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Hey there and welcome back to Behind the Line. I’m your host Lindsay Faas. If you are new to Behind the Line, what you should know about me is that I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and after over a decade working with First Responders and Front Line Workers around issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and related OSI’s, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for those who sacrifice so much for our communities out on the front lines. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off. While you are listening, please take a moment and rate and review Behind the Line on apple podcast. Your support and feedback goes a long way in making this resource more visible to others who work in First Response and Front Line Work. Thanks so much for your help and support! Last episode, I may have gone on a bit of a tirade. Our topic came from a story from a listener who had shared telling a close friend about a situation at work only to have the response be, “well, that’s what you signed up for.” Last episode I offered my thoughts on how responses like these are limiting, distancing, dismissive and unhelpful. I tried to clarify why this statement is not only unhelpful but also, untrue. And we left off last episode with a promise that we would come back and talk about how we can seek more effectively supportive support and clarify to our people how they can be the kinds of support you actually need. If you missed last episode, make sure you go back and start there to set the stage for our conversation today. My hope is that today’s episode would be one for you to listen to as front line helping professionals to guide you in seeking effective support, but that it might also be one to share with your key people, to help them have a better sense of how they can really show up for you. Entering in to today’s conversation, I want to preface that everything I am sharing here is based on one significant assumption. And here it is: I assume that your people genuinely care about you. That they want to do right by you. That they aren’t saying flippant things like “well, that’s what you signed up for” from a place of maliciousness or effortful neglect in caring for you. I assume that they are trying their best and perhaps lack words, or don’t know what the right thing to say might be. I assume that they perhaps don’t fully understand what you do, what you face, and what you might need that would be of benefit. I assume that they may feel ill-equipped, and unsure of what to do or say that would be consequential, meaningful or otherwise helpful. I assume they may be uncomfortable sitting in the discomfort of your distress, or in the discomfort of not knowing what to do or say. I assume that they are good people caught in a moment of not knowing, and words come out that unintentionally harm. When we start from this basic assumption, there is an important shift we get to make from hurt and angry and dismissed, to curious. If people aren’t intentionally trying to harm, and are, actually, genuinely trying their best to care but don’t know how – then it becomes a curious question to consider: how can we teach people to be better supporters? How do we equip our people to offer more effectively in response to our needs? And that question, leads to an even more significant and substantive question, are you ready for it? What do you need??? As a first step in guiding the people who care about you to be more effective in their ability to care for you well, is knowing what you are needing as you head into the interaction. Do you need to be heard and just listened to? Do you need advice? Do you need sympathy? Do you need to be encouraged to take action? What are you looking for from this interaction? This is an important question to ask yourself going in to an interaction for 2 key reasons. First, it allows you to get curious about whether the person you are taking this need to, has the requisite skills to meet that need. For example, some people are really great listeners but not great at giving advice; on the flip side some people are quick to advise but not so great at the listening. If you know what you need, you can more intentionally align seeking that need from someone in your life whose skillset is more aligned to serving that need. Second, clarifying your need allows you to front load the interaction to name the need – setting you up for much higher chances of successfully receiving what you are needing. If you open the conversation with, “I have had a tough thing happen at work and I really just need a place to share about it with no judgement. I need to feel like someone is on my side”. Then the person listening knows, ok, I am taking a bit of a backseat here and offering a safe place to talk – I can do that – and they just need me to be with them and on their side, that’s no problem. You see, the people who care about you genuinely want to do the right thing, but in a moment they can often not know exactly what the right thing is – if we can feed it to them, that winning looks like this specific end result, they are far more likely to follow through successfully because they know the target outcome on the front end and are often delighted to give us a space that gets there. Everyone walks away feeling successful. On the flip side, if you are a loved one of a helping professional, if they don’t front load with you, you can ASK for the front loading FROM them. Let’s say that your friend comes to you and starts sharing about a brutal day at work and you are internally tempted to say something dismissive like “well, that’s