Behind The Line

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **Picking up on last episode, this episode dives deeper into personal applications of The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman. Today we look at specific ways to apply love languages to meeting personal needs for building yourself up, interrupting tendencies to tear yourself down, and considerations in processing traumatic experiences and high stress exposure. This episode leans heavy on the episode before, so if you missed it go back and start there!Take the Love Languages Quiz here!Episode Challenge:·        What is your love language(s)? How can you imagine applying your love language to how you process trauma/stress? How could you leverage your love language to help you interact with emotional intensity more effectively?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more here, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. 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).Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman is one of the go-to books and resources for couples therapists and people seeking to care for each other well. But what if this same principle could go well beyond applications for couples and actually become a staple way that we think about ourselves, our needs, and be used as a tangible tool to build ourselves up and stop tearing ourselves down?? In this episode we are covering the fundamentals of love languages as a concept, and I am offering a new way to think about this classic concept that applies to you with love from you. If it sounds cheesy, think again, this has the potential to be a life-changing gift if you really take it and run with it. Try it, I dare you!Take the Love Languages Quiz here!Episode Challenge:·        What is your love language(s)? What kinds of things do others do that you really value and find meaningful in building you up? How do you sometimes engage in ways that use your love language against you to tear you down? How could you use some of the same principles to offer to yourself in ways that build you up, and reduce some of the things that you use against yourself that tear down?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more here, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. 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).Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here ** I recently had a listener reach out and share about an experience where she was sharing that she had suffered a hard critical incident to a close friend, and the friends response was, “well, that's what you signed up for.” Last episode I offered my rant-y thoughts on the matter and promised to put together a follow-up episode to offer some alternative ways loved ones can offer support and ways that First Responders & Front Line Helpers can communicate your needs to the people in your life. And here it is! I really hope that this episode offers some tangible tools that will allow you and your loved ones to transform moments that could be felt as dismissive or disconnecting into opportunities for deepened connection, trust and care. Episode Challenge:·        What are some ways you might adapt the language in some of today's suggestions to make them your own? Who might you need to try this with?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more here, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. 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).Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here ** I recently had a listener reach out and share about an experience where she was sharing that she had suffered a hard critical incident to a close friend, and the friends response was, “well, that's what you signed up for.” …And my response may not have been all the therapeutic, helpful, responsive pieces it could/would/should have been…it may have sounded more like, “just go fuck right off”. Admittedly, perhaps not my kindest response…but not without some reasons, and I'm sharing them with you today. If you have ever had this response of “this is what you signed up for” as a way of blowing off the validity and significance of what you have faced – this episode is for you. Not only is it for you, it is also for you to share with the ones you love so they know why that line is NOT ok and why it puts you at RISK. This is probably one of my more rant-y episodes ever, and I will frontload that I swear, so be mindful of listening with child ears present. I will be putting together a follow-up episode that I will try to keep a bit cleaner and will work to offer some alternative ways loved ones can offer support and ways that First Responders & Front Line Helpers can communicate your needs to the people in your life. Episode Challenge:·        What comes up for you when you hear, “well that's what you signed up for”? What is your reaction? Do you believe that's true? What would you say to someone in your life if they said that to you?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more here, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. 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).Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **Welcome to our final installment of "Above and Beyond", a series through October spotlighting the efforts of 3 amazing helping professionals who have taken their experiences and sought out ways to use their stories to support others in First Response and Front Line work. Today, I am joined by Patrick Greenhill. Among his accomplishments, Sgt. Greenhill was the Program Coordinator for Safe Passages, an initiative that opened the doors of police agencies as access points to substance abuse treatment services and other necessary ancillary services.  The Safe Passages Initiative began in 2016 and has run in 14 Cleveland area police agencies since that time.  The program was intended as a model program for public/private community partnerships to address overall community health and wellness. More recently, Patrick has partnered with a team from various backgrounds to develop The 4Rs Path: Emotional Resilience, Mission Readiness, Health Reintegration, and Retention which is focused on both individual and organization health and wellness.  The 4Rs Path team is comprised of individuals from varied backgrounds and professional knowledge to include first responders, active-duty military, military veterans, and mindset performance coaches, among others.  During this episode, we talk about the desire to help, the hurts from helping, the systems that support (or fail to support), and the hope to heal while remaining committed to the work.Listen in to our conversation and share it with those you know. Episode Challenge:·        Reflect on your story within the work you do. What have been some of the wins? What has helped you remain in it? ·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more at the link above, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. 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).Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **Welcome to our second installment of "Above and Beyond", a series through October spotlighting the efforts of 3 amazing helping professionals who have taken their experiences and sought out ways to use their stories to support others in First Response and Front Line work. Today, I am joined by Michael Sugrue, retired law enforcement and co-author of “Relentless Courage: Winning the Battle Against Front Line Trauma”. We talk about the events that led to Michael's retirement and that inspire his book, co-authored with Shauna ‘Doc' Springer. We dive into the learnings that have emerged from a career on the front lines, the impacts to family and loved ones, and his efforts to support others in preventing the same lived experience and finding support in the challenges of front line helping professions.Listen in to our conversation and share it with those you know. Episode Challenge:·        Reflect on your story within the work you do. What has impacted you? What stories stand out in your mind? If you wrote a book about your experiences, what would stand out to others? How might you share your story with people in your life?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more at the link above, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. Additional Resources:Follow Michael Sugrue on Instagram and get the book, “Relentless Courage: Winning the Battle Against Front Line Trauma”.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:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **We're BACK!!!It has felt like a long but genuinely refreshing break and I am SO excited and grateful to be back in your inbox once again to share about a new season of the Behind the Line podcast, highlighting wellness strategies for hardworking helping professionals. I hope that you have been able to find pockets of calm, joy, silliness and connection over the course of your summertime, and that you and yours are settling into the new rhythms that seem to come with the early fall months. I have been grateful to hear from some of you during our summer break, and know that life never quits, so know that I also see you in your efforts to keep showing up even as life keeps handing you more and harder and heavier. I will admit that while my summer offered some much needed refreshing, it also afforded me some new perspective that I have mixed feelings about sharing with you. Back in the spring, I was presented with the opportunity to make a big move for my clinical practice. I, alongside my family, decided to purchase a new office space for the clinic I own. It was an intense decision making process that depleted me quite a bit and resulted in the decision to take the summer off from podcasting in an effort to restore and rebuild capacity. It was also with the knowing that while the decision was made, the real rubber-hit-road of the decision would be coming in full force in the fall. We close on the deal in the coming month or so, and will begin a complete build out of the interior space...meaning that I will be continuing care for my full-time caseload of clients, managing our clinic, continuing projects like the podcast and supporting coaching my students inside the Beating the Breaking Point resilience training program, and overseeing the construction of our new expanded office space. Looking ahead to the additional demands on time and energy, I have made the hard but necessary decision to reduce the podcast frequency to bi-weekly. You will still be hearing from me with new episodes every other week, and I want to encourage you to use the alternating "off" weeks to catch up on episodes you may have missed from our last 3 seasons. I am hoping that this pace will allow me to continue bringing you valuable support while allowing me to balance work and life and all the other things!And that brings us to our very first episode of season 4! For October, we are kicking off a series called "Above and Beyond", spotlighting the efforts of 3 amazing helping professionals who have taken their experiences and sought out ways to use their stories to support others in First Response and Front Line work. Today, I am joined by Nathan Kapler, retired RCMP member and host of the Ten Thirty Three podcast. We do a deep dive into Nate's experience of posttraumatic stress, addiction, recovery, and choosing to use his story to make change and inspire a different roadmap for others in law enforcement. Nate brings insightful, meaningful thoughts that apply to anyone in helping work.Listen in to our conversation and share it with those you know. Episode Challenge:·        Reflect on your story within the work you do. What parts stand out to you? How would you tell it to others, like someone considering entering the work? What has shaped you/changed you? How do you intentionally manage/mitigate how the work impacts you?·        Consider whether Beating the Breaking Point might be a fit to support you in filling the gaps in your training and enhancing your capacity for resilience in the face of persistent stress (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!). Learn more at the link above, including what the program includes, our no-risk guarantee, and the high rated feedback from our past students. Additional Resources:Learn more about Nathan Kapler and the Ten Thirty Three podcast at the podcast website, the Instagram page, or listen now on apple podcast or on youtube.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:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **Have you ever felt like to do your job you are sacrificing parts of your soul? Like you have lost parts of your self and your belief in goodness? Front Line jobs demand a lot and expose you to some of the worst moments for people. Beyond the calls, the lack of support from the systems that “support” you can also undermine any sense of ok-ness. Retaining your sense of humanity and goodness and keeping your wholehearted desire for helping intact can be incredibly hard. Bridging off of last week's episode, I am honoured to be joined by Dr. Hillary McBride to continue the discussion on wholehearted helping.Learn more about Hillary's work here:https://hillarylmcbride.com/ where you can learn more about her work as a therapist, speaker and the author of “Mothers, Daughters and Body Image”, “Embodiment and Eating Disorders”, and “The Wisdom of Your Body”.Listen in to our conversation and share it with those you know. Episode Challenge:·        Reflect on your experience of wholeheartedness in the work. What was the heart that brought you to the work at the start? How is it feeling now? How do you protect your heart? How do you keep being vulnerable with your helping heart?·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!), my online resilience training program.Additional Resources:Register for Beating the Breaking Point, our top-rated self-paced resilience training program tailor made for First Responders and Front Line Workers to protect against (and recover from) Burnout and related concerns (eg. Organizational Stress, Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma).Check out some of our related episodes…-        Daring Leadership (Season 3, Episodes 34-41)Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:**Rate & Review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast – here **Have you ever felt like to do your job you are sacrificing parts of your soul? Like you have lost parts of your self and your belief in goodness? Front Line jobs demand a lot and expose you to some of the worst moments for people. Beyond the calls, the lack of support from the systems that “support” you can also undermine any sense of ok-ness. Retaining your sense of humanity and goodness and keeping your wholehearted desire for helping intact can be incredibly hard. Today I am joined by Jake Khym to talk about wholehearted helping. Jake is a Catholic leader with over 20 years experience in various religious and therapeutic settings. He has a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Theology with a concentration in Catechetics. Jake has worked in adult faith formation, seminarian and priestly formation, trauma therapy, and has had a private counseling practice for over 17 years. Currently, Jake offers human and pastoral formation to religious leaders, is a consultant to various ministries and organizations across North America, offers an annual Men's Retreat in British Columbia, Canada, accompanies male leaders on their journey of faith, and co-hosts two podcasts, Restore the Glory and Way of the Heart. With two children at university, Jake currently lives in Abbotsford, BC with his wife Heather and one of their three children.Learn more about Jake's work here:Life Restoration Ministries - liferestoration.ca (Non-profit charity)Restore the Glory Podcast - restoretheglorypodcast.com (podcast by two therapists sharing their personal and professional experiences)Way of the Heart Podcast - wayoftheheartpodcast.com (podcast for men about living an intentional life with God)Listen in to our conversation and share it. Episode Challenge:·        Reflect on your experience of wholeheartedness in the work. What was the heart that brought you to the work at the start? How is it feeling now? How do you protect your heart? How do you keep being vulnerable with your helping heart?·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!), my online resilience training program.Additional Resources:Register for Beating the Breaking Point, our top-rated self-paced resilience training program tailor made for First Responders and Front Line Workers to protect against (and recover from) Burnout and related concerns (eg. Organizational Stress, Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma).Check out some of our related episodes…-        Daring Leadership (Season 3, Episodes 34-41)Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:We are finishing re-sharing a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...This episode included some time-based events that have now ended. …And that's a wrap! Today's episode wraps up our series following Brené Brown's work from her book, Dare to Lead. This episode includes the bits and pieces we skipped over along the way for the sake of time, as well as some thoughts to tie together the concepts from the book with the interviews with T.C. Randall and Jennifer Pound, as well as with general applications in a front line work pace and environment. Some final thoughts and resources from Brené and Dare to Lead:Armored Leadership vs. Daring Leadership – check out the list here.Tools to Give & Receive Feedback – check out “The Engaged Feedback Checklist” here.Concerns & Applications – I encourage you to listen to hear some of the feedback and concerns I've heard from listeners throughout this series and my thoughts on how we work to apply these conceptual level skills to the very real and challenging work on the front lines.Episode Challenge:Having listened to this series, what is one step you can take in our workplace to grow in your daring leadership? What are you willing to commit to and how does it align with your values and the leader you want to be? …Remember, “who you are is how you lead.”Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...I am grateful to Jennifer Pound for joining me today. Some of the pieces that stood out to me in our conversation, as it relates to aspects of the system that need to change and tools that daring leaders can work to engage with more intentionally included:·        Limited training around PTSD and mental health related OSI's, which reduces our ability to self-assess and identify our risks and needs early on in the process. This increases our risk for a greater degree of impact.·        Lack of accessibility to treatment or intervention support in a timely manner. A lack of clarity about the process and the steps to go through. A lack of support in navigating the process and a need for system advocacy for those needing support through the process while managing an OSI.·        Failure to support connection and bridging through the process of being off work with an OSI. This leaves a feeling of being abandoned by the system we have given so much to serve, cultivates resentment that enhances the impact of the OSI and exacerbates symptoms. During these times, we need connection and support and the effort needs to come from within the system, not from those who are struggling to get by while managing an OSI.·        A need for collaboration. Those who know the most about the impacts of the work are those on the front lines engaged in the work. Those in the upper levels of the system need to be open to hearing from others and willing to hear ideas and address needs collaboratively.Episode Challenge:Consider these questions: Were you trained in what to look for as it relates to your own mental wellness and work related stress injuries? Do you have a strong understanding of the process and steps if you were to need support within the system that you work? How can you increase your knowledge of these pieces to support your wellness need?Additional Resources:You can learn more about Jennifer and her work advocating for First Responders and Front Line Workers by checking out her blog, “Stay On The Line” at fuelforfirstresponders.com. You can also view recent media coverage on CBC, here; and on CTV here.If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...I am so thankful to T.C. Randall for joining me today, sharing his experience as an ER Nurse of 14 years now off on medical leave due to work-related PTSD. Our conversation today focuses on the impacts of broken systems to the very real people working to offer services and make a difference to our communities…people exactly like you. We also work to talk about our perspectives around what needs to change and where we can collectively work to transform the system from the inside out. T.C. Also discusses these topics and more in his book, The View From The Wrong Side Of The Day: A Story About Nursing, PTSD And Other Shenanigans. You can snag a copy of his book here, or get it on your kindle here! Learn more about T.C. by checking out http://www.wrongsideoftheday.com/ and http://www.tcrandall.net/. Some of my favourite discussion points that emerged during this conversation (where I got RILED UP!) and connected to the practical ways we can work to transform broken systems from the inside out included:1.      