Navigating the intense world of first responders, Dr. Hayden Duggan and I uncover the layers of mental health struggles beneath the badges of our everyday heroes. With Dr. Duggan's vast experience, from being on the front lines as a firefighter and EMT to his current role guiding police and EMS personnel through psychological challenges, we delve into stories that reveal the true impact of stress and trauma. Join us as we venture into a discussion that's as heartfelt as it is enlightening, punctuated with the kind of humor that only those who've walked through fire – quite literally – can share.
This episode takes you through the winding roads of our memories, where familiar turns are sometimes missed in the haze of a crisis. We touch on the transformative power of life-altering events and how our personal narratives have been shaped by them. From my own shift in career to Dr. Duggan's intriguing Rorschach test revelation, our conversation bridges the gap between vulnerability and the quest for understanding the human mind in the aftermath of trauma.
Wrapping up with a call to action, we spotlight the indispensable support systems that safeguard the mental well-being of those who stand on the front lines. The importance of critical incident stress management and the push for better transitional care for emergency personnel take center stage as we acknowledge the gaps in current support structures. Tune in to absorb the wisdom of Dr. Duggan and to fortify your appreciation for the silent battles fought by our first responders.
And if the stories strike close to home, remember that help is just a phone call away at 988.
Navigating the intense world of first responders, Dr. Hayden Duggan and I uncover the layers of mental health struggles beneath the badges of our everyday heroes. With Dr. Duggan's vast experience, from being on the front lines as a firefighter and EMT to his current role guiding police and EMS personnel through psychological challenges, we delve into stories that reveal the true impact of stress and trauma. Join us as we venture into a discussion that's as heartfelt as it is enlightening, punctuated with the kind of humor that only those who've walked through fire – quite literally – can share.
This episode takes you through the winding roads of our memories, where familiar turns are sometimes missed in the haze of a crisis. We touch on the transformative power of life-altering events and how our personal narratives have been shaped by them. From my own shift in career to Dr. Duggan's intriguing Rorschach test revelation, our conversation bridges the gap between vulnerability and the quest for understanding the human mind in the aftermath of trauma.
Wrapping up with a call to action, we spotlight the indispensable support systems that safeguard the mental well-being of those who stand on the front lines. The importance of critical incident stress management and the push for better transitional care for emergency personnel take center stage as we acknowledge the gaps in current support structures. Tune in to absorb the wisdom of Dr. Duggan and to fortify your appreciation for the silent battles fought by our first responders.
And if the stories strike close to home, remember that help is just a phone call away at 988.
Hi and welcome to Finding your Way Through Therapy. The goal of this podcast is to demystify therapy, what can happen in therapy and the wide array of conversations you can have in and about therapy Through personal experiences. Guests will talk about therapy, their experiences with it and how psychology and therapy are present in many places in their lives, with lots of authenticity and a touch of humor. Here is your host, steve Bisson.
Speaker 2:Bonne année, grand né. Thank you, happy New Year, and if you want a little grand né, you can go ahead and look it up. My name is Steve Bisson. This is the premier episode of Season 11, or Episode 133 of Finding your Way Through Therapy. Very excited to be here for an 11th season. I'm looking very much forward to you guys listening and if you're on YouTube, you're going to see that I'm going to try to do these intros and the outros that I do recorded on video so you can see them. So this is my first time doing it. Any feedback is always welcome. So this is what I'm doing, but for Episode 132, if you listen to it, as my guests talked about their experience last year on my podcast Finding your Way Through Therapy and it was really good, so please go back and listen to that. But Episode 133 will be part one of two with Dr Hayden Duggan.
Speaker 2:Dr Hayden Duggan wrote a few books, but Dr Hayden Duggan also is the founder of the Onside Academy in Gardner, massachusetts, a residential trauma treatment and training program for public safety personnel. He is a team clinician for Boston Police Stress Support Unit and is the chief psychologist for the Boston EMS peer support team. He's worked in many fields he is a former firefighter, he's a paramedic, he's an EMT. He will talk about that, I'm sure, during the interview, and I'm going to separate it in two because I know this is recorded, we recorded it and I know this is a two-part episode for me. So I know he's going to talk about that. He's going to talk about other of his experience, but just a fascinating guy. This is a guy I've been chasing down for about six months to have this interview. But Hayden is a genuine person, very interesting. And here is his interview. Well, hi everyone and welcome to the first episode, episode 133, of Finding your Way Through Therapy.
