When the weight of the badge becomes a burden too heavy to bear alone, it's the invisible wounds that need tending. Dr. Hayden Duggan steps into our podcast realm, offering a lifeline of understanding to first responders grappling with the echoes of trauma. We unravel the complex tapestry of mental health challenges these heroes face, debunking the stigma and fears that often shroud their path to therapy.
Embarking on a journey through the psychological landscape of public safety personnel, our conversation with Dr. Duggan reveals the critical necessity for specialized mental health support. We tackle the barriers that stand in the way — from insurance battles to finding authentic, rigorously trained clinicians. It's a candid exploration of the hurdles and heartaches, but also a testament to the resilience and unspoken camaraderie that bind these protectors of our peace.
As our dialogue traverses the spectrum of first responder experiences, from the adrenaline rush of danger to the profound grief of loss, we underscore the lifesaving role of mental health counseling. We spotlight the power of peer support networks and therapeutic alliances, and the transformative potential of specialist treatments. This episode is a salute to the courage of those who run towards chaos, and a reminder that seeking help is the bravest step towards healing.
When the weight of the badge becomes a burden too heavy to bear alone, it's the invisible wounds that need tending. Dr. Hayden Duggan steps into our podcast realm, offering a lifeline of understanding to first responders grappling with the echoes of trauma. We unravel the complex tapestry of mental health challenges these heroes face, debunking the stigma and fears that often shroud their path to therapy.
Embarking on a journey through the psychological landscape of public safety personnel, our conversation with Dr. Duggan reveals the critical necessity for specialized mental health support. We tackle the barriers that stand in the way — from insurance battles to finding authentic, rigorously trained clinicians. It's a candid exploration of the hurdles and heartaches, but also a testament to the resilience and unspoken camaraderie that bind these protectors of our peace.
As our dialogue traverses the spectrum of first responder experiences, from the adrenaline rush of danger to the profound grief of loss, we underscore the lifesaving role of mental health counseling. We spotlight the power of peer support networks and therapeutic alliances, and the transformative potential of specialist treatments. This episode is a salute to the courage of those who run towards chaos, and a reminder that seeking help is the bravest step towards healing.
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:Merci beaucoup. Thank you and welcome to Episode 134 of Finding your Way Through Therapy. I am Steve Bisson. If you haven't listened to Episode 133, it's probably very important for you to listen to it, because this is the first part of two of an interview with Dr Hayden Duggan. Dr Hayden Duggan is the founder of OnSight, which is a academy which is for residential trauma treatment and training program for public safety personnel police, fire EMTs, paramedics, sheriffs, doc. He works with everyone.
Speaker 2:I hope you enjoyed the first part of the interview. We really talked about humbleness, we talked about his he graduated from Harvard and then we talked about a lot of different things. And then you know part two. I think we're going to talk about a lot of different things, including, you know, the seven deadly sins for first responders. I hope that's a good teaser for you, and here is the rest of the interview. I'm just going to interrupt you because you know I thought that in 2023, and I know we're in 2024 when this is released a few weeks ago I got a phone call from a police officer looking for therapy, and then he's. I say hello. He's like I'm John Doe. I hear you work with first responders. I don't want you to take away my gun and I'm like is there a reason, is there a reason why I should take away your gun? And he's like no, why. And I'm like, okay, so then there won't be any reasons for me to take your gun.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't understand. I said well, you're seeking help, so you're not that far off. Like you're not far away, so that's a good sign and my goal as a provider is to always keep you in the community, safe and taking care of the community, because that's what you want. But in 2023, probably 2024 now I still get people who are like, oh, you're going to take my gun away or you're going to make me lose my job as a firefighter, paramedic, emt whatever the case may be or sheriff, or even the nurses and the ER docs, which we don't like.
Speaker 2:Let me not put those guys out of first responders.
Speaker 3:because they are first responders, I agree.
Speaker 2:They have all these fears and I'm like, no, you're calling me, that's a good sign. And we got to stop thinking that calling and getting help and this is something that you know, you don't need bars to give that information to your team is that that's not the goal. Is you go see a therapist? That means you're not that far off. You know you need the help. If you don't go somewhere and you're doing screwed up shit, Now that's a problem. And that's where that becomes more of a problem.
