Through the Smoke

Seeing Systems, Finding Home

Category: Connecting – Social

“Connecting around” means social support – people who you truly know and who know you. Having companions you can be yourself around is essential. We all need to know and be known by others. In psychological research, social support correlates strongly to our resilience.

Where Are You? Reflections on California Fires

December 18, 2017 /

(Message delivered at New Creation Lutheran Church, Sunday, December 17, 2017)

“Where are you?” That’s the first thing God says to a human being in the Bible.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” (Genesis 3:8-10)

Throughout the Bible, God asks people questions, but I think we can be sure it is never because God is hungry for information – God knows the answers. We need to be asked.

We call this story in Genesis the “fall from grace” or “original sin.” We talk about it as our disconnection from God – that’s what the word “sin” means.  But as I have studied faith, psychology and neurophysiology for crisis intervention, peer support and chaplaincy, I have come to see that we need three dimensions of connection. All three become broken in the Genesis story.

The first disconnection is social. Adam, Eve and the serpent, rather than supporting each other, talk each other into doing the wrong thing.

The second is physical. Childbirth and food production will be painful; Adam and Eve will “return to dust,” becoming part of the earth that they were taken from.

The third disconnection is spiritual – they are banished from the garden and no longer have access to the tree with knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life. They no longer walk with God in the garden.

God’s question, “Where are you?” is about relationships. Where are you socially – your relationships, knowing your friends and neighbors? Where are you physically, in relationship with creation, knowing yourself, your body and the earth. Where are you spiritually, in relationship with the divine, knowing what is right and wrong?

I teach this by inviting people to think of them as directions. In wildland firefighting, one of our safety mottos is “Look up, look down, look around” – keep your head on a swivel so you will be aware of all of the things that can hurt or kill you in that dangerous environment.

Look around and you see your social support, which psychologists repeatedly find has the strongest correlation to our resilience under stress and after trauma.

Look down and you see your body and the earth – your physical presence in creation.

Look up and be reminded that the universe is far more than we can comprehend, that as much as we can and should try to dissect and understand it, awe and mystery transcend logic and rationality.

Jesus points to these dimensions when he answers the question “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?” He replies: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… And the second is like it, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:36-40). Your neighbor, yourself and God – social, physical, spiritual. How are your connections to them?

Although my primary work with CAL FIRE and others is called “critical incident stress management” or “peer support,” it is really about disconnection and connection.

When God asked Adam “Where are you?” Adam said he was afraid, so he hid. Fear leads us to disconnect from others, the physical world and God.

Fear is powerful. One of the most surprising recent discoveries about stress showed that it is only toxic to your health if you are afraid that it is. A big study about stress over 10 years found that people who had the highest stress level, but did not believe that stress is bad for your health, were least likely to die. (In a wonderful “coincidence,” the church’s theme on the day I offered this message turned out to be 1 John 4:16 – “Perfect love casts out fear.”)

I have never found anything in the Bible that suggests that when life becomes challenging, the answer is be “stress reduction,” which research shows rarely works anyway. The Biblical response to stressful situations is repeated hundreds of times – “Don’t be afraid.” The words that usually follow are, “I am with you.” Relaxation is not the opposite of distress; connection is. Even when Jesus retreated to the wilderness, it was not to disconnect, but to re-connect. Solitude is not the same as isolation.

Whether I respond to a fire as a chaplain or with CAL FIRE’s employee support team, our job is to be present for people to talk to and connect with. Most of it is quite informal, after things really go out of control, we also lead formal crisis interventions. We primarily serve the firefighters, but we have always also been available to other responders and the public. We ask a lot of questions, even though we often know, in a general sense, what the answers will be. In fact, after 15 days on the fires in the North Bay, I felt as though I had heard the same two stories – the citizen story and the responder story – hundreds of times.