Speaker 2:I am Steve Bissau. You've known me for a while. Season 11 is upon us and I have someone who you know. He's a busy guy, I'm a busy guy. We finally got together. I'm excited beyond any possible imagination anyone could have. But Dr Hayden Duggan is someone who has been referred to me by so many people how great he is. He started a bunch of different things that I'm going to let him talk about, but I told him before this interview that it's an honor for me to talk to him and he returned a favor and I'm like no, believe me, it's my honor. He said people said good things about me and I said who's lying and why are they lying to you? But at the end of the day, just very happy to have Hayden. Welcome to Finding your Way Through Therapy.
Speaker 3:My pleasure, great, to be here, my friend, and, as we say, I'm not any busier than anybody else, just less organized.
Speaker 2:Hey, welcome to the club.
Speaker 3:Right, as witnessed by the fact that, although you sent me multiple email I mean multiple text messages, et cetera I still, on the day in question, said oh yeah, it's 1030. Anyway.
Speaker 2:You know it was funny when I saw you at that 30, I was actually in a session I'm going to share this with the audience and. I saw you're like I'm waiting and I'm like I told my client. I'm like can you wait one second? And I responded quickly because I'm like he's going to sit there for like 30 minutes. I can't do that. I would have.
Speaker 3:That's me, and I had moved somebody to 12, from 1230 to 1030, so that we could end with the other way around.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:But here we are Great. Great to be here, Steve, and I'm glad to know that it's to be solved and not missing.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. See you just, you know. I know you went to Canada in November, so now you know how to say everything in French suddenly. That's what happens when you go to Canada. Well, actually I lived in France for a while, so I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:I mean great. I'm actually one of the few people that really, really loved it. I was in the south of France, where it's mostly rural and farming people, and they were fabulous, so anyway that was called the zoo. The other side, yes, and where they say 55, that's a good sign, because they're saying they're saying.
Speaker 2:And then Paris, and where they hate the Parisians as much as Americans do.
Speaker 3:Hey, pure white hate.
Speaker 2:Pure white hate, I should say that's what I tell people all the time. I said you would be surprised how much most French people hate the Parisians, except the ones in Paris which is awful because it's such a gorgeous city.
Speaker 3:But anyway, people kind of suck at that.
Speaker 3:That's not that's not all of France at all. No, you know, and we must remember, it was the French soldiers that done Kirk at the very end, that saved our asses and are responsible for like 30000 British troops getting off that beach because and all those French soldiers died and they stood there and took the oncoming German fire which, had they used tanks, they would have broken through, but they didn't, because I want to save the tanks for later. So, yeah, it was, that was the French, and remember our own revolution, and the French came just in time.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I'll shut up, that's not where you're going to talk about history all forever, because I love history, it's part of one of my favorite thing. Learn about history is my old man used to say when he was alive. Learn about history because those who don't know about it are doomed to repeat it, and I don't want to repeat history sometimes.
Speaker 3:Indeed, and you know, my wife says if you ask me what the weather is, I give you the history of meteorology. So it's terrible.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I kind of like threw a lot of like great things at you and obviously you returned them back. But maybe people know about me and they know I'm not that great. How about and I'm joking, of course how about you talk a little bit about who you are and tell me about yourself?
Speaker 3:Well, wow, that's not interesting question, but I'm a mental person, as we call us in the first responders world. I'm duly diagnosed. I love the kind of work you do. We both love doing treatment and I like crisis intervention work. I go back to the days when, in the 70s, that was great stuff. I wrote a couple of unread books and I won't inflict, in my view, what was about empathy and the others about crisis intervention along with a print. And then I well, how did I get into emergency services? My old man had a heart attack and he survived it. He was a bold, very strong, and I didn't know what to do. I felt really stupid and I was in my Late 20s, I guess at that time. I happened to be home when it happened and so I said well, I don't like to get, I like to be an EMT. I had no background in emergency services at all my brother's in the military, but so oh.