Cultural Level Change:a.      Reducing stigma around workplace mental health and wellness (speaking, clarifying, normalizing and supporting that no one comes out unscathed).b.      Increasing efforts toward prevention and early intervention including training staff in how to assess their status and know the next steps (or who to talk to in an effort to find out the next steps).c.      Normalizing support seeking, and clarifying ways to seek support and processes to access the appropriate support readily.2.      Management/Upper Level Change: a.      Changing the tendency toward reactive band-aid solutions, working instead to identify preventative strategies to reduce load and support the greatest investment which is into the wellness of the PEOPLE doing the WORK.b.      Engaging collaboratively (ie. LISTENING MORE THAN TALKING) with staff to understand the pressure points and actively working together to find creative solutions that actually work to solve the problems rather than juggling them.3.      Public Awareness Level Change:a.      Supporting information for the public around reasonable expectations and the challenges facing the parts of the system they may interact with the most.b.      Supporting information for the public around ways to support the system on a broader level as well as the front line staff most directly impacted.4.      Structural Level Change:a.      Making support accessible (with fewer hoops and WAY more clarity around how to navigate the process). This is both a workplace-level challenge as well as a community-access-to-services challenge.b.      More effectively identifying and supporting the levels of the system that add pressure (I loved TC's comment of the new ER being like a bigger funnel on the same sized hose – if we don't support the capacity and efficiency of community health as well as in-patient care, making changes to the ER's capacity does little to reduce wait times, etc. This problem exists in so many ways that are not specific to ER's and healthcare!).c.      Taking a stance of prevention and early-intervention in all levels of problem solving rather than being in a constant state of reactively putting out fires. Episode Challenge:If you haven't yet, check out our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Understanding where you stand is a huge step as we work to be our most effective selves and people, professionals and leaders. Take some time to consider some of the areas of change we identified in this episode (listed above) and how these fit within your workplace system dynamic. What are the most significant areas that you see needing change, and what are some ways you can start to make inroads? Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out T.C. Randall's book, The View From The Wrong Side Of The Day: A Story About Nursing, PTSD And Other Shenanigans. You can snag a copy of his book here, or get it on your kindle here!Connected to our series on daring leadership, I also continue to encourage you to grab Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...Today's episode covers the final aspect of daring leadership, following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead: Learning to Rise. This episode is all about how to handle the hard moments, and how to make them more fruitful for individuals and teams. The learning to rise process focuses on three main pieces: the reckoning, the rumble and the revolution. The reckoning: This is all about awareness – building our own awareness of when we're stumbling into a problem or hard interactions, cultivating awareness of our emotions and needs, and preparing to rumble. It means getting clear with ourselves and curious with others.The rumble: This is the process of confronting challenges together – not in a confrontational way, but rather in a collaborative one with shared curiosity and a willingness to acknowledge the stories we are telling ourselves in an effort the seek clarity and to disconfirm our conspiracies and confabulations. This is where we talk about SFD's (shitty first drafts) and the story rumble process for teams.Brené identifies three questions we should ask ourselves about our shitty first drafts:1.      What more do I need to learn and understand about the situation? 2.      What more do I need to learn and understand about the other people in the story? 3.      What more do I need to learn and understand about myself? The revolution: This is an acknowledgement that participating in daring leadership skills, particularly those around rising, is revolutionary. It is culture shaping and transformative. During this episode I talked about a couple of Brené's free online resources related to today's topic, here they are (you can access these and other free resources from Brené here):The Story Rumble Process (A Tool for Groups & Teams)Dare to Lead Read Along Workbook (you can find exercises including the piece I mention about “permission slips” in here)           Episode Challenge:Notice your SFD's (shitty first drafts) in various parts of your life and try checking them out with the people in your life. “The story I'm telling myself is…”Share this podcast with those you know who are in First Response & Front Line Work – emergency response workers, social services workers, healthcare workers, law enforcement workers, community support workers…the list goes on! Help us on our mission to support wellness and sustainability on the front lines.Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...We are continuing in our series on daring leadership following the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. Today we are focusing on the third area of courageous and daring leadership: BRAVING trust. In this episode we break down the BRAVING acronym for trust and discuss the value and importance of trust in cultivating committed and caring workplace cultures.Brené and her team have already done the hard work of summarizing the acronym into a beautiful downloadable pdf, and you can find that here under The Braving Inventory. This link also offers access to several other free tools that are connected to her Dare to Lead work.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Episode Challenge:Take some time to look over the braving inventory and consider your personal areas of strength and areas for growth. Consider your workplace and where these pieces show up in your workplace or fail to show up and consider some steps you can take to model some of these areas of deficit in your workplace.Consider bringing the braving inventory into your team and open discussion about applications within your team/workplace.Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:We are continuing to re-share a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...As we continue our series on daring leadership, following the work of Brené Brown and her book Dare to Lead, today we are talking about living into our values. This is about being able to identify what is important to us and ways to engage in our lives that align with these values. Too often we fail to reflect on our values and they become background to our daily choices. We go into survival mode, getting through the days and the challenges but lacking intention. Living into our values asks us to get clear on what really matters to us, the core aspects of what we believe matters most. It then means stepping out of survival mode and developing clear intentionality in behaving in ways that reflect these values, even (and especially) when it is unpopular or uncomfortable. To do this Brené outlines three steps:Step One: We can't live into values that we can't name.You can access a list of values developed by Brené and her team, here (click on the one called List of Values). Use this tool to narrow down one or two values that feel defining of you. Brené instructs that you can ask yourself these three questions to help guide the process (taken from Dare to Lead, 2018): 1.      Does this define me?2.      Is this who I am at my best?3.      Is this a filter that I use to make hard decisions?Step two: taking values from BS to behaviour.This involves aligning your actions to the values you've identified – it's where rubber meets road. Brené suggests three questions to help clarify these behaviours (taken from Dare to Lead, 2018):1.      What are three behaviours that support your value?2.      What are three slippery behaviours that are outside your value?3.      What's an example of a time when you were fully living into this value?Step three: empathy and self compassion, the two most important seats in the arena.We need to use empathy to be curious listeners through the process of living into our values and allowing others to live into theirs. We need to utilize empathy to bridge between teams who have varying values as well as varying experiences of being in the arena that shape how they show up. We need self-compassion to manage when we fudge things up, to extend ourselves some grace and an assumption of positive intent. Episode Challenge:1.      Use the List of Values curated by Brené and her team and narrow this down to one or two that feel defining for you. Use the questions above to help the process. If you are in a position of leadership, consider asking those in your team to do the same exercise and discuss the ways your values show up in your work. 2.      Work through the “operationalizing” process to identify behaviours that allow you to walk your talk. 3.      Consider your stance on operating from an assumption of positive intent. Does this feel easy/obvious to you that people are doing the best they can with what they have, or does it feel improbable/unlikely/rub you the wrong way? If you have someone in your life (work or otherwise) who you are struggling with, what would change about your approach to them/the situation if you were to know with 100% certainty that they are doing the very best they can with what they have right now? Would the situation with them feel different if you were able to know this was true?If assuming positive intent is difficult for you, and if you struggle with other pieces like perfectionism, lack of self-compassion, etc., look below for additional resources that you may find helpful. I highly recommend all of Brené Brown's work, although I think my favourite (aside from Dare to Lead) is Rising Strong…possibly because it was the first book of hers that I read and after that I was hooked!Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with. In addition to her books, she also has two podcasts, Dare to Lead and Unlocking Us, as well as a ton of free resources and guides available on her website.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:For the next several weeks I am re-sharing a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...Today we are tackling empathy which involves a set of five skills. Together these skills and the act of engaging empathically is a lynchpin piece in the willingness to rumble with vulnerability – which is one of the four components of daring leadership identified by Brené Brown's research. During this video we identify the value of empathy lies in our ability to connect in a real and meaningful way with people, who are high value assets within systems and organizations. We need people to bring their best in order to offer the best services and supports to the communities you serve – and we help cultivate their best by offering them leadership that sees, hears, knows and values them as whole people. Empathy is a set of skills that when used together offers space for people to be seen, heard, known and valued – empathy works to see what someone is struggling with through the lens of what they feel about it. It is curious and willing to learn rather than know, and it creates meaningful connection which helps to grow safety, trust, confidence and commitment. Workplace cultures that place high value on their people in offering these pieces have repeatedly shown significant improvement in job satisfaction, reduced burnout and related medical/stress leaves, reduced absences, increased productivity and increased commitment to the job and workplace. The Five Empathy Skills:1.      To see the world as others see it, also known as perspective taking2.      To be nonjudgmental3.      To understand another person's feelings (and be able to accurately label feelings – AKA Emotional Intelligence)4.      To communicate your understanding of that person's feelings5.      MindfulnessClick here to watch a short video by Brené Brown on the difference between empathy and sympathy/advice giving/etc.Click here to jump to one of my favourite tools for building feeling fluency – the Feelings Wheel (it's great, I promise!!).This episode is the third in a series covering the principles that emerged from Brené Brown's research and writing. I would highly recommend her book, Dare to Lead, and would encourage you to consider reading along as we cover pieces of it. I generally highly recommend her resources which include podcasts, a Netflix special, a youTube video on empathy and a TedTalk about vulnerability and shame from a number of years ago. Episode Challenge:Take some time to think about how you interact with empathy. Maybe it's something you use all the time, or maybe it's been a skill you've undervalued, ignored or never learned. Take a look at the five empathy skills and notice which areas you could work harder at honing and improving. Consider where you could implement these skills more effectively to cultivate daring leadership and a culture of care within your workplace, as well as within your life outside of work.Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:For the next several weeks I am re-sharing a "Blast from the Past" series that I did back in Season 1 of Behind the Line. It was one of my favourite series and I think really important content for those who may have missed it the first time. The series takes a look at Brené Brown's work in her book, Dare to Lead, and discusses applications to helping professions where it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we improve leadership and systems, because they are hella broken. I hope you'll share this series with your sphere of influence and that together we can make it different...Among the many challenges facing First Responders & Front Line Workers, systemic toxic workplace dynamics is a significant factor impacting wellness. Every front line worker I have ever known has identified this as a stressor they experience and has been a significant factor in the decline of worker wellness for far more people than it should be. Today we are talking about these realities, as well as a challenge to raise up a new generation of leaders who are equipped to lead from a place of wellness and with a focus on wellness, with a hope to create change to these toxic systems from the inside out.In this episode I share some of my own experiences of toxic workplace environments as well as my experience learning about leadership and collaboratively creating an incredible workplace culture that has been life changing for myself and everyone else who works in this space. I also share some pieces that have shaped this – largely emerging from the work of Brené Brown in her book, Dare to Lead. The pieces from her book and quotes identified in today's episode are below for reference, as is a link to this book and some of her others (they are all phenomenal!).No matter what role you are in, you are a leader. You shape and influence because you exist within the system. It may be in small ways, but it counts. And what if we connected together and all our small pieces added up even quicker into something totally altering to the status quo of the broken system that continues to break good people. Drawn from Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (2018, p. 4, 10-12):Definition of Leadership: “I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”Her research identifies that there are three pre-requisites at the heart of daring leadership (as outlined in the definition above), and these include:1.      “You can't get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck.”She then outlines that courage, in this context, involves four key skill sets:a.      Rumbling with vulnerabilityb.      Living into our valuesc.      Braving trustd.      Learning to riseNote: We will be covering these topics in coming episodes.2.      “Self-awareness and self-love matter. Who we are is how we lead.”No truer words have ever been spoken. “Who we are is how we lead” is exactly why we need to work at investing in ourselves and cultivating our own sustainable wellness plan in order to be able to lead from a place of wellness and in a way that asks others to invest in their own wellness for the sake of organizational wellness and the supports offered down the line to the populations we are serving.3.      “Courage is contagious. To scale daring leadership and build courage in teams and organizations, we have to cultivate a culture in which brave work, tough conversations, and whole hearts are the expectations, and armor is not necessary or rewarded.”We have to lean into our own courage – which, remember, connects back to being vulnerable – to be able to lead others to do the same. When we can be more real with each other, human with one another, there are more opportunities to connect authentically and work together in ways that can be transformative for all involved. This episode is the first in a series covering the principles that emerged from Brené Brown's research and writing. I would highly recommend her book, and would encourage you to consider reading along as we cover pieces of it. I generally highly recommend her resources which include podcasts, a Netflix special, a youTube video on empathy and a TedTalk about vulnerability and shame from a number of years ago. Episode Challenge:During the coming week, pay attention to where you have influence within your workplace. How can you anchor to your own wellness and model wellness to others within your workplace? How can you demonstrate care and valuing of others in the ways you wish leadership demonstrated? What would it look like to be vulnerable in ways that would enhance connection and leadership at work? And last but not least, consider sharing the podcast and related tools with others in your workplace – start a community of helpers who are motivated in becoming equipped to really make change to the system, together.Additional Resources:If you haven't yet, check out the free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide to help you self-assess your experiences and exposure to burnout. Use this tool as information as you get honest with yourself about the impacts you have experienced – and start considering telling the story of your resilience as someone who has invested in their own wellness by looking into our Beating the Breaking Point Training Program designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers. You can grab the free indicators checklist here, and learn more about the training program here.As discussed in todays' episode, check out Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. You may also enjoy some of her other books, including Rising Strong; Braving the Wilderness; and Daring Greatly. These are some of my favourite books for personal development and wellness. She has a couple of other books that are also excellent, but if you're new to her work, these are the ones I would highly suggest starting with.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:Today we are continuing our new series called “Family of Front Line Heroes” where I get the chance to speak with spouses and adult children of front line helpers who will be sharing about their experiences, the challenges they have faced, the joys associated with supporting someone on the front lines, and the needs they see for both front line helpers and the families that love them. My hope is that all of you listening will also encourage your family members to listen in and connect more together around how the job is served not only by you but also by your loved ones vicariously. And I hope that offers opportunities to open new conversations around what is cool, what is hard, and how you might support one another in the midst of it. I am so excited to share Jackie Brandhorst and Kathy Cantrell with you! I'll admit, this is one of my favourite interviews EVER! Dr. Brandhorst is an Associate Professor of Management and the director of the Integrative Business Experience (IBE) at the University of Central Missouri.  