For the citizens, it was a story of being woken in the dead of night, wondering if they would escape from a terrifyingly fast-moving fire. The story included many heroes – people who risked their lives to wake up their neighbors and help do things like figure out how to open a garage door when there was no power.

For the responders, the story was about staying awake for more than four days until there was finally enough help that they could take a day off. They talked about embers the size of basketballs blowing a mile or more ahead of the fire; falling asleep holding a nozzle or dozing for a few minutes in their engines only to be woken by someone pounding on their windows and yelling for them to get out because the fire was nearly on top of them. They described situations where it was their job to rescue people they could not reach, and wondering over and over if they would survive themselves.

One thing we never ask is, “How are you doing?” The answer is almost always, “Fine.” To our team, FINE stands for Frustrated, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. We don’t let each other get away with that answer, either.

Whether I was talking to citizens or firefighters, all it took for the stories to start pouring out was to say something like, “I know I can’t possibly understand how this is for you, but it’s got to be very hard.”

In this kind of situation, as people talk about what happened to them, we mostly listen, acknowledging and normalizing their reactions. We offer some education and resources to help them get through the crisis. In Santa Rosa, we also had the privilege of handing out $100 gift cards that the firefighters union provided.

Some of the tougher moments came as people talked about their neighborhoods and friendships, realizing that they had not just lost their homes, but entire communities. Along with the physical losses, that is an enormous loss of social connections.

For many of the firefighters, one of the hardest parts was hearing all of the thank-you’s from the community. Like all public safety people, we are perfectionists – the minimum passing score on our job is 100 percent. So it is very difficult to have a person who is sifting through the ashes of their home say “Thank you.” For me, it was most difficult of all when that person was a firefighter. After doing this kind of thing for more than a dozen years, I’m rarely at a loss for words. But for the firefighters who lost their own homes, I had nothing but big hugs. And that’s okay.

For a few days, there was a crowd of a couple of hundred people just outside of the fairgrounds where the base camp was located. They had signs and noisemakers and they would cheer loudly when we drove by, heading out to the fire. I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even look at them to thank them or say, “You’re welcome.” More than 8,000 homes were lost in the North Bay. Forty-two people were killed. I had to remind myself, just as I urged other responders, to remember that so many homes and lives were also saved.

In our peer support response, we did something new – we called in every dog team we knew about. At earlier fires, especially in Lake County two years earlier, we’d seen how effective dogs can be.

We saw firefighters, EMTs and dispatchers relax and open up as they petted and played with the dogs. I had a CAL FIRE captain as an instructor a couple of weeks ago. He told me that he was exhausted and irritable, doing paperwork, when one of our dog teams approached him. “Go away, I don’t have time for this,” he thought. Two minutes later, after petting the dog, he said he was relaxed and grateful that they were there. That’s what we want to hear.

If there’s a Biblical model for crisis intervention, it is the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They are in deep grief because their friend and teacher, who they thought would become their king and savior has been crucified. They don’t believe the stories of the women who claim to have seen him.

Jesus could have appeared to them as himself and cleared everything up immediately. But instead, he appears as a stranger who doesn’t know what’s been going on. “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things that have happened there in the last few days?” one asks (Luke 24:18). Like God in the Garden of Eden, he asks a question  – “What things?” – even though he already knows the answer. He doesn’t need information; they need to tell their story. Like in the Garden, the story falls short of the full truth – they have the facts right, but the bigger perspective is missing, so he reminds them of the Biblical prophecies of death and resurrection. They don’t finally recognize him until he joins them for dinner and breaks the bread – the symbol of his sacrifice.

The question, “Where are you?” seemed especially meaningful in the aftermath of these fires because I think that we tend to discount the importance of our connections to the physical world – our own bodies and the earth. We don’t eat well, we don’t exercise enough and we have greatly isolated ourselves from nature. And because we don’t appreciate nature deeply, we have been building homes in places that are highly vulnerable to this kind of disaster.

