Resources:
Absolutely do go andcheck out YFFR and learn more here. They have a ton of resources and supports and are genuinely trying to help make a difference for those who sacrifice so much on the front lines.
And if you haven’t checked it out yet, or it’s been awhile since you used this tool to self-assess and check in with your wellness, grab our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help assess where you’re at on the burnout spectrum and to get proactive in course correcting.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thanks so much to Dr. Glenn Landry, sleep specialist and creator of the Survive Shift Workprogram. Glenn has generously offered our listeners a 40% discount on this program using exclusive coupon code: BEHINDTHELINE. To learn more about Glenn’s work, his program, and private sleep coaching services – you can learn more at elitesleep.ca.
During this episode we talk about the common challenges with sleep facing those who work on the front lines, including falling asleep; staying asleep; nightmares; panic waking; and “bedtime revenge procrastination”. Dr. Landry walks us through what it means to build a sleep window, protect the sleep window and allow sleep to fill it. He offers some useful tools like the “sleep accountant” and addresses proper sleep architecture. All of this and so much more in included in his comprehensive sleep training program designed for shift workers, and if you struggle with sleep quantity or quality, I would highly recommend taking a look at his program and making use of the exclusive discount he has offered out listeners.
Episode Challenge:
What is one thing you can take from today’s episode and begin applying TONIGHT when you head for bed? If you’re open to it, I would LOVE to hear what you are going to work on – so give me a shout out on social media @lindsayafaas on Facebook or Instagram, comment with your thoughts on this episodes video on my YouTube channel, or shoot me an email at support@thrive-life.ca and let me know how you are working to apply what you are learning from our Back to Basics series.
Additional Resources:
Check out Dr. Landry’s program,Survive Shift Work and use the exclusive 40% discount for our listeners (coupon code BEHINDTHELINE)
Accessing Surviving Shift Work is done in 4 easy steps:
- Click on this link https://education.elitesleep.ca/courses/surviving-shift-work
- Create a new account
- At the checkout, enter this coupon code: behindtheline
- Make sure to click the _Apply_ button to activate your code
If you haven’t, go check out our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide – a downloadable self-assessment tool to screen for burnout and related concerns that also offers steps to get on the road to prevention/recovery.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you and tailoring this podcast to meet YOUR needs! If you love what we’re doing, please share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this resource 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.
Show Notes:
Today I am joined by naturopathic doctor, Catherine Multari to discuss common challenges faced by First Responders and Front Line Workers when it comes to nutrition, and strategies to benefit our brains to support sustainable health through nutrition and supplementation. And yes, we go WAY beyond “salad good, junk food bad” and work to make our conversation applicable to real people with real lives and the need for convenience in the midst of the chaos.
Catherine Multari is a licensed naturopathic doctor. She has been practicing in Port Moody, BC for two years. Previously Catherine was an elite athlete competing in the sport of rowing for team Canada on the international stage. Her experience as an athlete highlighted the importance of health basics- sleep, nutrition, supplementation and visualisation. Following her athletic career, Catherine has spent the last 7 years diving deep into the basic pillars of health and transitioning to a clinical role- where she now helps patients of all ages and backgrounds build a health foundation that can figuratively wither any storm. To connect with Dr. Multari, email info@portmoodyhealth.com.
During this episode we talk about common presentations of First Responders and Front Line Workers in Dr. Multari’s office – including inflammation, feeling exhausted, fatigued or lethargic, struggling with racing thoughts, and a general sense of feeling not healthful or experiencing a full, rich and connected life. We talk about ways our nutrition choices can add to this picture, creating a vicious cycle, and ways to step out of the cycle. We also discuss common supplementation needs for those in high stress jobs, and the ways these benefit your brain so you can keep doing what you do to the best of your ability.
To learn more about Dr. Catherine Multari, check out her work here.
To access more information about naturopathic medicine, check out:
The College of Naturopathic Physicians of BC
The Canadian Association of Naturopathic Doctors
Each province has it’s own regulatory college of Naturopathic Doctors, search to find one in your area.
Episode Challenge:
Choose ONE THING from today’s episode to work at implementing in your own life, and then tell us about it! We want to hear from you – so find me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca and let me know what you chose and how it’s going.
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Tell those you know about the podcast, and that they can find it on our website, here; on most major podcast platforms; and on YouTube. Help others access these resources.
Additional Resources:
Our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to self-assess burnout and identify immediate next steps to turn things around.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thanks so much to Aaron Zamzow (aka “Zam”) for taking the time to join me today. What a gift! Zam is the owner of Fire Rescue Fitness, with a background in personal training and then experience in the fire service. He has blended these pieces to create intentional fitness program to develop functional fitness tailored to the needs of the job.
Today we connected to chat about the impacts of fitness on brain health. We dig into the challenges and barriers that get in the way of prioritizing fitness, ways to circumnavigate these barriers, and tools for implementing meaningful change to give our brains their best chance. He breaks it down in some really straightforward and totally do-able steps that you are going to LOVE.
A little more about Zam:
Aaron Zamzow has over 18 years of firefighting experience as an on-call paid firefighter in Golden Valley, Minnesota and is currently a career Firefighter/ EMT and Training Officer in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the owner of Fire Rescue Fitness, a company that creates workout programs and fitness articles that focus on getting Fire Rescue Athletes "fit for duty." Aaron holds a Bachelor of Science degree in health and wellness, is a NSCA-Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, a NASM-Certified Personal Trainer, a Precision Nutrition Practitioner, and an ACE Peer Fitness Trainer.
He has also, worked in the fitness industry for over 25 years and has experience working with the general population as well as athletes from the NBA, NFL, and NHL. He is the author of numerous fitness programs catered toward Fire Rescue Athletes (firefighters, EMTs and medics). He has recently been published in and writes for Firehouse, Fire Rescue Magazine, Lexipol, FR1 and numerous other first responder publications. He has consulted with numerous departments on the best practices for firefighter fitness and has also managed personal training departments and teams for some of the largest health club chains and fitness businesses. He is excited to bring his enthusiasm and knowledge of the fitness industry and fire/ ems service to the program.
Aaron (Zam) is on a mission to help transform, motivate, and educate 100,000 firefighters, EMTs, and medics to get “fit for duty.”
Check out Zam’s programs! Learn more about Fire Rescue Fitness here, and try out the 28 day free trial here. Check out Zam’s blog resources listed below under “Additional Resources”.
Episode Challenge:
Choose one of the stand-out suggestions that Zam offered in our conversation today and make a plan to implement is starting NOW!
If you want to dive deeper into broadening your wellness repertoire and really digging into building your brain and your reserves, invest in you! Take a look at the Beating the Breaking Point online resilience training program that I developed tailored to support the key needs of First Responders and Front Line Workers in reducing burnout and enhancing sustainability. Don’t forget, from now until Thursday November 11th, we are offering Beating the Breaking Point for $100 off! This is the last chance to register for the program at reduced cost for 2021, and I hope you choose to invest in you and your sustainability by joining. I carefully crafted this program and tailored it to the needs I heard arise most frequently from my clients. The things they wished they had known sooner, the things that might have helped prevent them from landing in MY office – that and more is what you’ll find inside Beating the Breaking Point.
If you don’t know a lot about the program, the quick recap is that it’s a 7-week online training designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers. It develops tools for resilience while acknowledging the ways in which your job isn’t like other jobs. The program includes a thorough and comprehensive workbook designed to help you personalize the information and put together a rock solid plan for sustainability, and if you’re not sure if it’s right for you, it’s ok, because we back it with a 30-day money back guarantee. You can learn more about the program and all the details at here and register here using coupon code BTBP100OFF.
Additional Resources:
Check out Zam’s programs! Learn more about Fire Rescue Fitness here, and try out the 28 day free trial here.
Check out some of Zam’s blog posts on topics related to our conversation today…
20+ Reasons First Responders Should Workout
Healthy Nutrition Leads to More Resilient First Responders
The 5 Fitness Tips Every First Responder Needs to Follow
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We’ve wrapped up our therapy 101 series and we’re moving into a new series called “Back to Basics”. In my role as a therapist, I find that a lot of my time with clients, especially when they first start coming to therapy, is spent supporting them in addressing some pretty basic concerns – things like sleep, nutrition, movement, and other pieces that contribute to their brain health and their brains ability to be resilient. We have to address these pieces because if we don’t, they’ll continue to undermine the work we’re trying to do. These basics are the framework for everything. Throughout the series we will be bringing on experts to talk about each topic.
Today, we’re going to do a bit of a brain basics primer – an introduction, if you will, to our brains and how our brains are impacted by high-stress, predictably unpredictable jobs that can involve shift work, toxic dynamics and a host of other challenges. We’re going to talk about how stress effects you even when you think you’re not feeling stressed, and how to help your brain do it’s best job – which in turn helps you do yours.
Episode Challenge:
Invest in you! Take a look at the Beating the Breaking Point online resilience training program that I developed tailored to support the key needs of First Responders and Front Line Workers in reducing burnout and enhancing sustainability. Don’t forget, from now until Thursday November 11th, we are offering Beating the Breaking Point for $100 off! This is the last chance to register for the program at reduced cost for 2021, and I hope you choose to invest in you and your sustainability by joining. I carefully crafted this program and tailored it to the needs I heard arise most frequently from my clients. The things they wished they had known sooner, the things that might have helped prevent them from landing in MY office – that and more is what you’ll find inside Beating the Breaking Point.
If you don’t know a lot about the program, the quick recap is that it’s a 7-week online training designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers. It develops tools for resilience while acknowledging the ways in which your job isn’t like other jobs. The program includes a thorough and comprehensive workbook designed to help you personalize the information and put together a rock solid plan for sustainability, and if you’re not sure if it’s right for you, it’s ok, because we back it with a 30-day money back guarantee. You can learn more about the program and all the details here and register here using coupon code BTBP100OFF.
Additional Resources:
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thanks so much to T.C. Randall, ER Nurse of 14 years and author of The View From The Wrong Side of The Day (Buy his book, it’s great!), as well as Jennifer Pound, recently retired RCMP Staff Sgt. and face of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) in Vancouver, and creator of the blog Fuel For First Responders.
We broke this conversation about their experiences navigating therapy with an occupational stress injury into two parts. This week we talk about finding the right fit with a therapist and working to recover.
Go back to the previous episode to hear our talk about the difficulties navigating the system and accessing support that fit.
Episode Challenge:
Where have you had success in seeking support? What types of support have been most helpful to you? Are they meeting your needs right now?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers! Registration will close November 1st at 11:59PM. The dare kicks off on November 2nd. Registration is only $10 and includes 5 days of video lessons around 5 key domains for self-care; bonus resources and worksheets to develop a bombproof and sustainable self-care plan; access to our private facebook group to connect, problem solve and hone our skills; and fun prizes along the way to keep you pushing forward. If you are needing to up your self-care game, join us and take the dare.
Additional Resources:
Buy T.C.’s book: The View From The Wrong Side of The Day
Check out Jenn’s blog: Fuel For First Responders
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thanks so much to T.C. Randall, ER Nurse of 14 years and author of The View From The Wrong Side of The Day (Buy his book, it’s great!), as well as Jennifer Pound, recently retired RCMP Staff Sgt. and face of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) in Vancouver, and creator of the blog Fuel For First Responders.
We broke this conversation about their experiences navigating therapy with an occupational stress injury into two parts. This week we talk about the difficulties navigating the system and accessing support that fit.
Join us next week for the rest of the conversation about finding the right fit and working to recover.
Episode Challenge:
What learnings can you take from T.C. and Jenn’s experiences? How does your organization map out a path to accessing support when there is need?
Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers! Registration will close November 1st at 11:59PM. The dare kicks off on November 2nd. Registration is only $10 and includes 5 days of video lessons around 5 key domains for self-care; bonus resources and worksheets to develop a bombproof and sustainable self-care plan; access to our private facebook group to connect, problem solve and hone our skills; and fun prizes along the way to keep you pushing forward. If you are needing to up your self-care game, join us and take the dare.
Additional Resources:
Buy T.C.’s book: The View From The Wrong Side of The Day
Check out Jenn’s blog: Fuel For First Responders.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!! I prefer giving over receiving, so for my birthday week I declare a blitz giveaway of my full resilience training program, Beating the Breaking Point, designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers!! Go to the page and click to register before 11:59PM on Monday October 18th. Use code BIRTHDAY to get this 7-part online training program for ONLY $99!
Today we’re continuing our series on therapy 101 – focusing today on where to look for a counsellor; what to look for in a counsellor; what to ask a potential counsellor (and how to go about doing that); and what to expect from counselling (particularly early on).
Where to look for a counsellor: Different people stumble into counselling through different routes, and it’s important to acknowledge that there are lot’s of ways to find a professional support person.
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Google, how did we ever live without it?? The great thing about google is the ability to find someone conveniently located to you or to search for someone who specializes in a particular area of need. The downside to google and scanning clinicians’ websites is that it doesn’t disclose a lot about the persons personality and whether they’ll be a fit for you.
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Online counselling-specific directories, tend to ask specific fill-in-the-blank questions that allow prospective clients to compare and contrast clinicians skills, interests and so on a bit more side-to-side.
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Professional association directories, offer some amount of safety in knowing that the clinicians represented on the directory meet some minimum criteria for education, training and experience.
NOTE: I know I shared at length in last week’s episode about how counselling is not regulated in many areas, so this might seem confusing. Professional associations are not the same as regulatory colleges – professional associations are run by the group they represent. An example of this is the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors – I register with them, meeting their inclusion criteria, and I pay them annually to be allowed to represent myself as a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC). They have an ethical guideline that I am required to abide by to remain a member in good standing, but the guidelines are formed and enforced within the group, and the only ultimate outcome of failing to abide is to be barred from membership but can’t strip me of my ability to continue to practice since the profession overall is unregulated where I live and work. A regulatory body is intended for public safety to ensure that practitioners meet expectations and offers recourse if expectations are not met including being barred from continuing to practice altogether. Professional associations role is to support their members, but they do offer a layer of protection to the public in having some specific criteria for acceptance.
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A referral from your GP
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Word of mouth referral from a friend or someone you know
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Other professionals who are often connected to counsellors they’ve worked in parallel with – like lawyers, chiropractors, naturopaths, or other para-medical professionals tend to know clinicians whom they trust to refer to.
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Non-profit or government funded agencies can offer referrals or direction including crime victim assistance, ministry of child and family development, community mental health, legal aid, and first nations health. These groups tend to be well-connected to their respective community organizations and privately operating mental health professionals and can suggest who might be a good fit for your needs.
What to look for when looking for a counsellor:
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Education. The main professional associations across Canada require that their counsellors have a Masters Degree in psychology. Individuals who have completed this level of education will have done a four year undergraduate Degree as well as a Masters program typically between two and three years in length. These programs include training in assessment, treating psychological disorders, working with individuals/couples/families/children, and working with a variety of wellness concerns including relationship issues, work issues, addictions concerns, grief and loss, etc. These programs also include intensive practicum/internship experiences where students complete a given number of hours directly counselling clients under the supervision of a professional.
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Registration with a Professional Association (if not in a regulated area). You want to see letters after their name. In areas that are regulated, this is taken care of for you. But for those in unregulated areas, look for registration with a professional association which helps to protect the client. Finding a registered counsellor acts as a bit of a safeguard – you know they had to pass specific criteria to get registered which means that they have the fundamental things they need to effectively help you. Belonging to a professional association requires your counsellor to abide by specific ethical guidelines and it gives clients a place to voice any concerns/complaints. In addition, belonging to an association means that your counsellor is getting regular information about training, resources, and other information that allows them to be even better at their job.
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Be specific about what you want.
a. First, be clear about what kind of clinician you are looking for. Check with your extended medical coverage to see what credentials they cover, and look specifically for someone who meets that. It stinks to go see someone and connect with them only to discover that you can’t get reimbursed for those sessions after the fact. Clinicians do not know which medical programs cover which credentials, so you have to do this piece of diligence to ensure that you are finding someone who will be covered.
b. Second, be clear about what you are needing counselling for and find someone who specializes in that area. Just like there are GP’s who are generalist medical practitioners, and then there are specialists who focus on a specialized area of medical practice, therapists similarly have generalists who work with a range of needs but aren’t necessarily deeply versed or trained in any given one, as well as highly specialized clinicians who invest in dedicating themselves to a specific area of treatment. So if you’re looking for relationship counselling, don’t go to someone who tends to focus on depression. If you’re looking for counselling around a recent or past trauma, don’t go to someone who prefers to do career counselling. If your work factors in as a significant aspect of what you hope to work on in therapy, I would really encourage you to seek out someone who has a specialization in working with trauma, as well as experience working with other First Responders and Front Line Workers, as you are a somewhat unique demographic and tend to benefit from someone who gets your unique challenges.
Alright, you’ve narrowed your search down and found a few counsellors who you feel pretty good about. What comes next? Well, next I want you to anchor to WHO YOU ARE in this process. As you navigate into contacting counsellors and setting up initial sessions, I want you to remember that in this process you are the consumer of a service. This service is personal and intimate and you have a right to be choosy, to be informed and to make choices that are right for YOU.
Questions to ask a therapist you are considering booking with:
Practical questions:
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what level of education do you have?
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where did you go to school?
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how many years of experience have you had?
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are you registered? with which association are you registered?
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how much do you charge?
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how long are sessions?
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do you bill to insurance companies?
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how do you expect payment?
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where are you located?
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do you offer telehealth sessions?
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if you are seeking a counsellor who uses a specific kind of therapeutic approach (e.g. EMDR, OEI, body therapies, play therapy, etc.) you will want to ask about their specific training in the approach as many of these require additional training to a Masters degree.
Professional questions:
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ask about their counselling style (for instance, are they really directive or do they collaborate with you; do they do a lot of teaching skills or do they focus on processing feelings, etc.).
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ask about their theoretical orientation…now the answer to this question may feel a bit over the heads of some people who aren’t into psycho-babble, but you can say something like “can you tell me a bit about how you shape your treatment, in a user-friendly kind of way?” The answer to this question will tell you a lot about what you can expect from the counsellor in your work together.