what you signed up for” because you don’t know what else to say and feel uncomfortable holding this conversation and want it to be done. What if instead you said something like, “I see you’re struggling and I want to be helpful to you in this conversation, what do you feel like you really need from me in sharing about this with me?” Let them tell you what the need is, and likely you’ll find it is pretty doable. So step one in trying to support people in more effectively supporting us, starts within ourselves in being able to know and name our need. This then allows us to align the need with those who have the skills to support it, and to clarify the need and front load this in the interaction to try to help everyone know what the ideal outcome of this interaction would be. But what happens when, maybe despite our best efforts or in a situation where we failed to identify, clarify and fontload, the conversation lands at a comment like, “Well that’s what you signed up for”? Then what? Well, let’s remind ourselves of the assumption that our people do really care about us and have a desire to be helpful to us. Anchoring back to this is going to be important when we hear a comment like this and our internal reaction is to experience hurt and dismissal and want to back away, shut down and armor up. It is really tempting in moments like these to withdraw, to determine this person is just simply not safe to share this part of yourself with, and to believe the worst about them or about yourself (for example, “I’m too much” or “clearly caring for me is too hard”). Last episode, in my tirade, I mentioned that the risks to these kinds of interactions is not only emotionally harmful, but it can and does actually get people killed – because the isolation that comes if we have several of these experiences becomes so difficult that people become far more at risk for things like suicide. So, it is critically important that we hold tight to the knowledge that people care and that this is more likely lack of skill rather than lack of care or my mattering to them. We need to be really careful to not jump to a story that says more than that, because that can be lethal. The hard piece in moments like these, is that our protective systems want to just shut it all down, when what it actually most likely to be most significantly helpful in shaping a new story with this person is a level of vulnerability that feels very risky to choose when you have just felt hurt by someone’s unintended dismissiveness. Vulnerability is hard and uncomfortable. It feels risky exposing ourselves further in moments where we already feel wounded. And yet, this is where the magic lives. When we are vulnerable in these moments alongside people who really do genuinely care and who really do want to do well for us, these moments become the level up moments for relationships. It’s where bonding becomes stronger, depth becomes deeper, connection becomes more solid and trust becomes richer. What does vulnerability look like in a moment like this? It looks like calling it out with kindness. What if, in a moment where someone who you’ve shared with said something like, “well, that’s what you signed up for,” you could take a deep breath, and say something like, “I know that you care about me and I trust that you didn’t intend for that to feel hurtful or dismissive, but I also need you to know that despite what I trust and believe are your intentions, that is how it felt for me to hear you say that. I know it can be hard to know what to say when I share about some of the hard things in my work, and I know that you are wanting to offer something that helps. Maybe next time you could consider saying something like, …” and offer them an alternative that would feel helpful and caring for you to receive. Taking the time to lay out your belief in their care for you can disarm some of the tendencies toward defensiveness that can come up when we call things out more abruptly. And setting this boundary, clarifying that their action felt hurtful and offering an alternative, is a way you can set both of you up for future success in interactions. If you have difficulty thinking of alternative things you would want your people to say instead, I would suggest offering them even something as simple as, “you know, I don’t even know what to say, but I care about you and am glad you shared it with me. Is there something specific you are needing from me?” Sometimes we work so hard to find something to say, but the better thing can often be “wow, I don’t even have words” because it acknowledges the weight of what’s been shared, and it acknowledges that I don’t know the right thing but that I am with you. Now, this brings us to those of you listening who are the loved one of a front line helping professional. As a loved one, you can also invite these moments. You can be watchful and noticing of the response from your front line person. You can see them shut down, back away, armor up – and you can self-reflect and offer the opportunity for vulnerability. Can you imagine how powerful and meaningful it would be to say something like, “well, that’s what you signed up for,” then notice the change in the person you care about in receiving that and offer them something like, “goodness, I can see that was not the right thing to say and that you seem like you are feeling like you have to shut down. I wonder if there is something you were needing from me that I missed, and how I can be there for you in this?” Game changer. You have suddenly gone from a situation that felt dismissive and put a barrier in the relationship and trust dynamic, to a situation where there is vulnerability, care, effortful