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Show Notes: Continuing our “In the Thick of It: Small Steps for Quick Wins” series, today we are talking about brain building exercises to support resilience. For the purpose of todays episode, I want you to think of your brain like a muscle. Really, like a group of muscles. Each region of your brain performs different jobs to serve your needs, and much like a muscle, the more one region is used, the stronger it gets.  I’ve used this example before, but it’s been a long time and I think it has a lot of value, so bear with me. Think for a moment about bringing home a big pile of groceries. You go to the trunk of your car, reach in to grab 4 bags at once…which hand do you reach with? Most of us have one arm that we will tend to choose to overburden because it is our stronger arm. Without even thinking about it, we will reach in and grab those bags and haul them into the house using whichever arm our bodies unconsciously prefer as we internally know that it’s stronger and more dependable for this job. It becomes the arm that does the reaching completely unconsciously, it just happens. If we think about your brain as a group of muscles, we can picture this the same way. When you have something stressful, challenging or heavy come up in your life – what part of your brain is unconsciously reaching to pick it up? What part of your brain is getting strengthened and is being unconsciously trained to do your heavy lifting? The very real answer for many people, particularly those who work in high stress-related environments, is that their stress center, also known as the limbic system, has gradually and quietly become trained to be the muscle that does the lifting. Because we spend more time in survival responses than a brain was ever intended to spend time in, that muscle has gotten worked and worked and worked and has built itself up to feel really strong. Think of every stressful situation as a heavy weighted bicep curl for that part of your brain. Given your work, you have disproportionate exposure to stressful experiences, and so this part of your brain is doing bicep curls all the time.  What that means is that when something comes up – including not particularly end-of-the-world type things, like finding out your kid has a school project due that you didn’t know about – the part of your brain most likely to react and pick up the situation to run with it, is your stress center. If you have had times where your reaction to something has felt really disproportionate to the situation; or where you’ve felt really anxious or worried about something that is not a big deal; or where you quickly jump to shut down or numb in a scenario that overwhelms you more quickly than it probably should…those are solid indicators that your limbic system is running on overdrive and picking up things it has no business carrying.  So what do we do about it? Well, the goal is to strengthen a complimentary muscle group. If I have overworked my right arm, I probably need to spend some time investing in building up my left arm to try to match and better support the strain I’m putting on my right side. Similarly, if I have an overworked stress center limbic system, I need to invest in building up my executive function center frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe is the counterbalancing force to your limbic system. When the frontal lobe is strong, it helps keep the limbic system in check. The more intentionally we work at strengthening our frontal lobe, the better we can support our limbic system at picking up the things it is meant to pick up, but not the stuff that it’s not meant for. How do you build up your frontal lobe, you ask? Well, here’s what you need to know about your frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe is the part of your brain responsible for what we call executive function. It is the director of your brain – it is highly reasonable, rational, and systematic. It loves things like language, order and sequencing (like 1 and then 2 and then 3), planning and organizing, grouping, differentiating (like knowing the difference between things), recognizing, labelling, and numbering. When we understand what this part of our brain does, we can work at building in exercises to support strengthening it. Here are some of my favourites: 1.      Alphabet game: choose a category like fruits and vegetables, movie titles, actors/actresses, song titles, Disney characters…whatever you’re into…and work it through from A-Z. A, apple, B, banana, C, cantaloupe, D, dragon fruit…and so on and so forth. This exercise involves language, labelling, differentiation and sequencing. It sounds stupid simple to name things in alphabetical order, but it is just hard enough that it puts demand on your frontal lobe, and that’s what we’re looking for. 2.      Name as many countries as you can. This activity typically inspires people to use a skill called cognitive mapping which involves thinking in your mind of a map and constructing an idea of where things are located in space. Interestingly, cognitive mapping is a highly frontal lobe task and really puts demand on your frontal lobe. Think of it like adding 10 pounds of weight to your workout. You can equally do variations of this activity where you name all of the streets you would drive on your way to somewhere you go regularly, or the stores you pass.  3.      5-4-3-2-1: name 5 things you see around you, then 5 things you hear, then 5 things you can feel – like touch, not emotion. Then name 4 of each, 3 of each, 2 of each and 1 of each. Try not to name the same things to mix it up and make it harder. Again, we’re asking your brain to engage in labelling, sequencing, grouping and differentiation. All of these are frontal lobe tasks.  These tools are great to use when you are in stress – I often teach these to people who struggle with panic attacks as it forces the brain to recalibrate and redistribute energy to balance out panic and stress responses. That said, they are also great to use more generally as an effort to strengthen proactively. Imagine using this in stress response mode as lifting something in a moment of need; but that would be made way easier if you had done regular lifting and exercise to build up strength before having the moment of need. We want to do the same for your brain – we want to train it in down times, to build it gradually to be more effectively responsive in moments of real need.  Episode Challenge: ·        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…-        Impacts of Trauma Series (S3E9-13)-        May Mini’s (Quick Tips for Regulation) (S2E35-39) 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 coming back to our new series, “In the Thick of It: Small Steps for Quick Wins”. During this series I will be bringing you some of my favourite tools. These are things that are not rocket science, are totally able to be integrated into your life, no matter how crazy and chaotic it is, and that are guaranteed to make a difference if you apply them consistently.  I teased this one a bit at the end of last week’s episode, so you might already know that this week we’re talking about how we tell the story. Last week we talked about Opposite Action, which is a way we can actively engage in doing something different with our trauma experience. Opposite action is practical and tangible – it is about doing different. Today, as we talk about story, we are talking about thinking different and actively participating in shaping the narrative of who we are, how we’re defined, and how we allow our trauma and experiences speak to this in us and about us.  Often, the stories we tell about ourselves and the events that have happened to us and around us, are dictated from the most vulnerable and fearful parts of us. As a result, they tend to be narrated from a place of shame, self-judgement, unreasonably high expectations and so on. We will be likely to see ourselves as the villain – sometimes even twisting stories where we are clearly the victim into stories where that still means it was somehow our fault because we “allowed” bad things to happen to us.  We are storytellers. Our brains are wired this way. Thinking back on human history, we have always told stories and used this as a key tool in passing down information, keeping next generations connected to previous generations. We are constantly telling stories – of ourselves, of others, of our experience.  While we are well versed at telling stories, we are not generally well trained in telling them accurately or completely. It can be a little bit like the telephone game when you’re a kid – the message at the beginning gets warped along the way and distorted into something totally different as it gets passed along. …The same phenomenon happens with stories inside of our own heads. Instead of a message being passed from one person to the next, it’s being passed through multiple filters in your mind. Filters that scan for embarrassment, shame, stupidity, failure, weakness and anything else perceived as necessary to protect you from the parts of you that feel inadequate.  I’ve mentioned many times before on this show that your brain is naturally wired to give higher valuing to negative experiences as these are important for learning and keeping yourself safe. The good things are already good, but the bad things, those we need to pay attention to so we don’t let them continue to happen. As a result of this, the filters in our heads tend to be largely dictated by the negative skews we hold rather than any positive ones, and by default, our brain will run the story of an experience or who it believes us to be through these filters, ultimately popping out a distorted version of a story at the end that is often extremely inaccurate but feels very real and true to the parts inside of us. The real challenge is that operating from a place of believing that this story is true leads us to acting from belief that we are much like the villains in spiderman. It paints us into a corner, believing that we are destined to be weak, unacceptable, unlovable, helpless, powerless, stupid, and so on. The filters will continue to find confirmation by biasing stories on an ongoing that further reflect these, and we will feel increasingly helpless to the belief that we aren’t enough. To change the default we have to do a few key things: 1.      Notice when your brain is telling a story. Try to catch it in the act. 2.      Be aware of your personal classic filters – we all have a few that tend to stand out and be the heavy lifters when telling stories about ourselves.  3.      