Content note: This article contains references to sexual assault and traumatic events.
A retired firefighter and the founder of Fire to Light, an organization dedicated to advancing preventative Mental Fitness training inside the fire service, Brandon drew on his own lived experience and independent global research to develop the Fire to Light Mental Fitness Training System, a practical, operationalized approach that delivers Mental Fitness training the same way fire departments train every other critical skill.
In this excerpt, a ‘difficulty breathing’ call needs what medicine can’t fix, and a reframe from Gabor Maté pinpoints what healing actually requires. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
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KEVIN: I was talking about the act of communion rather than connection, so I’ll read you a little something John O’Donohue wrote and then ask you a question.
“The way we are present to each other is frequently superficial. We become more interested in connection rather than communion in many areas of our lives. The rich potential of friendship and love remains out of our reach because we push towards connection. When we deaden our own depths, we cannot strike a resonance in those we meet or in the work we do. A reverent approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”
I’ve heard you and others almost deny this moniker of heroes. Is there a necessity for first responders to deaden the depth of the responsibility that they have?
BRANDON: In part, yes. The average person only experiences a couple traumatic events within their lifetime; most first responders experience a hundred; that’s the reality of our existence. And, in a way, we’ve been taught to mask it, to suppress it, to bury it, thinking, “If I don’t get too close, it will go away.”
For example, we responded to a call for someone having difficulty breathing. Police were already on scene with the mother of a teenage boy who’d just died in a car accident. We didn’t really need to be there, but we thought, “We’re here; we might as well do something.” So we took her blood pressure, checked her heart rate, and ran through the protocol. And then I see my partner embracing this woman. She didn’t need a medical assessment. She needed a hug. Her kid had just died. The reality was, the only thing that was needed then was compassion. That’s 90% of our job. And in my experience, that’s what helps with the communion versus the disconnection. There’s a need for someone to just acknowledge that the people we show up for are also human.
For us, that word “hero” speaks to the ego. We need part of that to do the work we do. But we’re just people. We’re all contributing to one another in one way or another, and there shouldn’t be a hierarchy. Our egos create those hierarchies.
KEVIN: There’s something about—when we can’t turn that light of compassion towards ourselves, when we can’t deepen into those depths of ourselves—that offers a barrier to our own healing. What prevents first responders from engaging with themselves with the same kindness and strength they show everyone else?
BRANDON: I have a very challenging time talking to my father about personal things. He doesn’t know how to talk about those things, and I don’t think that’s uncommon for men from his generation or generations past. When I was putting the concept together for Fire to Light, that was the conversation. How can we help firefighters learn something new about themselves that they didn’t know yesterday? How can we help them narrate their own stories in their heads versus the stories that are put onto them by others?
Fire to Light’s answer isn’t therapy after the fact. It’s training beforehand, using the same rigour a firefighter already trusts, aimed somewhere new. We train and prepare until it becomes muscle memory. Our approach with mental health has been different, but what if we trained in this space the same way?
My father-in-law was a firefighter for 42 years. He competed in something called The Firefighter Combat Challenge, a sport that involves completing firefighting tasks against the clock. He himself was a world champion, and his team won their event for years. He told me it wasn’t the physical training that gave them the edge; it was the psychological side, the ability to visualize, to mentally connect to the physical body, and to overcome the fear of competition. There was a member on the team no one could beat on the training ground. Yet every single time he stepped onto the competition floor, he tripped up.
There’s a lot of research about the physical body and “prehab.” Those who undertake prehab before surgery drastically reduce their risk of complications afterwards. I think the same principle applies to our inner world. In my Fire to Light research, I interviewed the former U.S. Fire Administrator Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell. She described the fire service as “stuck in awareness” with mental health, so the question was, “How do we move into the operational phase?”
In our firefighter training, we use the same three stages to train literally everything in this job. After becoming aware of something, we learn how to do it, then, once mastered, we teach it. When things erupted for me, the first thing I did was call my psychologist. That was the first thing I did. For a lot of first responders, it might be the last thing they do.
KEVIN: There’s a movie with Gabor Maté speaking to a group of women who had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. He tells them, “You will never not be a woman that was drugged and raped by Bill Cosby, but you can heal from the incident itself.” The same is true for first responders. A firefighter will never not be the person who stood in that room during a multiple-fatality call.
That call becomes part of who they are, the way every hard thing does. But permanence isn’t the same as being stuck. Healing was never about becoming someone it didn’t happen to. It’s about becoming someone who can hold that it did… and keep choosing, afterward, who to be next.
BRANDON: If we can start to look at our psychological safety the same way we look at our physical safety, we will see a wealth of change. We’re already on these pedestals in our communities as police officers, firefighters, and medics. If we can become more mentally prepared for our jobs, we can embrace communion and be more compassionate, because we will have learned to be compassionate towards ourselves first.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if it resonates, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
Editor’s Note: This post comprises edited excerpts from The Gifts of Trauma podcast transcript. Selected passages have been carefully woven together to create a cohesive narrative that speaks in the guest’s voice and faithfully represents their perspective. – Rosemary Davies-Janes