and conscientious acknowledgement and accountability and a really opportunity for growing the depth of trust and regard in the relationship. Not only can this be offered after saying something in an effort to repair and recover, but you can invite it right off the hop. When your helping professional loved one is sharing about something hard from their day or a struggle with work, before anything else even happens in the conversation you could invite them to self-reflect on what needs they have from you and this interaction. You could say, “I really want to support you well in this moment, I wonder what you feel you need most from me right now and what it would look like for me to meet that need well.” What an empowering moment to be invited to name the need and what serving the need successfully would look like. And what a wonderful way to take the guess-work out of the situation and just know exactly what winning would look like – no mindreading or trial and error efforts at nailing the right answer…just collaborative clarity. Wouldn’t be refreshing if we could do this in relationships all the time?!? (Side note, you can…and probably should!). Ok, but what if the interaction happened a while ago. The hurt happened. The shut down happened. The distancing has happened. The trust has felt ruptured and maybe you’ve decided to just never talk to that person about work stuff ever again…kind of like the person who reached out to me about this topic who essentially learned, “you aren’t safe to hold this piece of me.” What then? Can it be salvaged?? The answer is, probably. Again, if we assume that our people want to do right by us and do genuinely care but lack requisite skills to know how to demonstrate that care effectively for your needs in some of these moments, we need to know that they won’t learn those skills in a vacuum. But here we are, back at vulnerability… it’s going to take some to try this. Returning to that person, we can do much of what we’ve already spoken about here today. It may sound something like this, “A few weeks ago I shared some pieces about my work with you. Now, I need you to know that I believe you care very much about me and I trust that your intentions weren’t to be hurtful, but the response you offered me at the time did hurt. I realize in reflecting that I have some specific needs from you in that interaction that I didn’t communicate well. I know that it is likely hard to know how to respond sometimes when I share about some of my work frustrations or challenges and I trust that you were trying your best. I do know that I need support sometimes and a safe place to share about some of my work stuff from time to time, and I would like to be able to find that with you, assuming you are ok and willing to offer that support. Learning from this recent experience together, I will try to recognize that you can’t read my mind and don’t know the right answer, and I will try to communicate my needs more clearly so that it feels easier to meet them. I also want to be able to offer that to you too, so please know that if you have something to share and have a specific need around what you want to receive from me, I would value you sharing that with me so I can be better at meeting your needs too.” Could you imagine? Now, I know this may not be language you use in your life or with your people, so feel free to adapt it so it sounds a bit more like you. Also, if it’s helpful, like I mentioned before, share these episodes with your people so that you all have a shared lens for what we’re doing, how it may look different, but why it’s important and meaningful even as it might be a bit weird and uncomfortable while we work out how to adapt it together. More than anything, this will take some practice and experimenting to find a version that feels like a fit and to get your people more well versed in meeting you in it with mutuality. I really hope that in the midst of it all, these pieces help to guide you as you and your people seek to care for one another well. We are wired for connection, we need that – and I hope this offers you some paths to find each other when you may have had some bumps that knocked you off course. As we wrap up today, let me remind you that if you value this podcast and want to help us in our mission to support front line wellness, there are 4 ways you can do just that: 1. Rate and review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast, or wherever you are listening 2. Follow me on social media, @lindsayafaas, and engage with me and this amazing little community we are building there. Every time you like, comment and share our posts you help us spread like wildfire thanks to the magic of the algorithm. 3. Share this resource and our other resources with those you know. If you would like a poster or info cards about the podcast for your workplace, send me an email to [email protected] 4. Last but not least, consider joining Beating the Breaking Point, my resilience training program that seeks to fill the gaps in your training and support you in limiting the degree to which the job takes a toll. This program serves to sponsor all of the free supports and resources we make available, and is available for individuals to sign up for as well as workplace teams. Go to the show notes for a link to learn more. Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. We make all of our resources available to you because the work you do matters, but more than that, YOU matter and we want to make sure you have what you need to keep up the good work at work, as well as in your real life outside of work. So use it, and share it, and until next time, stay safe.