So I invite you to tackle God’s first question – where are you? We need to answer it often. Where are you in your relationships with neighbors, yourselves and God?

 

The danger of “nobody else can understand”

December 21, 2016 /

If you are in public safety or the military, as well as some other fields, you know that some people insist that there it is pointless to talk about work to any “outsider.” Often, big agencies have this attitude toward smaller, less busy, ones –  “We are the only REAL firefighters, police, medics, etc., around here.” So they close themselves off from  support by people who otherwise might be peers.

The walls even go up within agencies – specialized, elite teams form a “tribe” mentality that says if you haven’t been part of a similar unit, there’s no point in talking to you about stresses and challenges, even if do the same kind of job.

No doubt, there is some truth to this. Working at a big, busy, urban agency certainly is different from smaller ones. Combat experience absolutely has unique aspects. Being part of an elite or specialized team really is different. People who haven’t walked the walk truly cannot understand. Experience is the only instructor – words quickly fail if we were to try to fully communicate it, especially the emotions around high-stress events (which can directly impact the brain’s speech center).

For a number of years, I have suspected that organizational isolation – that’s this is about – could be as toxic as individual isolation. We know that social support is the most important factor in resilience under stress or recovery from trauma; isolation aggravates stress. In fact, almost any trauma expert will agree that people will continue to suffer as long as they remain isolated –  connections with others give us strength and healing.

I recently began reading Ellen Kirschman’s book, I Love a Fire Fighter: What the Family Needs to Know, which has been sitting on my nightstand for a while. Dr. Kirschman, a well-regarded therapist in public safety, is also regularly involved in the West Coast Post-Trauma Retreat, where I have volunteered and learned.

Here’s the light bulb that went off as I read Kirshman’s introduction – the “nobody else can understand” attitude cuts us off from our friends and family. If you are certain that even a co-worker who isn’t part of your elite unit can’t support you because “they don’t understand,” then how can your friends and family who are civilians, possibly support you?

Here’s one of Kirschman’s observations about going through a fire academy (emphasis mine).

No one acknowledged how the emotional courage fire fighter families need or the independence that is forced on them contributes to the fire service mission. This is extremely puzzling in light of the many studies that confirm how family and friends are the heart of a fire fighter’s emotional support system.

Her books (she wrote a similar one for law enforcement) are for families, but the message to public safety is just as important. Your social support outside of work is also critical to your strength and resilience in the face of occupational stresses, and recovery from critical incidents and other injuries that aren’t physical.

The following words are why it does not matter that outsiders can’t understand the job.

Empathy does not require understanding.

It’s true – if you are an outsider, you will not understand. If you’ve never been there, I can’t explain what it was like to talk to a patient one minute and then do CPR on him, unsuccessfully, the next. You won’t understand how difficult it was to walk past his wife in the ER waiting room, seeing her comforting another wife, not knowing her own husband was just pronounced dead. If you’ve never done anything like helping a family bury their dogs who couldn’t escape a wildfire, nothing I can say will make you understand. If you haven’t been part of a rescue that went all wrong and killed the victim, I don’t have words for the emotions. If you haven’t done shift work, you don’t know the toll it can take.

Even if you cannot understand, that doesn’t have to stop you from supporting a responder if you are a trusted friend – because empathy does not require understanding. They may spare you details. They probably won’t repeat the sick jokes that helps many get through the day. But if you are willing to simply walk beside them, your presence can be healing.

You don’t need to understand responder experiences to know that they are painful. You don’t have to work shifts to that it is hard to be exhausted and miss family events. Everyone has experienced pain and frustration, he stress of an event or life going out of control. Co-workers can appreciate it more than outsiders, so co-workers are an essential part of any responder’s network of social support. So are spouses, friends with completely different careers, pastors and may others.

Camaraderie is powerful. Every agency – and groups within them – benefits from friendships, mutual support and teamwork. However, the idea that only our co-workers or people like them can support us is a misguided obstacle to wellness. We should not want anyone, from new recruits to  seasoned veterans, to believe that their friends and family have little to contribute. As Ellen Kirschman says, that idea cuts t them off from the heart of their social support system.

