Is our culture keeping us from talking about what's important?

Originally published on LinkedIn

This job will damage you.

That’s not a complaint; it’s just a fact. If you spend enough time as a responder, you will see things that damage you, often in small ways but occasionally in big ways. You’ll see the worst days of people’s lives. The weight of this exposure starts to settle in. You might not notice it at first. You’ll tell yourself you’re handling it. You’ll laugh at the dark humor you and your coworkers use to decompress; you’ll compartmentalize, and you’ll move on. But it adds up. Over time, your definition of normal shifts. You harden. You adapt. You stop reacting the way you used to.

This approach works extremely well most of the time. Becoming tougher might be necessary, but toughness and resilience are not the same thing. Then, once in a while, you’ll be exposed to something acute. Something awful. Even by your hardened standards. When that happens, those defenses that once protected you can isolate you. That same armor that is so effective at work can make you distant at home, distracted, or even disconnected from your family. In his book on the subject called The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk writes that “after trauma, we witness the world with a different nervous system…our energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in our lives”.

The truth is the coping tools we’ve spent years building and refining make it hard to talk. So many of us don’t talk. Our culture makes it hard.

We base our identity on being calm and capable under pressure, and we are. Vulnerability doesn’t fit that image. We’re tribal by nature. In close-knit groups, conformity is safety. Admitting you’re struggling makes you stand out, and no one wants to be the one who doesn’t belong. If we’re being honest, first responders (just like other human beings) care a lot about the way others see us. We were taught early that reputation is everything, and we must protect it.

So, we internalize the narrative that silence is strength.

We’ve made real progress as a profession. There are more resources now than ever before. We’re talking more about mental health in general terms and encouraging people to reach out. And that’s a good thing. But it’s not enough.

Resources don’t change culture, and culture is what’s killing the conversation.

We can be offered therapy, peer support, training, etc., but if no one we respect is willing to admit they’ve needed help, too, then those resources can become another thing we ignore—or worse, something we judge others for using.

This is where leadership matters. Formal and informal leaders (we all know plenty of both) need to go first. Leaders need to talk openly, not performatively, in real conversations about what they’ve been through and what they’ve done to deal with it. Therapy, medication, faith, physical training, whatever has helped them along the way. That kind of honesty can create a permission structure for others.

This job is extremely rewarding and extremely hard on us at the same time. When parts of the job damage us, it doesn’t mean we’re broken or soft; it means we’re human. Maybe it’s time we stopped pretending we’re not.