Speaker 3:Maybe I was about 28. I think 26 28. Maybe I wanted a uniform, who knows?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so my local department was Was hosting an EMT course, a little bit like the draft they said. You know you can take it free. It was expensive in those days, but you got to give us a couple years of service on the ambulance. I didn't sure find my meat and that's how it all started. I got on the meat wagon, as we call it, and and I actually liked it a lot. Not that I was all I good at it, but I liked it. And then, you know well, we there, you got to give the firefighter one deal oh okay, so I didn't know anything about fires, nor I want to Scared the shit out of me and figured out.
Speaker 3:Well, I gotta do it. So then I took the plan. I became a call firefighter for a department back in those days when most of the partners were heavily called. We didn't have as many professional full-time firefighters and it was very busy a lot of fires in the 70s and my god, I loved it. I love firefighting to the point where and I did it a part-time, so it helped me get to graduate school I was on scholarship and I'm going to go for graduate school Harvard, excuse me, that's just why I don't tell anybody.
Speaker 2:I know a little bird told me you wouldn't talk about it, so I figured I just you open it up.
Speaker 3:I was very, very lucky. I went to a program called Clinical psychology and public practice. It was an experimental program lasted about 25 years and you couldn't be part of the program unless you were willing to do public practice work for public agencies Later on. If you wanted to private practice, I was up to you, but you had to. All our internship internships were in public settings, so it was a good beginning to learn, you know it is an excellent program, working places like Dys or Jails or working for Locked state hospitals, things like that.
Speaker 3:That's where I sort of started. So. But at the other side was the firefighting side and I loved it and to the point where I applied to go full-time Would have been my career. But they were adding a lot of firefighters in. There was 14 guys in front of me who had been. You know, they were townies. They grew up, lived in the town, fought fires as as Eagle scouts, became part-time firefighters. They were way ahead of me so was hopeless, so I Didn't even try them. Later on it became part-time. I was very happy and we're trying this as a deputy many years later, but Tried never forget where I came from. So those are the two sides. The Dooley diagnosed Either either Psychologizing firefighter or a fight firefighting psychologist. I don't know which, but it did how about a great human that's?
Speaker 3:always.
Speaker 2:That's a good.
Speaker 3:That's a good start for me one thing it does is for me, for this old dude. It kept me very humble because there's no real place to hide in the fire ground and you can be as arrogant or foolish as self. You are until the defecation history road, eight blades to put a point and you're a building fire and you're right out of air and there's zero visibility. You're sucking your mask and you lost the wall. You have no freaking idea where you are and you feel like you're gonna lose bladder control in fact, once I did. And then you realize, okay, this, this stuff is real and it can kill you, and so let's, let's not get to, let's just stay right size, you know. So when nature overwhelms you, I think that's a good experience, but anyway, yeah, I stayed in for almost 40 years, on and off.
Speaker 3:We're trying a little small town, which I love, where I live here now and and was a port time deputy, although when you're on we have that Standing. You're always on call because you're always listening, with a third ear to hear. You know, did the bus, did the bus get out of the barn, the ambulance, or who's on engine two? And, yes, I better get going because that's not the crew we want for that. So my family just put up with all of it and lost everybody to emergency services. Knows the missed thanksgivings. They're running out the door on Christmas Eve your kids birthday party up, dad's gone. You know, children of first responders, let alone spouses, really, are a different breed themselves in terms of resilience, in terms of just getting used to. You know dad loves to do this or mom loves to do this. They're nuts, but it's the way it is. I Always remember one thing too, and it wasn't fighting.
Speaker 3:The fire was CISM. The night of the Worcester cold storage fire, my chief came by and said get in to me and my wife were going, and we got there about Eight o'clock. The fire had started at 6 13 and by the time we got there all six firefighters were declared lost, and that was a night that I'll never forget and we do all death note notifications with Kathy Minneham and my wife who had lost her husband. You know Charlestown warehouse fire ladder 15 over 20 years ago so a sidebar is it. After the cold storage fire of Valerie and Kathy started a group for For spouses who lost a loved one in my duty, called the wings group winners, and need a grief services. But that night we were so stressed I guess they're so shocked that when we came back at 4 am and we went back and spent the next eight days there in the tent, we drove right past our driveway.