Be intentional about catching the default story and confronting it with context – help your brain learn there is more to the story than what the filters would have it believe. 4.      Experiment with telling alternative stories. You don’t have to believe them, but you have to be able to entertain that they are possible, as much as the default narrative might be. For example, one of my filters is stupid, I often judge this of myself due to past experiences. When my feeling is embarrassment and my internal judgement is stupid, I get curious about what else might be happening. And you know what is often a more accurate story? I tried something that felt risky, and it didn’t go perfectly, but it was BRAVE. This story tends to be far more accurate but is harder to tell because it is certainly not the default. It takes intentional effort at interacting with my default systems, and digging beneath the quick and dirty assumptions my brain will jump to.  Episode Challenge: ·        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…-        Impacts of Trauma Series (S3E9-13)-        May Mini’s (Quick Tips for Regulation) (S2E35-39) 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: During the month of March, we are going to be launching our latest series called “In the Thick of It: Small Steps for Quick Wins”. During this series I will be bringing you some of my favourite tools – things that are not rocket science, are totally able to be integrated into your life, no matter how crazy and chaotic it is, and that are guaranteed to make a difference if you apply them consistently.  Today I want to tell you about one of my all time favourite tools – called Opposite Action. Before I tell you about the tool, let’s talk about when you are going to use it.  The most substantial way we can use this tool is when we are in trauma reactivity. When you experienced something traumatic, you had a response in the moment. It might have been to fight back, to run away, to hold still and wait it out, or to placate the situation to get through it by the skin of your teeth. More commonly we know these responses as fight, flight, freeze and fawn. I’m going to add a response type that many of you in First Response and Front Line Work might actually feel is more appropriate to when you are in work-related crisis situations, and I call it “Hold”. Hold is a weird mix of all of the trauma responses. It’s a little like freeze, because you are staying in the situation. It’s a little like fawn, because you might have to talk someone down or come across like an ally to try to deescalate. It's a little like fight because you may have to take action and engage. And it’s a little like flight because you are on edge and ready to move. When you are the responder in a crisis, your job is to stay. The role is to hold. To run into the fire when everyone else is running away. While this is the job, you are still human within your work and your brain is still firing off all of the natural stress responses, it’s just been trained to background those responses and hold in the moment.  Whatever our response to a trauma-related event might have been, and regardless of whether the trauma is work related or something else, that response becomes imprinted on us and embedded in the wiring around the memory of that experience.  Commonly, the response we had in a moment, is not the response we wish we could have had when we look at it in hindsight. And when it becomes embedded into our systems, it can become the triggered response over and over and over and over again. And that my friends, is crappy. Because each time we repeat this, it becomes further embedded into the wiring AND it starts to generalize not only to that one specific experience, but to others that your brain perceives as sufficiently similar.  Think about it like taking a pen and scraping a line into a wood surface. One time wouldn’t be particularly deep, but if you kept doing it over and over, that divot would get deeper and deeper and become harder to repair. That’s what it’s like when you repeat trauma reactions over time – the neurological connections around it become more and more deeply entrenched.  Now here is where opposite action come in to play – opposite action is like sandpaper. Every time you engage this tool, rather than further entrenching the trauma response you are creating a new neurological pathway, and every time you repeat this you are undermining the trauma reaction pathway. It like taking a piece of sandpaper and running it over that gouge. Slowly but surely, the trench we wore will smooth out and look brand new.  Ok, so how do we use opposite action? Start with these 3 questions:  1.      When you think back on the traumatic experience what do you wish you could have done or said in that situation?  2.      When the traumatic situation happened, what was your need?  3.      When you reflect on your body’s response to the traumatic experience, what would be the opposite of however it was made to feel and respond? In focusing on these questions and the responses that naturally come in answering them, you will get a sense of what would be a corrective emotional experience. In the moment of a traumatic experience, we lack choice and the freedom to make decisions – something hard is thrust on us without our vote and we are just left to figure it out. But as we continue to live with the impact of that experience, we have choice in how we allow it to continue living within us – in our bodies and in our responses.  Opposite action can show up in specific moments of being triggered, but also in general decisions you make to support yourself being aligned to the kind of person you choose to be. …This will connect a bit to where we’re headed in next weeks’ episode around the story we tell ourselves. If you are a member of the Beating the Breaking Point support experience, my enhanced resilience training program, you will find a worksheet in the training vault that includes and extensive list of examples of opposite actions. If you’re not yet a member – I really encourage you to go check it out – the program includes my signature self-paced online training along with access to a private support community where you can connect with me for support in applying your learning, and our growing training vault with bonus materials to help you continue to grow in your resilience.  Episode Challenge: ·        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…-        Impacts of Trauma Series (S3E9-13)-        May Mini’s (Quick Tips for Regulation) (S2E35-39) 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: As we continue in our “Normal People Problems” series we are diving in to the common challenges of managing a home and the unique and nuanced features of staying organized while working in first response or front line work. I am delighted to be joined by the pair behind Simply Organized For You, Christine & Naddine. These two professional home organizers know their stuff and are sharing their tips for staying on top of things.  Check out Simply Organized For You on their website, or go be soothed by their pretty pictures on Instagram! Episode Challenge: ·        What are some of the challenges you face in managing your home that are impacted by your work? What are some small ways you can work at implementing systems that support feeling more on top of your home? ·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, my online resilience training program. Additional Resources: Check out Simply Organized For You on their website, or go be soothed by their pretty pictures on Instagram! 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… -        S1E28-31 Front Line Families Series (especially E29 & E31 on parenting with Heather Toews and single parenting with Maria) 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: As we continue in our “Normal People Problems” series we are diving in to the common challenges of mastering money and the unique and nuanced features of finances while working in first response or front line work. I am honoured to be joined by Sandy Yong, author of The Money Master: What They Don’t Teach You About Wealth & Investing, and her husband, Albert Ho, nurse and author of Checkmate: How to Win The Sales Game in Healthcare.  Today we touch on the challenges of saving, maximizing opportunities to build wealth, and being proactive around planning for today and into the future with our finances. Check out Sandy’s work including her awesome book, The Money Master, here. Learn more about Albert’s work and his book, Checkmate, here. We are honoured to have 2 of each book to offer as a free giveaway thanks to Sandy & Albert – jump over to my social media on Facebook and Instagram and comment on one tip you took away from this episode to earn a chance to win a copy! Episode Challenge: ·        What are some of the challenges you face in financial literacy and financial planning that are impacted by your work? What are some small ways you can make some proactive steps forward? ·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, my online resilience training program. Additional Resources: Check out Sandy’s work including her awesome book, The Money Master, here. Learn more about Albert’s work and his book, Checkmate, here. We are honoured to have 2 of each book to offer as a free giveaway thanks to Sandy & Albert – jump over to my social media on Facebook and Instagram and comment on one tip you took away from this episode to earn a chance to win a copy! 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). 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: As we continue in our “Normal People Problems” series we are diving in to the common challenges of parenting and the unique and nuanced features of parenting while working in first response or front line work. I am thrilled to be joined by one of my favourite people on earth, Karen Peters. Karen is a child and family therapist who specializes in parenting support, and she is bringing the goods! Today we touch on the challenges of shift work, the difficulty of being present at home, the transition from work to home, the impact of calls that impact our sense of safety for our kids, and more. Check out Karen’s work including her awesome parenting podcast, Parenting in the Trenches, as well as her many free parenting resources available here, and her valuable paid programs included in her Living Room Learning platform, here. Episode Challenge: ·        What are some of the challenges you face in parenting that are impacted by your work? What are some small ways you can work at supporting you while supporting your kiddos? ·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, my online resilience training program. Additional Resources: Check out Karen’s work including her awesome parenting podcast, Parenting in the Trenches, as well as her many free parenting resources available here, and her valuable paid programs included in her Living Room Learning platform, here. 