starve your trauma

There's a lot of emphasis around trauma in the fire service.

Trauma-informed care. Lasting trauma. PTSD. Handling your trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma...

There are so many dominant narratives around trauma that make it feel insurmountable and inevitable in the fire service. But is that actually true? Or have we simply been sold a convincing story about it?

Psychology is cool, but sometimes the best way to understand something is to reduce it to its simplest components. So let's call trauma what it actually is: a bad habit.

Trauma is conditioning. When we allow an experience or incident to shape how we think, behave, and respond long after it's over, we've been trained into a new habit. The incident happened once. The feedback loop is what keeps it alive.

Humans are no different than any other animal in that we're easily conditioned by feedback loops that shape our behavior and motivation. Novel experiences that create high-arousal states hijack our normal patterns and create the opportunity to form a new habit.

The mind wanders back to the incident, tells itself a story about what happened, and triggers the same emotional or behavioral response. That response reinforces the story, making it more likely to happen again.

Around and around the loop goes.

Leave it in place and it can be yours forever. Or don’t.

The good news is that you're the one who decides whether to stay in the loop or step out of it. Healing becomes less about waiting for enough time to pass and more about deliberately interrupting the feedback loop—by redirecting your attention, changing your interpretation of the incident, or choosing a different behavioral response.

Ain't nobody got time to heal forever.

One of the biggest misconceptions about trauma is that time is what heals it. What time actually does is create distance between you and the incident. As that distance grows, your perspective changes, and so does the story you tell yourself about what happened.

But you don't have to wait for time to do the work. Change your conditioning now, and you change your relationship with the incident now.

Pick one to interrupt your trauma loop:

• Absorb yourself in a hobby or project that captures your attention more than replaying the trauma.

• Reinterpret the incident. What else could it mean? Play devil's advocate with your own story. Maybe it was completely random event and has nothing to do with you. That's always an option.

• Choose a different behavior when the trauma gets stirred up. If your habit is fighting intrusive thoughts, stop fighting them. Laugh at them instead. Indifference is often more powerful than resistance.

The fire service doesn't need more firefighters who identify with their trauma. It needs firefighters who understand that conditioning can be changed, habits can be broken, and the mind is far more adaptable than we've told.

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