Paramedics with social support sleep better

December 19, 2016 /

An article in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology earlier this year described a one-week study of paramedics’ sleep and their social support. Those who saw themselves as having more social support reported better sleep. The researchers also observed that the sleep quality of paramedics who perceive more support isn’t as impacted by job stress.  On the other hand, they reported “Those with low levels of support displayed poor sleep quality in the face of high occupational stress.”

In recent years, it has become quite clear that good, deep sleep is vital for coping with stress – poor sleep is associated with increased risk of developing PTSD.  The correlation between social support and coping with stress has also been observed repeatedly in studies. It’s unsurprising to find a link between social support and sleep quality – this reinforces the importance of both.

We are so desperate to connect with others that we will risk our own lives and those around us to exchange 140 characters while driving.

September 30, 2016 /

Although technology connects us in some ways, it has done much more to disconnect us over the last half-century or so. Freeways, commuting, school busing, television and most recently, handheld devices – all of these have resulted in a society unlike anything in history. Most of us don’t know many of our neighbors, we don’t often see our own families face to face. Most of our co-workers become strangers when the work day is over. Commuter churches are disconnected from their neighborhood.

I’m not a Luddite. Decades ago, when the Web was brand-new, I began to write about how access to more points of view was becoming a positive force in the world. I still believe that, even as Internet

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Face-to-face communication is essential sometimes. Photo from the Loma Fire, where I’ve spent most of this week.

gossip also does so much damage. Media domination by a handful of mega-corporations whose mission is to sell eyeballs to advertisers is not good for anyone. Diversity in viewpoints can drive creativity.

Research is uncovering fascinating insights into how our tone of voice, facial expression and eye contact – and even eating together – can act below our awareness to calm our automatic stress responses. Yet those means of communication, which are so important, are almost completely missing from social media. It is no wonder we are desperately eager to stay superficially engaged, even when we know how dangerous distracted driving is.

I myself don’t feel a great need to pay attention to text messages and so forth while driving. Don’t get me wrong – I feel the urge. But I rarely have trouble resisting it. So I’ve asked myself why this might be. The answer from my gut is that I have a good social support network – people I meet with regularly, face-to-face. These are people I trust deeply, from church, work, and our crisis intervention team. Social support has a very strong correlation to resistance and resilience under pressure. My intuition is that for people who build and maintain that kind of support, it is far easier to resist the urge to see and respond to every text, email or posting.

When we don’t have strong social support, we often buy into the myth that just getting away from the sources of stress will give real relief.  However, what really happens is that our “fight-or-flight” response just changes into different kinds of fighting (seen any online political fighting lately?) or fleeing (noticed anybody who is emotionally checked out around you?).

Building Gratefulness

September 23, 2016 /

A few years ago, my spiritual director challenged me to list three things I was grateful for, daily, for 30 days. There were a couple of other parts to this exercise, but it was aimed at helping build an “attitude of gratitude.” I’m happy to report that it stuck with me. One of the instructions that helped overcome my perfectionist and self-criticism tendencies was the instruction to not worry about missing a day – just pick it up again. The 30 days didn’t have to be consecutive. gratitude

Psychologists have only recently begun to look into the benefits of cultivating gratitude, but early findings are encouraging, confirming traditional teachings. In two long-term studies of college students and gratitude, researchers in England found that the more often and intensely people feel grateful, the more social support and lowered stress and depression they believe they have. This makes sense because anything that builds social support will almost surely help us cope with stress and do better overall.

Rejoice always, pray continuously, give thanks in all circumstances – 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18.

When we are more grateful, we tend to see the world in a more positive light, which protects against stress and depression. We also make our own world better by thanking helpful people – expressing gratitude – because they become more likely to offer us more support.

