Why Some Emergency Calls Stay With You for Years

After a twenty or thirty-year career in emergency services, you are going to have some calls you never forget. The fact that you will have those calls does not mean you need therapy; it only means your brain is doing what it is supposed to do to keep you safe.

Our brain is trying to keep us safe from harm. The emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, responds to danger by triggering the release of stress hormones while storing the sights, sounds, and smells of the traumatic event.

Why? The idea is to recognize danger before it happens and avoid getting hurt. If your brain can see the pattern happening in a similar way as it happened before, you are more likely to be aware of the dangerous event.

What does this mean for you? Unfortunately, this means you might have strong reactions to places, smells, and sounds associated with past calls. The brain recognizes one or more of these signals (I’ll call them triggers) and thinks danger is likely to recur. So, the amygdala releases the same stress hormones, and you go into fight or flight mode. Now your body is ready to address the danger the brain told it was coming.

Except that there is no danger right now.

Your brain and body are doing exactly what they are wired to do. Our body and brain are not set up to be exposed to trauma on a regular basis. Put another way, we are not built to work in a world surrounded by trauma. Every time your brain recognizes trauma, it stores the event for future reference. First responders encounter more trauma than the general public, and thus, we have more of these events stored in our memories. I call mine the Rolodex of trauma.

Recalling the trauma events is not voluntary, and actually, it is almost never voluntary. It could be a location (even one that looks similar to where the event happened), or a smell, or a sound. And it can be other people. Have you been asked by someone, “What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?” Of course you have. Being asked this question is, in my opinion, one of the most common triggers for my brain to flip through the entire Rolodex of trauma. I cannot stop the memories from coming, but I can change how I react to the memories.

By using grounding techniques, mindfulness, and learning how to regulate my emotions, I am able to reduce the severity of my response to the traumatic memories. Understand that it is not possible to forget or remove these memories. Learning how to recognize when we are responding to the memories in a physical way, being triggered, is the way to live with our memories.

If you’re a firefighter, paramedic, or law enforcement officer in Orlando looking for support, I offer therapy specifically for first responders.