She teaches courses in Business Communication, Management Communication, Management of Organizations, and Strategic Organizational Communication. Brandhorst specializes in organizational communication, employee well-being, and gender and professional identity in workplace contexts.  Her research has been published in prestigious journals including NonProfit Leadership and Management, Gender, Work, and Organization, Human Resources Development Review, the Journal of Applied Communication Research, and the Journal of Management Education. She is a member of the National Communication Association and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education.Kathy Cantrell served as stay-at-home mom and support system to her family for 30 years. She walked the journey of living alongside a career corrections officer while raising kids and navigating all of the challenges of family life. Listen in to our conversation and share it with your loved one(s). Episode Challenge:·        Connect with your partner and/or family and start some conversations about their experiences (the good and hard). Learn about their experiences and get curious about how to better know about, care about and support one another.·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!), my online resilience training program.Additional Resources:Learn more about Jackie's work: "Prison is power: Federal correctional officers, gender, and professional identity work" here "Constructing barriers to Employee Assistance Program use by federal correctional officers" here Check out the Prison Officer Podcast by Mike Cantrell, 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…-        Front Line Families – Balancing the Cost & the Protection of Connection (S1E3)-        Front Line Families Series (S1E28-31)-        Voices from the Front Lines with Correctional Officer, Mike (S2E47)Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:Today we are continuing our new series called “Family of Front Line Heroes” where I get the chance to speak with spouses and adult children of front line helpers who will be sharing about their experiences, the challenges they have faced, the joys associated with supporting someone on the front lines, and the needs they see for both front line helpers and the families that love them. My hope is that all of you listening will also encourage your family members to listen in and connect more together around how the job is served not only by you but also by your loved ones vicariously. And I hope that offers opportunities to open new conversations around what is cool, what is hard, and how you might support one another in the midst of it. I am so grateful to be joined today by the Kristen. Kristen has been a police wife for 10 years to her Los Angeles metropolitan police husband. She is a working mom of two boys ages 5 and 7. She started @heelsandholster, a supportive community for police wives in 2021. She is the author of “Heelsandholster: a police wife devotional” available on Amazon. She is known for her funny, relatable short form videos on Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube. You can also check out her blog, heelsandholster.com.Listen in to our conversation and share it with your loved one(s). Episode Challenge:·        Connect with your partner and/or family and start some conversations about their experiences (the good and hard). Learn about their experiences and get curious about how to better know about, care about and support one another.·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!), my online resilience training program.Additional Resources:Learn more about Kristen's work: HeelsandHolster Blog, here. HeelsandHolster: a police wife devotional (book), here. @HeelsandHolster on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok & YouTube 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…-        Front Line Families – Balancing the Cost & the Protection of Connection (S1E3)-        Front Line Families Series (S1E28-31)Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:Today we are digging in to a new series called “Family of Front Line Heroes” where I get the chance to speak with spouses and adult children of front line helpers who will be sharing about their experiences, the challenges they have faced, the joys associated with supporting someone on the front lines, and the needs they see for both front line helpers and the families that love them. My hope is that all of you listening will also encourage your family members to listen in and connect more together around how the job is served not only by you but also by your loved ones vicariously. And I hope that offers opportunities to open new conversations around what is cool, what is hard, and how you might support one another in the midst of it. I am so grateful to be joined today by the lovely Rebecca Lynn. Rebecca Lynn is the founder of Proud Police Wife (.com), a nationally recognized blog, where she provides support, encouragement, education, and resources to law enforcement families. She is also the founder and host of the Annual Police Wife Conference, a virtual conference featuring highly sought after speakers and resources to law enforcement spouses internationally. Rebecca Lynn is the author of The Peacemaker's Wife, A Journal for Reflection and Encouragement for Police Wives and Girlfriends and Proud Police Wife: 90 Devotions for Women Behind the Badge. She holds a degree in Psychology and Master's Degree in Education. Rebecca's husband has been in law enforcement for 14 years and they have three small children.Listen in to our conversation and share it with your loved one(s). Episode Challenge:·        Connect with your partner and/or family and start some conversations about their experiences (the good and hard). Learn about their experiences and get curious about how to better know about, care about and support one another.·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point (choose the enhanced support experience – it's worth it!), my online resilience training program.Additional Resources:Learn more about Rebecca Lynn's work: Proud Police Wife Blog, here. Proud Police Wife Podcast, here. The Peacemaker's Wife (book), here. Proud Police Wife: 90 Devotions for Women Behind the Badge (book), here. Proud Police Wife on Facebook and 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…-        Front Line Families – Balancing the Cost & the Protection of Connection (S1E3)-        Front Line Families Series (S1E28-31)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: I am so glad to have you here and with me today as we wrap up our series on small steps for quick wins. Today I want to share some of the top ways you can use your body to help your brain and support your mental health, wellness and resilience. Your brain and body are an intertwined system. Your brain offers feedback to your body, and likewise, your body offers feedback to your brain. When we know how the brain and body connect with one another, we can use the body as a tool to access supporting and managing the brain when it gets intense; along with being able to strengthen aspects of our physiological system in an effort to promote capacitates in our mental, emotional and psychological systems. The tools I want to offer you today are pieces that you can do that use your body as an access point to supporting your brain and its related thinking, feeling, relating, resilience capacities. As with all the things we've discussed in this series, the more you can engage these tools with consistency, the more effective they will be and the more effective they will help YOU to be. -        Number 1: heart rate and oxygenation. In recent history, scientists discovered regions of the brain that have ongoing capacities for new cell growth – meaning that the human potential for ongoing neurological growth and connectivity is far more than we ever knew. The regions of the brain that showed the most capacity for new cell growth are uniquely oxygen-rich regions in the brain. What this means is that people with more effective cardiovascular health, are more likely to have promoted cell growth in these parts of the brain, offering them advantages in potential for learning and growth that surpasses people with less effective cardiovascular health.  Now, I started out saying that I wouldn't make you get a gym membership – and I hold to that promise. I'm not saying you need to become a long distance marathon runner or triathlete…I'm saying that enhancing your cardiovascular health in any way, has a direct benefit for your brain. When you make your heart work, you are training your body to move oxygenated blood through your system. Any activities that get your heart rate up support this goal. You can have a dance party for 3 minutes to your favourite song, take a quick-paced walk on your lunch break, or do 20 jumping jacks.  Beyond offering your brain more oxygen and giving it new opportunities to reach new levels of potential, cardio-based activities also offer a great opportunity to express pent up emotional energy. Stress, fear, anger, and a host of other emotions play out not just emotionally but also physically. There is an energetic component attached to them. We want to shake or hit or cry or growl. Moving our bodies gives a mechanism to channel that energy somewhere and move it through and out rather than keeping it stuck and trapped inside. There was a famous clinician who wrote that “depression is anger turned inward” – when we trap emotional energy in our bodies with no outlet to channel it through, it burns and burdens and transforms into increasingly difficult things to cope with and heal from. Having a mixture of daily movements that support being able to put this energy somewhere can be really valuable in keeping us more emotionally stable. Having a mixture of situational movements we can access when we're in a moment of particular high energy and need to have somewhere to channel it, is also really valuable. These might not be as big – they may be things like shaking your hands out or doing a quick run on the spot – the goal is to give your body a quick release to help it recalibrate in a given moment. When we are able to engage in activities that give somewhere for the energy to go, we give our bodies a tool to tell our brain that we're safe and able to manage regulating our selves – and this is how our body gives feedback to our brain, which then help alleviate some of the stress feedback your brain offers back to your body. -        Number 2: muscle tension. When your muscles tense, it sends a feedback alert to your brain that there is something going on worth tensing up for. Your survival-centered brain interprets this as indicating threat must be lurking and further increases muscle tension to keep you at the ready to be responsive to whatever the possible risk might be. As you carry this tension over time, this feedback loop further and further entrenches itself.  Working to intervene at the level of our muscle tension, can send a new piece of information to our brain that the threat has lessened. And our brain can then come down a bit, which allows it to send an alert to your muscles to relax a bit more, and so on and so forth. We can use the exact same feedback loop to our benefit if we can mindfully intervene in it rather than ignore it or unhelpfully feed into it. Engaging in light stretching whenever you notice muscle tension coming up; regularly engaging in yoga or related stretching practices; and using tools like massage, heat and magnesium supplementation can all support building a new feedback loop that helps your brain re-train toward calm. Tools like an electric massager that can sit on a chair, or a foam roller, or an electric heating pad – these can all be used in ways that can support releasing and relaxing muscle tension to offer a new message to your brain about where you're at.  -        Number 3: muscle strength. Your body is constantly offering feedback to your brain. Things like your posture, your capacity to gather a deep breath and related pieces tell your brain something about how you're doing and what it needs to be doing to keep you safe and ok. Engaging in strengthening activities can support you in a host of ways. I'll give you an example – when I had my kids my body went through a ton of changes but among them was some significant postural changes. I suddenly lacked a lot of core strength, and was lifting babies, carrying babies, rocking babies, feeding babies…and all of this led to a kind of collapsed posture. I felt tight across my chest from hunching over to nurse or to cradle and my back muscles and core muscles weren't strong enough to compensate. This collapsed posture impeded my ability to have the same depth of diaphragmatic breath, and led to a lot of other pain, discomfort and tension. All of this served to tell my brain something is wrong, we're not ok, and so I would feel more anxious and stressed for absolutely no definable reason. I want to see my chiropractor who encouraged me to really focus on strengthening my back muscles to help pull my chest more open and to strengthen my core to help hold up my diaphragm more effectively. That advice was a game changer and made a tremendous difference in the experience I was having in my body as well as my emotional wellness.  So where are you hurting in your body? Where does the tension live? Where are you over compensating? What movements do you engage in regularly that may benefit from some functional mobility work and strengthening?  Beyond this functional movement pieces, strengthening practices also communicate to our brain an affirming sense of readiness and preparedness. Our brain likes when it feels like we are capable and ready to respond to anything. It feels calmed by believing that we are set. When we strengthen our bodies, even in small ways, it sends a signal to our brains that we are a little more prepared to handle something if it came our way than we might have been otherwise. And this lets our brain calm down a bit and trust that if shit hit the fan, we're more capable of handling it than we might have otherwise been. There is something empowering about feeling stronger. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to become body-builders – I am certainly not holding myself to that standard – but focusing in on practices that allow us to feel stronger benefit us in body, mind and spirit. I hope these suggestions offer something for you. I know we are bombarded by messaging around our bodies, and I don't for a second want you to take from this that your body isn't good enough. What I want you to take from this is that how you make use of your body can have a direct impact and influence on how you are feeling. I want this to hit you in a way that inspires you to use your body to create a greater sense of empowerment and control over your greater health and wellness – physically, mentally, emotionally…all of it. Every time you do any of the things I mentioned today, you are helping your brain, and vicariously your brain can give better to you in your life. 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…-        Fitness & Brain Health (Back to Basics Series) (S2E10)-        Mind-Body & Brain Health (Back to Basics Series) (S2E13)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: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 making intentional choices. It's work. But it's worth it. Episode Challenge:·        Try the inventory exercise described in this episode. Who do you suspect can grow with you? Who do you worry you will lose in this process? Where might you find people who align with your “new self”?·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, 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 (Season 3, Episodes 9-13)-        Trigger Happy (Season 2, Episodes 22-25)-        Processing (Season 1, Episodes 15-18)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 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 in the show notes. This program is great regardless of where you are at in the process of healing – it offers great prevention strategies for those early in the work, it is an awesome adjunct to therapy for those who are actively in therapy and doing the work right now, and it is a phenomenal tool for those needing something to guide the process of remaining invested in themselves after completing the work. While it isn't therapy in and of itself, it is the most essential pieces that I offer to clients as education during therapy distilled down to make it super valuable. I hope to see you inside of the program.Episode Challenge:·        Use our working definition of resilience and consider what it will look like for you to work at retaining resilience? What are some ways you are already doing this?·        Register for Beating the Breaking Point, 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 (Season 3, Episodes 9-13)-        Trigger Happy (Season 2, Episodes 22-25)-        Processing (Season 1, Episodes 15-18)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: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:Assess Daily Check-In Questions:·        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 your mood?Assess Bi-Monthly Check In – Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide (click and sign up to get the pdf, print it and use it as often as you like!)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 (Season 3, Episodes 9-13)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: 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 to choose us. We have to decide we are worth our own efforts. And as we do this in the work, we emerge from the thick parts of the work willing and able to be considerate of ourselves as we would be for others. We are willing and able to be engaged with caring for ourselves the same  way we would in any other relationship.10.   Willingness to recognize new or emerging areas of concern and re-engage the work to process it. Piggy-backing on number 9, not only do we check-in with ourselves and use our existing tools to support ourselves staying on track – we also check in and notice when our existing tools aren't answering the needs the way they used to. We are willing to see the places where new gaps are forming, new needs are taking shape, we as people are evolving and the needs we have shifting alongside us. And with this, people who have done the work are prepared to be open to new possibilities. They are willing to risk some discomfort to try new things. They are willing to have some things that fail while seeking out what serves them. They believe they are worth experimenting for to find what serves better. They are seeing the gaps sooner, so they have the buffer to be able to sustain some challenges in seeking out new solutions without feeling like this risks it all and brings them to the edge of their capacity. They are able to acknowledge when they need to resume the work, and often far more quickly. They engage in touch-ins with their  supports and professionals to catch new disruptions early, that any new work isn't left until we're falling apart, rather we're catching it and dealing with it the way we wish we could have when we reflect on our healing journey. It is conscious and brave and preventative, allowing us to be better versions of ourselves – more sustainable versions of ourselves – for ourselves, for those we care about, and for the work we continue to participate in.Episode Challenge:As you reflect on the complete (but likely not comprehensive) list of progress markers for healing - 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 -        S2E9-13 all on the impacts of traumaConnect, 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 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 traumaConnect, 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 differently. Instead of just taking pain meds and deciding this is something we have to live with, we can look at reducing stress or intervening at levels that support our body – maybe massage, yoga, meditation and other tools could offer supports that allow me to mitigate the concerns and meet my body's need to balance the demands on my nervous system.When retired RCMP member, Jen Pound came on the show she shared about her experience of PTSD manifesting as a cold she just couldn't shake. She shared finding it hard to get diagnosed properly and supported properly because this isn't the typical presentation. It went on and on because she thought eventually she would get better – but she didn't. And by the time it was identified for what it was, it required so much more effort to try to come back from it. She tried to push through for some time and the wear and tear took such a toll. I so valued her sharing her story because it's incredibly valuable and instructive – we need to know what to watch for. We need to know how to be interpreters of what our bodies are trying to share with us. We need to know that our bodies are trying to communicate, not trying to be assholes who get in our way. We need to interact with our bodies and the feedback our bodies offer us in a way that gives space to make sense of it and work out the message together. We need to create space to be curious about how our body is doing, changes we notice in how it's being, and aware of what it might be telling us about our own needs. No one can do it for us. No one can listen to our bodies on our behalf. We can recruit helpers like counsellors, naturopaths, massage therapists and doctors who support us as we work to learn to interpret our bodies, but we have to do the work and put in the time. Like learning what a new babies grunts and gurgles mean, we have to spend time, pay attention and really tune in. We have some trial and error – we may hear the baby and try feeding it, changing its diaper and still find that it's need has not been met. We try things out and see what the response is – does it sooth or not? And go from there. It is the same for us, we need to be willing to invest the time to pay attention, try things out, experiment and listen to the feedback – does this sooth my needs? Maybe a little, but it's still there, what can I try next? Ignoring and hoping it will go away can't and won't work. Like the baby, your system will just continue to get louder and louder until it becomes so dysregulated that no amount of soothing will bring it back down. Also just like a baby, your worth and value are defined not by what you do, how you perform, how much you give – but by who you are in your simple and glorious existence. You deserve to be treated with the same caring regard as you would treat a precious newborn. You deserve the same level of attentive attuned caring that we invest in small humans who will grow to be big someday. You deserve to continue to be invested in in the same ways you deserved to have been invested in when you were small, helpless and dependent on people to nurture you. Your needs haven't changed, just your size has. You are no longer dependent on caregivers to meet your needs, you are now the capable and reliable caregiver who can show up for you and be trustworthy in being responsive to your needs. The power is in your hands, all you have to do is pause to listen to the feedback, learn over time and through experimentation to interpret the feedback, and consistently work to show up with efforts to meet the needs identified by that feedback. Episode Challenge:·        What are some of the physical/physiological/medical symptoms you can identify noticing in your own life?