Does making gratefulness lists work? Yes, says a recent study titled, “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens.” Across three groups who either kept lists of hassles, things they were grateful for or ways in which they were better off than others, the people who tracked gratitude ended up with a more positive outlook. The gratitude list-makers were also more likely to offer emotional support to others – another example of gratitude encouraging social support. They also spent more time exercising, slept better, had fewer physical complaints and were more optimistic. Daily gratitude tracking was more powerful than weekly.

I will not be afraid, Lord, for you are with me – Psalm 23:4

Another study, on religious involvement and gratitude, showed that attending church more often leads to more gratefulness. The increase was greater for people who believed that God works with them to overcome difficulties and challenges.  This makes perfect sense through the lens of stress as a threat or challenge. When we feel ill-equipped to deal with a situation, our bodies have a “threat” stress response, raising the levels of hormones and neural pathways that cause long-term health problems. On the other hand, if we see the same situation as a challenge – because, in this study, we believe God is with us – our bodies react differently, in a way that doesn’t jeopardize long-term health.

Some other studies on the effects of greater gratitude:

  • Daily well-being increased with daily gratitude practices for Vietnam veterans with PTSD.
  • Gratefulness helps people stick with self-directed interventions to improve their body image.
  • Gratitude in children was related to positive functioning after the 9/11 attacks.
  • People who are more grateful tend to recall more positive life events, which helps make them more positive.
  • Writing about how a good thing, such as finding a romantic partner, might never have happened, increased their positive outlook – to the surprise of the writers.
  • Writing a letter of gratitude, about a time you were at your person best, identifying character strengths all contributed to happiness and positivity, while reducing depression.

Bibliography

Algoe, S. B., & Way, B. M. (2014). Evidence for a role of the oxytocin system, indexed by genetic variation in CD38, in the social bonding effects of expressed gratitude. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(12), 1855–1861. http://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst182
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377
Fredrickson, B. L., Tugade, M. M., Waugh, C. E., & Larkin, G. R. (2003). What Good Are Positive Emotions in Crises? A Prospective Study of Resilience and Emotions Following the Terrorist Attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 365–376.
Geraghty, A. W. A., Wood, A. M., & Hyland, M. E. (2010). Attrition from self-directed interventions: Investigating the relationship between psychological predictors, intervention content and dropout from a body dissatisfaction intervention. Social Science & Medicine, 71(1), 30–37. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.007
Gordon, A. K., Musher-Eizenman, D. R., Holub, S. C., & Dalrymple, J. (2004). What are children thankful for? An archival analysis of gratitude before and after the attacks of September 11. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 25(5), 541–553. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2004.08.004
Kashdan, T. B., Uswatte, G., & Julian, T. (2006). Gratitude and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in Vietnam war veterans. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(2), 177–199. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.01.005
Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1217–1224. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0013316
Krause, N. (2009). Religious Involvement, Gratitude, and Change in Depressive Symptoms Over Time. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 19(3), 155–172. http://doi.org/10.1080/10508610902880204
Park, N., & Peterson, C. (n.d.). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions Martin EP Seligman & Tracy A. Steen University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/happiness01.pdf
Watkins, P. C., Grimm, D. L., & Kolts, R. (2004). Counting your blessings: Positive memories among grateful persons. Current Psychology, 23(1), 52–67.
Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890–905. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.03.005
Wood, A. M., Maltby, J., Gillett, R., Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (2008). The role of gratitude in the development of social support, stress, and depression: Two longitudinal studies. Journal of Research in Personality, 42(4), 854–871. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2007.11.003

 

 

Connecting Out

September 21, 2016 /

The central teaching in Stress, Spirit, Science is that when we are well connected out, in and up, we can thrive under pressure. Connecting out means social support; connecting in refers to ourselves and creation; connecting up has to do with ethics, values and the divine. Many years ago, I had a powerful connecting out experience when I decided to take a risk by sharing a painful story.