Speaker 3:You know they talk about, when you're having a real post-traumatic symptom, perceptual distortions which I've never really really experienced, even in the size of things, and they also talked about deja vu In the jamming room. You know that I'm referring to something I think I've already seen, but I actually have it. I've never been there but a jammy vu is also being in a place. I should know it's familiar but I don't even recognize it. You know there's 31 chemicals in the stress response and they are powerful and they can have effects on cognition. It was 4 am, we're driving down our dirt road in Harveston and I drove right past my own driveway and my wife looked at me. I looked at her and I said where, the where are we? She said I don't know where you are, but we just passed our own driveway. That was, that was. That was a powerful, very powerful night, yeah. So yeah, you can't stay right sides in those things and I don't know how I get off on that. Let me show you.
Speaker 2:We were talking about different things, that in your career oh, retiring and all that. And I think that for me, you know, worcester, massachusetts, december 3rd 1999, will be etched in stone in my head and the Worcester 6 is Something that's very dear and dear to me, because I was watching TV, I was working in a group home that day and and remember like as a you know, when I came into this field I wanted to work with kids. I ended up in a developmental disabled home with people who have Pratt or Willie. And I'm watching this and I'm like now I have this intense urge to go and help mentally, not physically, because I don't have that capacity for people with first responders.
Speaker 2:So when people ask where you fall you know, how did you fall in this job I say ask backwards. It's not even what I wanted and for me it's realizing that things that really hit you are just those things that you gotta remember. So I don't know if that was like the oh my God, this is what my calling is, so to speak. But it was certainly an acorn that was planted in my head, because all I can do is think about what are the other fires Like? I didn't.
Speaker 3:I knew the other towns went there, but I can't imagine being in the city of Worcester, the firefighter, knowing your six brothers are in there and I can't imagine We've had a very close relationship with Worcester for years for that reason and a guy named Spike Walters who's since passed away, but he was an amazing guy. He was a Vietnam guy who was wounded and he was on Cambridge Rescue. A very smart and intelligent, just great guy, one of the founders of criticalness of stress management in the Commonwealth. He and I were in the tent right at the bottom of the building, so they stretched yellow tape that when you came off the deck, every one of these places has a name for it Worcester was the deck and New York was the pile and Oklahoma City was the pit. And when you come off these things, on the job.
Speaker 3:I don't mean as doing the stress work. There's usually a place where you go for like racks and a rehabilitation center. So that was ours in the tent, and Spike was the person who kind of got it started and doing that kind of stuff at the Coastal Arch Fire, where they were all eight days, and we've always had a close relationship with all those Worcester folks. However, I identify with what you did because that's how I started. I started working for after I got my degree. I started working for DOS, started working group homes, ended up working for the retarded and then I ended up. I ended up ending a first marriage after 13 years. We just it had a shelf life. We went separate ways we're still very cordial today, thank God when we co-parented our kids. But at that time I went into therapy because I felt like I was a mess, plus I was drinking a lot.
Speaker 3:That's how I dealt with my stress.
Speaker 2:Now here's another dual diagnosis you were talking about.
Speaker 3:That's true and I write. I think that's what I was on 36. How I got into it is interesting. I had a supervisor at Children's Hospital where I did my post doc, who was great, and she said, listen, hey, you gotta learn how to give the Rorschach. And I said, okay, it's my least favorite instrument, but so I had to take it and order, give it and one of the cards-.
Speaker 2:And I'm gonna stop for a second. Rorschach is an interpretive test where it's ink blocks. For those who don't know what it is, it's a very much interpretive, unfortunately not very reliable or valid testing, but I just in case people don't know what it is part of finding your way through therapies to make it as clear as I can about what therapy looks like, what we're talking about. So I apologize for-.
Speaker 3:No, I apologize for just throwing it out there. I should have explained the same thing. So yeah, it's a projective test but, as you say, it's not very reliable, but it can be interesting. In my case it probably saved my sanity because on the Colorshach card there's one card that everybody freaks out on, where they see a monster or whatever. I stopped talking, ooh, and I stared at the card.
Speaker 2:That's not interpretive, by the way, the Rorschach, I think, is interpretive, but when you see people's reaction to it, that's something you can visibly observe and I think there's psychological value in that. You're not kidding.
Speaker 3:And I went someplace else and I got the lip syndrome, you know, loved and throat.
Speaker 1:And I'm looking at this card.