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Another way to approach this is to tell the counsellor about what problems you are experiencing and ask for an idea of how they would approach these issues.
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It’s ok to ask the therapist whether they have background working with first responders or with the specific type of concern you’re coming with, like PTSD for example.
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You can ask about what additional training they have to support your specific concerns, and ask about what kinds of successes and challenges they’ve had with other clients with similar concerns.
If there are any other questions you would find helpful to feel clear about expectations or would promote your sense of safety with this person on an ongoing basis as you work together, don’t hesitate to ask. They work for you, you get to have a voice in that space, and actually need to for the process to really work for you. Did you know that research has shown that “therapeutic alliance” is THE strongest determinant of the successful outcome of therapy? Therapeutic alliance is the connection between client and counsellor and is defined by 3 main pieces: agreement on therapeutic goals (ie, why you are coming for therapy); agreement on the tasks that make up therapy (ie. the steps toward the goals); and the quality of bond between therapist and client. When these 3 pieces work together, the likelihood of success is far greater and is the strongest predictor of success in therapy.
What to ACTUALLY expect when you start going to counselling:
Now, every counsellor approaches things a little differently, but on the whole you should be able to expect a few key things. If these things are not present, ask questions.
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In your first session, you should expect the counsellor to present you with some kind of contract or agreement that outlines the counsellors expectations (i.e. payment, what will happen if you no show or cancel at the last minute, etc.) as well as the rights you have to confidentiality and the limits to confidentiality. Your rights are to have your information kept confidential except when there is a risk (or suspected risk) of harm to a child, when there is a threat of harm to yourself or to someone else (e.g. threatening to commit suicide or homicide, but not restricted to these alone), and where required by law which becomes a factor if you are involved in an active court case (or will be) as counsellor notes are able to be subpoenaed. Besides the confidentiality agreement, many counsellors will also use the first session to discuss any other stakeholders in your care (e.g. physician, psychiatrist, mental health, social worker, etc.) and may discuss with you the possibility of filling out a form that will allow your counsellor to have contact with these other professionals in order to provide the most effective care possible.
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Once these formalities are complete, the remainder of the first session is often an information gathering time. The counsellor may take notes while you talk, or may have an intake form with specific questions they require to have answered. These questions may include information regarding past counselling, other stakeholders (it can be helpful to bring a list of names and contact information for these people), medications (it’s a great idea to bring a list of medications you are on and the dosage), family (i.e. kids, spouse, etc.), and questions regarding the presenting concerns that brought you to counselling. If you are receiving counselling through an insurance company or other funding, you will likely have a specific number of sessions being paid for which you will also want to discuss with your counsellor so they can tailor treatment to your timeline. This may also be the time when the counsellor will tell you a bit more about themselves and their approach, and is a great time to ask any other questions you may have.
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After the first session, subsequent sessions will typically follow a basic pattern of checking in regarding how things have been going, and then moving into the specific work/goals you have outlined. You can expect that you counsellor will continually check in with you regarding how your goals are being met. You can also expect your counsellor to refer you to other resources/supports as they see fit in order to provide you with optimal care.
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You can expect that your counsellor will act respectfully but will challenge you to make changes that may not always be comfortable. Above all else, you should expect yourself to assess your own progress and be aware of whether you are making the gains you are wanting to make. If it seems like you are not making progress or have stalled, try discussing this with your counsellor, or consider finding another counsellor.
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If your therapist is trained in specific treatment interventions like EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), Neurofeedback, OEI (observed experiential integration), and so on, you can expect them to discuss this treatment with you and walk you through how they would apply it in their work with you before they begin applying these skills. Do ask for additional information and ask questions about any treatment intervention – they should be able to clearly identify why they think this would be helpful for you, how it will look, what to expect and should be able to point you to additional resources where you can learn more. You are allowed to decline interventions that don’t feel like a fit for you, or to try an intervention and then ask to stop if you are finding it is not helpful to you.
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Your clinician is skilled at lots of things, but we’re not mind-readers and your feedback is really important to help guide the process and ensure that we’re tailoring your treatment to meet your needs. Don’t hesitate to speak up.
Episode Challenge:
Check out our one week Birthday special of Beating the Breaking Point. Register before end of day on Monday October 18th to get the 7-part online resilience training program that I developed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers for only $99 using coupon code BIRTHDAY.
Sign up for our waitlist to be notified when the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers is re-opening for registration in ONE WEEK! Registration opens October 19th and will close November 1st at 11:59PM. The dare kicks off on November 2nd. Registration is only $10 and includes 5 days of video lessons around 5 key domains for self-care; bonus resources and worksheets to develop a bombproof and sustainable self-care plan; access to our private facebook group to connect, problem solve and hone our skills; and fun prizes along the way to keep you pushing forward. If you are needing to up your self-care game, join us and take the dare.
Additional Resources:
Check out these directories to help connect with a counsellor/psychologist/social worker who can help support you:
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The BC Association of Clinical Counsellors
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The Canadian Counselling & Psychological Association
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are kicking off our series on therapy for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the topics we’re hitting in this episode include: what therapy is all about, where to find a counsellor, and what to look for in a counsellor.
What a therapist is: This will vary depending on where you live. Here in British Columbia, and in many provinces throughout Canada, counselling and therapy are not “regulated” professions. What that means is that literally anyone can go out and call themselves a counsellor or a therapist without having any specific training, experience or demonstrable competency whatsoever. In other professions like nursing or medicine or even massage therapy, someone cannot call themselves a nurse or a doctor or an RMT unless they are registered with the appropriate professional college. This system ensures some amount of protections for the general public that when they are seeing someone with a specific designation they know that have met some minimum competency criteria to operate under that designation. Unfortunately in counselling, no such publicly held system exists to protect those seeking support at times where they are most vulnerable
If you want to get involved in voicing your concern about public safety and advocate for professional regulation, check out the links provided below under “Additional Resources” to organizations working in various provinces across Canada to lobby provincial governments to do better.
If you live in one of the provinces or states where counselling is regulated, it will be easier to find a therapist who is qualified and competent. If you live in BC or in an unregulated area, your efforts in finding a qualified counsellor will be a bit more difficult.
When we talk about what therapy is about, it’s about finding safety with a professional who works to serve your best interests by ensuring their own competency and credibility in whatever area of practice you are needing support in. It is really important that we identify the shortcomings of our system so that we can seek out explicitly the kind of support that is most likely to result in beneficial outcomes. It let’s us go in with our eyes wide open, and not feel as tripped up when we see some of the challenges for exactly what they are.
What therapy is for: Therapy, when done right, is intended to be a safe space to talk through and make sense of the various challenges you’re facing, alongside someone who is trained to walk you through that process in ways that are grounded in what we know to be effective from research. Much like many other medical professions, therapy is about listening to concerns, assessing needs and triaging interventions to support recovery and healing. Now, that’s a broad example and can apply to all kinds of different concerns, whether it’s trauma and PTSD related issues, or relationship concerns, or mood related challenges, or addiction issues, or general stress and difficulty coping, counselling works to give you a space to step back from the busy chaos of life, grow some clarity and work to develop tools to meet needs and make change.
What therapy is about (and isn’t about): Many people think that “sharing” in therapy means divulging every minute painful detail of our lives. Reliving our traumatic experiences. Feeling all the feels of every hardship ever experienced. That’s not therapy. While therapy may involve some amount of some of these things, therapy is NOT therapeutic or effective if we spend every minute drowning in all the hard stuff. Therapy is a balancing act of acknowledging the hard, finding space for clarity, feeling what we need to feel to support us in making choices about what we need and navigating change. A therapist’s role is to help us hold that balancing act – to not let us drown in the hardness of it all. To hold the tension of all that is hard with all that is good; all that’s been lost with all that’s been gained; all that’s been hopeless with all that is hopeful.
How to know when counselling is right for you: There is never a bad time. You may have times where your needs are not as acute or high, these tend to be times where we’re less inclined to seek therapy because we’re doing ok – but it also tends to be the time where we could be doing some really meaningful work from a place of greater capacity and internal strength to be preventative and proactive in supporting our wellness going forward. For example, if I have a history of depression but right now I am not feeling depressed, it might seem like I should wait to seek counselling for when I’m struggling…but what if I spent this time while I’m in my well place working to develop a plan for when I’m not doing so well? What if I used the energy, motivation and capacity I have in my well time to invest in developing some resources and supports, some interests and self-care, some strategies and tools for managing my depression long-term. Wouldn’t that be better than waiting for when my mood drops again and then desperately seeking out someone to help pull me out of it?
There isn’t a wrong time to seek counselling, but all too often our tendency is to wait until we’re in the deepest darkest hole possible. The hard thing about waiting for that place, is that it’s so much harder to get out. It takes longer. And it can feel too slow. On top of it, given some of the practical limitations we’ve already identified in getting into seeing someone and accessing support, the process of recovering can be even more delayed and prolonged.
My suggestion would be to use the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide to help guide you. If you are showing moderate to severe ratings on the checklist, you would benefit from seeking professional support. If you are in the mild to moderate range of the ratings, you would benefit from engaging in some pro-active and preventative measures to support your sustainability to help keep you from going down when hit by more stressors, or as the seasons change and it’s gloomy outside, or other factors hit.
If you are in that mild to moderate range and not sure that therapy is the right fit right now, I would also encourage you to consider jumping in on our next round of the Self-Care Dare which is an intensive 5 day challenge designed specifically for First Responders and Front Line Workers to hone their self-care and grow their tool kit for wellness and sustainability. We’ll be launching the next dare in October 19th, so keep an eye out for that or sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to access registration.
Episode Challenge:
Check out the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide and assess your needs for support. If you sit in the mild to moderate range, consider joining the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers to get a jump start on building a bombproof self-care plan to keep you sustainable.
Additional Resources:
Find the original blog posts on our clinic website (as well as a bunch of other awesome articles written by our incredible team) here, at ThriveLife Counselling & Wellness.
Want to know which provinces are regulated? Check it out, here.
Ready to push for better regulation of counselling?? Check out and get involved:
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The Federation of Associations for Counselling Therapists in BC
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The Federation of Associations for Counselling Therapists in Manitoba
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The Federation of Associations for Counselling Therapists in Newfoundland and Labrador
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The Federation of Associations for Counselling Therapists in Saskatchewan
Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide – a FREE downloadable pdf tool designed for First Responders & Front Line Workers to self-assess burnout and related challenges
The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers – daily videos walking through 5 key domains for self-care; bonus resources and worksheets to develop a concrete bombproof plan for sustainable self-care; a private facebook group to connect and problem-solve through the process; and fun prizes along the way. Registration opens October 19th. Jump to our podcast page and click to sign up for our waitlist to get an email reminder the minute registration opens up!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are finishing our series on suicide risk prevention, and in some ways we’re wrapping up in the place I intended for us to start. Today we’re talking about what it is like to be the person in the deep dark hole. We’re going to talk about the slippery slope that tends to send us into the hole, how to recognize the hole we’re in, ways to work at intervening to try to find a ladder back out and resources and supports that can help to do that
What leads us into the dark hole: Suicide does not happen in a vacuum. By and large, it doesn’t come out of thin air. It is most typically the “last resort” option that someone can perceive in an effort to cope with too much for too long. For some it is a means of escaping the heaviness of the world. For others it is a sense of controlling what I can in a world where I feel as if I control very little. It often feels tied to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, and sometimes a belief that the world would be better off without me. Getting to that place doesn’t just happen, like one day I’m totally fine and the next day life isn’t worth living. Most often it is a gradual wearing down of my sense of capacity, control and hope for a future that feels meaningful.
When we face gradually additive stressors, we don’t tend to notice the impact these are having on our mental health and wellness as dramatically as we would if one terribly catastrophic thing were to happen. The gradual and cumulative effect adds a little bit and a little bit and a little bit until we feel so overcome that we can’t continue.
For many on the front lines the problem is a bit convoluted. On the one side, you are a normal person. You have normal people problems. Problems that can in their own right be pretty stressful. Children who are sick or have special needs, elderly parents you are supporting, financial strain, and the zillions of day-to-day life stressors, big and small, that we’re having to navigate. Then, you have the problems you face as a result of the work you do. Your Tuesday is being present for someone’s worst day, on repeat. You are exposed to suffering, desperation, pain and so much more within conditions that can feel toxic and/or dysfunctional. All the while you are seen to be this kind of noble person with a noble profession, that can make us feel somewhat restricted from being permitted to fall apart or be human in some of the spheres we’re in. We’re busy, trying to coordinate and negotiate the intersection of our normal people lives with our professional lives. Oh, and our professional lives colour everything. What we see, hear, know and are exposed to in the work taints how we feel and engage outside of the work. We get more guarded, vigilant, hyper-aware – we’re tuned into risk and threat and work to be ready to jump into action no matter what venue we’re in. And to manage all of that, there’s the numbness. The thing that gives a break from feeling the intensity of it all piling up…but not really. Not really, because it’s still all right there. And I have to do it all again tomorrow.
The pace and complexity of navigating these multiple facets of who we are and what our lives are composed of, along with hereditary predispositions, can move us toward physical and psychological health concerns. Sleep is disrupted, appetite, coping behaviours like substance use or screen time, fatigue, irritability, mood swings… We can gradually move down this path and into spaces like burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and so on.
Now, this slippery slope of gradual compounding stressors and the associated mental health concerns I’ve just listed do not in themselves mean that someone will become suicidal. However, the risk for suicide increases exponentially when stressors are high, coping is low, and mental health concerns have become present. The risk increases further if we have had any previous experiences of suicidal ideation or actions, as well as if we know someone who has attempted or died by suicide.
Unfortunately it is common that those in First Response and Front Line Work don’t know what to look for. We hear a lot of the right buzzwords about breaking the stigma, getting help, seeking support – blah, blah, blah. But not being given clarity around what it looks like to need to do these things. We look around and it seems like everyone is struggling, so we assume this is just how it is and we keep on going. We silence ourselves, sometimes even from ourselves, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And we can march ourselves right into that deep dark hole without a clear path out. So tired by the time we get there that we can’t muster the strength to look for a path out. That’s the helpless, hopeless place.
I don’t want that for you. For any of you. It’s why we need to have these conversations – need to confront the uncomfortable things in an effort to equip ourselves. I want you to be the person who does know. The person who saw the indicators and did something about it BEFORE it got so deep and dark.
Knowing what to look for: we need to get really clear about the things that lead us into the dark hole. The thing about life is that it tends to keep moving – which can be part of the problem we find ourselves faced with. We get caught in meeting the day-to-day challenges, along with the big and small stresses that show up along the way, in tandem with a career that is predictably unpredictable. The nature of life continually moving along, is that we can get a bit dragged along for the ride, leading into some perpetual version of survival mode. We can be so caught up that we fail to notice the forest for the trees – we lose track of how we’re doing, whether our lives feel in alignment with what we want or like or would hope for. These pressures and tendencies to feel stuck by the cumulative weight of life can happen for many in the work, but this can be exacerbated by a hereditary predisposition to mental or physiological health concerns, as well as any amount of experiences throughout our lives of trauma or more severe stress. When we have overlap of these kinds of risk factors, it is going to be important to have awareness of what we need to be looking for – our own personal indicators and risk factors that let us know that we’re not doing so well, need support or otherwise need to attend to what’s happening.
For example, if I know that I have family members who struggle with depression and anxiety, that I have a family member who has attempted suicide, that I have some early life exposure to stress, that I have my own history of struggling with low mood sometimes, and that on top of my work right now I am also facing stress related to separation or financial concerns or something like that – the interaction of these multiple risk areas and stressors can quickly add up to feeling unable to cope. As these add up, we can grow increasingly helpless and hopeless, overwhelmed and out of control, disconnected and devalued. This is the place where risk becomes significant, particularly if we begin to pair this with planning or fantasizing about methods to end our lives, beliefs that others in our lives would be better off without us, untreated acute mental health concerns, and access to lethal means. As these factors combine and layer on top of one another, the day-to-day life stuff can easily tip the scales and the exposure to suffering within the work can sit differently. We can start to see ourselves in the stories of those we work with, or wish to trade places with those we are serving. Those can be some solid indicators that we are pretty deep in the hole.
How to recognize the hole we’re in: A common story for those on the front lines is not knowing that what they were experiencing was mental health or occupational stress injury. Not knowing what to look for puts us at risk of getting way deeper before we identify what’s happening or getting help, and finding it to be a much further way we need to claw our way back out. Before we talk about what to look for, let me remind again that we need to make space and time to regularly and routinely check in with ourselves. Knowing this information is only useful if we have the ability to check in with it, compare ourselves against it and evaluate where we’re at. If we don’t carve out space and time, life will continue to lure us into the survival mode tendency to keep spiralling down without knowing why we’re struggling.
Some of the most commonly identified early indicators of stress, burnout, mental health concerns and related occupational stress injuries that can lead toward suicide risk include sleep disturbances like difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, and nightmares or panic waking; increased irritability or difficulty regulating emotions in the face of small or insignificant seeming stressors; feeling jittery or on edge much of the time, even when there is no specific reason; feeling somewhat disconnected or tuned our from things going on around you; struggling to feel relaxed or calm; struggling to feel connected to a sense of purpose or meaning; along with physiological markers such as headaches, muscle tension, gastrointestinal issues, appetite changes, and so on.
As wellness becomes more compromised these concerns will tend to get more severe, sometimes becoming interruptive to capacity to function, requiring days off work or sick leave to manage. We can start to notice feeling more helpless, less in control and experiencing less agency in being able to make change in our lives. We can feel hopeless that things will change or improve and can become fatalistic, having difficulty finding worth or value in aspects of our lives we once found meaningful or purposeful. We can begin to contemplate or fantasize about ways to escape feeling what we feel – this may lead into use of substances or engaging in maladaptive behaviours in an effort to escape ourselves and our own experience. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, self-harm, gambling, shopping or other kinds if self-destructive efforts at disconnecting from our lives, these are attempts at coping that should signal that things are not ok.
If these sound familiar to you, and again you can reference against our Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist which I created as a burnout self-assessment tool, I would encourage you to take some steps to work your way back out of the hole before it feels too deep.