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… -        S1E28-31 Front Line Families Series (especially E29 & E31 on parenting with Heather Toews and single parenting with Maria) 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 I am joined by Raina Beugelink, a registered dietitian who is luckily (and happily) married to a first responder. She’s worked in private practice for almost ten years in weight management and chronic disease management.  She feels incredibly passionate about supporting shift workers and first responders increase their energy and improve their health, as she’s seen firsthand the toll it can take on them and their families.  She’s worked with police officers, dispatchers, fire fighters, paramedics, heavy equipment operators, physicians, nurses, and other front-line workers use nutrition strategies to fuel their body properly for shift work.     Raina is joining me as we dive into a new series called “Normal People Problems” where we identify common problems plaguing most people (things like nutrition, finances, parenting and home management) and try to tackle them from the angle of understanding and recognizing the additional hurdles faced by those working in First Response and Front Line Work.    During this episode we talk about common challenges in supporting better nutritional choices – like shift work/circadian rhythm; time for prep/planning; stress and the inclination toward junk; workplace cultural norms and more. Raina breaks down some tips and tricks to support better choices with minimal added stress, and offers further solutions through her services and her online program – both of which you can check out here.   Episode Challenge: ·        Where are the stumbling blocks for you in supporting better nutritional health? What are some small side steps that could help you make some changes? ·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, my online resilience training program. Additional Resources: Check out Raina’s services and program – here’s what she had to share about it:  I felt frustrated by the lack of good, clear, practical strategies for shift work.  Everything I saw on shift work nutrition resources included recommendations like:  eat healthy at night, exercise, get enough sleep.  WE KNOW THAT, but it’s easier said than done.  After doing a lot of research, I set out to create a program that would give shift workers a step-by-step approach to fuel their body well for shift work.  The Shift Fix is a hybrid of recorded and live teaching and Q&A sessions spanning 12 weeks that covers topics like supporting circadian rhythm, individual chronotype, what to eat, when to eat, caffeine, sleep, and stress management strategies.  To learn more, visit www.shiftworknutrition.com or follow on Instagram/Facebook @shift.work.dietitian.  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… -        S2E9-15 Back to Basics Brain Health Series (includes episodes with sleep expert and other amazing professionals) 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 how to know when you have “done” the work of healing from trauma and stress-related concerns. We have touched on what to look for to let you know that you are through the thick of it, as well as what comes next to maintain the gains you’ve worked so hard for. Today, we are focusing in on the last major piece of the puzzle that comes when you have done the hard work of healing. To tell you about it, I am going to quote from Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, which is known as one of the foundational works on trauma therapy and from which most trauma therapies are based. In the book, Judith proposes a 3 stage model for treating trauma – stage one involves building safety, which includes coping skills, reducing actual risk, and supporting people in their ability to regulate their emotions and feel safer in themselves. Stage two is about processing, reconciling what has happened to who we see ourselves as. And stage three, is about reconnecting to the world. Now, as we have gone through the process of healing and growing and refining, we are different, and the people we will want and need around us will likely change too. Here is what she says in her opening paragraph about this final stage:“Having come to terms with the traumatic past, the survivor faces the task of creating a future. She has mourned the old self that the trauma destroyed; now she must develop a new self. Her relationships have been tested and forever changed by the trauma; now she must develop new relationships. The old beliefs that gave meaning to her life have been challenged; now she must find anew a sustaining faith. These are the tasks of the third stage of recovery. In accomplishing this work, the survivor reclaims her world.”When living in trauma, we are often living in connections that either contributed to perpetrating the trauma, or were salient figures in supporting us to stay the same in our trauma. Especially when trauma started early in life, it has been an embedded part of who we become and the people we bring into our lives only know us as that person. That person who fears conflict and doesn’t tend to stand up for themselves. That person who learned to people please and bends themselves over backwards for others. That person who learned to be a grown up as a kid and hyper-functions making everyone else around them able to take a backseat while they do all the things for everyone. Even when our trauma comes later in life, we are shaped by it and the relationships we craft and create are invariably shaped by it too. Relationships with people who knew us before our trauma may experience distancing, confusion, hurt around how we’ve been changed. Trust is often damaged. The sense of safety within the relationship is often wounded. The process of healing brings awareness to how we are in and with ourselves, but also how we are with others…and how they are with us. We start to see places where we need boundaries to protect ourselves from those that routinely hurt us. We start to notice places where we are routinely hurting others. We try on new ways of being and interacting, and sometimes people in our lives embrace this, but often they don’t. They are used to us being the version of self we’ve been, and change feels uncomfortable for them. They can not only struggle to accept new and growing versions of us, but actually be pretty aggressively against it. We start to see how people in our lives are invested in us being less healthy versions of ourselves…because it benefits them. Maybe because we do things for them, maybe because it allows them to feel superior, maybe because they don’t know who they are to us if we aren’t needing them to hold us up or fix us anymore. For many who have gone through the painful and brave process of healing, the hardest part of the process is realizing that many of the people they are surrounded by contribute to keeping them stuck. Another hard piece is realizing that those who contribute to their health have been hurt by the vicarious impacts of trauma too, and that some of those relationships may have been badly damaged, sometimes beyond repair. As we move through the process of healing and come out the other side, one of the big jobs ahead of us is figuring out how we carry our newfound selves into relationships. Both existing relationships that will need to adapt to meet our present selves, as well as new relationships that we will want to grow with intentionality to ensure that they serve who we are NOW rather than finding our way back into old patterns. So, what do we need and how do we do this?1.      Take an inventory. Look at who is in your life right now. Take some time to really consider each person. Get curious about your relationship with each one. What are they great at? What do they feed in you? What do you bring to that relationship? Is it valued? Are there unhealthy patterns in this relationship that need to be addressed? Is this a person who is open to addressing and adjusting? You will likely discover some key people who will venture forward with you on this journey. You will also likely discover more people who will not. With this discovery come natural grief, and you need to know that this is ok. We may grieve releasing people that we wish could come with us but who we can’t afford to risk our progress for. We may grieve that some of the people we will choose to remain in contact with will never be the kinds of relationships we wish they were – they may need to be highly and rigidly boundaried to protect me while retaining some level of contact. This is often true of some family ties. We may also grieve that we have gone through the work of healing and now are in the position of having to make some of the decisions – we can know that they are better for us and yet not without loss and pain.2.      Grieve what needs to be grieved. Changes in us invariably lead to changes in our relationships with others. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the harder. As we become people who clarify our needs, set our boundaries and ask for support, we may discover that not everyone in our lives is as excited to get on board and change with us as we hoped. I often tell clients to prepare for this, to know that it will come, so they aren’t surprised by it. Allow room for grief. Grief needs to be felt. Bottling it only delays it and makes it bigger when we finally let it come out, so make room for it and know that it is ok to have it for awhile. 3.      Enhance the relationships that can grow with you. As you inventory and see who is able and willing to grow with you, invest energy into these people and relationships. Be aware of what you bring to these interactions and to work at keeping this in alignment to the person you are choosing to be. Relationships are the easiest breeding ground for going back to old patterns – they tend to trigger us more easily and elicit from us stronger reactions than just about anything else. Some of the key ways to work at enhancing relationships actually begin within you. a.      Being mindful – really setting an intention for interactions and being able to slow things down when they get sticky. b.      Being self-aware – really knowing your needs, your limitations and where your lines are. c.      