Speaker 3:The room got very silent, still started to spin a little bit. She was very kind and very nice to me. She said Hayden, I think you need to see somebody. So she got me through a fabulous shrink. I loved him because he swore it was a combat vet. He was, I thought it was the directive of patient psychiatry. Mclean, just a down-to-earth guy, really made me feel cared about. And I'm saying all this because I was not doing any treatment myself yet I was still working for state agencies and I was doing 90 hours a week. And what do you know?
Speaker 3:I got an ulcer.
Speaker 1:And, of course, within the midst of losing a marriage.
Speaker 3:it was also drinking myself into a blimion, not knowing that I had an alcohol problem, until my sponsor eventually said to me Hayden, you might not think you're an alcoholic, but you'll do until one comes along In the meantime. Why don't you just start dealing with it? But anyway, physician healer. So he said to me, the shrink said you're working with the retardant and I said yeah, I'm gonna link this to you, know CISM and understanding why incidents bother us. He said why are you doing this to yourself? Are you this many hours? You have an ulcer now and you got 90 hours a week. What are you trying to make them all unretarded?
Speaker 1:I looked at it and I said Zena, what are you talking?
Speaker 3:about. He said what connection do you have to this? And my God, it was like I just got hit with a two by four. I had a younger sister who was retarded and she died. And I was eight years old and that happened and I never got to live with her because in those days the prevailing wisdom of pediatrician was stick them in institutions. We wouldn't do that now. She died in an institution and I guess I had a much deeper effect on me than I knew.
Speaker 3:So he worked with me many years, a wonderful guy, and eventually I got in the fire department, continued to be a psychologist, living in the town where I was in. We had a working fire, which there are many in those days. And I just remember you know Captain Copeland on the phone on the radio, who was the brother of Don Copeland, was a famous weather forecast at that time and Copeland, if we call him, was very quiet. He was a tough guy, kind, but you know if you got three words out of him you were getting a lot. And I just remember I was not on duty. He tore past my house licensed siren. I just heard him say on the radio very quietly step on it. People trapped. That's all Kobe had to say, so I dropped what I was doing. I was only a block from the fire station.
Speaker 3:So I got an engine 24 first, which I liked because I was the only one that could drive it, because he had a double clutch on up shifts and I really enjoyed it. Captain Belma got in the seat next to me. Couple of fire fires. We arrived on scene and I won't tell you the story of the fire, but it was whipping. We had fire blowing out under the ease. Basically, what had happened I'll be brief was that a family was coming back from a skiing vacation. They drove all night. Dad went to work, mom got there was about seven o'clock in the morning but mom got out of the car, was fed there there was ice, there was snow, she's unpacking. And the door. The door a little Kimberly said, 12 years old, said mom, just go into the house, I'll be upstairs, okay, mom's unpacking.
Speaker 3:Literally like five minutes later the whole house erupts. What we forgot is that fire goes up and out. Yeah, so here we see the second floor with smoke puffing out under the eaves and we think the fire's on the second floor. So we said to the mother where's your daughter? She said she's on the second floor. We did a balls up search on the second floor, zero visibility. I found the family dog, golden Tree were dead, threw it down the stairs. We had two firefighters injured One. Finally, we had to bail out down the stairs.
Speaker 3:Over lattice, all fires go out eventually, right, but this one was ripping and it was surrounding the ground from the outside, so finally it went out. And then they said Doug, you know, take a cook on stairs and do overall in the basement. So I'm in the basement, picking through, you know, drop down from the ceiling sharp like snow, lower blades and everything Smokes, beginning to lift, and over by the cellar stairs I see what looks like a garbage bag. I said what the F is that? And it was like figure ground distortion. I can focus, you know, slide projector. Whoa, that comes in a focus. That's a kid. The charge remains of a kid.