How to help turn the tide and build a ladder out of the hole:
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Treat yourself the way you would treat others you care about. We tend to reduce the standards of care for ourselves compared to how we extend care to others, and this lends to the risk we can find ourselves in. If we can’t value ourselves, or show gestures of valuing to ourselves, we will have difficulty experiencing a sense of valuing in the world and from others. We are with ourselves the most, and need to offer care and valuing to ourselves. Sometimes we don’t know how or where to start with ourselves, so try thinking of what you would tend to do or offer to others and do pieces of that for yourself. This will include saying no to things – drawing limits to protect and preserve your energy. I read something recently that said, “you are a precious and limited resource” and it’s true. Part of valuing ourselves means doing things that care for us – both by inputting things that bolster our internal resources, as well as limiting external things that cost us resources. This may include drawing limits at work – like how much overtime I take on, or switching to a different line to remove myself from toxic dynamics or environments. For many, treating ourselves well when we’re in the dark hole can feel impossibly hard – in part because we know how far we need to go to get back out and it feels overwhelming to try. If this is the case, focus on small steps and allow permission for a gradual building of these pieces. Things like going to bed 20 minutes earlier, or eating one piece of fruit, or doing 5 minutes of light stretching can be starting points that become the rungs on the ladder out of the hole.
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Rreceive what others give. When we’re in the hole it can feel hard to see or hear the efforts others make to reach in toward us. We can be resistant to their care or receive it as pity – we can complicate what it is. Try to let what others offer stand as what it looks like on face value. The same way you would want others to receive from you if they were struggling. Try to allow people in your life to offer and support where they can in the ways they feel able.
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Ask for specific support. While others might offer and try to enter into our hard spaces, they don’t always nail it. Sometimes what they have to offer isn’t what we need – not because they don’t WANT to offer what we need, but because it’s not what they naturally think of to give. Sometimes they may not know HOW to give in certain ways, other times they can they just don’t THINK of it on their own. Being clear with others about what’s happening for us, and what we would find helpful can set them up for success in meeting those needs effectively which then sets us up for success in getting those needs met. Here’s an example – my mom, whom I adore, is an advice giver. What she offers naturally is creative brainstorming solutions to problems. Meanwhile, what I often need is someone to listen and not tell me how to fix. She can do this, she just needs to be reminded to put her fixer tendency to the side and focus on listening. When I pre-empt conversations where this is the need to let her know, we both walk away feeling better – she feels like she met my need, and I feel like I had my need met. It’s so much better than when I fail to clarify my need and she engages in fixing, to which I respond with either defensiveness or shutting down, to which she feels uncertain what went wrong and I feel unheard, devalued, and frustrated that my need wasn’t met.
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A caution around feeling like a burden. One of the barriers I often hear to asking for support from people in our lives is this idea of not wanting to be a burden to those we care about. Here’s the thing about that – if not getting support results in suicide, I PROMISE you that the burden of guilt, and confusion, and regret felt by those left behind is far greater and far more deeply and negatively impactful for their lives on an ongoing basis than whatever burden might exist in them supporting you to remain on this earth. Please don’t delude yourself into believing that you are somehow saving them from pain or discomfort by not asking them for help – this ends up inviting a level of pain for them that is in it’s own right hard to live with. People who care about you WANT to help. They WANT to be a part of your life – good, bad and otherwise. Know that this idea of being a burden is crap and doesn’t hold water.
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Ask for professional support. I know, counsellor is telling you to get counselling. …Or something like that. If you broke your leg, you wouldn’t expect your neighbour to fix it...would you? You would go to the hospital and seek out the right people to do the job. The same needs to be true with our psychological wellness – whether you connect with your GP, your health and wellness people at work or within your union, your workplace employee assistance provider, or with a counsellor or psychologist in your community – get support from the people who do this. We have invested in making our life’s work caring for people exactly like you, and we can offer more than your neighbour.
NOTE:** I know that some have had less-than-satisfying experiences seeking professional support – and if that is a barrier for you in getting help, know that we are going to talk about this exact topic in our upcoming series. As we wrap up this series on suicide prevention for those doing the hard work of caring for our communities on the front lines, we are bridging into a new series where we’re covering what therapy is all about, what to look for in a therapist, how to navigate barriers to getting support, and so much more. I hope you’ll join me as we jump into that series next week, and I hope you will encourage others in your life to take a listen as well.
Episode Challenge:
Take some time to check in with yourself and see what indicators and risk factors line up in your own life, and work to strategize some prevention/intervention ideas to start applying. If it’s helpful, use the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help guide the process to self-assessing and checking in with yourself.
Additional Resources:
Rituals for remembering and honouring here.
Workplace Suicide Risk Prevention quick-reference handout here.
Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide here.
Community Resources for Suicide Risk Prevention for First Responders & Front Line Workers:
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BC First Responder Mental Health here.
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Ways people can help here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are continuing our series on suicide prevention and today we are talking about how we cope when we haven’t been able to prevent a suicide – what we do when our workplace is impacted by the loss of a co-worker who has died by suicide. As we’ve identified in this series so far, those working in first response and front line work are at a higher risk of suicide than the average population, and as such it also means that we’re at higher risk of grieving the loss of a co-worker to suicide. I know that for many of you, it’s hard to not be stumbling on yet another anniversary of the death of someone you’ve worked with – that it can become numbing to cope with the sheer volume of compound losses. For others, the frequency may not be so high, and when co-worker suicides happen you may feel shocked and uncertain how to hold it. We’re also left with this expectation to keep going. To show up and put in your shift set. To carry on carrying on and act as if it’s “business as usual”… in part because to some extent, it is. You are an essential service who is at a higher risk for suicide, and there is expectation that you figure out how to manage the risks of the job, including the loss of people you have been connected to.
WARNING: While you may be able to avoid, ignore, numb or stuff our grief-related feelings around a given loss, or maybe even a series of losses – this will eventually sink you in it’s own right. Avoiding it isn’t actually avoiding it – it’s not steering you away from the iceberg right ahead – it’s more like covering your eyes while careening directly toward it. If you don’t deal with grief and emotions, it will eventually deal with you. That’s a promise, and I have a ton of clients who would echo that this is 100% true.
Common emotions that emerge when someone in our sphere dies by suicide include:
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Guilt. We can feel like we should have seen it coming, should have known somehow, should have done more, connected more. We can carry a sense of guilt for not knowing the person was struggling, or for not taking indications of risk more seriously, or for taking actions to help but these not being successful in preventing suicide.
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Anger. Often being a witness to the aftermath of a suicide leaves us feeling angry with the person who committed suicide. Anger for the impact this leaves behind for those left to continue living and working out how to carry forward with this significant event now a part of their story. We can also experience anger toward situations, people and systems that we perceive as being participants in the factors leading to suicide.
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Sadness. When a person matters to us and we lose them, sadness is an appropriate emotional symbol of the mattering they held within you. Sadness can feel uncomfortable for many, we’re still working to dispel long-held cultural myths about sadness equating with weakness. Sadness is really about missing and grieving something or someone that mattered to us. It is an echo of their mattering, and we shouldn’t want to trade that – because ultimately we are creatures of connection and having people matter to us and mattering to others is the most fundamental aspect of human living.
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A jumble of emotion. There’s an episode of a cartoon called “Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood” – it’s a spin off of Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood and I highly recommend it. In one of the episodes he sings a little song about how “you can feel two feelings at the same time.” Most of my clients have heard this little jingle because it’s valuable for us to know and understand. Humans rarely feel a single emotion. More often than not we feel not only one or two emotions, but rather a host of emotions simultaneously – sometimes even competing or mutually exclusive seeming emotions. We’re complex, and our emotions reflect our innate complexity. Sometimes we can be feeling guilt, anger and sadness all at once. We can remember good times and feel gratitude for those moments and memories while also feeling angry that we’ve been robbed of more time with a person we care about. The jumble of emotions can lead into expressions of our emotions that can feel hard to name or make sense of – frustration, irritability, mood swings, difficulty making sense of things, confusion, difficulty sleeping, and so on. We can struggle to know how to make sense of this thing that has happened – often feeling like we’re left with so many questions unanswered.
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Numbness or Action. For those who have worked within first response or front line work where crisis response is part of your moment-to-moment work every single day of your career, you may also find that you jump over emotions and move directly into numbness – the tuning out of feelings to continue on functioning; or into action mode – where you try to do and solve and fix and manage rather than be and feel.
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Disenfranchised grief. One of the strange emotions that can emerge as a co-worker to someone who has died by suicide, is feeling not entitled to having an emotional response. After all, you aren’t their spouse or child or family member or close friend. You worked together. That’s it, right? We can feel like our feelings need to not matter, or that the feelings we feel are silly or disproportionate. Meanwhile, in first response and front line work, co-workers often work very closely with one another. Shifts are often 8-12+ hours, spending more time together during waking hours of the day than that person likely will with their spouse, children or other close people in their personal lives. Many first response and front line work organizations are built on concepts like brotherhood or family. There is mutual respect, protection, and looking out for one another. These are professions where we rely on one another to stay safe and solve problems that can be life and death. You are riding out the highs and low’s of that together, and it builds an allegiance and bond that runs deep and has impact much like it might for those in the persons personal sphere.
These plentiful and big feelings tend to be why we try to hard to avoid and steer clear of really feeling them. It seems too big, too much, and we have to keep functioning somehow. The thing about grief is that it’s often compared to skidding on ice – when you slam on the breaks and steer to fight the skid it tends to get a whole lot worse, but when you let go of the gas and steer into the skid you tend to course correct a heck of a lot quicker with less likelihood for total catastrophe. When we try to do all we can to avoid grief, we make it worse and it becomes a bigger problem to get ourselves out of on the other side. Meanwhile, if we can try to let go on controlling it a bit and allow ourselves to move with the direction it’s steering us, we tend to be able to come out of it less damaged.
Grief can feel nebulous because it doesn’t really have a strong sense of timeline. It’s hard to say when we’re done grieving – some, myself included, would say that likely we never really are “done”. Grief ebbs and flows – days will feel easier and then harder again, triggers will happen that prompt us back to remembering and grieving a new piece connected to the loss of someone who has mattered to us. The thing about grief is that it is an emotional symbol of our living. If we’re really living, we’re really doing this life thing where we are connecting, feeling meaning in connection with others, and caring in ways that build the beautiful aspects of life – then grief is not optional. It is part and parcel. We grieve because we risked to care. We grieve because we gave a crap – and while uncomfortable, it reminds us that we are doing a life that hurts at times because we risked bits of our hearts.
Giving grief time can be hard, we can have difficulty trusting that the grief won’t feel overwhelmingly heavy for such a period of time that we will inevitably fold under the weight of it. Meanwhile, not giving it time is what tends to load us up for the weight of cumulative losses that will at some point come calling for our attention, and I promise that doesn’t tend to look pretty. My husband often says this thing to my kids when they are having a hard time falling asleep – he says “you have to give sleep a chance”. What he means is they have to stop chatting and reading and singing to themselves and looking all around the room and squirming in their beds – they have to breathe deep with their eyes closed and give sleep a chance to come. It’s similar in grief – we have to give grief a chance. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but we have to open some time for it to come and to have some space. We can’t move through grief if we don’t give it a chance to have space to move through.
Ok, so we know what grief looks like, why we need to engage it and that we need to give it space and time. So now, as we grieve, what do we need to focus on?
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Focus on support. Where you can, try to identify your own needs and engage to meet these, whether that means doing small things for yourself or asking safe people in your life to offer support to you. It is healthy to seek out comfort, nurturance, care and connection. It is also ok to have times of wanting quiet and distance – just be conscientious of engaging this intentionally and ensure you have times of coming back to connection.
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Focus on what matters. Losses are reminders of our vulnerability. Anchor back to the things that matter most to you, what you value and how you prioritize these pieces in your life. Find ways to show value to those people in your life you care about, and ways to feel valued yourself.
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Consider what needs to change. Losses often put things in perspective for us. Sometimes in a jarring and stark kind of way, but perspective nonetheless. These moments can be a prompt to consider whether we are doing our own lives in a way that feels meaningful, and it can be valuable to take pause and consider ways you may want to adjust your own choices and trajectory to be protective of your values and wishes.
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Cultivate rituals of remembering. As you move through grief, think about how you want to remember and honour the person who has died. Finding or crafting rituals for grieving can be really meaningful. For some it may mean getting a cupcake and lighting a candle for the persons birthday each year, taking time to remember the person and the meaning they had in your life. It may mean choosing a day once a year to remember the many losses of co-workers, perhaps a day you take off to go for a hike in nature, or a day where you run a fundraising run for PTSD or mental health, or a day where you talk with others you know about those who have been lost and share memories together. It can be big or small, it just has to be yours. I’ve included a link to some additional ideas below.
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Seek direction. Sometimes grief can get complicated, and sometimes it is complicated by the fact that we haven’t learned to do it very well and are trying to sort it out and do it differently. You don’t have to go it alone. The specialized grief and loss counsellors I know are some of the most incredible humans I work with and if grief is something you feel unequipped to face and steer into I would really recommend seeking out someone who has specialization in supporting the grief process. They can offer clarity, direction and support as you figure out what it looks like to journey forward.
Episode Challenge:
Consider and develop your own personal rituals for remembering and find a time to set aside to honour those you’ve lost. Open conversations about loss with those you feel safe with within your workplace and how to cultivate rituals of remembering together if possible.
Additional Resources:
Rituals for remembering and honouring here.
Workplace Suicide Risk Prevention quick-reference handout here.
Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide here.
Community Resources for Suicide Risk Prevention for First Responders & Front Line Workers:
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BC First Responder Mental Health here.
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Ways people can help here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are continuing on with our series on suicide prevention for First Responders and Front Line Workers in the workplace. In today’s episode we’re talking about how to name the elephant in the room and really identify the risks of suicide within front line workplaces. I know that it can feel hard and uncomfortable to confront this topic – we can find it difficult to look it in the eyes. I’ve talked to so many people about this and consistently what I hear is this: we’re afraid of naming it, because naming it makes it real, and if it’s real, we might discover that we can’t handle it. And what would happen then? The wheels would fall off. It would all fall apart. We might fall apart. And we can’t risk that, so we keep that elephant in the corner, acting as if it’s not there, because that somehow seems safer. Meanwhile, people are dying. People you know. People who you share something in common with. …So is it really safer?!
During this episode I mention a couple of statistics and research articles – you’ll find links to them here if you want to take a closer look:
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The Ruderman Family Foundation white paper report here.
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Paramedic PTSD rates here.
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Stats on trauma, PTSD and suicide (not mentioned in this episode but helpful) here. Additional article here.
How to support suicide prevention in the workplace:
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We have to start by doing the very hard thing of calling out the big fat stinking elephant. Putting it in the corner isn’t helping anybody, and it may actually be putting everyone at higher risk. We can’t change problems that we can’t identify – naming the issue is the biggest step we can take toward making it different.
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Next, we need to help other people name it too. One of the most significant barriers to seeking support around mental health concerns and suicide risk is, you guessed it, STIGMA. We fear that people will judge us, think less of us, be afraid of us, reject us, or a host of other fears. We need to work at cultivating conversations that help people know that we are safe to talk with, and work to build safe communities within our workplaces…yes, even when, or ESPECIALLY when, the overarching workplace dynamic is hostile or dysfunctional. Bringing up mental health and suicide can be uncomfortable, but the more you do it the more normal it becomes. And modelling this gives permission for others to do the same – it sets an example that we can grow more openness and gesture care for each other by bringing up the hard topics. Note that those afraid that naming suicide promotes suicide – this has been debunked repeatedly in the research. The truth is, asking the question shows you care to ask a hard question. It shows someone who might be struggling to feel worthwhile that they are worth it enough for you to be uncomfortable asking about their safety and their needs. Talking about suicide does not increase suicide. It opens the issue to allow people who might be headed that direction to feel seen, heard, known and valued – resulting in less risk, not more.
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Knowing what variables tend to increase risk for suicide can be valuable as you assess yourself and the risk for those around you. Check out the handout I created for workplaces to support navigating suicide risk prevention by clicking here and snagging the pdf – it offers a good quick-reference guide to prompt you through what pieces to look for, questions to ask, and steps to take. Search Behind the Line Lindsay and then go to our podcast page to access the show notes to snag this resource.
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Recognize barriers to support and help to circumnavigate where possible. The truth is, there are a lot of barriers to support. Stigma is among them but not the only factor that limits people from connecting with the support they need to find a way out of the dark holes we can feel caught in. For many, the cumulative stress that leads to mental health concerns that then dig us into the dark hole leaves us without the energy or the sense of resources to be able to seek out the support we need, or the energy to access it even if we know where to go and what to do. On top of that, resources themselves can be few and far between – particularly right now, we are facing a practical shortage in accessibility to physicians, psychiatrists, counsellors, mental health programs and so on. In our own clinic, we have seen our prospective client intake emails nearly double month over month since early this year as a result of the ongoing pandemic and related stress and anxiety. The reality is that it can be hard to find professional support with availability – often facing really long waitlists – and it can be challenging to find someone who feels like the right fit. There can also be practical barriers, like finances, transport, childcare, hours of availability clashing with shift schedules, and things like that. It can make the complexity of getting help so much harder in reality than it might seem like to an outsider of the situation.
Finding the energy to traverse these many hurdles when already feeling caught in the dark hole place can feel insurmountable. Having close people offer to help make phone calls, bridge to supports, and get a foot in the door can be a huge help. These gestures of practical support, while valuable in scaffolding to professional support, is actually even more valuable in gesturing care to someone who feels hopeless. It becomes emblematic of the hope that continues to exist in the world, and this can mean more than you know to someone who is caught in it. If it’s you that’s caught in the dark hole, while I know that it can feel impossibly difficult, reach out and let someone in your life know that you’re struggling. If you can, be clear about what kind of help you would find helpful – what can they do to meaningfully support where you’re at right now?