And being communicative – really having the skills to share what you are noticing, needing and hoping for. These skills allow us to support healthy relationship. We recognize that people aren’t mind readers, they don’t know what is going on for us, and that we need to do the job of knowing and sharing to facilitate genuine connection. Likewise, we can’t mind read for others, so we need to be prepared to ask and encourage others to let us know when we’ve missed the mark or how we can support them more effectively.4.      Invest in new relationships that can grow alongside you. As you inventory you may notice that your existing relationships are really limited in terms of people who can and will grow with you. We may need to start the search for new relationships. And honestly, this can be challenging because adult relationships are harder to cultivate…even simply because they are harder to find. We tend to wake up, go to work, go home and go to bed. Aside from the gym, the grocery store and maybe the kids school, we don’t tend to be in a lot of places that are particularly valuable social connect points. My encouragement to you is to be intentional and get creative. Consider the kind of relationship you are hoping to cultivate and the type of person you are hoping to find. What would their values be? What would they be interested in? What would their skills be? And then with those in mind, consider where you imagine such a person might exist in the world. If you value fitness, the outdoors and people with that kind of healthy living mentality – maybe you need to go join the local canoe club or hiking group. If you value close connection and small group activities, maybe you need to find a local game café that hosts board game nights. If you love learning and investing in growing you skills, maybe you need to register for a language class or a writing course. If you want someone who can be creative with you and mutually loves making things, maybe you need to find a pottery class or a knitting or quilting club. If you want really deep connections, look into signing up for a retreat. If you hope to find other people with families, sign up for a family camp. There are lots of things out there, but you’ll have to go find them, because they won’t come banging down your door to find you.By setting out into a world after healing trauma seeking out a community of support that we intentionally build around us, we are reclaiming our world. We are making a statement that trauma no longer controls a fundamental part of my life, and we are staking claim to a life that WE choose rather than one our patterns and trauma default us into. It involves conscious awareness, slowing down and seeing what’s happening in and around us, and mak

Show Notes:Today, I want us to talk about resilience, and how we work at retaining the resilience we have cultivated so that we don’t find ourselves in over our heads again. This piggybacks on what we talked about last week – we can’t know what we need to do for resilience if we can’t see the forest for the trees and know what’s going on for us. Awareness is ALWAYS the first and most important step – everything else works from there. Now, resilience is a word that I find has some cultural impressions and even stigma around. I was actually scrolling through social media recently and a past colleague who I respect and admire, had posted on his page a meme that said something to the effect of “I hope to never be called resilient ever again, don’t praise me for surviving things I had no choice but to survive and pretend that made me stronger.” I get it. Resilience has connotations of meaning things like “bouncing back”, being unaffected by hardship, somehow being stronger than the hardships that hit us. I wish I could tell you where all of that bullshit came from…I blame extreme versions of positive psychology and tendencies toward toxic positivity where being positive is used as a mechanism to retreat from facing what’s hard, calling shit what it is and rather uses positivity to ignore and avoid under the guise of “healthy”. Those definitions of resilience are total crap. And I get to say that because I literally created a training program all about resilience and not once do we talk about “bouncing back” other than to recognize that it’s a lie we’re sold about resilience. In my training program, Beating the Breaking Point, we actually go into detail defining what resilience is. I start the lesson on resilience with a quote by Leon Megginson that says, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Hear that? It isn’t about being strong, it’s about being adaptive. Here is the working definition we use in the program to talk about resilience, are you ready?:“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 (note the tense, the impacts of suffering may be a continuing state to some extent or degree), and seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative.”In the course we spend time breaking this definition down and if your interest is piqued, I am going to encourage you to find the link in the show notes and check out the training. What I am going to say about it here for our purposes today is that resilience isn’t about bouncing back and being fine, it’s about adapting to what has hit us which includes incorporating the impact it has had into how we think about and know ourselves, and how we choose to carry this forward with us. The meaning-making process we use to engage with the things that happen to us informs our capacity to be resilient. And if you have really engaged in the work of healing, you have already done so much of this. Healing and processing trauma, stress and other pieces like this involves making meaning of it. It means embodying a story about what happened to us and what we believe that then means about us - who we are as a result of what we’ve been through. If you have worked through processing and healing, you have already developed and embraced resilience as a part of who you are, because you made the uncomfortable choice to work at how you make meaning and considered changing how you made meaning of things that happened to you. So now, the work after having done the hardest parts of healing, is to keep what you’ve worked so hard to gain. To work at retaining the resilience you fought so hard for. How do we do that? Well…let’s go back to our working definition but from the lens of retaining resilience. To recap, resilience is:“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 (note the tense, the impacts of suffering may be a continuing state to some extent or degree), and seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative.”So let’s break it down…1.      An ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, stress or change in a way that accepts the truth of the suffering. What does this mean for us practically when we’re working to retain the resilience we’ve invested so much into accomplishing? Well, I am actually going to suggest that this breaks down into a few ways and that it’s best to start backward.a.      First, we have to start by being aware of and acknowledging that suffering exists. We’re back to square one from last week, assessing. We have to have our eyes open to what’s going on for us and where we are experiencing suffering. You may not name it suffering, it may be called something else, but if we don’t see it and name it, we can’t do anything with it and we’re back to ignoring or avoiding until it builds up enough to bite us in the ass.b.      Second, we have to be honest about the suffering. This means telling a full story about what is going on for us, not just the easiest or default version of the story. Here’s an example, when my husband and I get in a disagreement, I can tell a story about how he’s a jerk…or I can step back and be aware that I haven’t been sleeping well lately, I’ve been feeling more on edge and am probably more sensitive to him. While he may still be a jerk, I can also own that I am contributing to some amount of the suffering I’m experiencing by not supporting my needs more effectively. It’s not an either/or, it’s working at describing the fullness of what’s happening. c.      And third, we have to accept this as the starting point. To recover from something, we have to own that it is what it is. 2.      Let’s tackle the next part of the definition: Resilience acknowledges the depth of impact the suffering has. Resilience doesn’t just pay lip service to what is happening, it looks closely at the impact that is playing out in and around me. It works to recognize the impact in the past, present and what I may carry forward into the future. When you have done work on processing your experiences and you are working to retain resilience, this is about continuing to acknowledge the ongoing impacts some of your experiences may have on you. I have shared before a story from my childhood about a teacher who yelled at me and told me I was stupid and would never amount to anything. The impacts of this have been far reaching in my life, in hard ways that impacted my self-esteem and confidence for a long time and undermined my sense of my own intelligence, but also in ways that pushed me to prove otherwise – leading to a Master’s degree that I am grateful for. To this day I have moments where her voice creeps into my head. They are often in really silly moments and the feeling connected to it is usually embarrassment and shame. I am familiar with them and can often see them coming. While I have done the work of healing my trauma around this experience, it doesn’t erase that it happened or completely nullify all of the impacts. That said, when it shows up, now instead of becoming embroiled in the impacts, feeling the complete depth of embarrassment or shame, I can usually giggle at it. I’ll say things to myself like, “hey you, I see you there, I know what you’re about. I can understand why that’s coming up right now, but we’re ok, we don’t have to go to that place, we get to choose different.” 3.      Last but not least, Resilience seeks to make the suffering and its impacts a meaningful part of our self-narrative. As we continue to walk the journey of post-healing life, and we continue to face a world and a life that will continue to throw challenges our way, we need to continue to adapt the story-telling skills we learned during the healing work into our ongoing daily narrative. I read of meme today that said, “a negative mind will find fault in everything and a positive mind will find opportunity in everything”. While I don’t love the extremes of a positive and negative mind, because we all have room to be a little bit of both, I kind of appreciate the vibe. The way we perceive, interact with and tell the stories of our experiences shapes what they feel like, and how we feel about ourselves within those stories. I’m not saying we lie to ourselves, but I am saying that we get to choose how to make sense of what happens to us and we don’t have to mindlessly embrace the first version of a narrative that comes to mind. Honestly, that’s the one we should probably be more skeptical of. I go into this concept in another episode where I talked about my traumatic experience during labor and delivery of my first child. I shared that a mindset shift offered by my doula made a HUGE difference in how I made sense of that experience and likely determined my ability to have a second child…I’m not sure I would have been able to do that if I had been left with my default narrative.I hope that in all of this, you are hearing that resilience really isn’t about sheer grit or strength or positivity or bouncing back. It is work. It is earned through hardship by doing the work of interacting with it and choosing who we will be in, through and out the other side of it. If you are interested in working on resilience, please do take a look at my Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Training Program. It has received top ratings from those who have walked through and completed it, and we’re actually working on making it even better to include a private community for support, Q&A’s with me to support making the information applicable to your life, and a growing resource vault that we are going to continue to invest in developing. If you sign up now you will get automatically enrolled in all of these pieces when they launch in the next few weeks but for the price of the core program alone. The link to the program will be