Speaker 2:And I tell guys like Sysm is great, Scissors is great, Going to one session with a therapist Amazing, I'm all for that. I don't perform miracles in one session, I've never done. I tell people like you know, I'm waiting on that, that whole thing where you put up my hand and go all right, you're good Next person and then maybe I'll change jobs when I can fix everyone like that. But the point I want to make is that when you talk about all this is I find that our feel, like the first responders, feel they're like oh, it's got to be fixed right away. And I always give this example also to. I gave this to one another guy. It was like when you break your arm. It's fixed. Right after you go to the hospital. It's fixed and you're like well, no, it's going to take six days, Eight weeks or whatever. Oh so I think mental health is suddenly not a science, because we're not curing you right away. It's the same exact thing.
Speaker 3:You got a great analogy.
Speaker 2:I give people that's work on that stuff and you know, being trauma informed, I just I let you talk with now. I got like now my, my, my verbal diet is coming out Bye.
Speaker 2:My biggest pet peeve about trauma informed is people like, oh, I know about trauma, Like that's not trauma informed. Oh yeah, but I know about trauma. No, that's not at all what that means. And we have too many people out there who like, oh yeah, I know about onsite, so I'm trauma informed. That's not even close to knowing about trauma, that's not even knowing anything about mental health. Passing the buck to onsite or Hayden is not the answer. You're part of the problem because you don't want to look at it. But anyway, that's my two cents. And if you're a chief or someone in higher ranks that heard me say that and you feel attacked, good, I did my job.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for letting me tell that story and to boil it down to its essence. I was a hair club client and I had a event that was very obviously upsetting to me. I had helped, making the connection to a failed rescue that you know that that fire, when we didn't save that child, related to my own feelings about not being able to save my sister. It wasn't rocket science, it's not psychoanalysis, it was a clear connection. It sent some failure. So anyway, I did, I did get trained, I did get sober.
Speaker 3:Tim and I decided to form a nonprofit many years ago. We didn't know what we were doing. We started as all volunteers and then it grew and we went out to Oklahoma City after the Murrow Building was bombed. We did go down, we decided to call it the onsite because we'll go. If you call us, we'll go. Then we went to 9-11-27 days corner of Weston Vessie. Then we happened to be at the Marathon 10A when the bombing occurred. After we got there, after the bombing, I don't want to misrepresent myself, but we there until midnight and we were in the temporary morgue, et cetera, et cetera. But why do I say that? We started a place, we created a nonprofit, we got a board of directors all with the years. We did get contracts. God bless. Boston Police, boston EMS, mass Department of Fire Services, worcester EMS, now Mass State Police, as well as the Department of Corrections.
Speaker 3:All have agreements for the onsite where the people can come free, no matter what. They also get our clinicians to come to them. This year, finally, the legislature voted to make all admissions free for Massachusetts first responders, including nurses, doctors, both pre-hospital and hospital-based services. Now everybody can come free. The rest of the services still, we get compensated for for going to them. So that's 30 years later. That's what happened to us as a result of the very early beginnings, with Tim who's the peer, and me the mental person, and to this day we're still best friends and he's the chairman of the board.
Speaker 3:But to get back to where this comes from, there are 24 CISM teams in the Commonwealth. I serve on one and we're all volunteer and we're all united somewhat loosely by the Mass Statewide Peer and CISM network, which all follows the same standard of care. All have monthly meetings, all require a clinical director and a peer director of the team. All require that peers are green certified. That's the three-day training course certified by the state, and if you are green certified you can get on a team. Clinicians included have to go through it and then you will get both CISM trained.
Speaker 3:So God bless you. You get confidentiality and you get privilege, meaning that you can't be forced to testify. As long as you are disclosing this to a green certified peer and a clinician in a debriefing, you cannot be forced to testify. So there are many different systems out there, you know. Gordon Alport said they show us where the loose truth is to pretend that one holy possesses it. There are other methods of group crisis intervention, of course. As it is right now, though, the only method that can guarantee its volunteers both confidentiality and privilege is if you're green trained and you're in that state network. So we strongly believe in the state network, and the onsite now has become really just a small. If you look at all the services as the broad edge of a funnel. You've got peers out in the street, you've got people embedded in local departments police, fire, ems who are trained.
Speaker 2:God bless for those.
Speaker 3:You've got chaplains. Mass core fire chaplains are fabulous, absolutely. They do excellent work, and you know that's the broad edge. Then you get through the debriefings, and then the one to one's and then finally you get down to the stem. That's us low frequency, high intensity resource. If somebody is really in need of it, you better have it for them, because you know very well, steve, there's that moment in time where they're willing and open to talk and if you miss it they seal right over. No, I'm good, no, I'm okay. See damn, we should have taken that person in when we could. So the onsite said 9,500 folks through over the last 30 years.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:We're not going to be advertised, we don't market. We do have a 90% return to duty rate because our people want to get back on duty. We are focusing a lot now on retirees my age and younger I'm truly old, but a lot of them retire much younger than me and families. That's our new focus and we want to build a new building for it.