My friend and roommate, Dave Land, and I had started attending Bethel Lutheran Church in Cupertino, in the heart of Silicon Valley. For an upcoming young adult retreat, I had decided to tell about my friend John Heidish Jr., the popular president of the Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, volunteer fire department. He was a fellow volunteer with the Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services  and was burned to death in a flashover at a house fire just days before his 21st birthday, a year before I moved to California.

I created a “multimedia” presentation, which in those days meant a slide projector triggered by tones in a sound track on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I used James Taylor’s Fire and Rain as background music. The images were from my fire photos, with “rain” from firehoses.

The Methodist church where John’s memorial took place had pew Bibles and so, with nothing else to do, I picked one up and opened it. I like to read. It opened to John, chapter 13. The first words I read were verse 15, “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” They struck me as terribly, terribly appropriate. At Bethel, I had begun to realize that John’s funeral had affected me deeply. I drove the Sally Wagon (the Salvation Army’s mobile canteen) to the service and arrived early because we knew it was going to be heavily attended – fire companies were traveling long distances, even coming from surrounding states, to pay their respects.

The pastor used John 15:13 as the theme of his message. At the cemetery, he read the verse again as John’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

Those words came back to me in California during Bethel’s young adult group Bible study, when we read Luke 24, the story of grieving disciples on the road to Emmaus, who meet a stranger who turns out to be heidish-plaqueJesus. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” echoed how John 13:15 had touched me. I call that my “Emmaus experience,” when I realized that I was no longer just curious to know more about Christianity, but I had come to believe that its stories and teachings are deeply true, offering a path that leads away from death and toward life. At the retreat that day, with my slide projector and tape recorder, this was the story I told my new friends.

When the tape ended, I shut off the projector. The room was completely silent. For a moment I thought that they had all fallen asleep. Then I realized that some were quietly crying. I had experienced my own strong, uncomfortable emotions while creating the story, but I had no idea it might also deeply touch others. More than anything else, I found it intimidating, even scary, to provoke such strong feelings. As a radio and newspaper reporter, I had sought to be provocative, but this was so different – I was “reporting” about myself and receiving tears of empathy. In the safety of that church retreat, I felt new and unexpected connections to my friends.

I shared that story more than 30 years ago and I’m still a member of Bethel Lutheran. Although the people and pastors have changed over the decades, it continues to be a refuge where we lift one another up and share burdens.

In telling my story about John Heidish, I had begun to see how I could revise the past. His story was no longer just a tragic line-of-duty death; my friends and the Bible had given new meaning to his spirit of service, his life and death.

My story about John’s life and death touches the three spiritual themes of Stress, Spirit, Science – metanoia (often poorly translated as “repentance”), redemption and creation. Writing a new story helped me think differently about John’s life and death (metanoia); I discovered spiritual meaning in his sacrifice (redemption); and the retreat itself was a gift of presence and grounding, soil for new growth (creation) as we left behind day-to-day distractions.

LCES for Everybody

July 7, 2016 /

If you spend time around wildland firefighters, you’ll notice the abbreviation “LCES” quite often. Some people have it on their helmets. It can be a hashtag (#LCES) in social media. You might hear crews calling “LCES!” to one another as they head out to the fireline.

LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes and Safety Zones. Before firefighters engage the fire, they are always supposed to establish LCES – it is the starting point for fireline safety. It can also be a starting point for maintaining your emotional safety.

Lookouts

Lookouts at a fire are in a position where they always can see what the fire and the crew are doing. They should always know where everyone is – if crew members are moving out of view, they let them know. They monitor the weather and maintain communications between the crew and the rest of the world. They stick to their position until the hazards are no longer present.