·        What kind of needs might these symptoms be indicators of?·        How long has your body been working at alerting you with these symptoms?·        What are some ways you could work to meet the needs beyond just treating the symptoms?·        What are some ways you can set aside time and space to listen to feedback from your body to be able to hear it before it gets louder?Additional Resources:Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check out some of our related episodes…·        S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skillsConnect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:Today we are continuing in our series on the impacts of trauma, and we are really trying to focus on the early indicators that alert us that trauma is starting to take a toll. The goal we are working toward is to be able to notice these earlier so we can catch them and intervene earlier and prevent ourselves and others from landing in my office…or worse. Your job as a First Responder or Front Line Worker comes with risks – we know that. It isn't new information. And no one is better than the risks. Like I have said SO many times on the show before, nobody comes out unscathed. Nobody.So given that the risks are real and that the promise is that you will be scathed by it – how do we minimize the scathing, or the harm to you that results from it? That is really what we're trying to tangle with here, is how to we contain the scope of the impact. How do we limit the extent to which your beautiful, meaningful life – along with those of the people you care about like your partner, kids and family – is detrimentally impacted by the toll the work exerts?We have talked so far in this series about several early indicators including hypervigilance – being on hyper-alert and the resulting fatigue; dissociation – your bring tuning you out to manage the degree of stress it's experiencing for too long; and nightmares and flashbacks – intrusive ways your brain works at making sense of what it's been through. Today we are talking about yet another indicator, and total honesty, I think it is likely the most prevalent and most salient early indicator of the lot. I see this one showing up more in my own life and in the lives of those I work with in the early phases of burnout, occupational and traumatic stress than any other category. And here it is: numbing.If you listened to the episode on dissociation from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that dissociation is kind of connected to numbing. Dissociation is a mechanism by which our brain overrides us and tunes us out so it can take a break from the immense stress response cycle and hypervigilance it was not meant to deal with on an ongoing basis. Similarly, numbing is a mechanism by which we choose to check ourselves out. It is also closely related to avoidance – the desire to not go near discomfort or sit in pain or suffering for any length of time. I mentioned a moment ago that numbing is one of the most prevalent and significant of early indicators…the other thing I should mention is that it is also one of the most ignored, justified, denied, rationalized and otherwise inappropriately excused of the indicators. And why is that? …Well, because the things we tend to use to numb, tend to be largely socially acceptable tools for distraction, comfort, and/or “coping”. They are behaviours and activities that make us “feel better”. They “calm us”. …Except that they aren't being used to strategically support us, rather they are being used to temporarily mitigate our discomfort, interrupt our ability to process in favor of something that feels good for the moment, and over the long term, they cut us off from ourselves by distancing us gradually from interacting with our own thoughts, feelings, needs, worries, and more. So, what does numbing look like. Well – the easy to name ones that likely you would think of as obvious would include drinking and drug use. I would also include self-harming behaviours, and extreme type behaviours like constant partying, dangerous promiscuity and related activities. These types of behaviours tend to serve by temporarily chemically diluting our feelings of suffering, or temporarily chemically enhancing our feelings of elation in an effort to drown out our experiences of hardship that we feel ill-equipped to process effectively.Now, don't get me wrong. I love a glass of wine while I watch trashy chick flicks on a Friday night. I am not saying that drinking is bad, or that drugs and medication are bad, or that having a good time and enjoying sex are bad. What I am saying is that when these things are used in excess or used explicitly to avoid our own experience, they can rapidly become problematic coping and lead into addictions that can be incredibly difficult to break. And I think we all know and see in others around us, the tremendous catastrophic effect that addictions can have on peoples lives. People lose partners, access to their kids, relationships with loved ones, the ability to do their jobs safely, and so much more. The cost can get steep, quickly. But beyond the obvious and extreme forms of numbing – there are a TON of other ways we numb, all the time. How much time do you spend scrolling on your phone? Does that time increase or decrease when your stress is higher or it's been a tough day at work? How much TV have you been watching? Again, does this amount of time go up or down when it's been a hard day? How much have you spent on online shopping? How many bags of chips have you eaten…or here's a more timely one, how many candies have you stolen from your kids Halloween stash hoping they won't notice?? The truth is, numbing can look like a lot of really common, normal behaviours. And more than that, they can look like behaviours that when used a very specific way can actually be a component of healthful coping…but when taken too far, become a new problem all their own. Recently I had a chat with my daughters kindergarten teacher. My daughter is the oldest in the class and is a force of nature by personality, I've been told the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Her teacher told me that they have been working a lot on leadership. She strained when she said the word. I asked if that was a whole class thing – no. It was not a whole class thing. My daughter is working on leadership. I asked what that means, working on leadership, and I was told that my fiery girl possesses an incredible amount of power over her classroom dynamic, and that she could either use those powers for good, or for evil. Those were the teachers exact words. They, apparently, are learning to use her powers for good, by helping kids to listen and pay attention rather than get into silly moods that have every child bouncing off the walls. …Side note, I am SO grateful not to be a kindergarten teacher and believe every single one of them deserves a freaking parade. I could not do that job.I share this story because, as I have mentioned in other episodes, adults are just children in tall bodies, and much like my 5 year old daughter, we have to decide if we will use our powers for good or for evil. Will we make choices that maximize the value something offers us, or will we take it to extremes where it suddenly has power over us? Can we work to use tools to serve us, or will we overuse them to the point that we are serving them? Whether it is scrolling your phone or having a drink, these things can be nice, self-caring actions that can communicate to our brain and body that we acknowledge ourselves and acknowledge our need for a little bit of space or distance or distraction from what has felt hard, and welcoming of some chill, some enjoyment, some treating. But when it goes too far and becomes habitual to the point that we don't know how to cope without it; exclusive to the point that we don't know how else to cope if not it; or excessive to the point that it absorbs us and leaves little else, we have a problem.And this is where the tricky part lies. Defining where we move from decently healthful normal coping into problematic unhealthy addictive numbing. Because most of us start many of these activities in the normal healthy zone. They tend to be occasional and enjoyable. And then hard times hit, so we seek out more enjoyment to balance the hardship. And we find that it feels good to be engrossed in binge watching old tv reruns on Netflix, or that drinking a couple more glasses than normal feels like a nice buzz instead of the anxious feelings I came home with. The things feel like they take the edge off. But as with all things addictive and how our brains work, little by little we develop tolerance, and slowly but surely we need more and more to get the same or less of an effect. To feel more numb we need to do more of the numbing. And suddenly it has taken on a life of its own. What had been justifiable for a moment turns into a monster of our own making. And that's the thing – it becomes a monster not only because of the addictions that can ensue and the costs associated with those – but because it also keeps the problem churning. Whatever you were numbing from is still there. Sitting on a shelf in your body, screaming for your attention while you work to turn the volume up on the TV to drown it out. And then you go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, add more difficulty and stress and trauma in a job that is facing it all the time, adding to the shelf, and then going home and doing it all over again. It accumulates and accumulates and when the problem is so big it can no longer be ignored, it is also so much more complex and festering after being left so long and the work to recover and heal from it all is so much more difficult than it needed to be.And it's all to avoid. To not touch what aches in us. To not look at what is crying and hurting in us. To not deal with what we're afraid of.And not because we don't know we should, or we don't think it's important…although those might be reasons that crop up for some. But most of the time, when I ask people why they didn't interact with their pain the answer is that they didn't know HOW. We are ill-equipped to navigate our own pain. We haven't been taught practically what it LOOKS LIKE to process our experiences effectively. So we stuff it. And we numb it. And time passes, and we and the people in our lives suffer for it, and on and on it goes. 2 years ago, when I first started this podcast, I did a series on how to process, specifically related to how to process and make sense of the pandemic. Check out Season 1, episodes 15-18 for a recap. Really, at the heart of the idea of processing is the understanding that humans are wired for stories. We talked about this last week around nightmares. We are designed in such a way that our brains desperately want and need to make sense of things that happen to us and around us. We need stories that fill in the gaps and round out the edges. We can face all kinds of hard, scary, sad things, but if we can tell a story about us that feels like it makes sense and meaning of it all, we will tend to be able to let it settle over time and go on with life relatively unencumbered by the events. But when we fail to tell a story, the story will try to tell itself, and it will always try to do so by putting us at the center. What I mean by that is that if we don't take an active role in analyzing, writing and shaping the story, the default story will tend to be told by our greatest insecurities, fears and beliefs of personal inadequacy. And this is part of what contributes to many of our stories feeling traumatic for so so long after an experience. We can't put it to bed, because it still feels like it says so much about how we failed, how we aren't enough, how we can't hack it… Our brain feels on the hook for keeping it alive in our heads so that we don't fuck it up again, so we don't make the same mistake, so we won't blow it like we always do… And yet, I can say that of the multitude of stories I have heard over the years working in a job where I hear everyone's internal storytelling – our default stories are almost never the most accurate version of the story. They are biased, and they need us to take an active role in sussing out the bias and retelling the story through a more accurate lens.When we let default stories happen, and when we ignore them and let them build up over time, they start to build on eachother and serve as confirmation bias for one another. See, there's another time you blew it. Oh look, there's one more. Holy smokes, look at all these failures you've amassed! If that's what is happening under the surface, is it any wonder you would want to numb out more and more and more? This is exactly why we need to talk about this and catch it early – because this can be totally doable if we catch it early and intervene. What if every day after work you granted yourself permission to enjoy a glass of wine and a tv show, but then after that one episode, you set aside 20 minutes to reflect on the day and intentionally decide how to tell the story of the day to yourself. What went well? What didn't? What did you do about what didn't go well? How do you feel about the decision you made to handle it that way? Is there more you could have done or some learning you can take forward? What can you be grateful for? What can you acknowledge about yourself, your efforts and your value? Sit with these questions, let yourself mull through them, and let them build a story of who you are. I bet if you do this you'll find you'll start to discover some theme about yourself. I'm someone who shows up. I am someone who doesn't give up. I am someone who cares deeply. I am someone who…what? What will it be for you?If you can engage in this consistently, beginning right now, you will be taking an action that invests significantly in your wellness and pays big dividends in reducing your risks for numbing that becomes problematic. The other piece I would encourage you to be reflective of is your needs – what do you feel like you need and why? What would serve that need best? If you need some time to numb, that can be ok, if it is intentional and strategic and caring. But it can't be to avoid on an ongoing basis, that is a recipe for trouble. I certainly have days when I decide I need to numb out , and I may have a couple glasses of wine and watch more TV than I would usually allow myself, but it's with the promise that I will circle back to myself tomorrow once I've taken this space to breathe. And I always keep that promise, it's a key part of how I build relationship with myself to be trustworthy, reliable and keeping to my internal promises. One of my best indicators that I am struggling more and needing to be attentive and intervening is when I notice myself wanting to be on my phone more. When I feel irritated by people interrupting me when I am mindlessly scrolling. When I would rather be scrolling or watching a show than having the important conversation my husband or kids are trying to have with me. The desire to distance and numb out is an alert system that lets me know I'm not doing as ok as I could be, and it puts me into action looking at what I've let slide from my wellness plan, and what needs to get set back up or set up differently to meet my ever-evolving needs and the ever-evolving demands of life.This isn't a perfect science, it is for sure more of an art. There is an abb and flow and it asks us to be pausing, reflective and interpretive of what is happening for us, what we need in it, and how we can serve those needs most effectively. As in art, it asks us to confront and make sense of pain and suffering, but it also moves us to places of calm and beauty and joy. Episode Challenge:·        What are some of the ways you numb?·        What are some of the pre-cursors that lead you to feeling like you need to engage in numbing?·        What helps you know the difference between when you are using a coping tool for good purposes, or overusing the same thing for numbing purposes?·        What are some ways you can help yourself ground and be present?·        How can you set aside time and space to make choices around how to do more consistent processing so that it doesn't build and build and build to the point that numbing is the only strategy left?