Show Notes:The last couple of episodes we established some of the things to look for to help guide you in knowing where you are at in the process of healing. To get here you’ve put in a ton of work, and I’m sure that it has not been easy. But, now what??The primary focus is to stay on top of things and to maintain all you’ve worked so hard to accomplish. How do you do that? Well, this may sound too simple, but the answer is this: assess and adjust.Let’s start with assess. One of the reasons that people wind up in burnout, traumatic stress responses and other stress-related challenges, is because they let things that were too big go for too long without recognizing them for what they were and doing something effective about them. When we avoid, ignore, and leave things too long, pretending that we’re “fine”, we make it all so much worse. Now, I want to be clear that I don’t think people generally purposefully neglect their trauma thinking that it will magically get better. I do think that people generally have no idea what they should be looking for to help them know that’s what they are dealing with AND I think that people generally get so caught up in the daily demands of life that they legitimately miss noticing how bad things are getting until it’s SO bad that it stops them in their tracks. I also think that our trauma is not just made up of the big stuff alone. It can be an additive effect where big and small things pile on top of each other, so gradually and progressively, that we don’t fully notice it until the pile becomes smothering. It isn’t as straightforward as that really traumatic call – it’s often childhood experiences, mixed with marital stress, financial uncertainty, parenting stress, and then on top of that add the work-related exposure to traumatic material…and then on top of THAT, add the toxic and often dysfunctional organizational systems within which we are not sufficiently supported to face what you tend to face. And then there’s the jerk in the grocery store parking lot, and the mean mom at your kids school, and the boss you can’t stand…it is an amalgamation of these big and small offenses, difficulties and traumas that shape our experience in nuanced ways until we realize that they have completely eroded our sense of self and stability within our own existence.If you have done the work of healing, or are in the process of that work, you’ll know that some of the greatest discomfort comes in the reckoning. For many of my clients the hardest part of their work will be the effort at becoming aware of their own shit. Stopping and really looking at it. No longer ignoring it, avoiding it and passing it off like it’s normal and fine and the same as what everyone else is dealing with. To see it for what it is, is uncomfortable, to the point of distressing sometimes. Naming it and recognizing that it’s worse than we’ve given it credit for is unsettling. And yet, if we can’t see it and name it and know what it is, then we can’t ever do work to interact with it. So in doing the work, we carry with us this newfound capacity to call a spade a spade. We have done the very uncomfortable work of peeling back the layers and looking at each and every one of them with new eyes. We have developed tools like awareness, mindfulness, self-compassion and boundaries, to support us in carrying this forward. And that is a key part of where we need to focus our time and our attention once we have done the bulk of our healing work. …Because life won’t stop life-ing. It will continue to throw new things at you, and it will be tempting to fall back into old habits of ignoring and avoiding and pretending it’s all good. If we don’t want to find ourselves right back where we started, we have to change how we approach the whole process.So here is what you can be working on investing in: schedule 2 types of check-ins. First, a daily check in. I know this might sound like a lot, but doing this will cost you less time, energy and frankly money than if you find yourself having to return to intensive therapy down the road! On a daily basis, have a time where you sit and reflect on your day and how you felt in it. What went well? What felt life-giving? Where did you shine? Who showed up for you? What was challenging? Did you rise to the challenge(s) or are there learnings around how you would want to approach those differently a next time? What was hard or uncomfortable? What did you do with the hard or uncomfortable and how do you feel about how you handled that? Where was your mood at and what contributed to shaping that? What did you do to help shape it? …While this might sound like a lot of questions, you should be able to do this in about 7-10 minutes, which I am almost certain you can afford to carve out the time for. Oh, and yes, all of these questions will be in the show notes for you to reference.The next type of check-in I want you to schedule is bi-monthly (so every other month). I want you to print off our Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide and complete it. Notice where you’re at, and use the triage guide as a roadmap to help you stay aligned in using skills that keep you well. Keep your completed checklist! Find a pretty binder or cool folder to store these, and each time you do one, compare it to the one or ones before. Notice patterns, as well as any changes that indicate worsening symptoms. Use the guide to help map out tools to support you in staying on track, or getting back on track if you’ve been veering off of them. This brings us to “Adjust”. Assessing involves awareness and making the time to see the forest for the trees so we don’t ignore and passively avoid. Adjusting takes the information we glean from our self-assessing and considers what we need to keep ourselves in a place that feels aligned with our goals and connected to the people we have worked so hard to be. Adjusting doesn’t have to look like big sweeping changes. More often than not, it’s about small tweaks. But it all starts with seeing where we’re at risk so we can be effective and accurate in making tweaks that actually serve the needs we have rather than just throwing a ton of shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Here’s an example – my daily and bi-monthly assessments might indicate that I’m feeling more tense and burnt out, and I am aware that I have been giving a lot and not taking time for myself to have quiet time alone, which I find to be rejuvenating. Seeing the problem clearly, and the needs that are connected to this, I can make some small adjustments that can start moving me in a better direction. Things like waking up 15-20 minutes earlier to have some quiet time with my coffee and a book in the mornings has actually honestly been a valuable part of my journey. It’s not huge, it doesn’t demand much from me, and it gives back in disproportionate ways. To make this tweak, a couple other tweaks also had to happen – my nighttime routine had to adjust a bit to be able to get enough sleep to not begrudge this earlier waking up – but with that, it feels so much better than resenting everyone for taking up time and energy and never getting my own need for time alone met. Adjusting can look like changes and adaptations to your self-care. Maybe you need a bit more time for self-care, maybe you need to adjust some self-care that used to work but isn’t meeting the need anymore, maybe you need to adjust the heart you are bringing to your self-caring actions. Adjusting can also look like changes and adaptations to your boundaries. Maybe you need to practice stronger boundaries with someone in your life. Maybe you need to hold stronger internal boundaries as you work out what you will permit or tolerate. Maybe your boundaries are really rigid, still tied to a time when you felt like you had to do a lot to self-protect, but maybe this is keeping you lonely and disconnected. Adjusting can look like mindset changes, choosing how we bring ourselves into situations and interactions and being mindful of engaging as the people we choose to be rather than from our default settings. Again, none of this has to be big and sweeping, it happens in the small things and gets tweaked until we find a sweet spot…and then life will happen and the sweet spot will change and we’ll continue to tweak until we find it again.The capacity to assess ourselves and our surroundings accurately, identify and attune to our needs, and utilize these to inform the choices we make to help ourselves align to the people we choose to be are core aspect of post traumatic growth. While our experience of trauma can impact us in ways that can be negative and show up as “disorder” – they can also impact us in ways that can be positive and show up as opportunity and growth. If we move through healing, we can find that our experiences of trauma give us a sense of valuing life, valuing people and valuing ourselves. We can come to see strengths in ourselves we would never otherwise have known. We can gain clarity around our values and discover internal passions we might not have discovered. …Let me be clear that none of that is to say that the trauma experiences are good, or that we have to be grateful for them…but that if we have to live with them regardless, it’s ok to hone in on how they’ve grown us at least as much as we are aware of how we have felt broken by them.In the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Training Program, the core training outlines many of the skills we’ve talked about today and goes into deeper detail – as well as walking you through personalizing and applying this framework to your own life. While the training isn’t therapy, it is all of the most essential information I find gives my clients lightbulb moments in the therapy room, distilled down into 7 videos. If you haven’t checked the training out, I would highly recommend that you do. We are actually adding a community and coaching component to the course that will be coming soon and those who register now will be automatically added to the new program when it launches in the next month or so, but you’ll get it at the price of the core training alone. Episode Challenge:Asses