- Be a beacon of hope. Let’s remember that more often than not, people aren’t committing suicide because they want to die. More often than not, people are committing suicide because they can’t see a way out of the dark hole. They feel like death is the only way to escape how complicated, hard and hurtful the world can be. Or, they feel like death is the one thing they can control on a life that feels too far out of control to rein in. The common tale of suicide is despair, disconnection, helplessness and hopelessness. When we see this story being lived out, in someone we know or in ourselves, what is the need? The need is hope. The need is to feel empowered in our lives. The need is connection and care. The need is to be seen, heard, known and valued. The need is practical sometimes, digging out of tangible constraints that feel like they can drown people – support navigating bankruptcy, divorce, the loss of a loved one, and so on. The need is to have others show up to fight alongside, offering the glimmer of hope that I’m not alone in the battle.
There are all kinds of ways we can work to support needs like this alongside one another. We can extend time and energy if we have it to offer to help connect resources and offer care. We can help dig up names and numbers for additional support people who could help pivot the situation – whether that’s a counsellor or a psychiatrist or a financial planner or the local community law program… Our workplaces, if they were willing to be a space that really wanted to care well for their people, could keep updated referral lists and resource handouts that offer meaningful and time-sensitive access to support. To some extent aspects of these already exist in many workplaces – the challenge is the stigma to go and access them. This is why we have to start with opening the conversations, naming the elephant, and building workplace cultures where these conversations are commonplace and not only allowed but highly valued and welcomed.
Most communities have listings of resources, I have included a link in the show notes to some that you may find helpful. For those who are listening who live in BC, I would also encourage you to reach out to our clinic, ThriveLife Counselling & Wellness. Our clinicians specialize in diverse areas of practice and offer both in person support as well as online sessions for those living not in the lower mainland. We also have reduced cost services available to those who are not covered for counselling through your benefits, or for whom benefits are really limited like many social workers or casual paramedics. Our clinic works to be a referral resource to other clinics in the area, so if we don’t have someone who does the work a prospective client is needing, we work hard to connect that person with the right resources in the area. You can reach our clinic at info@thrive-life.ca or check us out at thrive-life.ca.
Episode Challenge:
Grab our Workplace Suicide Risk Prevention quick-reference handout here and open some discussions within your workplace about barriers to talking about suicide risk and ways to talk more about the elephant in the room.
Additional Resources:
Workplace Suicide Risk Prevention quick-reference handout here.
Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide here.
Community Resources for Suicide Risk Prevention for First Responders & Front Line Workers:
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BC First Responder Mental Health here.
-
Ways people can help here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Welcome to season 2 of Behind the Line! We are kicking off this season with a big topic: suicide prevention in the workplace for First Responders & Front Line Workers. As we head into this series, I anticipate it will bring up some discomfort, and possibly some grief for those who have been impacted by the loss of co-workers or others due to suicide. Today’s episode will cover some of the requisite skills we’re going to need as we walk into this topic together for the coming month. I’ve included some additional resources and tools for each week of this series, so come back to the show notes to find more, and please share this series with others in your life.
Friday September 10th is Suicide Prevention Day – learn more about First Responder trauma and suicide risk prevention here.
During this episode I identify the high risks for First Responders and Front Line Workers in developing increasingly complex mental health concerns and risk for suicide as a result of burnout and related difficulties. If you haven’t yet, please check out our Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide for self-assessing burnout and risks for related concerns. Share this resource within your workplace and to those you know in First Response and Front Line work.
As we navigate into this difficult topic, today’s episode focuses on four key pre-requisite skills that we’ll need firmly in place to go through this series together: Clarity; Boundaries; Bravery and Empathy. For each of these we identify what it is, how it relates to suicide risk prevention, and ways to practically integrate each skill starting NOW.
Clarity. Clarity can seem like a fairly simple and straightforward concept – to be clear about something. But the challenge with clarity is that it doesn’t come without some effort. Clarity doesn’t tend to just land in our lap – it requires that we carve out some space and time to shut out the noise and focus in. We need to get clear, we don’t just stumble into it. To work on our wellness and develop skills to reduce the risk for suicide and the mental health concerns that tend to lead toward suicide, we need to cultivate a routine to stepping back from the noise and chaos to get clear about the challenges we’re facing, the impacts those challenges are having on our wellness and our lives, the needs we may have in the midst of these challenges, and the strategies for supporting these needs by using or developing supports, resources and tools. I say often that we can’t address problems we aren’t aware of – this is what clarity is really about – seeing what is happening, getting clear on breaking it down and figuring out what needs to happen to reduce or resolve it.
Feeling caught in a never-ending spiral of meeting unreasonable demands from our employer and the public, mixed with sacrificing so much of ourselves to the work, along with the detrimental impact this tends to gradually have on our relationships with spouses, children, family and friends can set us on a trajectory toward hopelessness, helplessness and powerlessness - and this is a dangerous combination. Prioritizing time for clarity and working to anchor to the things we value and leaning into being the person who lives out our values can be protective - it can help divert us from the trajectory and keep us rooted to hope, connection, and empowerment.
So how do we implement clarity? Start by doing two things – first, download our Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide– print off several copies of the self-assessment page. Next, set aside some time in your calendar on a monthly basis to start. Each month during this time, use the self-assessment to see where you’re at. Use this to ask yourself some key questions about the areas where you seem to be struggling and what you can do to help support those areas more proactively for the coming month. If you want to dive even deeper, have your spouse/partner or a trusted person in your life fill out the assessment as they see you and ask for their feedback on ways you may need to be focusing on supporting your wellness differently. This is a practical way you can start carving out time and space for clarity and a structured tool that can help prompt questions to kick things off. As you feel more comfortable and confident in this process, you can grow your questions to consider additional areas of your life not covered in the indicators checklist to further refine your clarity as it pertains to your life and the person you want to be within it.
Boundaries. We talk a lot about boundaries out there in the world. It’s one of those topics that we’re really good at paying lip service to but tend to be less skilled at actually meaningfully engaging. Boundaries often bring up fears for people about offending or hurting other people’s feelings; worries about creating distance in relationships and alienating people in our lives. It also tends to bring up stuff in our culture about humility, self-deprecation and servitude and believing we need to be giving and gracious towards others. That said, they say that you can't pour from an empty cup, and it's true. If we don't set limits to protect our cup and what's in it, it will quickly be dumped out and run dry. And then what? Then we are at higher risk for burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, posttraumatic stress, anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, and yes, suicide.
Boundaries have two pieces:
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Internal Boundaries: these are limits I set with myself. Limits like, I'll only stay at an event for an hour to ensure I'm home in time to get the rest I need; I'll only pick up shifts a maximum of twice in a month to ensure that I value my days off and carve out "me time"; and so on. These are boundaries that I may never speak outside of my own head, but are limits I set within myself to identify what I value and how I will go about reflecting that value and protecting it from getting swayed by things outside of my values.
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External Boundaries: these are more like the classic boundaries we think of that we set outwardly with other people. It may include boundaries with co-workers about our willingness to engage in debriefs, or limits with others in our lives around the questions they ask about our work (eg, "have you ever shot somebody?"), or a million and one other examples of limits that need to be set to teach those in our lives how to respect us well and care for our values alongside us.
When we engage in identifying areas where we need boundaries (internal AND external), and when we work at enacting these consistently to protect what matters to us, we get to lean into what matters to us more and more, and feel less and less constrained by distractions and needs that aren't our priority. We get to live more of the lives we long for, and this helps to protect us from some of the hard things I mentioned earlier, like burnout, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and concerns leading to suicide.
To implement this skill, I want you to find some time and make a short-list of people who tend to overstep your boundaries or ask a lot of you; or situations where boundaries would help protect your time, energy and values. It’s a short-list, so keep it to the top 5 for now. You can revisit this and change the list down the road. Out of your short-list choose one or two boundaries to focus on for the coming week. My suggestion is not to choose the hardest one to start – allow yourself a couple of smaller wins in the boundary setting arena before you try to conquer something bigger or with someone you perceive as riskier to set a boundary with. Remember that external boundaries can be set kindly, and that ultimately clear is kind – it allows everyone to be set up for success in having shared expectations that feel reasonable and sustainable.
Bravery. The thing I think is magical about bravery is that it isn't about the absence of fear or uncertainty or anxiety - it actually can't exist without those things. Bravery is defined by the existence of fear. It is the doing, engaging, being, showing up, IN SPITE OF fear, uncertainty and so on. You can't have it without the shit. Which means we all have an invitation to be brave, because let's face it, we all have shit going down.
Talking about suicide is uncomfortable for most people, and when you've had any exposure to suicide it becomes more complex and riddled with a mixture of feelings that can shut us down. We need to be able to be brave to jump into this topic together.
Being brave doesn't mean ignoring what comes up for us. Whether it's in your daily life, your work, or this upcoming series, your fears and anxieties are indicators that need to be heard and used to meaningfully direct your coping, self-care and wellness actions. Bravery is not being self-sacrificial... that's more like martyrdom. In part, bravery is knowing what we need and engaging this despite the fact that this might be counter-cultural. It might mean setting boundaries or limiting exposure. Being brave as we embark on our series this month may mean setting aside time to listen and process what comes up rather than skip it altogether or rush through and not make meaning of it. It might mean setting limits around when, how or who you listen with. It might mean spacing out listening or choosing not to listen if it feels too triggering to engage the topic for now.
In terms of implementing, be brave and advocate for you. Not only as we enter into this series, but as we consider what leads first responders and front line workers to the place of suicide. Be brave in addressing your needs before you're so thick in the weeds that it feels impossible to get out. Be brave in seeking support and asking for help. Be brave in identifying your limits and voicing your boundaries to protect yourself from being drowned by the demands of others. Try to consider one area to focus on bravery this coming week.
Empathy. While most people know the word empathy, and perhaps feel able to practice it in some spaces, it tends to be a bit more complicated than we might imagine.
We are familiar with the idea of offering empathy to others. Listening, holding space, being nonjudgmental, working to care from our own place of experience that allows us to share in someone else’s emotions... It takes time and energy and a willingness to offer of ourselves to go there with someone. We do it because they are worth it, we value them, we genuinely care.
But what happens when we need to offer ourselves empathy? Do we have the same capacity to value ourselves, carve out space to hold for ourselves, to really listen to our own needs and feelings, and to engage these non-judgmentally? That one tends to be trickier.
What does this have to do with suicide risk prevention? The truth is that if you work in first response or front line work, you more likely than not have exposure to someone (often many) who have attempted or completed suicide in your workplace. The statistics are staggering and are projected to get worse as we face the long-term consequences of the pandemic and the opioid crisis on those serving on the front lines.
You are at risk.
I know that may sound dramatic, but I promise it isn't. I also promise that the differences between you and those who have attempted or completed suicide are not as significant as you might hope or imagine. We like to think that "those people" face serious mental health concerns, addiction issues, or have other substantial reasons for ending their lives. Meanwhile, the truth is that while these pieces can inform suicide, they don't come from nowhere. They gradually build to the point that we lose control, and it can sneak up on us. Any of us.
Holding empathy is a key skill for navigating this series on suicide prevention, and it will be a key skill for engaging in some of the processes we'll discuss within the series to protect ourselves and those we work with.
Being able to take time to extend empathic care for co-workers and those you see impacted within the work is a valuable resource you can offer to protect those you work alongside. Being able to take time to extend empathic care for yourself is an even more important capacity, as it allows you more to give to others (a better quality of you) and it serves to protect you from some of the risks of getting too far down the rabbit hole without a way to dig back out.
A few ways to start working on empathy for self?
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Set aside time. Sit with yourself without distractions and consider how you're doing. What are you struggling with lately? Where do you expend energy? What do you wish were different in your life? What do you love about your life? Sounds a little like growing clarity, don’t you think?
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Consider the answers to these questions and hear them non-judgmentally. Consider what needs emerge from the answers to these questions.
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Work to address the needs with a heart of caring for you.
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Engage in general self-care and wellness practices
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Review this process regularly.
Episode Challenge:
Engage in the implementation exercises described above to work on building your clarity, boundaries, bravery and empathy skills.
Share with your workplace, union, colleagues and friends about this podcast series and additional resources – help us to make inroads for change and wellness for First Responders and Front Line Workers. Behind the Line can be found on most major podcast platforms, as well as at our website.
Check out our Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide, or go deeper with our Beating the Breaking Point online training program.
Additional Resources:
Suicide Prevention Additional Resource Links
Center for Suicide Prevention – Article for First Responders here.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – Article on Suicide Risk for First Responders here.
BC First Responders’ Mental Health – Crisis Information here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thank you to Maria for joining me today and sharing her story and thoughts around ways to manage the balancing act of front line work and the unique challenges of single parenting. I so deeply appreciate her willingness to share her insights.
During this episode Maria shares about the challenges she has faced in finding a balance – an ever changing balance to be sure! She shared about having to “always be on” and that others who have a partner or additional help may not understand the feeling of constant pressure and having to be everything to everyone. We talked about what it is like to be “on” at work, caring for everyone’s needs, and then “on” at home, having to manage all of the household and parenting tasks solo, while also trying to maintain mental health and sanity.
Maria shared about her own learnings and ways she tries to balance – some of her insights include:
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Simplify wherever possible. Make use of meal delivery services or grocery pre-order services to take some of the stress out and reduce time spent doing the “task-y” stuff.
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Focus on what matters. Maria shared about her custody arrangement and that when she is with her kids she tries to let other things go by the wayside to focus on what is in alignment with her values – sharing time with her kiddos.
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Have grace. Remember that the time with kids is short in the scheme of things. “The days are long but the years are short” so they say. Try to hold grace for your self and for all the expectations to spend time, make mistakes, and find connection.
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Give permission to NOT be perfect. Allow permission for yourself to be human and to share that with your kids. Be mindful to keep it in the realm of age-appropriate, but know that it’s ok to not always be at your best with your kids and that this can benefit them in the long-term, to see and know that as adults they don’t have to meet unreasonable standards.
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Find care for you in the small moments. This is something Maria shared learning about when participating in the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers. We talk a lot about the “big and small moments” and that often it’s the small moments that count for a heck of a lot when they add up. When single parenting and trying to balance so many pieces, the “big” self-care things tend to be harder to find the time and space for, but we can get REALLY creative about finding small things and letting them add up to mean something significant. If you are curious what this can look like for you and how to implement a strategic plan to enact this, sign up for the waitlist to join the Self-Care Dare when we run it next!
Episode Challenge:
Share today’s episode with someone you know who is balancing front line work and single parenting. We know that divorce rates are disproportionately high amongst First Responders & Front Line Workers, so help us spread some support to those who may be struggling to feel seen, heard, known and valued as they walk a journey that can feel really isolating. If you are a front line working and single parent, I challenge you to consider some of the things you already do to show yourself some care, and to consider some small things you could add in to help grow your self-care repertoire.
Additional Resources:
Get on the waitlist for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers!
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are continuing in our series on front line families and the topic today is around family life and cultivating a legacy with intention. During this episode I invite you to think back and reflect on your own experiences within your family of origin; your experiences throughout your lifespan; and the multi-generational impacts that continue to show up and inform who and how you are today. I encourage you to work at engaging similarly in understanding the context and “baggage” of others in your life who you are close with.
During this episode we talk about how our experiences shape us, and can have deep impact in our present-day lives if left unchecked. We discuss the process of looking at our context and growing awareness of the ongoing impact that our experiences have for us. From there, we talk about how awareness arms us with the ability to have power over our experiences and be intentional in shaping how we continue to allow these to influence our lives. We talk about the idea of legacy and being a “legacy change-maker” – anchoring to how we want to be remembered and living into being the kind of person I hope others would see me as.
It is hard to summarize today’s episode, so I am going to encourage you to listen carefully and revisit this one if it’s helpful. I also think that this topic is extremely needed, and I hope that you will share it with those in your life that you think would benefit.
**If there are other concerns that come up often in your home that you would like me to tackle in another episode, shoot me an email at support@thrive-life.ca and let me know.
Episode Challenge:
Engage in the exercise described in the episode – take time to reflect on your family of origin, your experiences throughout your life, and the multi-generational factors that impact you. Spend some time, whether in your mind, with a journal, with a trusted person, or with a counsellor considering how you want to be intentional around the legacy you leave and what it looks like to live into the values you choose to carry forward.
Additional Resources:
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers! We had SO much fun the first time that I can hardly wait to do it again!
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today I am joined by clinical counsellor Heather Toews to discuss the challenges facing First Responders and Front Line Workers who are also juggling the art of parenting. We spend time talking about the difficult transition from work to home, from the perspective of Heather’s previous experience as a child protection social worker. We talk about the impact of what we see on the front lines and the ways this can infiltrate our parenting. And we dig into some tangible ways to work at supporting ourselves and our kids to separate the influence of work from home (hint, you’re going to hear about self-care!).
Heather created an awesome handout that you can snag here, that reviews some of the concepts we discussed today and can act as a reminder prompt as you work to develop your transition skills. And check out her parenting program for parents of children with trauma, Trauma Attuned Parenting.
Episode Challenge:
Work on crafting your list of play ideas that you enjoy – extend an invitation and initiate play/silly/connection in an area that you feel comfortable in that your kids also enjoy.
Additional Resources:
Check out Heather’s Trauma Attuned Parenting Program, here and learn more about her work supporting families struggling with the impacts of trauma.
Register now for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers!
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are shifting gears from our series on daring leadership to a new series on front line families. Tin this episode we are focusing on partnering and the challenges that couples face as a result of the unique stressors involved in first response and front line work. I break down 4 of the common concerns I hear from front line couples/families and work to get clear on the heart of what’s happening and some skills to regroup and reconnect.
The 4 common concerns I hear from front line families include:
- My partner struggles to be present with me and our family. Even when my partner is home, it feels like they aren’t connected.
At the heart of it: I miss my person.
What’s needed:
For the front line working partner: Efforts at skill building around grounding and being present at home. Investing in tools for anchoring and mindfulness can be a big support in really being home when you’re home and getting to fully enjoy what life outside of the work can bring you.
For your partner: Understanding and a shift in expectations that at times your brain will check you out. Clarification around what tends to trigger “checking out” can be helpful for them to have the ability to see it coming and support adjusting and adapting expectations in moments that are harder to remain connected.