·        What might processing look like for you?Additional Resources:Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check out some of our related episodes…·        S2E35-39 May Mini's Series on calming and grounding strategies·        S2E22-25 Trigger Happy Series on identifying and managing trauma triggering·        S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skills·        S1E15-18: Processing in a Pandemic SeriesConnect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:You guys, we are back and talking some more about early indicators for trauma and stress-related injuries that are common to front line workers. We've been talking about how important it is to be familiar with what to look for in yourself and those around you, so you can catch things early and ensure your wellness. For your sake, for the sake of the job you love, and for the sake of those who love you. This is crucially important stuff you guys, believe me, I know – because it's what every client who ends up in my office for stress-related injuries says they wish they had known and done more about sooner to prevent having to get so deeply caught in it, where the impacts are incredibly damaging to them, their families, their potential to continue in jobs they have loved, and so much more. I have these conversations every single day, and I don't want you to end up in an office like mine having the same regret-filled conversation if you don't have to. We've talked about what to watch for around hypervigilance and dissociation and today we are talking about nightmares and flashbacks. Now, many people who think about traumatic nightmare and PTSD-related flashbacks likely think of what we see in movies – really intense experiences that make you wake up in a cold sweat or knock the wind out of you while engaged in some totally mundane task. While this can be what nightmares and flashbacks look like when traumatic stress has really taken hold, they aren't the early indicator presentation, and that's what we really want to focus on for today.Before nightmares ramp up to the level of cold sweats and screaming in your sleep, they begin with less intensity but should be an early alert that something is up for us. Let's talk for a minute about what sleep and dreaming is all about, and that will help us to better understand why and how nightmares play a role as early indicators around our wellbeing. When you sleep, your brain begins a really important task called consolidation. I tend to think of this process, kind of like the mail room in a busy law firm on TV shows like the Good Wife. When you go through the day, you have a constant stream of input – data that is coming into your brain. Some of it is important, a lot of it is pretty meaningless, but your brain won't necessarily know what it what until time has passed. For example, your brain might be aware of tree branches blowing outside your window while you are talking to your spouse or kids – and generally that input of the branches blowing would be pretty meaningless and unimportant…unless one of those branches suddenly broke and blew through your window…suddenly that background noise peripheral input becomes vitally important data that your brain is able to bring to the forefront and use to enact action to duck out of the way. Think of each piece of data – noises, visual input, smells, and so on – as a piece of paper in that busy mail room. By the end of the day it has amassed and there is a ton of material to sort through. Your brain doesn't have time all day to deal with organizing and sorting all of that material, it's too busy dealing with the next bit of input coming in and working to determine if, in that moment, it is background or foreground information that you need to interact with. So, in the quiet of night when your brain gets to tune out it's high degree of perceptive awareness of things like sights and sounds, it goes to work dealing with the mass of material you collected that day. Again, think of the mail room and workers sorting through papers – deciding what goes where. Does this need to be kept? Do we need it soon, like a presentation I have to give tomorrow? That might go into our short-term memory stores. Or do we need it for sometime further in the future? That might get put into our long-term memory bank. Is it something that is related to our survival? That needs to be kept locked in an air tight safe in our trauma center. If it doesn't need to be kept, maybe it can be shredded and forgotten. During the night, while you sleep, your brain is busy working on this sorting and filing process, scrutinizing each piece of data. And your brain, wired as it is for imagery and stories, tends to create visual representations and narratives – like shadow puppets of the things it's working on. Imagine that your brain pulls up something about your day that was stressful with your partner, deciding what to do with it, while also pulling another file up of a movie you watched starring some hot actor or actress…suddenly in your dreams you are having an argument with Brad Pitt who is your husband but obviously Brad Pitt isn't your husband. Your brain smushes the shadow puppets together and concocts stories that often make very little sense when we wake up, but while we're in it feel like they make perfect sense. Psychology has a long history of “interpreting” dreams. I will admit, this isn't something I do, but the idea is that we process symbolically through our dreams. In some ways we have common symbols that tend to mean common things in what we are trying to make meaning of; but at the heart of it what's happening is that our brain is combining symbols of various things it is processing and trying to sort through simultaneously and then working to tell a story with it…because that is what our brains love to do. Why do you think we love fiction books and fantasy films and TV shows with intricate plot lines? We are wired for stories. From the beginning of time, people have told stories to translate key information. We have documented stories in pictographs and then written word. It shouldn't be surprising that our dreams would be marked by story-making.The thing about early indications of stress, is that we might not be finding ourselves recalling explicit nightmares of detailed events that reflect what we've been through. At the early stage, it will likely be less obvious than that. It will show up as more restless sleep – you might get feedback about that from your partner or from your fitbit, or just feeling more fatigued in the mornings. It will show up in dreams that feel more active – not necessarily intense nightmares, but dreams that circle around themes like helplessness, powerlessness, being chased or chasing after something, or other distressing kinds of feelings in the midst of the dream. These might gradually rise to the level of nightmare – again, perhaps not specific nightmares that re-enact the exact details of a traumatic lived experience, but images and stories that reflect fear, helplessness and horror. The difficulty of nightmares – whether on the mild end or the intense end, is that they happen when we feel powerless to do anything about them. We can feel the victim of what is happening in our sleep. And this can give rise to a totally new problem, which is that this then builds a relationship to sleep that feels victimizing. It can lead us to stay up later, feel more anxious about going to sleep, use things like leaving a light or TV or music on – intended to bring distraction and comfort but also adding a dimension of ongoing input your brain is having to wrestle with attending to while desperately needing to turn this off to be able to focus on its job of consolidation. It can become a vicious cycle, because as we delay, avoid and degrade the quality of our sleep, we also give our brain less room to work with to do the consolidation job it can ONLY do while you sleep. That means that over time, there will be a backlog. You brain won't be able to get through a day of material during the night, so it will hold it over for tomorrow night, and so on and so on. Add to that that you are in a job where you are exposed to more material of significance that needs to be processed, and the reality is that you need every minute of sleep you can get to consolidate all you go through. It is critical.So, how do we work at managing something that happens while we're not conscious? Probably not surprisingly, it starts when you are awake. The old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, totally fits here. While we may not be able to directly control whether or not we'll have nightmares or disrupted sleep, we can do things that set us up in a direction for better success. 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 may be things you already do, like wash your face and brush your teeth. It may also include things like checking outside your home, locking doors and setting security to help your environment feel secure. Connecting with a person who feels safe, or comforting items or routines that promote a sense of being cared for can help your body wind down into a deep sense of safety and security. When we give our bodies and brains this kind of safe context to fall asleep within, they are carrying less activated unsafety into sleep with us, and tend to have less of a stirred up experience while we sleep.Those are a couple of things you can do each day before you sleep. With consistency, they can make a big difference in the quantity and quality of your sleep. On the flip side, what do we do if we've woken from a tough dream or nightmare, or been woken up by a partner who sees us fitfully sleeping? How do we help ourselves go back to sleep after that?Well, some great skills are ones we've talked about on the show a bunch of times before. When we wake up from a nightmare or in an activated state, what we need is to quickly help our body find a way back to a sense of safety and homeostasis – that sweet spot when we are calm and balanced. We can do that using grounding skills. These are things that help our brain move from whatever it was processing in our dream, whatever filing it was working on, to being present in this moment where I am totally safe and fine. Grounding tools like 5-4-3-2-1, the alphabet game, or other identification games help your brain re-orient to space and time and anchor back to your present moment, in the safety of your cozy bed and your secure home (See Season 2, Episode 37 when we did our May Mini's series and covered these tools. For the video, check it out on youtube). If after 10-20 minutes you have not been able to fall back to sleep and still feel quite activated, move to another space to limit associating your bed with an activated, stressed awake state, and do a little bit of movement like stretching or some yoga poses. Your body may need to move some of the activation and release some of the muscle tension. Try to continue grounding and work to do some of the opposite actions we've talked about before – if your breathing is short and shallow, try to deepen and lengthen it. If you are hot and sweaty, try to cool off. If your heart is racing, try square breathing (breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, breathe out for a count of 4 and hold for a count of 4 – do this a few times and then resume breathing normally). Gentle work to bring your body back to safety. Listen to some calm music or nature sounds. Try a guided meditation. We don't want you moving into alert things like watching TV or reading if we can help it, but allow yourself to anchor your body back to where you are and remind it that you are safe now. When you feel able, try to go back to sleep. Again, if you go more than 20 minute lying awake, move out of your bed to prevent associating bed with an awake state.Now, let's talk about flashbacks. Flashbacks are a little like nightmares in that they involve some visual imagery or sensory reminders of a traumatic event. For some people, especially in the early indicators of trauma exposure, will have a kind of mild reference. It won't necessarily feel immersive, but more like a spike in heart rate or a quick flash of heat or some other strange but innocuous experience at the reminder of something. It may be something we can clearly connect, or it may be something that we can't pin point what it is about. For others, particularly further down the spectrum of trauma and more deeply impacted, flashbacks can be extremely immersive, where we feel right back in a situation we were once in. They can feel very real, including all of the sensory input of the time – sights, sounds, smells, all of it. It can be incredibly disorienting and absolutely terrifying. For a lot of people who I talk to, they will reflect back that before the flashbacks got really bad and intense, they had often had little niggles. Fleeting moments where suddenly it was hard to breathe, or a strange feeling of something being in their periphery and nothing being there when they turned to look. They often identify thinking and ruminating about events, like a call that went sideways or a conversation with a supervisor that felt hard. They bring that into other things, like a projected image cast on top of other moments in their day and week. And feelings connected to those events will cast themselves onto other moments too – the feeling of helplessness, powerlessness, anger… It can sometimes feel hard to explain or describe. We can know we feel inappropriately or disproportionately activated but struggle to moderate it. We'll snap at people we care about from this heightened place, and struggle to feel like ourselves in moments where we would normally feel more tethered to who we are. Regardless of the end of the spectrum your on, the job is the same. Bring it back to safety. We have to help our brains know the difference between now, an environment where I am fine, and then. We are working on coaching our brains to learn the difference between safety states and unsafety states. We need to teach and reteach our brains about what to look for to help us know when we are ok and when we're not. And again, grounding becomes a key skill we can use here to help us really root in to the here and now, to help our brains know their time and place. When I have clients in my office who experience flashbacks, I prompt them to help find things in the room. I'll say, “tell me something here that is purple”, “tell me something in here that starts with the letter C”, “tell me something in here that is small”, “touch the chair, does it feel hard or soft?”, “touch the wall, does it feel warm or cool?”. The goal here is to help them orient back to the room we are in that is known and safe by having them interact with the room and describe aspects of it in detail. When we go into flashbacks, whether mild or severe, we disconnect from where we are and go into where we've been. Bringing ourselves back to the present and really anchoring to the safety we have right now is vital in helping our brains learn that the unsafety we experienced is not an ongoing and persistent state. It ended. It was hard, and awful, but it's over.When we can engage this consistently, we are teaching our brain that we are able to help control it's felt sense of safety. We are showing our brain that we can show up for it, we can be dependable for it. We can be a reliable coach that it can trust and believe in to keep it safe. And in this way, we develop a new relationship with ourselves that puts us in the drivers seat of our safety.Yes, bad things happen. They have happened, they may continue to happen. We can't control everything. But when we do these pieces, we help our brain learn to trust that wherever we have the power to control safety, we will, and we'll do a damn good job of it.Episode Challenge:·        How often do you get nightmares? Has the frequency or intensity fluctuated?·        How is the quality of your sleep? Do you use a sleep tracker – maybe think about trying one out (heads up, it can be SUPER depressing for a bit! …But then it gives some helpful information to help you track and make changes)·        Where do you fall in the flashback spectrum? ·        What are some strategies you have found helpful or would try out and experiment with to help ground and anchor back to safety?Additional Resources:Self-assess indicators for burnout and related concerns by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Check out some of our related episodes…·        S2E35-39 May Mini's Series on calming and grounding strategies·        S2E22-25 Trigger Happy Series on identifying and managing trauma triggering·        S2E9-17 Back to Basics Series on basic self-care, emotion regulation and stress management skillsConnect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:We are continuing in a new series around what to look for and be aware of as professionals more exposed and more likely to suffer from things like PTSD and related occupational stress injuries. This comes after so much feedback that I hear about first responders and front line workers getting a lot of lip service advising to be on the lookout and conscientious about the risks for stress-related impacts of the job – but then aren't given any information or tools to help know what the hell to actually be looking for that would let them know they aren't ok…until they are SO not ok that the wheels have completely come off and course correcting is WAY more work than it needed to be.Our goal in this is to help equip you with the warning signs. I want you to know the things to be noticing and on the lookout for. I also want you to have this resource to offer to your people – your spouse, close friends or family members – so they can know what to be on the lookout for – because they are often to ones who will see it first. And along with all that, I want you to be equipped to be an ambassador for change within your workplace, and to have what you need to help notice warning signs in others you work alongside to give them feedback and support them in seeking what they need before it is so much further down the rabbit hole.We want to catch things early. Like any disease, the earlier we catch it, the more options we have to treat it and the less invasive the treatment needs to be. When we don't know what to look for and let it persist way longer unchecked, the consequences can be so much more catastrophic and working back from it is so much more difficult. It doesn't have to be that way. If we can help to catch it early and intervene when it's not too far gone, the process is not so difficult. This is exactly why I built tools like the free downloadable Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist and Triage Guide – which if you haven't gotten it yet, go to our website (link above) and grab it. The checklist helps you to self-assess early indicators for things like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and occupational stress injuries. It is a really powerful tool if you use it on a semi-regular basis to track where you're at and notice early on any changes in your wellness.Among the indicators that the checklist tracks, one of the key symptoms associated with stress-related injuries is a phenomenon called dissociation. If you are not familiar with the term dissociation, let's take a minute to break down what it means. Dissociation is a neurophysiological tool your brain uses to distance itself from stress and overwhelm. It is adjacent to numbing – it's our brain checking out for chunks of time or to varying degrees all of the time. The dictionary definition of dissociation is, “the disconnection or separation of something from something else or the state of being disconnected.” Now, it's important to know that everyone dissociates. Everyone has experiences where they check out mentally. Whether or not you dissociate is not in and of itself an indicator of a problem – it is a human mechanism to manage a world that can be inundating and it's our brains way of managing the flow of energy it's expected to dedicate to interpreting and interacting with it all. When we talk about dissociation we talk about it on a spectrum, from mild to severe and complex. On the mild end of the spectrum, and what is in keeping with normal human experience, is things like watching TV and zoning out to the point that you don't know what's happening in the plot and have to back track a bit to catch up with what's going on. Another example is “highway hypnosis” and that feeling of getting to a destination but not really remembering the choice-points involved in doing the drive. So, what are we looking for when dissociation is going beyond normal coping into problematic? What should we be looking for?Well, one of the markers may be less about whether you miss the plot line in a show, and more about the frequency with which these normal level dissociative experiences are happening. To disconnect and zone out once in a while is one thing, but when it's happening on a daily basis – that's a sign of a problem. So one of the things to be looking for is normal, mild level dissociation happening at a frequency that is increased. Do you find yourself reading and re-reading, and re-reading again the same 3 sentences of a book when you used to be an avid reader? Do you have difficulty keeping track of steps in a process? Do you walk into a room and forget what you were there to do? …Now some of these things can be associated with distractibility – like having a lot on our minds – as well as with aging, and true story, those can be legit reasons.  