Who are your emotional lookouts? Are you “visible” to your co-workers and family enough that they’ll be able to notice when you have had a rough time or you’re heading for trouble? Emotional transparency can be difficult in public safety, where there will always be some stigma about appearing “weak.” However, it’s life and death – the same macho attitude that has killed firefighters – by leading them to take on more than they can handle – can also kill you emotionally and spiritually. Do you have lookouts that are independent of your family and job – a support group, religious study or other small group that you can trust? Sometimes strangers are the easiest people to trust.

Are you being a lookout for people around you? Are you paying attention to your co-workers, family and friends, watching for signs that they are struggling or getting into trouble? Are you willing to gently confront and offer to support them when you can see possible danger signs? Look out for people who are drinking, eating, spending or working too much. Watch out for changes such as increasing isolation, depression, anger, anxiety, unfocused, not sleeping enough, having affairs.

Communications

Lookouts are useless without communications. In firefighting, lookouts have to maintain communications with their crew and the outside world. Radios are the most frequent means, but non-verbals are also important. Daily communication starts with briefings – what’s the current situation, other information that’s necessary to going through the day safely. Communications failures have led to firefighter deaths, including the 19 who died in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona in 2013. Only their lookout survived.

Do you have regular and thorough communication about your current emotional situation with the key people in your life? Even if you and your family are lookouts for each other, that won’t do any good unless you communicate regularly and effectively. Effective communication, which is an essential part of any public safety career, has to be a two-way process – clear messages from senders with confirmation and clarification from receivers. The same applies to personal communications – speak and listen well. Do you raise your defenses when your lookouts give you negative feedback? Do you schedule time to talk with family, friends and other sources of support – a spiritual director, small group, counselor or therapist – as needed? Are you willing to give others direct feedback about themselves even though they might perceive it as rude? That’s the kind of communication it takes to stay alive on the fireline. You’ll find that even though it is uncomfortable in daily life, a friend who is fearlessly honest about communicating your blind spots is a friend to hang onto. Psychologists repeatedly report studies demonstrating that our resilience correlates to our social support more than any other factor.

Escape routes

Escape routes are the paths that firefighters will take to leave an area quickly and reach a safety zone. Everyone needs to know at least two escape routes; those routes have to be cleared of barriers.

When we face critical incidents, we need emotional escape routes when the work is done. Does your agency have protocols so that your critical incident “lookouts” – line supervisors – know when to automatically trigger a defusing or other intervention? Is anyone empowered to call for one if they are having a difficult reaction or they are worried about others? Do you have trusted people you can call or meet with to talk about a rough day – peer support team, family, counselor, therapist, sponsor, pastor, rabbi. Are you good at saying “No” to overtime and other extra tasks when you know you need down time?

Safety Zones

In firefighting, a safety zone is a place where you can retreat and not be injured if the fire burns through. It isn’t just a spot where you might survive using all of your safety gear; it is a place where you can be confident that you won’t even need any of that equipment.

Where are your safety zones? Sometimes, the signal that you’re in a safety zone is that it is where you discover that you’re carrying more emotional baggage than you realized. For me, that is often Sunday morning at church during a particularly powerful song. I find that my throat tightens up and it’s hard to get the words out as my mind drifts back to something that happened earlier in the week. If the feelings are strong enough, I’ll seek out our pastor or a friend after the services.

Any 12-step meeting or other support group had better be a safety zone – a place where you can speak freely and honestly – or it’s not doing its job. The same is true, naturally, of critical incident stress defusing, debriefings and individual support. Above all, these interventions need to be safe, which means confidential, supportive rather than critical and low pressure. If the facilitators of these interventions do nothing more than create a safety zone, that’s a win.

Whose Job is LCES?

Just as we are each the primary person responsible for our physical safety at work, we are responsible for our emotional safety – our own lookouts, communications, escape routes and safety zones. A great peer support team facilitates and encourages these, while supplementing them by creating and maintaining agency-wide lookouts and communications. Escape routes and safety zones – mutual aid, support meetings, clinicians and other shared resources – also need to exist at a higher level, so that there is a strong continuum of care available to all.

LCES for everybody!

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