Show Notes: If you missed the intro to our latest series last week, here’s a quick recap: Based on listener feedback, we received a request to talk about how to know when you’re done the work of trauma processing, and what to do once you have “done” the work of therapy or healing. If you missed last week, you’ll want to be sure to go back and start there as it was part one of a two-part intro around how to know when you’re done the work – and today’s episode follows closely as part two. I gave you 3 things last week including:1.      You are not ignoring, avoiding and distracting a substantial amount of the time.2.      Coping feels established and stable. And3.      We are aware of our common triggers, the feeling of being triggered, and have a tool kit to support us.Carrying on from there, here’s what you can look for:4.      You are noticing that you are generally experiencing more good days than not, or that you are better able to hold the tension that a day is not defined wholly by negative experiences. I remember one of the most profound things I have heard someone say was in a class I took on addictions. Our professor brought in two men who were recovering addicts and one of them said this thing that I wrote down and reflect on often. He said, “I learned that I can’t let a bad minute turn into a bad hour, turn into a bad day, turn into a bad week, and so on.” What he was talking about was the slippery slope that our brain can be when something hard or perceived as bad happens to us or around us – if we aren’t careful of our mindset or allow our stress center to take that ball and run with it, it will run down a path that says that everything is ruined. The whole day is bad, maybe even the week…maybe even my life. When trauma and stress are telling our story, they tell it from this kind of lens. As we heal, we start to discover pockets of curiosity where maybe not everything is terrible all of the time; maybe I’m not terrible all of the time. We start to hold newfound tensions, that hard things can happen, and that I can also be ok. That we can allow our minutes and hours and days and so on to be defined not only by my perception of hardship, but also by my perception of goodness. As we heal, it’s a bit like a horse wearing blinders – the blinders start to open up and gradually come off – allowing us to not just see what’s straight ahead of us, but far more context and periphery. We get exposure to not just the stressful thing before us, but have access to the care we experience, the connection to hope, the memories of fun – and together this offers us a more well-rounded and accurate experience of the world within which we exist.5.      Problems are more present tense than past. If you are a loyal listener of this show, you’ll know that the part of your brain that manages stress and trauma responses doesn’t have a clock. What that means is that it experiences ALL stress and trauma as if it’s occurring in the present moment – even when we’re recalling events long since over and done with. Last week I quickly summarized that the process of healing from trauma and stress concerns involves helping our brain to relocate stress-related memories to the parts of your brain that are meant to hold and contain contextualized memory recall. As we do this, our experiences begin to feel old, distant, a bit faded, and contextualized within the time and conditions within which it happened. We can recall experiences without feeling like we’re reliving them, and we can recognize that we did what we could, and that it’s over now. As we heal and experience this distancing from past experiences, we get to interact more with present-day problems. There is room for the present-day problems, and when we interact with them, they are less triggering to the past and less informed by reactions that come from being triggered. You will notice that the problems you bring up with people – your therapist, trusted friends or loved ones, will have a more current-day context. There are still problems, they are still impactful, but they are real problems that we can interact with a make choices around now – not things long gone that we have no more influence over changing. 6.      Closely connected to number 5, problems feel proportionate to present stressors and less informed by past experiences showing up in the present. This is really connected to that triggering piece. If you haven’t heard us talk about triggering on the show before, go check out our “Trigger Happy” series – Season 2, Episodes 22-25. Triggering is what happens when our stress center is still holding a lot of our memories, and keeping them highly activated in a largely misguided effort to protect us. When present-day problems happen, our stress center is scanning those experiences for any hint of connection to our past stressful/traumatic experiences with the goal of preventing the present-day problem from turning into experiences like our trauma again. When this happens, our reactions to present-day problems tend to be extremely disproportionate to the current situation. We are highly reactive, and likely to have our reaction be really out of whack with what the current situation would normally call for. We see this come up a lot in conflicts with partners and kids where reactions are intensely disproportionate, but it may also show up at work or driving in traffic or other random places. When we have done the bulk of the healing work, our brains have relocated our trauma and stress memories and contextualized them in a way where we can notice the difference between now and then. As this happens, we are able to remain more present in situations and respond to them in a way that is more in line with what the situation in its purest form needs from us. This doesn’t mean we won’t still have reactive moments, but they’ll be reactive because this moment genuinely calls for it, not because I’m so triggered by past experiences that I can’t see the forest for the trees and become overreactive to the current scenario. 7.      I am able to be calm and connected rather than calm and disconnected. This is one of my favourite things to ask my clients about. Often I have clients who will come in and share that they’ve been feeling calmer lately – and the question I always ask is, are you calm and connected, or calm and disconnected? Depending where they are in the process, calm and disconnected is often the answer. As we move through trauma processing, sometimes the brain feels threatened at the thought of relocating trauma memories and experiences – your brain believes is needs these to keep you as safe as possible from them happening again. What this can mean is that your brain will learn to dissociate, which really just means tuning you out for periods of time, in an effort to cope and keep you from moving through the work of processing. Dissociation often does feel like calm – we feel kind of numb and tuned out…but that’s not the same as healed. It is actually it’s own version of a stress response and a defining feature of being not done the work depending on the degree and extent to which we’re experiencing it. When we have done really good healing work, we can experience spaces of being in our bodies and feeling calm and connected to ourselves and the world around us as opposed to calm thanks to disconnected dissociative efforts at coping.8.      Support systems are beginning to emerge and are an intentional area of development. Support systems don’t manifest themselves overnight. They take work to create and cultivate, and effort to maintain and grow. Healing isn’t defined by having this full formed and strongly in place, but it is defined by the effort to move in this direction with conscious intention and valuing. People who have done really good healing work see where they need support, and see what they bring to others and where they can offer support. They are willing to seek out support, risk in conscientious and safe ways, and enter into relationships with their own boundaries mindfully in place and a willingness to engage with the boundaries of others. This is a whole topic that we go into in a lot of detail in the Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program, because it is a significant facet of healthy human living and can be extremely challenging and nuanced for people who have done a lot of work to self-protect from others for long periods of time. If this is an area that you need to work on, consider checking out the course, link is in the show notes.9.      Competency in regular and consistent self check-ins to assess for “blips” and identify needed actions to stay on track. People who have invested their time and effort, blood, sweat and tears into the work, know how hard it really is, and they don’t want to have to start from scratch and do it all over again. They are also able to be more in tune with themselves, their needs and the indicators that alert them to something being needed. They invest time and energy on an ongoing basis to pause, self-assess, check in with how they are doing and consider what their needs might be. They are willing to interact with their own needs. Increasing in their comfort and familiarity in recognizing their needs, being ok with having them and honouring that this is part of the human experience, and prepared to engage in seeking out pieces that support and meet the needs. People who have done the bulk of the work take ownership over their needs – while they may rely on others to support their needs and ask for help in meeting needs, they understand and are willing to engage as the one who intuits the needs and activates the steps to support the needs rather than expecting others to interpret and provide need-meeting solutions without prompting or guidance. The work teaches us about ourselves and where we’ve missed ourselves. It also teaches us about where we wished for saving and shows us that we are the ones who have to step in to save ourselves by engaging in the work. We learn that we have t