Speaker 3:And what had happened, steve, was that she decided to go down to the basement where they had a rumpus room and just watch TV. They've been up all night. She wants us to relax for a minute, lay down on the couch. She hit the light switch. Gas had been escaping the entire time they'd been on the vacation. That one flipped the switch and it was a gas bed fire. It exploded but it went up and out, right. Nothing we could have saved there if we'd known. But we went to the wrong floor. We missed it, so I ended up shoveling the remains of no body bag, didn't really think much of it. You didn't at the time.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:You fucking job and shut up so shoveling. Remember being surprised at how heavy the internal organs were the liver, the lung, the heart, the kidneys, stomach. And then I didn't think much of it because what do we do? We went out and got drunk. That's how we handle stuff in those days. In fact that's what was encouraged Get out the fire, step over the body and go get drunk. So anyone was going to tell you where you can find a bloody buried breakfast at like 10 o'clock in the morning. By that time at the Conqueror Traffic Circle, yeah, howard Johnson's, they would see us coming in, looking like we looked. They say the back room. There we go the back room. They keep us away from the other customers. Why am I saying all this? It asked me up to a fairly well.
Speaker 2:We have no key. Say the whole word if you want to. There's no, there's no. I don't do editing on that.
Speaker 3:I appreciate that. So to finish this up and thank you for listening to it, it's a little long-winded, but it was a seminal event in my life.
Speaker 2:That's why it's not long-winded if it's seminal in your life, but go ahead.
Speaker 3:It didn't work out too well and I did have nightmares and flashbacks, as you would have expected, only because I was so up close and personal with her. And I finally went into therapy and I had to get sober because I was drinking myself into a stupor trying to get rid of that stuff. And as they later teach you in the trauma work, alcohol is not only central nervous system depressing but it does make flashbacks and nightmares more vivid. The colors are more vivid and it'll knock you out and put you to sleep, which is what I wanted because I couldn't sleep. But then you wake up three or four hours later, fitful, you're still in your BDUs, you got shower, shaving, you get to woke, all. You get to work seven o'clock and you go for years like that no sleep, alcohol up down, up down, adrenaline exhausted, adrenaline exhausted, medicated. You go to work over time. That doesn't work too good.
Speaker 3:And so what happened to me is, about eight years later, my department said to me because by then I was doing some of this work, I had become a forensic doctor working for the courts no jail. This is a little long story, but I wasn't working with kids anymore, which had been my career for like 15 years or they were taught it, but for a job. It was the courts and it was a good job and I enjoy it. But my department said you know, there's this new stuff called criticalness and stress management and you ought to take a look at it Because if you do we will send you folks to be helped. At that time it happened to be the veterans agent in town. I was seeing vets free. My idea of helping them was to sit on my porch and drink Jim bean with them. That was great. I thought I was great.
Speaker 2:They loved coming to my house.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I go to see you for therapy too.
Speaker 3:That's why I stopped drinking too, so now I'm getting sober. You've taken away my best friend. I can't sleep. I still got the images, but at least I'm not drunk. There's no order of alcohol in the courts. So I want you to this program 1989.
Speaker 3:This was and it was taught by Vicky Harris, who was one of the early instructors in critical ness and stress management, and she was a fabulous speaker. And I'm there wrapped with attention in a room of 155 fires, nashor, new Hampshire, and I'm learning a lot. I'm way in the back row and she gets to the hack and sack fire. I'm trying to talk about triggers and events and how you connect dots. And the hack and sack fire was a famous fire in the CISM lore because what happened was it was like the cold storage fire in the sense that there was a wide open space in the garage. When they first came in, there was no smoke, nothing. They had the mass hanging down. What they didn't realize is that the fire was ripping in a crawl space between the ceiling and the roof, which was concrete and sealed completely.
Speaker 3:So, the fire had no place to go but down and we couldn't have vented it because of the roof. So they walked in, the Hackersack firefighters, and there was one engine crew with a little tent of five guys, and they got way far in. All of a sudden there's a reason I'm telling you this it broke through and the fire came rushing down, just like what happened to the firefighters. I know, you know the story, the cold story fire.
Speaker 3:That whoop when that petroleum based installation let go all at the same time the whole building cold storage fire. It was up to same thing in Hackersack and these guys, they're firefighters. They put on their mask, the lieutenant took them to a paint locker or a closet in the back. They couldn't go back to the entrance as they came in and they had a steel door and they closed themselves in and they couldn't get out because there was bars on the first floor window but they had comms. So this lieutenant is very calmly saying yeah, we're stuck in a paint locker here. If you can just rip off these grates on this window, we'll be okay, but we can't go out the way that we can. Nobody heard him In those days.