But sometimes people mistakenly chalk up some of these early indicators as “getting older” when in actual fact they are symbols of stress taking up more space in our minds and our brains trying to quash the impact of that by tuning us out a bit, because we aren't doing the shit to help make it better more actively.If you used to be a decently present person and you are noticing, or getting feedback from others that you seem more checked out than you used to be, that's some solid feedback to listen to. More moderate-level indicators are struggling to be present in conversations with loved ones, needing to ask for people to repeat themselves multiple times to get what they are saying. Having people repeat your name multiple times to get your attention. Excessive mindless scrolling. Feeling like you lose time – minutes or hours where you can't account for what you were doing or thinking. Some have difficulty FEELING present in moments – like they are there in body and can see their kids joy on Christmas morning, but can't bring themselves to FEEL a part of it. And on the severe end of the spectrum people will lose significant chunks of time that they can't account for. Often people who end up in this end of the spectrum have experienced such severe trauma over such a prolonged period of time in their lives, that their brains have taught themselves to segment off into parts and this shows up as something called dissociative identity disorder, which is the terminology used to refer to what was once known as multiple personality disorder. A very real experience that I work with in my office on a regular basis, this degree of dissociation is virtually always in response to very early experiences of incredibly significant trauma that is frequent and unsupported. It is the brains only way to cope and function, to parse itself into segments that can exist in and face demands from different parts of life. Now, DID is a bit beyond the scope of what we're going to try to tackle today, but I bring up this end of the spectrum because I don't think it gets enough attention, AND, because I think it is more prevalent in helping professionals than anyone actually knows about. While I can't speak to this from a quantitative research perspective, anecdotally I will say that so far every single client I have ever worked with who has dissociative identity disorder works within first response and front line work. And it's not that first response and front line work makes someone more at risk for DID, I actually theorize that the relationship goes the other way around. I tend to believe that people who experienced significant wounding in childhood develop into adults who want to make a difference and help to make the world a better, safer place. I also tend to think that kids who grew up in extreme trauma are extraordinarily well (unfortunately) equipped to exist in high stress and traumatizing jobs. It's normal for them. The distress is a walk in the park to their nervous systems that have trained for this their whole lives – literally. So, if you are hearing this and see yourself in some of this, know that you are NOT alone, and likely are in better company than you might imagine. We will try to come back to this topic down the road, but I do want to say that if this is a piece for you, reach out to a really experienced trauma-trained therapist.Ok, so for our purposes today we want to tackle early indicators of dissociation that is in the mild to moderate end of the spectrum, in an effort to catch it early on and intervene asap. Again, if you want a tool to help you assess – go get the free downloadable checklist. We've talked about what dissociation is and some examples of mild to moderate indicators – if you hear these and see yourself in them, then what comes next? What do we DO about it?Well, first we need to acknowledge that this is a result of stress. We have to name the problem for what it is and stop treating it like aging or making excuses for it that keep it persisting unchecked.If we are acknowledging that stress is playing a role in shaping this, we then need to explore what our brain and body is needing from us to help recalibrate our nervous system so that our brains don't have to rely on dissociation so heavily to do the regulating for us. Essentially dissociation is our brains way of saying, you aren't doing anything to help us manage all of this, so I guess we'll have to take you offline for a bit to manage it for you. If you don't want your brain checking out on your behalf, you need to be an active participant in intervening and supporting your nervous system so your brain doesn't have to go to these measures to handle it for you.So that brings us to how we support our nervous system. If you are a loyal listener, these won't be shocking to you, we talk about them often. It really comes down to simplifying, creating and connecting to safety.If stress is what builds us to this, we need to focus on simplifying what we have the capacity and control over simplifying to reduce additional stress where possible. Now, I get that life doesn't make that easy. Stress is around every corner and adulting brings all kinds of unexpected demands and surprise curveballs. But it's really about trying to help our nervous systems have a counterbalance to the up by giving it intentional, carved out and dedicated times for down. In times of particularly high stress where we have limited time and control, it can be as simple as feeding your body well and regularly – basic needs like nutrition and ensuring our bodies can be fueled predictably lets our body know it can trust us to do the basics to care for it – but when we skip meals and feed it junk, it learns it can't even rely on you for the most basic of needs. Beyond the basics, it can also be things like taking time to breathe and reduce muscle tension, getting to bed a bit earlier, activities like crafts or hobbies that feel engaging in a nice way, singing or listening to music you love, moving your body, and the very best one – play. Intentionally setting time to engage in these activities can help give your body what it needs so it doesn't have to rely so heavily on dissociation to manage. Engaging in these routinely can be preventative to reduce risks for dissociation and can be responsive when dissociation is already cropping up. In addition to these pieces, engaging in very active mindfulness is another important way we can help shift out of dissociation, especially if dissociation has been creeping up in frequency and going on for some time. As our brains use the tool of dissociation to cope, it becomes increasingly habitual. It becomes to go to skill set. To undermine this, it is going to take some effort and consistency – and the tool to use is grounding and mindfulness skills that force your brain back into conscious presence rather than permission to check out. Mindfulness tools like 5-4-3-2-1 and the alphabet game can be great ones. If you don't know about them, check out Season 2, Episode 37 when we did our May Mini's series and covered these tools. For the video, check it out on youtube. Other ways of engaging in mindfulness include describing an activity you are doing in detail while you're doing it – this forces your brain to be really IN the moment rather than checked out. In conversations with others, using active listening skills where you say back what they've said to you can be a helpful way to keep your brain in it rather than tuning out. Really, anything that is encouraging your brain to be connected and engaged with the moment you're in helps to retrain your brain to stay rather than go off into la-la-land. As we practice these skills, in combination with giving our nervous systems what they need to trust us with the capacity to help ourselves so our brains don't have to intervene on our behalf, we can move from relying on dissociation to relying on our own awesome regulation skills to keep ourselves ok and in a zone that can interact with stress without needing to run away from it.Episode Challenge:·        Where does dissociation show up in your life? Where on the spectrum do you think it falls for you?·        How often does it usually show up? Has the frequency increased or decreased?·        What helps you stay anchored and grounded to the moment you are in?·        What tools can you try out and experiment with to help support grounding to the present?·        How can you work at mitigating stress and supporting your nervous system? What does your nervous system need from you so your brain doesn't have to work so hard to check you out?Additional Resources:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:Since starting this podcast, one of the most frustrating things I hear all too often is that as front line workers you are told to be aware of trauma. To be looking out for PTSD. To be on alert that you are at higher risk for stress-related mental health concerns. …But then never being told WHAT to look for. Not knowing what exactly PTSD looks like, feels like. How to know when there's a problem, before it's so bad that you can't convince yourself to get out of bed and face the world. That trend is so very concerning to me. While I know we have made gains in reducing the stigma of mental health concerns and that things like therapy are being made more accessible and are encouraged more by workplaces now than ever before in history – what does any of that matter if we aren't equipping people with the basic knowledge of what the hell to look for? How can we expect people to get support and do the work to help themselves if they don't even know there's a problem? This stood out to me most starkly a while back, and I have referenced it a number of times on the show since then, when Jenn Pound came on and talked about her PTSD symptoms manifesting physically. She felt sick, like she had a bad flu that she just couldn't shake. No one told her what to look for. Despite posters from occupational health that said to be watchful for indicators of occupational stress injuries, no one clarified what exactly to be on watch for. So it went on and on and on, untreated, assumed to be some bug. Until it got so bad that it could no longer be chalked up to the flu. And by then, the damage was so severely done that it becomes a totally different kind of ballgame to try to play out.I hate this. I hate that this is a thing. I hate that you are trained to identify markers of mental health concerns in those you serve, but aren't trained to look for your own. Whose brilliant idea was that?!?So during this series, we are going to talk about some of the hallmark concerns that show up in people who are exposed to trauma and high stress experiences. We will also talk about some of the less hallmark but equally need-to-know pieces to be aware of. Of all of the series' I have done on this show, this one is among the most important and I hope that you will listen, use what we talk about, and please, please help others working alongside you by sharing it as far and wide as you possibly can. This is the stuff that can help us turn the tide on so much of what is plaguing front line workplaces. We can make it different guys, but I need your help.Today I want us to talk about hypervigilance. Hypervigilence is the word we use to describe the feeling of being on high alert. That feeling when your body feels tense and activated, ready to do what it needs to do to keep you or others safe. It's an on edge feeling. A heightened feeling. When we're in vigilance, there are a number of changes that happen for our brains and bodies. This state is the readiness that would, in a stress inducing situation, give way to fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. When we feel it, muscle tension increases, blood flow changes, body temperature changes, breath rate and heart rate both change. Our senses will tend to feel heightened, looking and listening for indication of threat. Our brains will tend to get super focused, scanning and assessing. That's vigilance…but what about HYPERvigilance? Well, this is vigilance on speed. It is an activated state that carries with us, regardless of the scenario. It's extra, beyond what we need and beyond when we need it. When nothing stressful or threatening is happening, it is energy directed to waiting for something that isn't coming. More often than not, it's wasted energy. And it's ridiculously depleting. Why would your brain want you to be on edge when you're having a bubble bath, or trying to fall asleep under your comfy blankets, or when you are sipping your coffee in your favourite chair in the morning? …Well, because stress and trauma generalize.What that means is that our brains expand stressful and traumatic experiences in an effort to protect us not just from bad things that have happened but also from any possibly affiliated things even in close proximity to a thing that's happened. And they think a great way to serve you is by having you ready for anything, all the time.Some people would talk about this as triggering. And they are connected. A trigger is exposure to something that our brain has associated with a traumatic experience (whether consciously or not), and when our brain picks up on that trigger, it elicits a hypervigilant response – an over-the-top protective activation even though there is nothing of particular importance to be activated by right this moment. For lots of people, vigilance will come up in very specific situations, when triggered by specific stimuli related to specific past events or experiences. For others, their vigilance will feel persistent and unabating. The thing about hypervigilance is that number one, it's not natural. And number two, it's not helpful. What do I mean by not natural? Well, while vigilance is a natural protective response, HYPERvigilance does not work with what our bodies were intended to give us. Our bodies are meant to have a reactive, self-protective response to threat but it's meant to be very time limited. It's meant to come up, advise me to fight for my life or run as fast as my feet with take me or hold my breath and hope to God it's over soon…and then it's meant to subside gradually as our system finds itself in safety again. Our brains and bodies didn't plan for being in persistent threat where safety is never known or felt. They aren't meant to run in this state all the time – the energy cost is WAY too high and the depletion connected to it is immense. Which is why for many people who live in this state they struggle with fatigue, irritability, feeling like they have a short fuse. The vigilance burns the wick so short that there isn't much left to work with. On top of that, hypervigilance is rarely helpful. Your brain is choosing to stay stuck in vigilance because it believes that despite not being made to do this, it's better to stay here than lower your defenses and risk something happening you weren't ready for. …It's maybe not terrible in theory, but in actual practice the issue is that your body carries the toll – the cost of being in this activated state for a prolonged period of time. It actually becomes LESS responsive, LESS capable of thinking and problem solving and handling something if a threat did end up popping up. The cost is more than whatever benefit it generally offers and it can dramatically reduce our capacity to manage through a stressor or traumatic experience because we're walking into it so very depleted rather than with our best skills and capacities intact. If fact, for some, the persistent extent of hypervigilance leads to a new problem we'll be talking more about in another episode – dissociation. Quickly for today, dissociation is when our brain and body numbs out in an effort to cope with too much activation – it checks out because the cost is too high. And this happens often in connection to hypervigilance costing too much for too long. Now, we've been naming that so much of this happens without feeling like there is a lot of conscious choice to it. Your brain and body are mapping these things without your vote, and often it feels like you're just along for the ride. Worst ride ever. So how do we take the reins and get off the ride? Well, two things…and one caveat.First, opposite actions. At the start of this episode I described some physiological ways that your body reacts when it moves into vigilance. To train our bodies that they don't need to be in that state right now, we have to help them go back to homeostasis – that place we're in when we are safe and chill and fine. When you think about the things your body does when it becomes vigilant, your goal is to do the opposite. So, if you get tense, shake your muscles out. If your extremities get cold, squeeze your hands into fists to get blood moving back into them. Scrunch your toes in your shoes to do the same thing. If your breathing gets short and fast, challenge yourself to lengthen and deepen each breath. If you tense down into tight, closed off posture, try to stand with your feet firmly on the ground and stretch out to take up space. By putting your body in the opposite of what vigilance demands of it, you are making your brain think about whether it really needs the vigilance right now. You are coaxing it into the possibility that you are more safe than it thinks. And you are training your brain to gradually recognize the difference between threat and safety. The big trick here is consistency – when you do it consistently, you can train your brain to adjust how it interprets and interacts with stress and small triggers. If you aren't consistent with it, your brain easily gets roped back into what it thinks is the safer option, which is to keep you hypervigilant and ready for anything…even as you try to fall asleep in your warm safe home.Second, anchor to safety. Safety is a complicated thing, because often we have had it until suddenly we didn't. Because of that, it can be hard to try to convince your brain you're safe because it knows about times when you thought that and were wrong. Your job here is to look for evidence. Be like a detective – what is there to tell you that you ARE safe? And what calls into question the safety? If there is a hefty long list of evidence for safety, and virtually nothing on the list of evidence to suggest unsafe, then your brain and your body can anchor to that. They can rest easier in knowing that they have fully evaluated the situation to the extent they are able, and recognize that the evidence leans heavily toward this being a safe scenario. Now, I said there were 2 ways to take the reins over hypervigilance, and one caveat – and here is the caveat. Looking at the evidence and building a case for safety, is actually a really important part of the process for people who experience severe and persistent hypervigilance, because safety can sometimes FEEL unsafe, even when it is totally there and present. This is most especially true for people with more complex trauma histories, where environments that were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren't; where people who were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren't. When this is our experience, especially from early in life, it wires our brain to link supposed safety with unsafety, and we have difficulty finding a feeling of safety almost anywhere. In these cases, our brains have been forced to strongly associate what should be safe with unsafety and they struggle to tease these apart later in life when we have more capacity to control situations and ensure our own safety. Because of this wiring, we will often have a FELT sense of unsafety even when situations are completely and perfectly safe. Even more than that, we might actually find ourselves with an INCREASED felt sense of unsafety when we are in the presence of safety, because we are actually more familiar and strangely comfortable with unsafe – it's known and predictable…like the evil we know being better than the evil we don't know. Safety can FEEL threatening, because we don't know what to do with it. We don't know how to trust it. We don't know who we are or how to be in it. The problem in these situations is that we are relying on our feelings as the only source of viable information. While our feelings are an important source of information, and ones we should listen to and take into consideration, they are easily skewed given our wiring, and we need to make sure we check them against other sources of data. This is where evidence comes into play – my feelings are telling me I am unsafe, but all of the evidence suggests safe. I can be informed by the feeling, but also give weight to the evidence. I might then act from a cautious but more open place, and as I have more evidence I can then use this to train my emotions to know the difference between safety and unsafety.  Regardless of whether you have known safety and struggle with hypervigilance now in certain types of situations, or if you have always struggled with safety and experience hypervigilance in many spaces almost all of the time – the job is the same. Develop attunement to evidence for safety, and anchor to it. Notice it. Really pay attention to it. Examine the evidence, and let it build the case for your brain to take it down a couple of notches. When you can combine these two skills – opposite actions to de-escalate hypervigilance, and using evidence to anchor back to safety, you will find yourself conquering hypervigilance so much more often than you are currently feeling conquered by it. Episode Challenge:·        Where does vigilance (and possibly hypervigilance) show up in your life? ·        How does it usually show up in your body? ·        What would be opposite actions you could try out?·        What are hallmarks of safety for you? What evidence tells you that you are safe (even if you don't *feel* safe)?·        How can you actively and intentionally use these pieces of evidence to anchor to safety? How can you remind yourself about them and prompt yourself to notice them in moments you might need to?Additional Resources:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.This podcast is designed for First Responders and Front Line Workers including Law Enforcement (Police, RCMP, Corrections, Probation Officers); Public Safety (Fire Fighters, Community Liaison Officers, Emergency Call-Takers and Dispatchers); Social Services (Social Workers, Community Outreach Workers, Addictions Support Workers, Housing Support Workers, etc.); and Public Health (Nurses, Doctors, Hospital and Health Support Staff) and anyone else who works in high exposure, high risk workplaces. Please help us to help our community heroes by sharing this free resource to those you know in these front line roles.