Show Notes: As we kick off this new year, we are also kicking off a new series here on Behind the Line and covering a topic we haven’t tackled before. Back in the fall I put out a question to my followers on social media, and I was so grateful for the thoughtful responses. The question was simply, what would you like to hear about on the podcast? And yes, for those of you who listen but aren’t following me on facebook and Instagram, I do connect there and engage with your questions, feedback and I love getting your thoughts and input as we continue to shape this resource and build a community of amazing helpers together. So please do jump over and follow me @lindsayafaas, and reach out with your feedback. I work really hard to always respond to every comment, question, and DM. Ok, back to our topic for today – one of the fantastic responses I received to my question was this: what do you do when you are “done” the work of trauma therapy?  Such a great question, and I am so glad someone was brave enough to ask it. And when I sat with it I came up with some other questions, like how do we know when we’re done? What helps us know that we’ve done the work and are out the other side of processing and healing our trauma? And this is what we’re going to be talking about today and next week, in a two part breakdown of how we know we’re done the work; and then we’ll spend the rest of January tackling what we do once we recognize ourselves as done the work. How do we maintain what we’ve accomplished and protect ourselves from finding our way back into old patterns and recreating experiences that hurt us. If you know anyone who has faced trauma, this might be a great series to share with them too. For some who listen religiously, this will be a recap – but I want to make sure we all have this important background understanding. When trauma is experienced, it is experienced and interpreted through our stress centre. Our brain activates a very specific region that handles the traumatic event or events and does what needs doing to survive it. The upside to this is that your stress center is very good at survival. The downside is that it’s not so great at a lot of other things. When the traumatic event is experienced with high stress activation, the memory of that event can get locked into that same region of the brain, which, by the way, does not have access to a clock or sense of time. This is not the part of your brain meant to hold memories, everyday kinds of memories get stored in other regions that have greater access to context and a sense of time, which is why they will over time fade a bit and start to feel old and distant. Traumatic memories, locked into this region that has no clock, will tend to feel very real and we can remember them in a way that feels like reliving the experience as a result. The goal of trauma processing is to help the brain relocate the memory to its usual memory storage banks by helping the brain to contextualize and make meaning of the events in a way that lets it off the hook for our fundamental survival.  When I work with clients, there are a number of things I am looking and listening for that let me know we’ve made some really substantial progress and that we have moved through the bulk of their trauma.  1.      You are not ignoring, avoiding and distracting a substantial amount of the time. This doesn’t mean that you don’t ever scroll your phone, or that you don’t ever delay a decision – but these are done with intention. When we are in our trauma, we will mindlessly engage in these ways of tuning out. We will actively avoid anything that triggers our trauma, we will avoid conflicts that make us feel uncomfortable or reignite our insecurities, we will distract and numb from our discomfort. When we have healed our trauma, we will turn toward the discomfort and be curious about what is making us uncomfortable. We will face it, engage with it, and not let it get in our way or cause more harm. We interact with discomfort, and lean in to our newfound skills and resources to manage through it to see that we can do hard things, we can navigate hard conversations, we can deepen connection through healthful conflict. We don’t let things shut us down. We may make choices to shut ourselves down for short periods of time to reset, reconnect with our needs, consider our intentions and next steps, but then we re-engage. It is done with purpose and mindfulness.  2.      Coping feels established and stable. We have routines and supports firmly in place. We know about our own needs, we are comfortable getting curious about ourselves, and we are willing to intervene in caring ways to ensure our own ok-ness. We have a hit list of things we know help us feel more steady and secure. We regularly engage in thoughtful actions that gesture caring and meaning to our own selves. We have awareness of when we’re feeling off, and are prepared with tools to become curious about this and engaged in meeting our emerging and evolving needs. We don’t just engage in coping as a response to a bad day or hard experience, we are engaged in it constantly in big and small ways to preventatively support our own stability. 3.      We are aware of our common triggers, the feeling of being triggered, and have a tool kit to support us. We understand that triggering can happen, even when we have done a lot of healing work. Triggering is the bodies way of trying to keep us safe. We value our body’s effort, but recognize that not all triggers mean unsafety, and we have tools to support our body in calming down and finding safety again. We know what things are likely to trigger us and approach these things with gentleness toward ourselves and compassionate understanding for our body’s efforts at self-protecting. We know what our bodies feel like when triggered, how to assess and know what’s happening for us. When we experience this, we use grounding tools to help our brain recalibrate and trust that this process will gradually continue to embed new networks that promote a sense of safety where once we felt unsafe.  Episode Challenge: Sit with the three indicators of healing outlined in today’s show. Where are you at in your process of healing? What work is yet to be done? What are areas that may need some attention to continue to move you in the direction of healing and posttraumatic growth?? Additional Resources: Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.  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… -        S1E15-18 about processing (this was specific to the pandemic but has principles that can be applied more broadly)  -        S2E5-8 covers information on therapy  -        S2E22-25 talks about trauma triggering and managing reactions to triggers  -        S3E1-4 on alternative therapeutic approaches to healing when talk therapy hasn’t been enough  -        S3E9-13 all on the impacts of trauma 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 look at simplifying and finding genuine meaning in the midst of the chaos of the holiday season. This week we are focusing in on how to connect with our own selves, and how this is a stepping stone to strengthen relationships with others. Don't miss this discussion on immersing ourselves in studying our own internal landscape - it may sound a bit cooky, but it is essential!! Episode Challenge: Sit with the questions outlined in the show: What does your internal landscape look like? What does it feel like? How has it changed? What is growing? What is changing? What is dying off and making way for new growth? How can you spend time here and get to know it's idiosyncrasies better? What would knowing about this allow you to bring to other relationships? How might you imagine other people's internal landscapes? 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…·        S3E5-8 Reclaiming Self Series (being in alignment with values and being the people we want to be) 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 diving into simplifying and finding genuine meaning in the midst of the chaos of the holiday season. Today we are digging into what we value and looking at how this can evolve and change over time. We are talking about how to reflect on what serves us, as well as what doesn't serve us well; how to refine what we choose to better reflect what serves us meaningfully; and ways to recharge in the midst of it - both passively as well as actively.  Episode Challenge: Sit with the questions outlined in the show: What serves you well during this season? What used to serve you well but no longer does? What has never served you well? How might you refine your choices to maximize what serves you well, and reduce the things that don't? And how can you seek out spaces and activities to recharge - both passively (chill out time) and actively (memory making fun or engagement)? 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…·        S3E5-8 Reclaiming Self Series (being in alignment with values and being the people we want to be) 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: Last week we opened the conversation of finding quiet in the chaos of the holiday season and working to shape the expectations we allow to have placed on us to be more reflective of who we want to be, what feels important to us and what we choose for ourselves during this season. I shared that our family loves a lot of really meaningful traditions and rituals and I already feel like we are well into them. We have our tree up and decorated, the lights on the house, and this past weekend marked the 4th annual Faas Family Sing-along Christmas party, barring the couple of years we missed from covid.  If you don’t know, I am married to a musician, a trained jazz pianist, and music is a huge part of our holidays. The Faas Family sing-along is a family favourite event, but it is one I will admit I have had to practice loving. I mentioned last episode that I am something of a perfectionist, and if I reflect on my family upbringing, one of my early learnings was to be stressed about how others perceive your home. My mom was always really conscientious about people coming to our home, scrubbing every surface and having everything pristine before anyone arrived. I absolutely inherited this pressure to have everything look just so, and have had to work hard at reducing the pressure I put on myself. Because if I let myself, I will rob the experience of every ounce of joy by being so stressed out about small things out of place or stains I can’t get out and how others might judge me.  