Speaker 3:I only had one channel on the fire ground and the chief was directing the fire from the outside, multiple incoming units from other towns, his whole department there. Now this thing is ripping, we're starting out, it's just not even smoking. The building possible fire is now a conflagration, but he's got a crew way in the back. This is before. We had good procedures around keeping track of people in a large area, search et cetera, and they couldn't get out and they remain very dignified, just like the cold storage, the Worcester 6,. Right till the end say things like okay, come get us, it's getting hot in here, we're running out of air. And that ding, and then the mass sucks and then start to ding, ding, ding, you're out of air.
Speaker 3:So okay we're breathing off the floor, we're buddy breathing and they sounding more urgent. They never once lost their cool until finally it's just stopped. Nobody on the fire ground heard them, but everybody in Scannerland heard them as true in the Worcester cold storage fire. Many of those families of firefighters lived in that area and they heard the transmission of the dying firefighters. So although at that time the cold storage fire hadn't happened yet, we learned a lot because the cops came on scene after it was out and said hey, don't worry, we'll take care, we'll get your guys out. You don't need to see that. The firefighters said, excuse me, we take our own people out and they said well, let us take care of the buyers of the ME text.
Speaker 3:We'll take care of it. They said no you're taking and there was a fist fight. So the Gemini team one of the first teams in the nation that was so well regarded with fire, cism team, critical assessment, as a team as you know, everything's volunteer as a clinician, as a trained team that team came in and really had their hands full because they got a men's fences between police and fire. So that was a fire that was very emotional, was very emotional for the crowd to watch.
Speaker 1:To me.
Speaker 3:I started to feel nauseous, I had a rapid heartbeat and I really felt sick and dizzy. I got up and I walked out and I went to the water fountain outside and there was a very kind, compassionate EMT named Neil Bradman from Boston AMS who had started their peer support team and he came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and jumped like food and silly.
Speaker 3:He said you're getting triggered, aren't you? I said yeah, but Neil, oh, he introduced himself. I don't know why, because I've never been in a huge, large area of search like that. I'd never been in that level of fire. He said there's nothing to do with it. When your body reaches a certain level of heart rate and fight or flight and increased blood flow in the muscles and all the stuff that's going on in your brain process information two to 10 times faster than normal, it doesn't know that it's not back in something else. When else have you been that scared? Kimberly Jolleyfair, that was easy for me. So at that point I got CISM trained.
Speaker 3:I did love working with the folks. Obviously, we did everything free and I'm almost done the long story of how we got to the on-site. I got the help I needed. I did get sober. I stopped working on the department for quite a while, probably four years, and I just concentrated on doing this stuff. And they bought a firefighter to me and said you know, we're going to give you our very best. His name is Tim Tenney, 1991, the Nickel Street house fire and gardener. It was the same kind of thing balloon construction fire. Ie, there's a space between the floors and the walls and the fire travels up that space. So in a balloon construction fire you look in the basement for the origin, even if it's in the ceiling in the third story, because that's where it started.
Speaker 3:Yeah, travel up the side of the building.
Speaker 2:So Tim and his partner, Just to stop you for a second, also To let everyone know that that's the construction that was very prevalent in the New England area for many, many, many years. So this is not something like people like said oh yeah, this is going to cost fires, it wasn't purposeful, but this is something of old structures of old New England from the late 1800, early 1900. So I just want to throw that out so that people don't go and wait a minute. Why did they build them that way? Well, yeah, we didn't know any better. That's why.
Speaker 3:But I'm excited. No, second time I thank you, because I get cranked up and then I forget that.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm here, I'm just hosting, just sitting here just listening.
Speaker 3:No, that makes a big difference. Thanks, anyway, particularly with Victorian structures. So Tim and his partner, who was a Vietnam debt tank commander, went into this basement heavy, heavy fire. My department was there but I was not on it yet that was how much that I was living in acting and they sounded the all out to get everybody out, because all three fours are fully involved Tim and his partner in the basement, because they even told there were three children there.
Speaker 3:The fire had actually started when the mom went across the street to play cards and drink with a friend, she left all three kids in this basement apartment. It was somebody's one of their birthdays. They tipped over candles on the fire. Anyway, I think the kids were. The baby was about six months old, the kids were two and four, very little. Tim and his partner were not going to leave the ground floor. Again, zero visibility. They had what's called a rollover, not a flash over, but the fire was rolling over their heads all the way down the hallway and they couldn't for life of them find these kids To this day. Tim, who was still the chairman of our board 30 years later, will tell you that he swears that he couldn't possibly have heard this Over the noise of steam windows breaking, diesel engines, pumps cranking up, people talking yelling through their masks, all the sounds of fire combat. He swears, and so does his partner David Upguard, that he will swear that he heard as he passed one of the words one of the rooms.