Show Notes:We have been talking about alignment for the last few weeks – the way we intentionally align ourselves with the kind of people we want to be. We've been talking about how to be the authors of our own stories, rather than bystanders while life writes our story for us. We've talked about how to be a scientist and use curiosity, experimentation and learning to craft alignment and tweak it to serve us and our goals for our own lives. Today we are wrapping up our series on reclaiming self, and focusing on the one other key piece in creating a life we feel the authors of. If you think about authors…and scientists, for that matter…they have a couple of things that we need to have too.An author has a team. An editor, a publisher, a guild…people to bounce ideas off of and workshop with. They consult to ensure that their story is grounded and believable. They have others read their work to get feedback. They are not an island. While some writers can be reclusive, in the midst of it they are checked by others who support their vision and share their goals, to ensure the end product is a reflection of what they intended it to be.A scientist as a team too. An ethics board who approves experiments, an academic body who guides the process, a funding organization, research assistants, academic mentors… Again, check points. People who are invested in the project, who want to see it do well and support keeping it on track. People who ask hard questions when things seem to be going off the rails or aren't aligning with the plan. They are people to be accountable to, to keep the project honest and in integrity…most of the time anyway.So, the part one takeaway is that we need a team. We need people in our corner who get our plan and intentions and support us in making that come alive. We need people we can be honest and vulnerable with who are willing to walk with us and check us and hold us accountable to who we say we're going to be. The other thing that authors have is a plan. Before they put pen to paper, or keyboard to blank word document, they create a plan. The identify the key characters, who they are and what their deal is. They outline the basic plot points and some of the anticipated twists and turns. They imagine and envision some of the substantial details and note them. Outlining all of these pieces helps a complex work of fiction to be broken down AND it acts as something for the author to anchor to. So when things get a bit off course, they can come back to the outline and re-hash things. It acts as a tether, to keep them honest to the vision for the project. Similarly, a scientist has to have a plan before they can start running experiments. They have to have a breakdown of what they are curious about, what they think will happen, and how they plan to go about finding out the answer. They have to have a rationale for why they are doing what they are doing and convey how their actions steps will serve to advance what we know about a subject.In both cases, these plans are what authors and scientists share with those in their circle. They disseminate the plan to the people in their respective spheres of influence and by knowing the plan, the people in their lives can better support the integrity of the work. They can see when things are going off the tracks and are equipped to call it out and name problems before they become so catastrophic that they undermine the quality of the end product, or lose a ton of time, money and energy for those invested in it. Questions to Consider:-        Who are YOUR people? -        Who are the people who you can be honest and vulnerable with? -        Who can you communicate your plan to? -        Who can help you stay accountable in crafting the person you choose to be? -        Think about your plan - What would it look like to be the person you want to be? What would that person look like? How would they feel? What kinds of things would they do? What would be notable about them? And what needs to happen to move you from where you are right now in the direction of that vision of yourself?-        What is the story you want to tell about yourself? -        How would you like your story to be remembered? -        What do you hope you would be known for? -        And how to you take steps toward being more in alignment with that person? -        Who you might need to help you get there? -        What kinds of accountability would you need? -        Who do you know who has skills that would be helpful to your efforts?-        What would you need to communicate to them for them to support you well? -        What permissions might they need to be effective? Episode Challenge:Register now for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guideto help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. Register now for $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Additional Resources:Register for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidefor $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.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:The process of considering alignment and experimentation involves asking questions about what might fill my bank account back up. What feeds my spirit? What brings energy? What replenishes? Or, at minimum, what limits the rate at which I get depleted? Last episode I shared some examples from my own life and what felt noteworthy to me as I shared them was just how small and simple most of them were. Taking a multivitamin, experimenting with when I exercise and what kind of exercise I enjoy most, trying out something silly like crochet…none of it is big or particularly complicated or time consuming. It really is just slowing down enough and leaving my curiosity on that makes the difference. And honestly, what we're talking about is learning.The process of learning happens when we try something out, take information from that experience, and adapt that into what comes next. We learn whether we are conscious of it or not – our brains are constantly taking in information, recognizing patterns and adapting expectations to those patterns. For example, if I come home and am greeted by grumpy, snarky kids and a grumpy husband and a messy house, my brain over time learns to expect this and probably creates an adjusted mood of being grumpy too. If you are a brain and behaviour psychology geek like me you'll know that this is basic conditioning and the model for how we learn pretty much everything. Harnessing the power of learning gives us conscious level control over the factors and allows us to shape the outcomes. Let me say that again, because this is key – harnessing the power of learning gives us conscious level control over the factors and allows us to shape the outcomes. The thing about scientists is they don't just run one experiment, write the results and then stop. They ask new questions, better questions, more informed questions because of what they have learned so far. And they use it to keep on learning. They invest not in the specific outcome but in the process of curiosity and learning. They are in it for the growth, not the end result. And the thing is, we need to keep that piece at the forefront because we aren't ever going to be a finished product. The truth about life is that it keeps changing. And the truth about people is that we keep changing because of it and within it. What fit and aligned for you as a teenager probably doesn't fit or align quite the same way today. That doesn't mean that it didn't align way back when…it just means that you've grown and need to have what supports you grow with you. It might look like aspects of what once fit for you, but it might have to be adapted to fit who you are now and what your life looks like now. And it might be brand new things you've never even considered before, because that might fit better and be more aligned than you ever could have suspected. What I am saying is that you need to be willing to try, and when you feel like you've found a sweet spot enjoy that but don't get complacent in it. Keep observing. Keep noticing. Keep being curious – because that sweet spot can be amazing but it won't last forever and if you keep your curiosity on, you'll notice when it's not so sweet a lot quicker and be able to adapt more effectively than if you get complacent and fail to notice that things aren't feeling like they fit for you quite the same way. To some extent I see this showing up for a lot of clients I work with who struggle with low-grade depression – they keep doing what used to work and fail to account for the fact that it's not working anymore. They feel caught and have low energy and so trying new things, stepping out of the routine and comfort zone, feels so hard and uncomfortable that their depression just won't let them do it…but then that continues to feed the depression…and it's a downward spiral of stuck on top of stuck on top of stuck. If we can be open to curiosity, we can catch it earlier, adapt it and find a new sweet spot rather than getting caught in that spiral.I know we talk about intention a lot, and it's for good reason – being an engaged participant in our own lives really makes the difference between a life lived and a life well-lived. We need to have our eyes open, we need to be seeing and noticing what's going on for us and around us, to be able to be active in shaping the story of our lives. Being passive to this allows everyone and everything else to tell our story, to decide who we are. If you want to be the author of your story, you have to own it. You have to sit down, look at your character and make choices that shape that character to be the fullest version of themselves. Life will try to convince you to put down the pen and just hang on for the ride, and it's your job to do the hard work of sitting down each day, picking up the pen, and writing the story. Just like a book character, you'll face bumps and hardship, it will test your character and shape you – but you can be active in that process and you can intervene on behalf of yourself to support an ending to the story you can feel proud of.Episode Challenge:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. Register now for $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!Additional Resources:Register for our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidefor $100 off from October 18th-27th, here!Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.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:The really cool but often uncomfortable thing about life changes is that they open up an opportunity, a potential, for learning and growth. They tend to push us into a place of HAVING to do something differently, and by extension, learning about ourselves, what fits for us and what doesn't, and sorting our way through how we either contort ourselves or how we make things contort to fit us. Like I said, it tends to be uncomfortable – because as people we crave routine, stability, predictability, and so on. We like to know what to expect and have a clear sense of what is coming next. Being pushed out of our comfort zone, out of our routine and predictable, and being forced into new and unknown terrain, is going to feel uncomfortable. And that's ok. …But it is also what makes stage of life changes feel so overwhelming and daunting. If we aren't accustomed to uncomfortable…if we aren't open to discomfort for the sake of growing…then we'll have a tendency to shut down, enter survival mode, hope to God the discomfort ends soon, and likely not take much from the opportunity other than negative self-perceptions and resentment toward the transition. Certainly I can appreciate digging heels in and not wanting to enter a time of transition or change. I have had my fair share of metaphorically curling up into a ball and waiting for it all to be over, refusing to participate in the opportunity for growth. Often when the invitation intime of change felt unwanted and forced upon me with all the doom and gloom feelings of the world ending…Sometimes even in changes that were good and that I had a hand in choosing…because it felt big and hard and called me into discomfort I wasn't fully prepared to face. That said, out of these experiences I have learned a lot and have tried to adapt toward embracing these opportunities rather than trying to run and hide from them. And today I am sharing the number one trick I can offer around how to engage and embrace times of transition – whether happy and hopeful changes, or hard and unwanted ones. Here it is: Be a scientist.Ok, here's what I mean. Scientists, by nature, are curious. They are open to possibilities and interested not in any one specific agenda or outcome (or at least they aren't supposed to be…) but rather interested in learning a little more and allowing that to lead to new questions and directions. Scientists make educated guesses, but go where the data takes them. They set a hypothesis and try to prove it wrong rather than prove it right. They are willing to try things out and when they don't work out the way they expected, they take that as learning. And you guys, THIS is what we have to do in our lives.So, let's talk about experimentation and being a scientist. Now, we're going to start in a place that will likely be familiar if you are a loyal listener of this show. Every good scientist starts by asking a question. That is where the process begins. And to ask the question to begin with, they need to have noticed a pattern or oddity that elicits the curiosity to say, “why?”. And that brings us back once again to the need for AWARENESS. We have talked about this SO many times before on the show – that we can't take intentional steps in any direction if we don't first have awareness of where we're at and how it relates to where we imagine wanting to be or go. Scientists ask questions based on observations – they notice a thing and then get curious about it and ask more questions. The first step in acting like a scientist in our lives is to have some carved out scientist time. To have time set aside where we can slow down and notice. When we are caught up in the survival mode moment-to-moment chaos of our days, or when we numb out or distract ourselves in every down-time moment, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to take stock and notice what is happening in us and around us. Having moments of quiet pause throughout a day and a week is what allows us to take note of patterns, oddities and other bits and pieces that can inform the questions we ask next. Step two in being a scientist is to ask a question. We've taken time to pause, we've looked inward and outward, and there are some things we're noticing. One of the insightful pieces that came up for me about a year ago was awareness that there is a craving for reconnecting with things I used to love and enjoy. I noticed feeling nostalgic in weird moments – a great example was watching Olympic rock climbing with my kids, and while I was never a great climber…or even a very good climber…I used to rock climb and really enjoyed this. It actually was a really meaningful life line for me at a particularly difficult time in my teens and continued to be an important part of my life in early adulthood. I kept saying to my kids, “mommy used to do rock climbing” and each time it felt sad and disconnected from anything they know about me now. So, I got to asking some questions: “why is sadness the feeling that comes up when I think about this?”, “what is it I miss about climbing”, “what would it look like to try to climb again?”, “what would get in my way from climbing again?” and so on. Now let me be clear, I didn't run out and buy a harness and throw myself into climbing. That's not real life. But, it opened up thoughts that I hadn't allowed to live there before and it has yielded some amazing moments for me and with my kids and family that I am so grateful for. It turns out, my son loves climbing too. He and I went for a mommy-son date last winter to a bouldering gym and it was the best bonding. As a family we hit up a kids climbing gym while on holidays and made some fantastic memories together. And while hiking around Squamish, one of our favourite places on earth, we would make climbing challenges and compete with each other and it brought endless laughs and some epic stories the kids will tell on repeat. This brings us to step three of being a scientist…experimenting. When we have awareness and some questions, we can take time to formulate a plan. But the key to this plan is unlike most planning in our lives where we have a sense of certainty and a need to know how it will all turn out, we're going to enter this planning with curiosity and openness to it going in unexpected ways and being ok with that. Rigidity is not our friend here, the goal is to try some things and learn from them. It might look like experimenting with things you have done before, or adapting things you've done before to fit into life now, or it might look like trying out totally new things.I feel like what should be obvious to you is that none of this is rocket science, but when we treat it like science of some kind, we can become intentional about how we choose to engage in our lives and lean in to what we're in rather than fighting against it or succumbing to the weight of it. During this episode I share that 2021 was a crappy year for us. It was incredibly hard and I wouldn't want to do it again. But, I also learned a lot about myself. I learned that I am capable of more than I ever knew. And I learned how to care for myself ridiculously well in the midst of a really trying time – which gives me so much confidence in my ability to care for myself even better as we shift gears into a time where I don't have to be all things to all people all of the time. Because of 2021, I feel equipped and battle-tested for what comes next. I don't feel afraid of the process and experimenting now feels like second nature – an adventure to learn to adapt to the moment I'm in. My hope it that you will come to feel that way about it too, and I would love to hear about your adventures in experimenting and discovering alignment.Episode Challenge:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. This is also how you get on our email list to hear about new podcast episodes and to be the first to find out about our upcoming promotion!Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!Additional Resources:Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:I'm not sure where you are at in your world right now – maybe you feel like you are totally killing it…maybe you feel like you're drowning. Maybe you are somewhere in the in-between. As for me – I am in this weird and uncertain and beautiful stage of change and transition. I know that change can be scary for a lot of people, myself included, for sure. But this stage, I'm finding myself embracing it – reveling in it, actually. And as I have been working through this in my own life, I am aware that this is something we all go through and I thought we could spend the next few weeks talking about stages of life, adjusting to meet the changing moments, and working to re-align ourselves each and every time to work at being the people we want to be.Stages of life are kind of funny to me. We all know they happen – that we ebb and flow between stages where we feel really capable and on top of things, to a time where we feel tired and lagging, to stages of insecurity and anxious uncertainty, back to stages of being our best selves. We have felt them. We see them clearly when we look back and recognize in hindsight that we were working through something challenging there, or were in a highlight phase of our lives back when… Yet, despite knowing about these ebbs and flows cognitively, we often struggle to own and recognize them for what they are in the moment. We fight them, or fall victim to them. We feel caught up and struggle to see the forest for the trees. In the thick of it, we feel like it's about us – how we aren't good enough, strong enough, on top of it enough, intentional enough… During this episode, you'll hear me share about some of my own present-day journey around stage of life transitions. About being aware and conscious in making the choices that support being in alignment with who I long to be as I see this shift happening in, under and around me. I think much of this is what we all face, and I hope we can share in it together. Over the coming weeks, we are going to explore together some of the ways we can claim ourselves and seek to align and re-align ourselves with who we want to be when we face changes in our stage of life. The beginning of all of these efforts though will always be the same: AWARENESS. We can't ask good questions or be intentional in enacting an action plan, or purposefully move to align ourselves, if we lack awareness of where we're at and what needs to happen to move us where we want to go. We can't get found if we don't know we're lost. And we can't make the most of any given stage if we're unaware that we're in it.Episode Challenge:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!Additional Resources:Consider whether our Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guidemight be the right fit to help guide you in aligning with your goals of health, wellness and resilience both at work and in your life outside of the work you do. We are getting ready to offer the 7-part online training program at reduced rate one last time from October 18th-27th, so for now just go check it out and if you have any questions about it reach out and ask!!Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:Today I am so excited to be joined by Michael Mariano, neurotherapy expert, and we are diving into the benefits of neurotherapy including neurofeedback, biofeedback and related tools. I am so grateful for this conversation including Michael's show and tell with some of his equipment so you can get an idea of what it all looks like. You can listen to this episode, or watch and see the show and tell time on YouTube! Check out the links in the “Additional Resources” section below for more info on neurotherapy, and for Michael's information if you would like to follow up with him.Episode Challenge:Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Additional Resources:Neurotherapy Related Resources: ·        Biofeedback Certification International Alliance·        International Society for Neuroregulation & Research·        The Association for Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback IncMichael Mariano Contact Info (Office in New Westminster, BC): michaelroymariano@gmail.com Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:As we continue in our series on alternative approached to healing, today I am sharing about my background in using Observed Experiential Integration (OEI) as well as a related therapeutic approach called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Both of these therapies integrate neurological understandings of trauma/high stress experiences and the ways these experiences map themselves out into the brain and body. Both approaches rely very little on talking and much more of visual processing. Listen in to hear how they work and how they can be of tremendous benefit to First Responders and Front Line Workers struggling with posttraumatic stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, anxiety, panic, and other occupational stress injuries. For Further Reading…OEI:https://sightpsych.com/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232561961_Observed_Experiential_Integration_OEI_Discovery_and_Development_of_a_New_Set_of_Trauma_Therapy_Techniqueshttps://thrive-life.ca/innovation-in-trauma-therapy-oei/EMDR:https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/eye-movement-reprocessingEpisode Challenge:Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Complete our listener feedback survey and be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card as a thank you for helping us make Behind the Line even better! Jump here to complete the survey now.Additional Resources:Don't forget to complete our listener feedback survey and be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card as a thank you for helping us make Behind the Line even better! Jump here to complete the survey now.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:Today I am joined by Registered Clinical Counsellor, Claire Weiss, who is sharing about her work is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Hear her story to brought her to this alternative treatment method as a client and a clinician, and learn about a non-traditional treatment intervention that has been shown to be helpful for many “treatment resistant” individuals. As a follow up to our interview, Claire provided a long list of resources (thanks Claire!!):VideosTalks given by some of the leaders in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy:Mary Cosimano:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt6ZpzByMsRick Doblin:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9XD8yRPxc8&t=872sRobin Carhart-Harris:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIaTaNR3gkRoland Griffiths:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81-v8ePXPd4Rosalind Watts:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kfGaVAXeMYMendel Kaelen:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehi0Cfm4DQMNetflix Docuseries:  How to Change Your MindMagic Medicine Documentary:  https://youtu.be/6UX8HMXZVbAPatient Experience Videoshttps://vimeo.com/130995470https://vimeo.com/51254785https://youtu.be/xYhtXI4Prpohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyc7iM7ZNrAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sST7BvFfEGwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVIfQaqVG4More patient videos can be found here: https://www.heffter.org/media/Podcastshttps://www.plantmedicine.org/podcast/psilocybin-scientific-research-dr-garcia-romeuhttps://www.plantmedicine.org/podcast/psilocybin-patient-experience-dr-lynn-marie-morski*The above podcast has episodes on every psychedelic and more!https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/https://tim.blog/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/*Scroll down at the above webpages to locate the recording.  Tim Ferris has a lot of content on psychedelics if you search his episodesBooksHow to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence – Michael PollanConsciousness Medicine – Francoise BourzatResearch HubsJohn's Hopkins:  https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/index/#researchHeffter:                   https://www.heffter.org/study-publications/MAPS:                      https://maps.org/research/other-research (scroll down for psilocybin studies)Episode Challenge:Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Additional Resources:Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.