- My partner struggles to talk about what is happening with them. I get that they are trying to protect me from what happened in their day, but I feel like I’m losing connection to knowing them.
At the heart of it: I miss my person, and feel missed by them.
What’s needed:
For the front line working partner: Developing conversational topics that allow for you and your partner to join around common interests and shared subjects. If you can’t talk much about work, invest in finding other topics to bring up and share in together. Try the Gottman Card Deck app (google play link / apple store link) for conversation starters and check out their Love Map deck to work at joining and supporting one another in feelings seen, heard, known and valued.
For your partner: Again, shifting expectations is going to be important. Recognizing that we may not get to connect around “what happened in your day” the same way other couples do, but not allowing this to deter connection. Changing the types of questions we ask or ways we connect can be helpful. Supporting the effort to find shared meaning and subjects for connecting around goes a long way.
- My partner struggles with emotions. They seem to rage or be numb, without much in between.
At the heart of it: I’m worried for my person and worry that our family doesn’t know what to expect.
What’s needed:
For the front line working partner: Efforts at skill building around emotion regulation and being present are again going to be significant here. Invest hard in tools that support your capacity to regulate. This might include some boundaries around the transition home, extra buffer in your commute, doubling down on self-care, investing in therapy, etc. You need to be clear with your partner about what you need and what your plan is. Coming up with a code word/phrase/gesture can help to alert people in your life that you’re having a hard moment and need to check out for a bit – with the agreement that you will use this time to actively engage in tools to manage your extremes and come back when you can be connected.
For your partner: Understanding and a shift in expectations that these challenges are common for first responders and front line workers. Clarity about their concern and support in skills to help navigate. Tons of self-care to support their own needs (see below).
- Given my partner’s struggles, I feel like I carry the weight of keeping everything at home afloat, and I feel like my partner doesn’t see how much I take on or have compassion for how hard it is on me at times.
At the heart of it: I’m struggling too and need to be seen, heard, known and valued.
What’s needed:
For the front line working partner: Investment in your partner. Acknowledging their efforts and sacrifice. Energy expended to offer support. Listening to their day with openness and non-judgemental capacity. Compassion for their bad days.
For your partner: Accept help from your partner and others. Invite people in to your struggle, even if it’s a therapist/professional who can support you well. Take care of yourself and focus on your own needs. Provide clarity to your partner about your needs and how they can help meet them.
**If there are other concerns that come up often in your home that you would like me to tackle in another episode, shoot me an email at support@thrive-life.ca and let me know.
Episode Challenge:
Try out the Gottman Card Deck app (google play link / apple store link) – it can be a lot of fun if you let it!
Additional Resources:
Sign up for the waitlist for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers! We had SO much fun the first time that I can hardly wait to do it again!
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
…And that’s a wrap! Today’s episode wraps up our series following Brené Brown’s work from her book, Dare to Lead. This episode includes the bits and pieces we skipped over along the way for the sake of time, as well as some thoughts to tie together the concepts from the book with the interviews with T.C. Randall and Jennifer Pound, as well as with general applications in a front line work pace and environment.
Before we jumped into the episode topic, I mentioned a couple of exciting pieces…
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Our social media contest is happening now until June 7th. Find me on Facebook and/or Instagram and follow the contest rules to score a chance to win a fun prize!
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We are running the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers again at the end of June. Registration will open June 15th and the dare will kick of June 29th, but you can get early access to registering by going to our podcast page (here) right now and signing up for the waitlist!
Some final thoughts and resources from Brené and Dare to Lead:
Armored Leadership vs. Daring Leadership – check out the list here.
Tools to Give & Receive Feedback – check out “The Engaged Feedback Checklist” here.
Concerns & Applications – I encourage you to listen to hear some of the feedback and concerns I’ve heard from listeners throughout this series and my thoughts on how we work to apply these conceptual level skills to the very real and challenging work on the front lines.
Episode Challenge:
Having listened to this series, what is one step you can take in our workplace to grow in your daring leadership? What are you willing to commit to and how does it align with your values and the leader you want to be? …Remember, “who you are is how you lead.”
Additional Resources:
Remember to check out our social media contest and let us reward you for helping us get the word out to others who are struggling on the front lines (links to social media below). We want to grow our reach and support those in need. We also want to hear from you and tailor this resource to offer you the support you need most. AND sign up for the waitlist for the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders and Front Line Workers! We had SO much fun the first time that I can hardly wait to do it again!
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
I am grateful to Jennifer Pound for joining me today. Some of the pieces that stood out to me in our conversation, as it relates to aspects of the system that need to change and tools that daring leaders can work to engage with more intentionally included:
· Limited training around PTSD and mental health related OSI’s, which reduces our ability to self-assess and identify our risks and needs early on in the process. This increases our risk for a greater degree of impact.
· Lack of accessibility to treatment or intervention support in a timely manner. A lack of clarity about the process and the steps to go through. A lack of support in navigating the process and a need for system advocacy for those needing support through the process while managing an OSI.
· Failure to support connection and bridging through the process of being off work with an OSI. This leaves a feeling of being abandoned by the system we have given so much to serve, cultivates resentment that enhances the impact of the OSI and exacerbates symptoms. During these times, we need connection and support and the effort needs to come from within the system, not from those who are struggling to get by while managing an OSI.
· A need for collaboration. Those who know the most about the impacts of the work are those on the front lines engaged in the work. Those in the upper levels of the system need to be open to hearing from others and willing to hear ideas and address needs collaboratively.
Episode Challenge:
Consider these questions: Were you trained in what to look for as it relates to your own mental wellness and work related stress injuries? Do you have a strong understanding of the process and steps if you were to need support within the system that you work? How can you increase your knowledge of these pieces to support your wellness need?
Additional Resources:
You can learn more about Jennifer and her work advocating for First Responders and Front Line Workers by checking out her blog, “Stay On The Line” at fuelforfirstresponders.com. You can also view recent media coverage on CBC, here; and on CTV here.
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:I am so thankful to T.C. Randall for joining me today, sharing his experience as an ER Nurse of 14 years now off on medical leave due to work-related PTSD. Our conversation today focuses on the impacts of broken systems to the very real people working to offer services and make a difference to our communities…people exactly like you. We also work to talk about our perspectives around what needs to change and where we can collectively work to transform the system from the inside out.
T.C. Also discusses these topics and more in his book, The View From The Wrong Side Of The Day: A Story About Nursing, PTSD And Other Shenanigans. You can snag a copy of his book here, or get it on your kindle here! Learn more about T.C. by checking out http://www.wrongsideoftheday.com/ and http://www.tcrandall.net/.
Some of my favourite discussion points that emerged during this conversation (where I got RILED UP!) and connected to the practical ways we can work to transform broken systems from the inside out included:
1. Cultural Level Change:
a. Reducing stigma around workplace mental health and wellness (speaking, clarifying, normalizing and supporting that no one comes out unscathed).
b. Increasing efforts toward prevention and early intervention including training staff in how to assess their status and know the next steps (or who to talk to in an effort to find out the next steps).
c. Normalizing support seeking, and clarifying ways to seek support and processes to access the appropriate support readily.
2. Management/Upper Level Change:
a. Changing the tendency toward reactive band-aid solutions, working instead to identify preventative strategies to reduce load and support the greatest investment which is into the wellness of the PEOPLE doing the WORK.
b. Engaging collaboratively (ie. LISTENING MORE THAN TALKING) with staff to understand the pressure points and actively working together to find creative solutions that actually work to solve the problems rather than juggling them.
3. Public Awareness Level Change:
a. Supporting information for the public around reasonable expectations and the challenges facing the parts of the system they may interact with the most.
b. Supporting information for the public around ways to support the system on a broader level as well as the front line staff most directly impacted.
4. Structural Level Change:
a. Making support accessible (with fewer hoops and WAY more clarity around how to navigate the process). This is both a workplace-level challenge as well as a community-access-to-services challenge.
b. More effectively identifying and supporting the levels of the system that add pressure (I loved TC’s comment of the new ER being like a bigger funnel on the same sized hose – if we don’t support the capacity and efficiency of community health as well as in-patient care, making changes to the ER’s capacity does little to reduce wait times, etc. This problem exists in so many ways that are not specific to ER’s and healthcare!).
c. Taking a stance of prevention and early-intervention in all levels of problem solving rather than being in a constant state of reactively putting out fires.
Episode Challenge:
If you haven’t yet, check out our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Understanding where you stand is a huge step as we work to be our most effective selves and people, professionals and leaders.
Take some time to consider some of the areas of change we identified in this episode (listed above) and how these fit within your workplace system dynamic. What are the most significant areas that you see needing change, and what are some ways you can start to make inroads?
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out T.C. Randall’s book, The View From The Wrong Side Of The Day: A Story About Nursing, PTSD And Other Shenanigans. You can snag a copy of his book here, or get it on your kindle here!
Connected to our series on daring leadership, I also continue to encourage you to grab Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:Today’s episode covers the final aspect of daring leadership, following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead: Learning to Rise. This episode is all about how to handle the hard moments, and how to make them more fruitful for individuals and teams. The learning to rise process focuses on three main pieces: the reckoning, the rumble and the revolution.
The reckoning: This is all about awareness – building our own awareness of when we’re stumbling into a problem or hard interactions, cultivating awareness of our emotions and needs, and preparing to rumble. It means getting clear with ourselves and curious with others.
The rumble: This is the process of confronting challenges together – not in a confrontational way, but rather in a collaborative one with shared curiosity and a willingness to acknowledge the stories we are telling ourselves in an effort the seek clarity and to disconfirm our conspiracies and confabulations. This is where we talk about SFD’s (shitty first drafts) and the story rumble process for teams.
Brené identifies three questions we should ask ourselves about our shitty first drafts:
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What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation?
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What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story?
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What more do I need to learn and understand about myself?
The revolution: This is an acknowledgement that participating in daring leadership skills, particularly those around rising, is revolutionary. It is culture shaping and transformative.
During this episode I talked about a couple of Brené’s free online resources related to today’s topic, here they are (you can access these and other free resources from Brené here):
The Story Rumble Process (A Tool for Groups & Teams)
Dare to Lead Read Along Workbook (you can find exercises including the piece I mention about “permission slips” in here)
Episode Challenge:
Notice your SFD’s (shitty first drafts) in various parts of your life and try checking them out with the people in your life. “The story I’m telling myself is…”
Share this podcast with those you know who are in First Response & Front Line Work – emergency response workers, social services workers, healthcare workers, law enforcement workers, community support workers…the list goes on! Help us on our mission to support wellness and sustainability on the front lines.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
We are continuing in our series on daring leadership following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. Today we are focusing on the third area of courageous and daring leadership: BRAVING trust. In this episode we break down the BRAVING acronym for trust and discuss the value and importance of trust in cultivating committed and caring workplace cultures.
Brené and her team have already done the hard work of summarizing the acronym into a beautiful downloadable pdf, and you can find that here under The Braving Inventory. This link also offers access to several other free tools that are connected to her Dare to Lead work.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Episode Challenge:
Take some time to look over the braving inventory and consider your personal areas of strength and areas for growth. Consider your workplace and where these pieces show up in your workplace or fail to show up and consider some steps you can take to model some of these areas of deficit in your workplace.
Consider bringing the braving inventory into your team and open discussion about applications within your team/workplace.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
As we continue our series on daring leadership, following the work of Brené Brown and her book Dare to Lead, today we are talking about living into our values. This is about being able to identify what is important to us and ways to engage in our lives that align with these values.
Too often we fail to reflect on our values and they become background to our daily choices. We go into survival mode, getting through the days and the challenges but lacking intention. Living into our values asks us to get clear on what really matters to us, the core aspects of what we believe matters most. It then means stepping out of survival mode and developing clear intentionality in behaving in ways that reflect these values, even (and especially) when it is unpopular or uncomfortable. To do this Brené outlines three steps:
Step One: We can’t live into values that we can’t name.
You can access a list of values developed by Brené and her team, here(click on the one called List of Values). Use this tool to narrow down one or two values that feel defining of you. Brené instructs that you can ask yourself these three questions to help guide the process (taken from Dare to Lead, 2018):
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Does this define me?
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Is this who I am at my best?
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Is this a filter that I use to make hard decisions?
Step two: taking values from BS to behaviour.
This involves aligning your actions to the values you’ve identified – it’s where rubber meets road. Brené suggests three questions to help clarify these behaviours (taken from Dare to Lead, 2018):
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What are three behaviours that support your value?
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What are three slippery behaviours that are outside your value?
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What’s an example of a time when you were fully living into this value?
Step three: empathy and self compassion, the two most important seats in the arena.
We need to use empathy to be curious listeners through the process of living into our values and allowing others to live into theirs. We need to utilize empathy to bridge between teams who have varying values as well as varying experiences of being in the arena that shape how they show up. We need self-compassion to manage when we fudge things up, to extend ourselves some grace and an assumption of positive intent.
Episode Challenge:
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Use the List of Values curated by Brené and her team and narrow this down to one or two that feel defining for you. Use the questions above to help the process. If you are in a position of leadership, consider asking those in your team to do the same exercise and discuss the ways your values show up in your work.
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Work through the “operationalizing” process to identify behaviours that allow you to walk your talk.
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Consider your stance on operating from an assumption of positive intent. Does this feel easy/obvious to you that people are doing the best they can with what they have, or does it feel improbable/unlikely/rub you the wrong way? If you have someone in your life (work or otherwise) who you are struggling with, what would change about your approach to them/the situation if you were to know with 100% certainty that they are doing the very best they can with what they have right now? Would the situation with them feel different if you were able to know this was true?
If assuming positive intent is difficult for you, and if you struggle with other pieces like perfectionism, lack of self-compassion, etc., look below for additional resources that you may find helpful. I highly recommend all of Brené Brown’s work, although I think my favourite (aside from Dare to Lead) is Rising Strong…possibly because it was the first book of hers that I read and after that I was hooked!
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with. In addition to her books, she also has two podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, as well as a ton of free resources and guides available on her website.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are tackling empathy which involves a set of five skills. Together these skills and the act of engaging empathically is a lynchpin piece in the willingness to rumble with vulnerability – which is one of the four components of daring leadership identified by Brené Brown’s research.
During this video we identify the value of empathy lies in our ability to connect in a real and meaningful way with people, who are high value assets within systems and organizations. We need people to bring their best in order to offer the best services and supports to the communities you serve – and we help cultivate their best by offering them leadership that sees, hears, knows and values them as whole people. Empathy is a set of skills that when used together offers space for people to be seen, heard, known and valued – empathy works to see what someone is struggling with through the lens of what they feel about it. It is curious and willing to learn rather than know, and it creates meaningful connection which helps to grow safety, trust, confidence and commitment. Workplace cultures that place high value on their people in offering these pieces have repeatedly shown significant improvement in job satisfaction, reduced burnout and related medical/stress leaves, reduced absences, increased productivity and increased commitment to the job and workplace.
The Five Empathy Skills:
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To see the world as others see it, also known as perspective taking
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To be nonjudgmental
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To understand another person’s feelings (and be able to accurately label feelings – AKA Emotional Intelligence)
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To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings
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Mindfulness
Click here to watch a short video by Brené Brown on the difference between empathy and sympathy/advice giving/etc.
Click here to jump to one of my favourite tools for building feeling fluency – the Feelings Wheel (it’s great, I promise!!).
This episode is the third in a series covering the principles that emerged from Brené Brown’s research and writing. I would highly recommend her book,Dare to Lead, and would encourage you to consider reading along as we cover pieces of it. I generally highly recommend her resources which include podcasts, a Netflix special, a youTube video on empathy and a TedTalk about vulnerability and shame from a number of years ago.
Episode Challenge:
Take some time to think about how you interact with empathy. Maybe it’s something you use all the time, or maybe it’s been a skill you’ve undervalued, ignored or never learned. Take a look at the five empathy skills and notice which areas you could work harder at honing and improving. Consider where you could implement these skills more effectively to cultivate daring leadership and a culture of care within your workplace, as well as within your life outside of work.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today we are in week two of our series on daring leadership and cultivating a new generation of leaders who are equipped to lead with courage and transform the broken systems from the inside out. We are continuing to follow Brené Brown’s work, primarily from her book, Dare to Lead. Today we are focusing in on the first of four skills sets that she identifies as components of courage, which is a key facet of daring leadership.
As a reminder…
Brené Brown defines leadership as, “anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.” (emphasis mine).
And the four skills that are key components of courage include:
a. Rumbling with vulnerability
b. Living into our values
c. Braving trust
d. Learning to rise
This episode is focused on rumbling with vulnerability, and next week will be a part two of this topic digging into empathy and shame resilience a bit further as well as some additional concepts and skills that fall within rumbling with vulnerability. Following weeks will focus on the other three skills identified above.
The idea of the rumble comes from a speech made by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
This quote lays the groundwork for the idea of vulnerability and risking being in the arena, which isn’t always glorious, but is the only path to glory – the spectators (the “cheap seats” as Brené calls them) do not. Brené defines vulnerability as, “the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” Can you think of a time where you had to show courage and bravery where you didn’t feel uncertainty, risk and/or emotional exposure?!? Vulnerability is often misperceived as weak, but it is in actual fact directly tied, invariably, to every act of courage that has ever taken place.
Rumbling with vulnerability really just means that we are interacting with this uncomfortable space – that we’re not taking the easy way out and choosing the “cheap seats”, but that we are looking honestly at our own stuff, and inviting interactions with others that are open and willing to touch on things that can be uncomfortable but are also very meaningful. It means taking off the armor and being real, with ourselves and others.
Here is a link that shows the “Armored Leadership” versus “Daring Leadership” lists that come from Brené’s work – check it out here.
We acknowledge that we are often working in settings (and living in settings more generally for that matter!) that demand that we armor up. The broken sharp edges of the system require armor to survive, but this is also a contributing factor to burnout – we starve people of feeling seen, heard, known, and valued because we only reward the armor, which is not sustainable. This is why we need to change the system – to reward brave, courageous interactions that grow vulnerability and wholeheartedness.