Speaker 3:He heard a sound like this Ah Mom, that's what he heard. He couldn't have Steve. There was so much noise you couldn't hear a thing.
Speaker 2:They went in that room and they found both kids Underestimated by the public. How loud a fire truly is.
Speaker 3:It really, and they found both kids in there, so they carried both kids out In those days we didn't have a hyperbaric chamber in this day so they got life led to Maine. They couldn't save the baby, unfortunately. So they said we're gonna bring this guy I was still living in after then we're gonna bring this kid to you to do something, Cause CSN was very new. Then All I did, honestly, God, was 60 briefings with him. The standard seven phase model, which is not therapy. It's a treatment for a critical listen. It's definitely a crisis intervention treatment, but it's very structured. It's a structured discussion designed to have a very positive impact. All it's supposed to do is just lessen the impact of the event and jumpstart somebody's normal coping abilities. It was designed for people who are already pretty resilient. It doesn't work with civilians as well. It shouldn't be used with civilians.
Speaker 3:It's designed for people who've been there, done it, got the t-shirts seen, the baddest, maddest, saddest, and they can handle a tough fact phase where you've got to get them to look in the eye of the tiger and just describe sight, sound, smells, what they went through. They're able to do that, but you got to do it as a group cause. They need that peer support. You know, am I telling some medic oh, I understand why you couldn't innovate that kid on a bumpy country road who was very anterior in his throat presentation. You get to the hospital and they're floating. You said how come you didn't make the tube? My saying to him oh well, you did a great job. I'm not a medic, Doesn't mean anything. I have other things to give him, but not that or her.
Speaker 3:But another medic looking at him and saying hey, listen, I understand exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 3:If I had a dollar for every tube I'd miss. I'd be rich. That means something. So that's where we began to realize okay, we have to do this as a group where possible. But Tim came along, so I just did something you're not supposed to do, which is I used a model one-to-one. I had no choice.
Speaker 3:He had been in a psychiatric hospital for 30 days. His department didn't know what to do with him. He couldn't function. He had floor PTSD and this was the best interior guide. They all said he was the best interior structure firefighting guy they had. So they didn't mean to do them any harm. But he was in a psychiatric unit, locked unit for 30 days, used $18,000 of insurance. He came back out and he still couldn't function Because they didn't address the trauma you know being very well-traumatized in form.
Speaker 3:It's different from regular ongoing psychotherapy, which is fine for something else, but not for losing two kids in the house fire. All we did. Every time we start to talk to you we'd get a blinding headache. There was such an overload of chemicals he was sitting on so much like Eddie Lee from the old state police dress here. They used to say kid at the beach for the beach ball, the more you stuff it down, the more you take your head off when it comes out. So he would just go out to his van he was electrician and he'd sleep in his van for 45 minutes, then he'd come back in, then he'd get it done.
Speaker 3:We went through all seven phases of a debriefing and he finished beautifully. He went back to work, never had another day where he lost any time due to trauma and he and I several years later said hey, tim, you know, sometimes the debriefing is not enough. It's great, but you gotta have some follow through. But they can't. They won't go into ongoing therapy which I do, what you do, which is great, but sometimes they just won't do it. We need a place. We have halfway houses for recovering abs. We got halfway houses for the retiree. We got halfway houses, pre-release centers for prisoners what the F? We don't have anything for police, fire, ems.
Speaker 2:Well, that concludes episode 133 of Finding your Way Through Therapy. Dr Hayden Duggan, you will be back next week or next episode, depending on when you listen to this, but he will be back for part two and I can't wait to hear that, and I hope you join me then.
Speaker 1:Please like, subscribe and follow this podcast on your favorite platform. A glowing review is always helpful and, as a reminder, this podcast is for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. If you're struggling with a mental health or substance abuse issue, please reach out to a professional counselor for consultation. If you are in a mental health crisis, call 988 for assistance. This number is available in the United States.