Show Notes:I've been trying to lean in to the openness to the not knowing more generally in life these last many months. It's not my knee-jerk – I'm pretty hardwired toward planning, perseverating, anxiety and hyper-controlling. Settling in to the unknown and trusting that I'll have what I need whenever I end up needing it – trusting that I have done what I can and allowing the rest to fall where it may – is not usually in my comfort zone. Yet, I'm finding it to be my saving grace lately. Curiosity and trust. Those are the muscles I am exercising a lot more regularly, and it's been really cool to see how this allows me to relax into uncertain situations without sacrificing any of my capacity to be meaningfully involved or capable. I don't think I'm alone in trying to micro-manage and control things in an effort to make everything be ok – my hunch is you might be in the same boat. Given that, you may also understand how uncomfortable it can be to try to shift from that mode to something less vigilant and “on top of things”. But it's been simpler. Calmer. Nicer in a lot of ways. And it has allowed me to consider and explore ideas I wouldn't normally have even allowed space to exist. Now, that has been true in my world and life generally but also as it relates to my work and the topic we're kicking off with for Season 3 of Behind the Line. A few months ago we had a guest on the show, you might remember, Kelsi Sheren from Brass & Unity. As a quick recap, Kelsi is a retired artillery gunner with the Canadian Armed Forces. She shared her story of experiencing PTSD and struggling with treatment resistance to traditional or conventional therapeutic interventions. I so valued this conversation and her calling out of the limitations of many conventional therapy models – because the truth is that they don't work for everyone. And I really appreciated that she brought up a topic that in my profession is still pretty controversial, but I believe is really important, and that is the topic of psychedelics for PTSD treatment. When she brought it up I honestly had a moment of shock – not because of what she was sharing but because I realized that we had not yet spoken of this in a year and a half of this show existing. We did a whole series on therapy in the fall of 2021, and somehow I missed talking about some key pieces. As soon as I got off the interview with Kelsi, I reached out to 2 colleagues and asked them to schedule interviews for a new series I wanted to do to kick off season 3, and so here we are and we are jumping in talking about alternative treatment modalities for those who are struggling to find the right fit in conventional therapy.Over the coming weeks I am going to introduce you to two amazing clinicians and the ways that they work outside of the conventions of traditional talk therapy to support healing and change. You'll hear from my friend and colleague, Claire Weiss who specializes in Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as my colleague, Michael Mariano who specializes in neurotherapy. You'll also hear from me about non-verbal trauma processing approaches like EMDR which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; and OEI which stands for Observed Experiential Integration. For today, I want to start by talking about why talking doesn't always work. Let's start with this. As a therapist, I may be biased, but I genuinely believe therapy works. I have witnessed time and time again the incredible power of the therapeutic process, including the influence of talk therapy in shaping or reshaping how we think, feel and engage in the world. I have had so many opportunities to watch people make substantial shifts and live lives more aligned with their core values. I have seen people re-write their internal narratives and discover freedom from the stories they were handed. I have myself been shaped by therapy, growing from the opportunity to look more closely and intentionally at myself, my choices, my ways of perceiving, and considering alternative ways to going about it to be more the person I want to be. I want to be clear that I am not saying that talk therapy isn't helpful – on the contrary, it can be incredibly helpful and consequential in changing someone's life. That said, it has it's place and it has it's limitations, and chief among it's limitations is in the processing and healing from trauma.We have talked on this show a number of times about how traumatic experiences get encoded into our brains. We've talked about how the regions of the brain associated with trauma memory as unique and struggle with things like time and context. One of the other things these regions struggle with is language. That's right, when we store traumatic memories, we store them in a part of the brain that doesn't have particularly keen access to our language center. Our brain has to work hard to connect the memory to words to describe it, and often when people share about their traumatic experiences they find that they stumble trying to find the right words, or randomly blank on words. The part of our brain that is awesome at language is our frontal lobe, which is also where we do our really good thinking, decision making, learning, and so on. As we've identified in many other episodes, the frontal lobe part of your brain essentially gets turned off when trauma happens, and this also occurs when we go into memory recall of traumatic events. Whenever we are putting demand on the part of our brain that manages stress and stores trauma, our brain recalibrates itself to give more resources to the stress center and less resources to other parts of the brain including our frontal lobe. So think about that for a minute – if you are going for therapy to work on traumatic experiences or the impact of trauma over time, and you are being asked to recall or share about the impact trauma has had for you – the act of doing what needs to be done means that language is automatically reduced. Which means that talk therapy is going to have a MUCH harder time accessing what it needs to, and supporting you in navigating what you need to move through, in an effort to rewire how your brain has stored that traumatic information. Talk therapy for trauma can feel very slow and very difficult, as it leaves people sitting in their traumatic experiences with minimal equipping to move through and out of it. It rests heavily on talking being the tool that gets us through, but the part of the brain that connects with that isn't likely to be online. Unfortunately when people have tried talk therapy and found it ineffective in helping them with their trauma and symptoms, they tend to scrap therapy altogether. But what if there are other ways at getting to your brain that don't rely so heavily on a skill that isn't online? What if we can find some workarounds that get us there through some sneaky back doors?For decades now trauma therapists around the world have been searching for the back doors. We have been working to be creative and emerging brain science has helped move us forward in better understanding how we can access and reprogram trauma. I won't say that we have all the answers, because man alive, the brain is a complex thing and I'm not sure we've even scratched the surface of all that there is to know about how it works. But I will say that we have learned a lot and that we're taking what we're learning and working really hard to find better ways to provide support to people who don't find conventional therapy to be doing the trick. I remember about 6 years ago I went to a training by one of my psychology idols, Bessel van der Kolk. Dr. van der Kolk is known as a trauma expert. He has been at the forefront of the most significant and consequential research related to trauma, he has acted in roles of leadership within the most significant bodies related to trauma work, and if you do what I do, you have read everything he has ever written and admire his dedication to serving people better. He shared during this training about his work before learning about EMDR. He talked about the limitations he kept running into and the “treatment resistance” he observed in so many trauma clients. He shared about the lack of outcomes in treatment research, or outcomes being really limited and hardly passing a level of significance. He shared about how he started hearing about this thing called EMDR and that he thought it sounded like nonsense. There's no way anything could give the results EMDR had been found to offer. Then he shared about his experience with a specific client who he could not figure out what to do with. Nothing was working. All of his best work wasn't touching this persons trauma. So he sent her to a colleague who did EMDR, and the gains this client made were so substantial that he couldn't deny the efficacy of this intervention. He got trained in EMDR soon after and has since been one of the most considerable contributors to research related to EMDR and PTSD. Now, we'll get into the specifics of EMDR later in this series, and I'll be clear that I don't think EMDR is a universal answer to trauma either – but the point I'm trying to make is that we need to be open to the possibility that the problem isn't that our trauma can't be helped, but rather we need to get curious about whether the intervention that's being used is the best way to work at helping our trauma. What if, instead of calling it quits after a few unsatisfying talk therapy sessions, and feeling like we aren't fixable, we instead asked questions about other options, and sought out alternatives that could bring different relief? Let me say really quick that this requires you as the consumer of a service to know that there are more options available. …And that kind of sucks. It shouldn't have to be your responsibility to know and seek out alternatives – I think this should be made more easily available and accessible, but we live in a managed care system that does ask more of you than it should. Advocating for yourself and not giving up will fall to you. I hate that that's true, because often when we're struggling with something like PTSD we don't have the sense of capacity to do more for ourselves, we just need help. Yet, this is where we're at, and I hope that at minimum, episodes like this help you feel more aware and discerning as you seek support and equip you with questions to ask, things to watch for, and the ability to pull the plug on something that isn't working to find something that will if you aren't getting your needs met. Over the coming weeks we will talk about three specific treatment interventions offered by specialized clinicians and practitioners. My hope is that you might hear something you gravitate towards and that you'll be inspired to continue seeking support and ensuring your wellbeing. Your wellness is critical. We are living in a time where we need every person, every person who is able to contribute to making the world a better, safer place. We need you, and we need you well. We need you to keep helping, in whatever role or capacity that might be, because goodness knows the world has been in an increasingly tough spot. Investing in you can't be optional, we need you too much for that. So I hope you'll continue listening over the coming weeks and that you'll take something away that will shape how you invest in you.Episode Challenge:Take 5 minutes to complete our listener feedback survey!! Help shape the future of Behind the Line to ensure that it is meeting your needs and covering topics that matter most to you. If you complete the survey before September 30th you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!Complete the Behind the Line Listener Feedback Survey, here.Reflect on where you're at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide. Additional Resources:Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card by taking 5 minutes to complete our Behind the Line listener feedback survey, here.Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off. 

Show NotesWhat an amazing summer it has been! It has been fun, challenging and inspiring to connect with so many incredible guests and get the chance to share their stories with you this summer. I hope that you have found something meaningful to take from our Voices From the Front Lines series. This episode wraps up Season 2 of Behind the Line – 52 straight weeks of podcast episodes. We're keeping it short and sweet today, as I work on bringing you a brand new and really exciting season of Behind the Line. We are nearing 2 years of this podcast being out in the world, and it has been such a rollercoaster ride! From the very beginning I wanted this podcast to focus on bringing you the tool and information you need as front line helpers to remain as sustainable as possible. I have always wanted and continue to focus on having this resource echo your needs and interests – so my invitation today is to use the link in the show notes to complete our podcast survey. The survey is short and only takes about 5 minutes to complete. It allows you the opportunity to share what you think would be most helpful to hear about on the show in our upcoming season. I take your feedback super seriously and will use it to shape upcoming episodes and series. If you complete the survey before September 30th, you will be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card. The survey will remain available after September 30th for those wanting to provide feedback after that time.Jump to Survey Link here.Episode Challenge:Complete our season wrap up listener feedback survey now and be entered to win a $50 amazon gift card!! Jump here and take 5 minutes to help shape the future of Behind the Line.Additional Resources:Learn more about the Beating the Breaking Point Resilience Series & Survival Guide – a complete program that offers a step by step road map to build a plan for sustainability and wellness, designed just for First Responders & Front Line Workers and the challenges you face. Connect, Rate, Review, Subscribe & Share!Connect with me on Facebook and Instagram, or email me at support@thrive-life.ca. I love hearing from you! Subscribe and share this podcast with those you know. I appreciate every like, rating and review – every single one helps this podcast to be seen by other First Responders & Front Line Workers out there. Help me on my mission to help others just like you to not only survive, but to thrive – both on the job and off.