This episode is the second in a series covering the principles that emerged from Brené Brown’s research and writing. I would highly recommend her book, Dare to Lead, and would encourage you to consider reading along as we cover pieces of it. I generally highly recommend her resources which include podcasts, a Netflix special, a youTube video on empathy and a TedTalk about vulnerability and shame from a number of years ago.
Episode Challenge:
Think about your sphere of influence. How can you offer small steps toward wholeheartedness within your sphere? How can you connect with others who are willing to do the work to do the same?
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Among the many challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers, systemic toxic workplace dynamics is a significant factor impacting wellness. Every front line worker I have ever known has identified this as a stressor they experience and has been a significant factor in the decline of worker wellness for far more people than it should be. Today we are talking about these realities, as well as a challenge to raise up a new generation of leaders who are equipped to lead from a place of wellness and with a focus on wellness, with a hope to create change to these toxic systems from the inside out.
In this episode I share some of my own experiences of toxic workplace environments as well as my experience learning about leadership and collaboratively creating an incredible workplace culture that has been life changing for myself and everyone else who works in this space. I also share some pieces that have shaped this – largely emerging from the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. The pieces from her book and quotes identified in today’s episode are below for reference, as is a link to this book and some of her others (they are all phenomenal!).
No matter what role you are in, you are a leader. You shape and influence because you exist within the system. It may be in small ways, but it counts. And what if we connected together and all our small pieces added up even quicker into something totally altering to the status quo of the broken system that continues to break good people.
Drawn from Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (2018, p. 4, 10-12):
Definition of Leadership: “I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
Her research identifies that there are three pre-requisites at the heart of daring leadership (as outlined in the definition above), and these include:
- “You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck.”
She then outlines that courage, in this context, involves four key skill sets:
a. Rumbling with vulnerability
b. Living into our values
c. Braving trust
d. Learning to rise
Note: We will be covering these topics in coming episodes.
- “Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.”
No truer words have ever been spoken. “Who we are is how we lead” is exactly why we need to work at investing in ourselves and cultivating our own sustainable wellness plan in order to be able to lead from a place of wellness and in a way that asks others to invest in their own wellness for the sake of organizational wellness and the supports offered down the line to the populations we are serving.
- “Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectations, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.”
We have to lean into our own courage – which, remember, connects back to being vulnerable – to be able to lead others to do the same. When we can be more real with each other, human with one another, there are more opportunities to connect authentically and work together in ways that can be transformative for all involved.
This episode is the first in a series covering the principles that emerged from Brené Brown’s research and writing. I would highly recommend her book, and would encourage you to consider reading along as we cover pieces of it. I generally highly recommend her resources which include podcasts, a Netflix special, a youTube video on empathy and a TedTalk about vulnerability and shame from a number of years ago.
Episode Challenge:
During the coming week, pay attention to where you have influence within your workplace. How can you anchor to your own wellness and model wellness to others within your workplace? How can you demonstrate care and valuing of others in the ways you wish leadership demonstrated? What would it look like to be vulnerable in ways that would enhance connection and leadership at work? And last but not least, consider sharing the podcast and related tools with others in your workplace – start a community of helpers who are motivated in becoming equipped to really make change to the system, together.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
As discussed in todays’ episode, check out Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you’re new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Courtney Jewell is an ICU nurse in Calgary, AB. In November 2020, during the "second wave" and the wave of anti-mask backlash from those with "COVID-fatigue" and the ongoing politicization of masking, Courtney posted her frustration on her social media. It went viral and was picked up by news sources across Canada (check out the Global coverage here). Here is what she shared, and you can link to her post here.
"I have been absolutely disgusted by the comments made by fellow Albertans on Facebook posts and news articles. These horrific Internet Trolls are spreading misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 in our province. These awful people, hiding behind their computers are accusing Nurses and Doctors and data analyst of inflating the numbers, lying about the overwhelmed state of our hospitals, trying to fear monger or even trying to take advantage of all the overtime pay.
It’s gross, and I this is what I want to say to every terrible, ignorant person out there who has been changing my perception of humanity...we will still be there for you!
Despite all the crap you are spreading on-line, when you come into Emerg, with your eyes bulging out of your head because you can’t breathe...we’ll take care of you. Even at great risk to our own health, we will do everything we can to help you oxygenate better as Covid starts to ravage your lungs. And when you deteriorate, we will sedate you, intubate (put a breathing tube in) and transfer you to one of the EXCELLENT ICU’s we have across this province! Even though you’ve been spreading on Facebook that these critical care areas are empty and full of lazy staff that just want to collect overtime pay, we will care for you. We will carefully flip you onto your belly (prone positioning) so that your lungs can have a better chance to oxygenate. We will chemically paralyze you but be nice enough to make sure that you are well sedated so that you are not awake, paralyzed and scared. We will call your terrified and worried family members to tell them that we are doing EVERYTHING we can to save your life. When you go into acute renal failure we will put you on CRRT and become your kidneys for you. As the virus over takes your body, we will support your blood pressure, carefully titrating life saving medications so that you don’t suffer a cardiac arrest. We will bath you, clean your mouth and make sure to lubricate your eyeballs every two hours. I know you think we are just lazy and bored, but we’ll still do all this for you.
We will treat you with respect and dignity and compassion, because that is what we do. No matter what you have said, what you have done, we will care for you. Because that’s just who we are. We are not hero’s but simply people with compassion and who have a desire to help....we don’t need to be attacked right now.
And you know who else we care for??
We will care for your older brother who had a heart attack last night, and your son who was drinking and driving and smashed into a pole. We will care for your niece who had her first baby and then suffered a massive postpartum hemorrhage and your cousin who had a mental health crisis and poured gasoline over himself and lit himself on fire. Your mom who had a massive cancer surgery and your uncle who fell down the stairs and is now a quadriplegic. Because despite what you are telling everyone on-line, we are full of these patients as well.
So my dear ignorant, misinformed Internet Troll, even though you tried to take me down, make me lose my faith in humanity, I’ve decided that you won’t win. And when the reality of this crisis hits you in the face, or destroys the health of someone you love, we’ll be there for you.
I will stop reading the comment sections and continue to teach my kids that when there is a crisis...look for the helpers. And of course, to love thy neighbor!
So much love to my brothers and sisters, fighting in ICU’s across the province, especially to the staff at the Peter Lougheed here in Calgary. We, at the Foothills ICU are thinking of you guys!"
I so enjoyed this conversation with Courtney, and I hope that you found it meaningful too. It would be great to show Courtney some love for coming on and sharing her heart. We would love to hear what you found meaningful from this conversation - share with us on my Facebook or Instagram and I'll make sure Courtney gets tagged in! You can also give a shout out to Mike Sangster whose awesome post we share at the end of this episode.
I am also grateful to Mike Sangster, a pediatric PT from Halifax, who shared this (link to original post here):
"Anyone who really knows me knows that I love Spider-Man. I have loved Spider-Man since I was a kid. I wanted to be a superhero when I was six years old, and that dream never really left me, which probably explains why I chose pediatrics. Some of my patients call me Spider-Mike. This all started in my early career when a young patient and I shared our love for the webslinger and he told me that Spider-Man was the only real superhero because “Peter Parker was just a regular guy, just like us, who happened to be bitten by a radioactive spider”. Made sense to me.
In times like these, many people call healthcare workers heroes. Some celebrate us by making noise in the streets every night, giving us discounts at stores, and even thanking us for our service in the street. At the face of it, that makes sense. People need heroes because heroes save us when there is trouble. Heroes overcome the villains. Heroes give us hope. At the start of the pandemic I thought that maybe this was my Spider-Man moment. However, as I reflect on the past number of weeks, I know that none of us working in healthcare are heroes. Sure, we wear masks, face shields, gloves, and the PPE equivalent of a cape, but in truth we are a lot more like Peter Parker than we are Spider-Man. Peter Parker is a person, “just a regular guy” in the words of my patient, who is just trying to figure it all out. Behind his mask, he has suffered loss and experienced victory. He has doubts and sometimes wants to retreat. He feels every hit in every battle, noting in the movie ‘Spiderman: Far From Home’ that even though he is Spider-Man “it still hurts”. But he keeps showing up. He is scared that who he is puts his family and friends in danger. He longs for normalcy. And there is no superhero PPE to protect his heart and his mind.
We aren’t heroes. We are Peter Parkers. Behind the mask we are just trying figure it all out and do our best. And it hurts. But we will keep showing up.
One of the great Spider-Man quotes comes from Uncle Ben who says: “With great power comes great responsibility”. All of us have the power and indeed the great responsibility to flatten the curve. Please do your part, follow the guidance of our health leaders, and know that we will be there when you need us.
nottodaycovid"
Thank you to those willing to talk with me, share their stories and make a difference every single day. Keep showing up friends, and stay safe.
Episode Challenge:
Listen. Hear your own story, and make room for your story of this past year.
Additional Resources:
All about Courtney: I am a busy momma of 3 that wears many different hats. I have been an ICU nurse at the Foothills for the past 14 years. To balance the crazy and stressful situations that I experience in the ICU, I have also run a small family and wedding photography business for the past 12 years. It has been an amazing creative outlet. I am also passionate about running and fitness as it has helped me cope with difficult and stressful times in my life. Maybe it's the nurse in me, but I have a deep desire to help women reach their own fitness goals. I started an on-line women's fitness accountability group 2 years ago. It is a group of over 40 of the most amazing women who post their workout accomplishments and are celebrated and supported by all members. Our latest endeavour is a new adventure that we are embarking on as a family. It has always been my husband's and my dream to renovate flip houses. We have finally jumped in and are renovating an original 1978-year-old house here in Calgary with the intention of making it a beautiful family home. We are sharing our renovation experience on Instagram @houseofjewell5.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In today’s episode, we are talking about how to process our experiences (COVID-related or otherwise) with others in our lives. We are talking about shaping interactions intentionally and pro-actively – whether these be with colleagues who “get it” or our communities of supporters outside of the work who don’t necessarily get it, but care about us and want to offer what they can. We talk about seven key steps to setting up an interaction for success in an effort to process and make sense of our experiences. These seven steps are laid out in a free downloadable pdf info sheet that you can snag, here.
Episode Challenge:
Download the free pdf info sheet that pairs with this episode, and use it to work through the seven steps in at least one interaction this week. Challenge yourself to step outside of your comfort zone and try it out!
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In this week’s episode we are talking about the pieces that we need to have in place to set ourselves up for success as we work at processing experiences, including (but not limited to) something with the magnitude of a freaking pandemic. If you missed last weeks episode, you’ll want to go back and start there as much of this weeks episode is predicated on understanding what it means to process, which was the focus of last week’s discussion. Also, in case you missed it and would find it helpful, I’ve included the link to last week’s info sheet – a pdf download that you can access by clicking here. You may find this tool helpful to support you in covering your bases while you work at processing.
Key pre-requisites for processing:
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Safety Is Key. The opposite of stress and trauma is safety. Safety helps to reassure our brain and our body that we are out of the hot-seat moment of a significant stressor or traumatic event and that we can let our guard down a bit. It lets our brain and body take a break from scanning for threat, assessing for risk, and running anticipatory scenarios to be prepared for all of the possible outcomes. Safety also helps us keep our brains and bodies anchored in a context that recognizes that we have not-so-safe experiences but that we also have some safe ones – which helps it to process from a lens that knows and feels connected to the fact that the world isn’t all bad or hard or stressful all the time. Skills to support safety include mindfulness practices which we talked about in Episodes 7, 8, and 9 of Behind the Line (check out our library of episodes here to listen to these)
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Balanced Brains Process Best. In your work you run the risk of over-training the stress-center part of your brain (which we talked about in Episode 7). To help support the most effective processing, we need to ensure that we are cross-training our brains so they can use all their best resources to help us make sense of our experiences. We do this by consistently utilizing resilience skills, mindfulness practices and self-care routines (if you want to review these concepts, check out episodes 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14…yes, I know that’s a lot, but they cover these exact pieces – listen while you are commuting or exercising or doing the dishes – you got this!)
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It’s Not JUST About The Story. When we are processing, it’s not about just telling the story of how things went, it needs to be our story of how what happened impacted us. We need to be able to take time to really look at it, and be willing to be honest with ourselves about the scope and scale of impact.
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Connection. Anchoring ourselves into a community of people who help us to feel seen, heard, known and valued is imperative. This helps us to contextualize our experiences from a frame of reference that knows we have worth and helps to counteract some of the crummy thinking, perceiving and skewed/biased internal narratives that we tend to carry with us and allow to inform our meaning-making processes. Reach out to your people to help feel connected to being seen, heard, known and valued – and if you don’t have this kind of support, get really intentional about working to build it.
Episode Challenge:
Review any of the suggested episodes that you may have missed to help round out your skills to support great processing. Keep working at implementing consistent resilience, mindfulness and self-caring skills – it’s a gradual process, and it’s ok to play the long game.
Additional Resources:
If you haven’t yet, check out the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
COVID-19 has hit the world hard, in ways we were largely unprepared for. But no one was hit quite the way First Responders and Front Line Workers were. Being in the thick of it, with your own fears and risks, showing up because you’ve committed to helping – there’s been no time or space or support to step back and really take stock of all that’s happened. All that’s been asked of you. During this episode I share my concern that if we don’t ensure our front liners are equipped to process what they’ve had placed on them, we risk losing a swath of really incredible helpers to burnout, and that would be such a tremendous loss for our communities and an absolute shame.
The content of this episode was a bit more dense than usual, so I have created an info sheet to summarize the concept of processing that you can access by clicking here. You may want to consider printing this off and using as a reference, particularly if you practice journaling or other practices where you engage in reflection, as you may find this helpful to guide some of those practices. I suggest in the episode that you may find it helpful to listen to this episode a couple of times through to help anchor the concepts.
Episode Challenge:
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Spend some time reflecting on how you are processing the story of the pandemic in your own life. What factors are you listening to? Are there one or more factors you need to pay more attention to? What is the story your psyche is putting together? Are there additional perspectives or context that you need to bring in to help the story fit in a way you can integrate and hold as your own?
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Consider registering for the Beating the Breaking Point course, currently at reduced cost using coupon code BTBP100OFF. Click here for more info, or here to jump to the registration page.
Additional Resources:
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Info sheet created to partner with this episode can be accessed by signing up here.
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Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point training here. Register here using coupon code BTBP100OFF before the end of the day on March 11, 2021 to access the training for $100 off.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you (really – it’s my favourite!)! 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.
Show Notes:
This week we are finishing off our 5 week series on self-care, and today’s episode focuses on how we make lasting change and habits to go the distance. During this episode I talk about the Stages of Change Model by Prochaska and DiClamente which includes 6 stages. I have created an infographic that summarizes the stages and you can find it here. The Stages of Change Model is helpful in clarifying that change is not a one-and-done kind of process – it takes time, effort and repetition. We may slip and feel like we’ve gone “backward” sometimes – but know that it’s never really backward, it’s always one step closer than you were before.
We also discuss James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, as well as a video resource he offers on his website that you can check out here. In his work he talks about four stages of habit formation which include: noticing, wanting, doing and liking. It looks a bit like this:
· Noticing: Get really clear on the habit you want to create or eliminate. This isn’t just noticing there’s an issue, it’s noticing how that issue works in your life and getting really explicitly clear on what you are going to do to change it. For example, it’s not enough to say “I’m going to do more self-care” – it needs to look more like, I am going to go to avoid screens after 10pm, and be in bed by 10:30pm every night after doing 15 minutes of stretching.
· Wanting: Once you’re clear on what you are going to change and the commitments you are willing to make to make it different, you need to set things up to help you get there. James talks specifically about your physical environment being a significant factor in either supporting or derailing our habit formation and he says, “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment, you can also be the architect of it.” This might mean things like setting an alarm to remind you to stop screens at 10pm, having fresh sheets on your bed to invite you to crawl in at 10:30, and a space set up with your yoga mat and some chill music to do some stretching before you hit the sack.
· Doing: I love what James says about this: “shut up and put the reps in.” When it comes to doing, we just have to do. Over and over again. Habits come through repetition, and as we do something more it becomes more and more a part of us and who we perceive ourselves to be.
· Liking: Human nature is such that we are provoked to do things when there is a sense of reward. One of the challenges with many of the “good for us” things is that the reward is less immediate. James suggests creating a reward system to promote engaging in habits that don’t have immediate gratification and offers the idea of marking a calendar with an X for each day you do the new habit. Work to get a string of X’s and then try not to break the chain. Might seem silly, but it works!
Last of all we talk about how the system you belong to will tend to offer mixed messages about self-care. It will likely encourage you to do it, but then slap you upside the head when you do. It’s tricky, and unfortunately it is hard and slow to change the system, so focus on what you have control over and not what you don’t. You can do you. You can control taking a deep breath, scrunching your shoulders up and then releasing them down and away from your ears, you can control your screen time and your sleep on days you’re not working…
At the end of the show I also let you know that for the next week, until March 11th, we are offering the Beating the Breaking Point course to our listeners for $100 off the regular price. If you don’t know much about this course, check it out here. When you’re ready to register, click here and use code BTBP100OFF.
Episode Challenge:
If you’ve enjoyed this series on self-care, you’re going to LOVE Beating the Breaking Point, and I would really encourage you to consider registering before March 11th using the code BTBP100OFF. The 7 part online course can be done at your own pace, and is risk-free with a money back guarantee. Check out the info page for more details by clicking here, or jump to the registration page here to sign up. If you’re not sure whether the course is the right fit for you, I would encourage you to snag our free Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help assess where burnout is at for you right now – you can sign up to get it here.
Additional Resources:
Stages of Change pdf infographic
Atomic Habits by James Clear
James Clear’s Website & Video
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
As we near the end of our 5 week series on self-care, this episode focuses on getting practical and ensuring you are equipped to build a plan that will stand the test of time. Here are the key areas we talk about during this episode:
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The core of what we are doing here is showing care, make sure you are orienting your plan back to this over and over again.
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It has to fit. Make your plan flexible and diverse so it can meet the changing needs of your daily life and circumstances. Don’t put all your eggs into one basket – make sure you have ideas that you can use if you are sick or hurt, if you are in an especially hectic time and need to squeeze self-care into less time than usual… Anticipate scenarios and proactively construct contingencies.