What I’ve realized, is that no one has time or interest in caring much at all about what my house looks like. Barring stinky gross mess, I think most people are just thrilled to have something fun to do with people they like and could care less about whether my bathroom vent has been scrubbed until it’s shining or if my ceiling fan has some dust on it…and yes, that is the level of pressure I once held for myself.  People love our sing-along for the family friendly vibe, the fun games and atmosphere and the yummy food and good company. I love our sing-along for those same reasons. Each year, I work to simplify the food so it’s delicious but doesn’t keep me handcuffed to the stove missing out on the time with our people. I work to simplify the processes so that I can focus on what matters when it matters most and have a lot of it done and out of the way so I can really enjoy being in the moment.  What a lot of this boils down to is values. Last week we talked about expectations, and these emerge from the values we hold. Now, our values can be decided by us, but they can also be dictated by our histories and the values others laid upon us. We have to interact intentionally and question our values to be sure that we are living by values that feel truly aligned with the kinds of people WE choose to be in the world. While I still value cleanliness, I have scaled that value to know that I value people more. I value relationships more. I value being in connection more. And so, whether or not my home is pristine, I will not allow that to dissuade me from inviting people to come be in my life. I will not have a standard of perfection that separates me from connections I care about. I continue to value how people think of me, but no longer fear them thinking poorly of me. Instead, I think that people are either in alignment with what I value or perhaps not, and if not, I am not prepared to twist myself into a pretzel to fit their values and expectations. If that means releasing some relationships where we are not aligned and serving each other well, that’s ok with me, it leaves more room for the people who are really on the journey of life with me.  I want to encourage you to sit with your values. What matters to you. At the end of the day, what do you want to be known and remembered for? What stands out as most important to you? What is the legacy you long to leave? …Now, take these values and refine them to how they show up in the holiday season. If you value caring for people, what does this look like at the holidays? Does it look like expensive gifts or engaging from a place of service? If you value quiet time to yourself, how does this show up in the holiday season? Are you overcommitted and need to scale back, or have you done a great job setting time aside to meet your needs? Do you have values that feel in opposition to one another or mutually exclusive? What does it look like to try to balance these or meet a little bit of each need during the holidays? As you refine your values, you will be able to more intentionally choose what to say yes to, what to say no to and where to put your time and energy. It won’t mean that there aren’t lots of invitations to spend your time and energy in a whole bunch of places that are out of alignment – the invitation will be there – but it will be a little bit easier to decide what you sacrifice for and what you don’t. You’ll have a better capacity to hold boundaries that allow you to exit the holidays feeling like you lived that out really well and got what you needed from them, rather than reflecting on them from a place of “thank God that’s over!” Episode Challenge: Sit with the questions outlined in the show: What matters to you. At the end of the day, what do you want to be known and remembered for? What stands out as most important to you? What is the legacy you long to leave? …Now, take these values and refine them to how they show up in the holiday season. If you value caring for people, what does this look like at the holidays? Does it look like expensive gifts or engaging from a place of service? If you value quiet time to yourself, how does this show up in the holiday season? Are you overcommitted and need to scale back, or have you done a great job setting time aside to meet your needs? Do you have values that feel in opposition to one another or mutually exclusive? What does it look like to try to balance these or meet a little bit of each need during the holidays? 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…·        S3E5-8 Reclaiming Self Series (being in alignment with values and being the people we want to be) 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:  December has arrived and we are into that time of year that many people experience as a love/hate relationship. The holiday season can come with a lot for us. There can be a lot of joy and excitement and connection, but there can also be a lot of overwhelm, stress, and grieving. For many who work in First Response and Front Line Work, there are added factors, like being on call or working over the holidays while the rest of the world seems to be allowed to hibernate and enjoy their families by the fireside. The season can come with closeness as well as resentment. It can come with a sense of quiet or a sense of chaos.  Acknowledging that the holidays are a time that can be very mixed, I want us to take a little time each week during this month to focus in on how we can create some quiet in the chaos and choose the kind of season we want to have rather than it feeling forced upon us. I’ll be honest, I love so much about the holidays. I love the magic – the surprises – and the traditions. I love that my kids are still ages where they love santa. That they are old enough to remember our rituals and to get excited about doing the things that matter to our family each year. I will also admit that I hate the commercialism, I hate the shopping mall, I hate the many demands on my time and energy, I hate the pressure for perfect. And because of all of this, I have, year to year, worked to focus on ways to simplify our holidays to be able to really enjoy them rather than feeling like I am consumed by them.  I’ll be real, it hasn’t come easily or gone perfectly. I am prone to perfectionism, and if I am not careful to hold myself in alignment with my hearts longing to be in the moment with my people, I can easily get caught up in the busy-ness and noise – trying to find that perfect gift or twisting myself into a pretzel trying to throw the perfect holiday party.  Really what I am attempting…and I think what many of us feel a craving for…is counter-cultural. And stepping outside of the norm, going against the grain, is difficult. You’ll be challenged at every turn, called back to the uncomfortable familiarity of the cultural standards. …And yet, I know that I don’t love how I feel within the cultural standards. I don’t love the pressure and the fatigue. And I don’t want my kids to carry that feeling with them into their internalized values as they grow and eventually wind up in my position trying to pull this off with their own families one day.  If I think of what I want to gift my kids, I want them to have the gift of knowing how to rest. I want them to have the gift of knowing how to slow down. I want to gift them the ability to release expectations placed on them, and the courage to choose their own path. I want for my kids to have the capacity to hold space for their own families, to have closeness and connection and deep meaning in the precious moments shared with those we choose to spend our lives with. I want my kids to remember the magic, not the stuff. I want for them to pass along a legacy of magic and hope and joy.  When I reflect on these longings in me, I feel called back year after year to simplifying and I find that this brings me to the reflective place around my expectations as well as the expectations I feel placed upon me. If I leave them unchecked, these expectations can become a burden, an albatross around my neck that I am forced to carry. And then it’s no wonder that the season feels like pressure and exhausting – I am carrying something unwittingly and it costs something.  But when I enter the season willing to tangle with the expectations, notice and name them, I get to take some power back and decide which ones I am going to carry with me and which ones I will leave behind. I get to invite the opportunity to be a conscious chooser of what I will focus on during the season, and a conscious chooser of what I have no interest in carrying with me. We are back to this word we hit so often on this show – the word is intentional. Entering the holiday season thinking about the expectations we bring in with us and whether or not these are what we actually want and choose to live by allows us to be intentional. It allows us to set our intentions and align to them. It gives us the chance to lean in to who we choose to be during this season. My encouragement to you is to not run into this season full force without pause. Don’t let the seasons chaos dictate how you engage it and how, at the end of it all, you’ll feel about it.  Take some time and sit with these questions: 1.      What was your early learning about the holidays? What was modeled for you? 2.      What, from that early learning do you want to keep? What did you love that you would like to continue? 3.      What, from your early learning do you want to leave behind? What does not serve you that you would like to discontinue? 4.      What, based on your life now, energy and interests, feels most in alignment with who you want to be and the values you hold in the holiday season? 5.      What, based on your life now, energy and interests, feels not in alignment with who you want to be and the values you want to hold in the holiday season? 6.      What can you do to simplify out the things that are not in alignment? And what can you do to maximize focus on the pieces that feel highly aligned? Episode Challenge: Sit with the questions outlined in the show (see above) 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…·        S3E5-8 Reclaiming Self Series (being in alignment with values and being the people we want to be) 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 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

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 s

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. 1.      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.2.      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

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 dow