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Keep it repeatable and consistent. Our brains learn through repetition, and your brain loves consistency. While not every action will be a daily part of your routine, engaging in efforts of care often and consistently will be key to helping your brain and body learn to calm, regulate, and experience safety and trust – which are all significant in helping to prevent/reduce the impacts of stress, burnout and even trauma.
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Your plan needs to transcend location and context. To be sufficient to flex to your changing days, you will need enough diversity in your plan to shift from flying solo at home to being in a group training at work, to cheering on the sidelines of your kids soccer tournament…and everything else you run into.
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Best when shared. New routines are most likely to succeed when shared with others. It engages a sense of commitment, possibly even accountability, that supports our success. Tell someone about your plans, and share how they might be able to help you be successful.
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Review regularly. Check in with yourself on a semi-regular basis. How is it going? How have you been feeling? Are there areas of your plan that need improving or could be honed? Check in with those close to you, what have they noticed about the changes you’ve been making? Are there areas they see that could use improvement? Use this to catch stumbling blocks early and pivot your plan to keep out of the weeds. Here is the prompt I suggest in the show: "I’ve been working for the last little while on practicing more self-care to help me manage my stress. I wonder if you have noticed any changes in me, and if you could help me reflect on what is going well and what I could continue working to improve on.”
Your plan will be uniquely your own, and it will change over time. Let it. Allow it to grow with you as you continue to grow and evolve. Be an active participant in your plan, review often and don’t let it get stale. Experiment, let it be fun. And remember, we are working at this to pour into you – because this world needs you, and you do best when you are taken care of.
Episode Challenge:
If you have started drafting a plan, consider applications from today’s episode to ensure it is as practical and useable as possible!
Join the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers (registration closes March 1, 2021)
Additional Resources:
Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
A self-care plan needs to reflect you – your interests, needs and lifestyle. It has to fit like a glove, or you’ll be fighting against it rather than allowing it to work for you. In this episode we are digging in to strategies to help us personalize a plan that will be as unique as you are, and the framework to support adapting that plan as you grow, change and evolve as a person over time, or as your needs or time change due to situations and circumstances. Remember, the point of a comprehensive plan – one with lots of ideas and diversity, keeping in mind the areas we discussed last episode (time, budget, energy & context) – is that it can flex with you and your life as you face new challenges or constraints. During this episode I also share some ideas and examples of self-care to help get your brainstorming juices flowing – but I have also included a couple of links to helpful online resources with lists of ideas if you need a jumping off point.
As you develop your personalized self-care plan…
- Take an inventory of what you already do. This will likely fall into a few categories, but remember from last episode, almost anything can be classified as self-care if it’s done with a heart (ie. intention) of demonstrating care. Spend a few days keeping track of the actions that you do all the time, and notice which ones fall into the categories below:
a. Activities you already engage in with the intention of self-care (eg. You may already choose a nice smelling shampoo, or spend time listening to your favourite music in the car).
b. Activities you do often and could have a heart of care incorporated into them relatively easily (eg. Taking a shower everyday but normally rushing through it from a functional focus – shifting this to being a bit slower and enjoying noticing the warm water, the sound of the water falling, the smell of your soap, etc.; Your daily commute normally being to whatever is on the radio – shifting this to finding and loading some great music you love, or nature sounds, or interesting or funny podcasts/audiobooks onto something that can come with you)
c. Activities that you do often that you can create some passive self-care to go along with you (eg. Turning an essential oil diffuser on in your environment while you attend to other things; turning on your favourite music/podcast/audiobook while you do dishes or fold laundry)
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Cover your basic needs. These are the things that need to happen, whether or not they feel nice, in an effort to ensure your health and wellbeing. These include doctors check-ups, dentist visits, hygiene, visits with specialists (physio, massage, doctors, therapist, etc.), as well as ensuring that you are eating nutritious foods that give your body it’s best chance, drinking enough water and getting enough sleep. Think of the things you would do for a kid in your care – eat your vegetables, limit your screen time (I know, that’s a tough one!), get the things done that need to be done.
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Look for things you like. Once you know what you are already doing well or could adapt to be more caring, and you cover your basic needs, move on to the fun stuff. This requires knowing, or being willing to learn about, what you like. For some this may be a bit uncomfortable, as many of us disconnect from our own likes and interests in an effort to do for others. Be willing to experiment and try some things on. Need some ideas…
a. Go back in time. Think about what you used to like when you were a kid. Were you a daredevil? An artist? A bookworm? When you think back to the time in your life when you were the least inhibited and most capable of connecting to joy and hilarity, what did you gravitate towards? Use these as a jumping off point and try to connect them to actions your adult self can engage in.
b. Look around. Take notice of what other people seem to do and enjoy. Use this as a tool to start your experimentation and try things out you might never have thought to try before – then see what fits for you and what doesn’t.
c. Know thyself. Think about what you know of yourself – your personality, characteristics and traits. Beyond your interests, what are the core aspects of you that need spaces to shine? Are you more introverted or extraverted? Do you tend towards action? Competition? Connection? Quiet contemplation? Look for ways to allow these parts of you to shine.
d. Focus on your 5 senses. Your senses are used both for survival and for pleasure. Because of the work you do, they are likely used to being used for survival functions and are associated with stress responses, so we need to work at offering a counter-balance where they connect to good, calm, fun, and other non-stress-related experiences. Seek out smells that make you feel calm, incite a deep breath, or provoke positive memories; seek sounds that help you feel grounded or nostalgic to good parts of your past; seek out flavours that help you connect to the present moment like a cup of coffee, a piece of chocolate, or a mint; seek visual cues that anchor you like your favourite colour, or photos from positive experiences; seek textures that help to feel calm or cared for, like warm fuzzy socks, cozy slippers, a comfy blanket, silky jammies, etc.
Listen to your body and enact the parts of your plan that meet your needs moment-to-moment. Going to the gym may be part of your self-care plan, but if you’re feeling sick or hurt, you need to have something else to do instead that meets your need without doing more damage than good. Make sure to take time to notice how you’re doing throughout the day and use your self-care plan as a reference to spark ideas for what you can offer yourself to help add to your emotional bank account. Remember, we are caring for ourselves because investing in ourselves is great and it allows us to give to others more effectively.
In the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers we will be working at putting all of these pieces together into a concrete plan that you will start putting into practice beginning day one. I hope you’ll join me!
Episode Challenge:
Start working at personalizing your plan. I encourage you to make notes and write down your ideas and thoughts about how and when different ideas would be implemented.
Join the Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers – it’s going to be fun!!! …And what a great gesture of your investment in you, for only $5.00!?
Additional Resources:
The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers
Self-Care Ideas List
Products I Love:
Car Diffuser
Home Diffuser
Orange Essential Oil
Vanilla Essential Oil
Thieves Oil
Saje “Energy” roll on oil (LOVE this product – let’s me breathe better when I feel stressed!)
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In this episode we are talking about the strategy involved in creating a useful, meaningful and sustainable self-care plan. For plans to be useful they have to actually be grounded in reality and practicality – without that they’ll just sit on the backburner, never being implemented. Our goal is to understand the ways to diversify our self-care plan to ensure we have a plan for every circumstance. During this episode we talk about 4 key areas to keep in mind as you consider crafting a self-care plan:
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Keep time in mind: self-care actions need to be diverse in terms of the time they take. Some need to fit into 5 minutes or less, others within 30 minutes, and others may be longer. Accessibility is key to making self-care consistent and useful, and you should have more things that take less time included in your plan, as time is often hard to come by.
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Keep expense in mind: just like self-care needs to be diverse based on time, it also needs to be diverse based on expense. You cannot go for a 2 hour massage everyday…well, maybe some people can but most of us can’t. So plan actions that cost nothing, are cheap and then range from there. Again, there should be far more activities on the free or cheap end of the spectrum than the expensive end.
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Keep energy in mind: diversify your activity planning based on the energy it takes. You may have days where you are up for a hike, and others where brushing your teeth feels like Everest. Ensure you have a range of ideas that you can use when you are low energy or sick, as well as when you are moderate and higher energy.
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Keep context in mind: consider activities you can do wherever you are and whoever you’re with. While it might be ideal to engage in self-care when you have a night to yourself at home, this will not always be an option. Come up with creative ideas for showing a heart of care whether you’re at home or getting groceries; whether you are on your own or with one or more people.
We also cover some reminders:
· Self-care won’t always feel good. Self-care includes nice things that feel good, but it also includes regularly scheduling dentist visits and caring for your basic wellness.
· Self-care involves setting boundaries and saying “no” sometimes – with ourselves and with others.
· Self-care involves experimentation and self-reflection to notice what you like, what you don’t and how to continually adapt as your preferences and needs evolve.
Episode Challenge:
To begin, start by meeting basic needs – hydrate, eat nutritious foods, engage in hygiene activities, prioritize sleep habits, limit substances, limit screens, prioritize base health needs including doctor/dentist appointments. If you are already doing all of these things – bravo! I would encourage you to reflect a bit on whether you are doing them with a heart of care for you or out of a place of routine or obligation and consider if there are ways to could shift your mindset about them a bit to lean heavier into the caring for self heart.
And, register for the 5 day challenge here!
Additional Resources:
The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers
https://theblissfulmind.com/self-care-strategies/
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Today’s episode kicks off a 5 week series on self-care. I know, everyone and their dog talk about self-care but what is it really all about – can it be more than bubble baths and spa days? Join me as we focus today’s episode on dispelling the myths about self-care and focus on the science around how this tool works as a foundational element of a strategic action plan for wellness to create sustainability, both on the job and off.
In this episode, we cover 4 common myths and work at debunking them, including:
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Self-Care is Selfish: Nope! Selfish means to excessively or exclusively focus on self at the expense of others; but self-care is all about supporting and replenishing self in an effort to give more and better to others. It is actually the best gift we can give!
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Self-Care is a fluffy/girly/dumb waste of time: Nope! Self-care is for everyone and there are a million and one ways to do it that have nothing to do with bubble baths, painting nails or facials (…although those can be nice for some!). Future episodes will dig into brainstorming self-care options for everyone, so come back for the next few episodes!!
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Self-Care is just random feel-good stuff: Well…yes, but also nope. Yes, self-care is a bunch of activities that can feel good, but that’s not what it’s really about. At the core, it is about showing ourselves demonstrable gestures of care, because these help our brain and body strengthen skills to regulate stress, soothe complex emotions, and feel more deeply connected to others and rooted into our lives. Self-care actions yield improved health and wellness on multiple measures – so don’t get caught believing it’s just fluff, this stuff really makes a difference!
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Self-Care is complicated/time consuming/expensive/etc.: I mean, it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Self-Care can look like a lot of things, and we will cover this in more depth in future episodes in this series to prove that self-care can be simple, straightforward, cheap and fit into your schedule.
Episode Challenge:
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Consider your preconceived notions about self-care. What myths were you buying into and how can you work at challenging them now that you know a bit better?
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What kinds of self-care are you already doing? Remember, lots of things can count, but they should include a heart of care to really have meaning!
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Check out The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers and consider joining – the challenge starts March 2nd!! Register here.
Additional Resources:
The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:Thanks again to Ryan for sharing his experience as a member of the RCMP who is integrating mindfulness skills and willing to talk about what this looks like. I so value those who are willing to speak up and speak out to help change the culture in front line workplaces. I hope you enjoy listening in to this conversation and encourage you to take note of the ways that Ryan shares how he works at anchoring into what he values as a way to be mindful and maintain sanity (listen to Episode 4 for more on what this looks like), as well as attunement to the environment skills to regulate and be more present (listen to Episode 8 where we talk about this type of skill). For more ideas on ways to integrate mindfulness into your daily life, both on the job and off, check our Episodes 7 & 8 where we talk about how to incorporate mindfulness.
I mentioned at the end of this episode that I would LOVE to hear how you are working at applying mindfulness after listening to these episodes - you will find my contact info below and I genuinely mean it, reach out and let me know what you're doing and how it's going.
Episode Challenge:Make a list of things you value and use this to start trying out the anchoring skill discussed in this episode. Try using this to prompt you to think about why you do what you do and why it all matters on a semi-regular basis during your week. Remember, it only takes a couple minutes and doesn't require anything fancy.
Additional Resources:Check out Episodes 2, 7 & 8 if you haven't already!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!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.
Show Notes:
In last week’s episode (Episode 7 if you want to hunt it down), we made the case for why mindfulness matters and how it helps to strengthen the parts of your brain that help to counterbalance your stress centre and the overwhelming amounts of persistent stress you face as a result of your work. This week, we focus on practical mindfulness tools and ways to incorporate these into your daily life as a consistent practice. Consider these skills a workout for your brain – little bits often add up to mean more than you might think.
Breathing Skills· Square Breathing: Inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four. Remember, the goal is not to breathe this way all the time, the goal is to help your brain focus on a single, present task: your breathing. Try doing this type of breath for a couple of rounds, then breathe normally for a minute or two, then try to do a couple more rounds.
· Mantra Breath: Choose a word or phrase to focus on as you inhale and exhale, include imagery in your mind if you find this helpful. In this episode I suggest “inhale relaxation” and “exhale tension” as one of my favorite.
Meditation Skills· Mantra Meditation: Choose a word or phrase to focus on – ideally something in alignment with what you would like to be thinking or feeling, such as “still”, or “peace”. Find a comfortable place to sit or lay down, preferably somewhere with minimal distractions if possible. Close your eyes if you like, or find a neutral place to look. Set a timer for whatever amount of time you prefer (I usually choose about 5-7 minutes), and reflect on your mantra. When other thoughts pop into your head just notice them, and gently guide your mind back to your mantra.
· Imagery Meditation: Choose an image to focus on – I describe a scene with a small stream in this episode. Find a comfortable place to sit or lay down, preferably somewhere with minimal distractions if possible. Close your eyes if you like, or find a neutral place to look. Set a timer for whatever amount of time you prefer (I usually choose about 5-7 minutes), and reflect on your image. Try to become very aware of sights, smells, textures, temperatures, etc. of the place you have chosen – immerse yourself in it. When other thoughts pop into your head, just notice them. You can even incorporate this into your image, like my example of the thoughts being leaves that fall on the stream and watching the water carry them gently down stream and away from me. Work to gently guide your mind back to your image.
**Caution: Those with complex trauma histories, particularly early developmental traumatic experiences, may have difficulty meditating or engaging in mindfulness practices as your nervous system has been trained that things that are meant to be safe are more often dangerous, and can lead your body to become reactive to “safe” things or feelings. You may need to tread more carefully using these skills, and may need to build in additional protections. I encourage you to search for trauma-informed mindfulness or meditation practices to get specific tools that may better support you as you work to engage and strengthen the part of your brain that helps to support and counterbalance your stress and trauma centre.
Mindful Movement Skills· Structured Movement: Yoga, Tai Chi and other movement-based practices that incorporate mindfulness and breath. See below for a recommendation of my favorite yoga app that changed me from a yoga hater to a yoga lover!
· Movement + Mantra: Choose a word or phrase and try to focus on this as you engage in some kind of movement activity like a walk, bike ride, or dance party in your living room. When other thoughts pop in, just notice them and guide your mind gently back to your mantra.
· Movement + Breath: As you engage in any movement activity – a walk, bike ride, hike, dance party… - notice your breath and try to focus on connecting your breath to your movement. For example, while walking, try breathing in for 3 steps, hold for one step, breathe out for 3 steps and hold for one step.
· Movement + Attunement: As you engage in any movement activity, work to focus on noticing the things around you. Use your 5 senses and really take notice of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures/touch sensations. When thoughts pop in, just notice them and guide your mind back to noticing things around you.
Everyday Attunement Skills· Attending & Describing: Use your 5 senses to notice things around you in everyday moments. You can do this anytime, anywhere. Notice the colours of things, different textures, etc. Or describe an everyday activity in detail to yourself as you do it – really notice what you’re doing and attend to your actions and environment.
Episode Challenge:Choose one or two of the skills described in this episode and find ways to implement them in your daily life at least once a day. Try to find at least one skill you can use while you are at work. Focus on making it consistent – use timers or reminders to help prompt you until these skills feel habitual. Adapt any of the skills described to help it fit for you.
Additional Resources:If you want to go deeper into utilizing mindfulness skills, I’ve included a couple of resources you may find helpful including links to two meditation/mindfulness apps that I have heard great things about, and my favorite yoga program (it made me a yoga-lover after years of HATING yoga!!). You can also easily google things like “guided imagery”, “quick meditation”, or “meditation scripts” to help guide your development in some of these areas.
Check out the Calm App here.
Check out the Balance App here.
Check out the Down Dog yoga program here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!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.
Show Notes:
Today’s episode digs into the myths and truths about mindfulness in an effort to make the case for implementing mindfulness skills as a part of our strategic wellness action plan. An episode like this is necessary because I see SO many front line workers roll their eyes when we talk about mindfulness and related skills, like they can’t imagine this kind of “new-age BS hippy-dippy junk” (actual words I’ve heard from clients and those I know) can be useful to them. But the science doesn’t lie, and it behooves us to take a closer look at how some simple and seemingly small tools can make a big difference in strengthening areas of our brain that help to counterbalance the impacts of ongoing, persistent stress and trauma.
First Response & Front Line Work invite us to over-train the parts of our brains that are responsible for risk management and survival – making this the part of the brain that feels most able to respond even when it’s not appropriate. When we over-train this part of our brain and fail to train the parts intended to counterbalance and regulate the stress response areas, we end up having stress responses to everything all the time…which is exhausting and our brains are not meant to live in full-time, which then leads to numbing and dissociating. It’s a catch 22. We have to work at integrating skills that work to strengthen parts of our brain that help to carry the load and give our stress system a break now and then by being capable of picking up some of the heavy lifting. Mindfulness skills, when developed as a practice, can be a big part of how we strengthen these other systems to help ourselves have a more diverse and more human experience. At it’s core, mindfulness is a group of skills or practices that support our brain and body in being connected to the present moment, in space and time.
In the next episode, we are going to talk about specific mindfulness tools that you can start to incorporate into your daily/weekly routine. But in the meantime, I offer a few categories of mindfulness skills in this episode including:
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Meditation: No religious/spiritual associations required. Meditation is intended to be a dedicated time of quiet contemplation of the present. This can look like a lot of things and doesn’t have to last for long. If you’re new to meditation, I would encourage you to look up “guided meditation” and find some audios that walk you through the process.
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Movement Based Mindfulness: Obvious options like yoga or tai chi integrate mindfulness into the movement by encouraging being aware of how poses/movements feel and your breath while you engage in the movements. Meanwhile, other options like going for a walk and gently working at bringing your mind back to noticing what you are seeing/hearing/smelling, etc. as you walk can be a version of movement-based mindfulness as well. Moving our bodies has a ton of benefit to work stress out of our systems and restore homeostasis (ie. stabilize), and incorporating mindfulness into movement of any kind can help quiet the stress centre and enhance the parts of our brain that work to counterbalance our stress centre.
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Cognitive Directing Skills: These skills focus on how we attend our thoughts. Directing our thinking to really attend to what is around us and what we are doing in present space and time can help us strengthen connections to the parts of our brain that help counterbalance the stress centre. Describing everyday tasks, surroundings, etc. in detail can be a great, small way to start.
Start small, add some pieces in a little bit at a time, and experiment to see what fits for you. Mindfulness is not a magic bullet, but when done consistently it adds up to be significant and meaningful. The sooner you start the sooner you’ll see your brain strengthening and growing connections that benefit you. Try using prompts like post-it notes or reminders on your phone to help you get into a routine.
During the episode I mentioned a couple of links I would put in the show notes, including the article from UC Berkley which can be found here, and a link to my favorite yoga app which can be found here.
Episode Challenge:
Try to notice any reactions or preconceived notions that might be barriers to adding mindfulness skills to your arsenal.
Find a couple of guided meditation practices that you can add into your weekly routine, they don’t have to be long, but aim for a few days out of your week. Then gradually add additional skills.
Listen in next week when we’ll talk about some of my favourite mindfulness skills and ways you can use these to inspire your own scrappy and creative interpretations that fit you and your life the best.
Additional Resources:
During the episode I mentioned a couple of links I would put in the show notes, including the article from UC Berkley which can be found here, and a link to my favorite yoga app which can be found here.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In today’s show we are talking about the importance of hope in surviving life on the front lines, and how to go about engaging with hope intentionally and strategically. Too often we take hope for granted or we undervalue it. But without hope, we don’t stand a chance in this line of work. And because of the work you do and what you interact with, hope tends to be quickly eroded – often without realizing it – and we’re left with being swallowed up by the suffering witnessed day to day. Hope doesn’t just happen, we have to pay attention, and today we are going to talk about specific, tangible ways to do just that.
Your brain naturally values negative experiences as a survival mechanism to ensure your welfare – but unfortunately this can cut hope out of the picture if we’re not careful. The average Joe-citizen doesn’t have to worry about being quite as intentional as their daily lives don’t tend to bombard them with hardship, life-and-death stress, and deep human suffering. But for those on the front lines, the part of the brain that manages the shit works on overdrive while the part of the brain that manages hope is left to wither away, neglected. We have to be intentional to exercise the part of our brain that does hope so we can give it a chance to do some of the heavy lifting when we need it.
In this episode I talk about 6 tangible ways to engage in strengthening the hope part of your brain. To summarize this information and offer some helpful prompts to guide you are you start implementing these tools into your daily and weekly life, I created a worksheet that you can snag by signing up here.
As a quick review, these include…
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A helper’s heart
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Scan for good
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Context is key
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Gratitude is hope’s cousin
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Active rest to restore
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Complain constructively
Clear as mud? Snag the worksheet to have a solid reminder and some prompts for success. Happy exercising!! …Just what everyone expected to kick off the New Year, right!?
Episode Challenge:
Download the worksheet that pairs with this episode by signing up here, and try to integrate at least 2 of these tools into your week this week. I would love to hear how it goes – tag me on social media to your pictures out hiking or a snippet from your gratitude journal!!
Additional Resources:
The Gottman's work was mentioned in this episode, and their work has excellent applications for couples seeking to strengthen relationship. Here are a couple of my favorite books from their work and links to snag them on Amazon:
The Gottman's "7 Principles for Making Marriage Work"
The Gottman's "The Relationship Cure"
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
This year has been a lot of things, and it has called us to be flexible, adaptable and responsive in a myriad of ways.
Thanks to my roles as a trauma therapist and the director of the largest counselling clinic in my area, as well as being a mom of school-aged kids, spouse to a stay at home parent stuck with kids all day, friend and family member, I have had so many vantage points to observe some of the challenges that COVID has brought to light for us.
Remember, we increase our power in situations when we can accurately identify what we’re working with and the challenges we’re facing. We can only help something when we know about it. We have to give voice to the challenges to have any chance of engaging them. There is value in talking about the good the bad and the ugly of what this year has called us into and drawn out of us.
· 2020 has been a year of anxiety.
Shattered assumptions refers to our general assumptions as humans that our lives are generally predictable. We’ve all experienced shattered assumptions this year. When we experience shattered assumptions, it is a moment of reckoning. A moment of realizing that the world and life is not as predictable as human nature would like to try and pretend that it is. And when we realize our vulnerability, the degree that we lack control and predictability in our everyday lives, we feel it in our bodies, often as anxiety.
· 2020 has been a year of fear.
Fear is about a real and present danger. For First Responders and Front Line Workers the fear has been real and a combination of the obvious interactions in the work you do, but also the “average Joe” experiences of having to be mindful of the grocery store trips, or dentist visits, or what your kids bring home from school. The fear centre of our brains is that it is not meant to operate for any length of time. The challenge with what we have faced in 2020 is that the fear feels constant, and yet the markers of safety are also confusingly all around us – our bodies don’t know what to do with it. I’m in my home, I’m safe and warm and fine…yet I might also feel fearful that I’ve just brought home the plague from shift today…your brain doesn’t know how to hold these at the same time and it leaves us in this awkward dissonance that is hard to make sense of and impossible to settle into.
· 2020 has been a year of grief.
In addition to the grief witnessed and felt at work, there is also likely grief that is personal and on varying levels. Grief is connected to loss, and for many there have been a number of losses this year. As a culture, we’re not well versed in how to hold grief and move through it. It is uncomfortable so we try to divert from it or avoid it. The challenge with grief is it’s a bit like driving and skidding on ice – you have to steer into it to correct. Much like the skid, if you try to fight it, by avoiding or distracting, it will often make it so much worse. But in the pace of this year, working overtime shifts, short-staffed and exhausted, there has been little time to process grief well even if we knew how to steer into it.
· 2020 has been a year of loneliness.
Social distancing has been a significant weapon in the battle against COVID-19, but we are also seeing the toll on mental health and wellness at all levels. We are lonely and overwhelmed and trying to distract and numb in whatever ways we know how.
2020 has also been…
· 2020 has been a year of being pushed to our limits.
This year we have been called to adapt. You have shown up, day after day. You have witnessed so many hard moments. You have managed through the fear and anxiety and grief and loneliness and you are somehow still putting one foot in front of the other. You have probably even found some moments of normal, maybe even enjoyment, in the midst of it.
· 2020 has been a year of challenging our thinking.
This year has called us to step outside of the monotony and the status quo of our thinking. Assumptions were shattered, our vulnerability had the spotlight turned onto it full blast, and we have had to sit with that and wrestle with it a bit.
· 2020 has been a year of gratitude.
As humans, we have a tendency neurobiologically to place a high value on negative experiences. Biologically this makes sense as negative experiences are ones the brain perceives as being relevant to shape future behaviour. Psychologists and Beuro-Scientists talk of a ratio of positive experiences or interactions to negative ones – usually a 5:1 ratio. We need more positive experiences or interactions to outweigh a single negative one because our brains don’t naturally allocate as much space for them. Gratitude is a part of this, and one we have need to rely more heavily on to get through this year.
Episode Challenge:
Three things to focus our intentions on going in to 2021:
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Take time. Time to breathe, time to feel, time to grieve, time to reflect, time to be grateful. All of the things that allow us to shape the direction we want to go begins with us taking the time to shape it.
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Get Grateful. Because you see and participate in so many negative moments and aspects of experience in your work, you have to be even more intentional about exposing your brain to positive experiences, interactions and thoughts to hit the ratio to counterbalance the intensity of your daily life. Take time every day, multiple times a day if you can, to pause and look carefully for moments that were good, enjoyable, calm, connected, silly, funny, interesting, hopeful… Notice these moments, scan for them throughout your day, catch them when they happen, and let them occupy space for more than the fleeting moments when they happened. If you are going to pour energy into any thing in your life for the coming year, this is the place to pour in.
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Anchor. Last week’s episode we talked about anchoring in. Anchoring is about what we connect to, what we use to ground ourselves into a sense of safety, stability, connectedness, meaning and mattering. Notice what you tend to anchor into. Where do you derive a sense of meaning? What makes you feel like you matter? What helps you to feel calm, safe or stable? If a lot of your answers revolve around your work, I’m going to suggest that you work at investing in some other areas of your life to help offer some balance and additional support.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Anchoring is a process of connecting with intention to the people, things and experiences that matter to us. Anchoring helps us to feel a sense of stability and security even when things get bumpy. It helps us to feel connected to what feels meaningful and mattering about us and about our lives.
Much like a ship attempting to anchor into varying types of underwater surfaces, we can try to anchor to different aspects of our lives. Being intentional about knowing and choosing those aspects that create the greatest sense of connection to meaning, helps us to get the best results.
Anchoring into First Response and Front Line Work as an exclusive or highly valued sense of meaning can be risky. While the work can be incredibly meaningful, it is also extremely complex.
Learning to engage in anchoring effectively and intentionally is a layer on creating a strategic action plan.
We need to focus on two key things when anchoring to meaning as it relates to the work:
- Anchor into the work WELL. Anchoring into the work can be risky, but can be done well if done with intention. This means taking deliberate time intended to focus on the aspects of the work that feel affirming, connected and meaningful. This time is valuable to help us prevent burnout, but also to have time where we are checking in and assessing how we’re doing – how hard is it to come up with what feels meaningful and mattering? This might help us to notice when we’re headed down a slippery slope and work more effectively to intervene.
Suggested Exercise: End of work day 15-10 minute breathing activity. Take deep breaths, stretch your muscles and shake out tension while thinking about the parts of your day that felt meaningful, connected, affirming, mattering, etc. Do this before heading for home.
- Anchor in, outside of work: Work cannot be the exclusive aspect of meaning. Putting all of our eggs into this one basket is dangerous. We need to follow the advising of investment banking and diversify our portfolio. Invest in activities, relationships and interests that develop aspects of meaning outside of your work. Be intentional about seeking out hobbies, continually developing interests, explore areas of curiosity, connect meaningfully in relationships, kickstart a side-hustle, pour into volunteerism, or dive into social justice initiatives. You are more than the work you do – allow other skills sets to shine, and find meaning in flourishing as a whole and multi-faceted person.
Episode Challenge:
· Think about your own family transitions (holidays, significant life events, and/or daily living). What do these say about what you? What do they say about what you value? Are there ways to reconnect with the meaning in these, or to develop new traditions/routines that would help hone your developing sense of anchoring into meaning?
· Make a plan to anchor into your work well, and to anchor outside of your work. What would this look like? What traditions would you want to try to implement? What kind of time would you create and what would it include?
· Try out the end-of-the-work-day-pause that was mentioned in this episode.
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
Thank you to Meredith for joining me today to talk about her experiences as a front line family member from multiple vantage points. Meredith was raised by two front line parents, her mom as a nurse and her dad as a paramedic. She became a nurse herself and has been working on the front lines for 13 years. She married a member of the Canadian Armed Forces and they are raising their three young kids and working to balance life on the front lines. I am so thankful for Meredith’s vulnerability and openness. Meredith shared her insight and wisdom – here are a few of my favourite quotes that came out of our conversation:
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“That’s kind of the approach that they’ve taught me to take in life. Is just like, where’s your next clue? Where’s your next clue? …That’s been helpful, you know, to deal with emergencies, and trauma, and life, and the hardships…” (5:45)
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“It’s very interesting to reflect back on what you remember in your childhood versus how you piece it together now in adulthood.” (10:38)
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“And like all great parents, you kind of shelter from the hard. And so, you want to protect and keep, you know, those barbed wires from the fence away from the little hearts that you’re entrusted with.” (11:40)
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“Again, like not perfect, at all…like throwing stones at a glass house, I get it! But that’s kind of where I’ve tried to focus and where I’ve found some relief and some coping strategies in the angst and the hardship of first responding and some of the things that you see and experience.” (15:50)
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“Trying to find those places to sink yourself into and feel whole are just transient and, you know, that 2020 lens is just such a big mirror of how strong and brave we all are in hard times but also exposes the cracks and shows, you know, where we all live just under the surface and how hard life is.” (16:30)
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“One of my favourite pieces about us and about the idea of us (and it could happen with any couple, it doesn’t just need to be first responder couples), but the grace that we offer each other in regards to the hard days and the stressful things that we experience. Everyone has a different way to communicate, which is no secret, and him and I utilise just a really simple traffic light emoji, and we kind of check in with each other daily to see where we’re at in the traffic light…and that just allows you without words to position yourself and be the least amount of vulnerable but still vulnerable to say ‘this is a hard day’ or ‘things are going great’ and not miss each other in the wind. Because there’s nothing worse than one person having the worst day as a first responder coming home to someone who’s had the best day, and you come in and just like vomit your whole life on them and they come in and are like so cheerful and not ready to receive that information.” (20:30)
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“I am totally vulnerable in the fact that if I’m a puddle on the floor my kids will see it, they will learn from that and know that you can be weak and brave all at the same time.” (31:00)
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“You know, it’s hard in relationships to speak words out loud and feel like you’re being very, very clear and very, very explicit and still not have the resolution of being heard. It’s just so defeating. And so, the 5 love languages, have been like a prescription and a necessity for us to be able to not miss each other in regards to our needs.” (35:30)
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“Some of the specific instances in our routine I’ve intentionally carved out to be the instigator, and I’ve intentionally carved out Matt to be the instigator. Because there are a lot of times where I am the bystander, just like hearing the mayhem but not necessarily involved. And that might actually be the bigger impact that, you know, my work and my life and how I interact with people is having on my kids is the fact that, you know, it’s hard to set boundaries when your work comes home with you.” (39:30)
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“And you don’t necessarily notice when it bleeds onto other people in your life. You kind of just selflessly feel that you can take this on and you have capacity, without acknowledging that maybe other peoples capacity is tied to yours, or tethered may be a better word, and how your decision making in regards to boundaries and interactions can affect kind of your safe space at home when it’s all blurred.” (40:30)
Resources Discussed In This Episode:
The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (discussed in the episode, offers clear language and easily applicable tools to connect as a couple, also generalizable to other people you care for or interact with in your life).
The Five Love Languages For Children by Gary Chapman (this was not discussed in the show but is an awesome resource for parents to support connecting with their kids).
We discussed the concept of being a Bystander, Witness, Participant or Instigator in different moments in our lives with the people we care about. To help support connecting and finding protection in connection, I put together a Being "With" Cheat Sheet that includes prompts with ideas to kick-start some of these postures or ways of being with others. You can sign up to snag the infographic cheat sheet tool here.
Episode Challenge:
If you're looking to up the ante and challenge yourself to build your wellness, get intentional about catching yourself in bystander moments and notice when they happen and what's going on for you when these moments happen. What kind of day has it been? What are the pressures that have added up? What have you done/are you doing to actively manage and cope with those pressures? Then, try to engage more into witness, participant and instigator whenever you can. Get creative and have some fun. Say yes to things. It might feel uncomfortable, but keep trying it - it gets easier!! If you really want to push to the edges, post a picture of you conquering this challenge with your loved ones and tag me on Facebook or Instagram - I would love to see you joining our family's ninja-fight hilarity!!
Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!
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.
Show Notes:
In an effort to get proactive, we are talking about what it looks like to develop a strategic wellness action plan.
A strategic action plan for wellness is crafted, personal and intentional. It works to respond to your unique needs, interests and situation. It is created to support your resilience.
In this episode we define resilience as: "an ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, stress or change in a way that accepts the truth of the suffering, acknowledges the depth of impact the suffering has, and seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative."
I have broken down this definition into the parts described in the podcast, and you can grab the infographic summary here.
Take the next step in creating your strategic wellness plan. Click here to sign up and access the tool mentioned in this episode, the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide
I would love to hear from you! Send your feedback, and your ideas for topics you would like to hear covered to support@thrive-life.ca
Follow me on Facebook and Instagram where I post additional resources, share about new episodes and keep connected with my front line friends.
Subscribe to 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.
Thank you for helping me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off. Together, we can change the culture of front line work from the inside, out.
Show Notes:
- First Responders & Front Line Workers face unique challenges including persistent stress and systems that tend to focus on reactive supports rather than proactive ones.
- Reactive support can be helpful, but fails to account for the compound effects of life on the front lines.
- Proactive support focuses on prevention and early intervention tools to and helps to keep our metaphorical "mess" under control.
- Critical incidents do not exist in a vacuum. Critical incidents are a hard part of the work you do, but they are not the defining features of what is difficult in your work - it is way more complicated than that, and the wellness supports you implement need to meet that degree of complexity.
- Reaction is never as strong as prevention - so focus your efforts and energy on prevention. Remember the adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
- Prevention and being proactive involves a strategic action plan that is personal to you, where you're at, and your context.
Take the next step in creating your strategic wellness plan. Click here to sign up and access the tool mentioned in this episode, the Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide
I would love to hear from you! Send your feedback, and your ideas for topics you would like to hear covered to support@thrive-life.ca
Follow me on Facebook and Instagram where I post additional resources, share about new episodes and keep connected with my front line friends.
Subscribe to 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.
Thank you for helping me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off. Together, we can change the culture of front line work from the inside, out.