Speaker 3:But right now yeah, that's where we are. We're just an extension of everything else the mass statewide peer assistance network does out in the field, the one to one. So the debriefing, the response to the crisis, to the shootings or whatever, and then we're that last piece If you need it. Not many people do you better have it for them, because we lose them, as you know we lose a firefighter, it will be 3.2 days.
Speaker 3:In the United States, despite all the training we have size up and RIC training and rescues we still lose a firefighter every 3.2 days. Every 57 hours. We lose a cop shot in the line of duty, still in both emergency services. Heart attack, lung disease and cancer are the leading causes of death and they shorten the lifespan of the average firefighter by 12 years and police now used to be 10 years. They've overtaken us. In this current era of everybody hates cops we now. They have a shorter lifespan than we do, so it's really important that the work you do every time we have a provider out there that understands what people are talking about and has the respect for them, just listens to them. We don't want clinicians that has to be a cop or have to be a firefighter or a need. That's all it's about. We want the best clinician we can get, but they have to respect and understand what these people have been through.
Speaker 3:Just shut up and listen you can't go wrong by listening and thank God you worked with cops. We've had cops who come in, come into us and say I might as well stab myself in the eye with a pencil before I'll go back to that person. That person made me feel worse when I came out than I did when I went in. So yeah, you're right, it is a specialty. Not all of us in the clinical world are training it and we need training for it. But, that's the overview of the onsite, where it fits, et cetera.
Speaker 2:You forgot one important thing, though I don't know what the stats are gonna be for 2023, but there is a first responder I think it's every 20 hours that commits and completes suicide, and I am not I'm not looking over that, because this is something that's important for people to understand that you know, you said it yourself. This is we hate cops mentality at this point, and but the stress that firefighters and police go through on a regular basis, daily basis, is something I can't even fan them and I work in this field and you need. I wanted to mention that too, because we're losing too many to suicide and I want to mention that too. You know.
Speaker 3:You're absolutely right. We lose four to six times as many police officers by their own hands every year as we lose by perpetrators. The bottom line of all of these activities is suicide prevention. You're 100% right.
Speaker 3:And I think that now of course it's trauma and addictions, because 87% of completed suicides involve alcohol. So for all guys like me, aa becomes just as much of a cause, because we lose people if the only tool in there toolbox is booze or opiates or whatever, and I understand it. I only be looking in the mirror if I didn't, but it'll kill you. So we got lots of ways to die in this gig.
Speaker 2:What did people call it? Going to church is usually what happened after a shift.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's, right, quiet practice.
Speaker 2:Quiet practice. Thank you, I couldn't remember the exact expression, but one of the things that I would say to you, that and again, maybe a more not trying to be provocative here, but one of the things that really is happening is you said to yourself they go to a therapist who is a first responder therapist and they go. I would never want to go. Like how many guys come to my couches and go? Okay, I was scared because a lot of people call themselves specialists and they are truly not.
Speaker 3:And I was afraid you'd be one of those guys. There's bucks in it. There's bucks in it now.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think that that's the problem is that people are looking at it as a financial gain. For me, it's like, really, how do we, you know? One of the things that comes to mind is that I can fill out. There's an insurance company I mentioned this in the past podcast, but I'll mention it to you now because there's an insurance company now remain nameless that took me off their first responder specialist because I wouldn't do their one hour training, which absolutely was horseshit and it wasn't even close to what I'd be able to do.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm like fuck you you actually know what you're doing.
Speaker 3:That's supposed to a one hour training course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for the frustrated people like me, how do we really help? Like therapists sometimes come to me and say gee, steve, I really want to help first responders, but I don't want to put and those are the best ones because they're like I know, I'm not trained for it, I'm like perfect, let's work. I think that one of the things that I've mentioned to people and someone mentioned it in my podcast a few months ago one of the things is we got to let some therapists in on it, and when I mean yeah, we do.
Speaker 2:We need to like I don't mean like I got to go live in the firehouse for 24, or I got to go do like seven weeks of mids or you know, for afternoon shifts or whatever with the police, but I think that we got to let in a little more the mental health providers and the social workers of this world in order for them to understand. How do we get that message across to a whole lot of people? That's my question to you.
Speaker 3:Well, that's a very good question and we need to be inclusive. And I think that you know, our sort of basic vetting is if a clinician is willing to take the CISM class, as you were, that speaks volumes. I mean, maybe they're doing it to enhance their private practices, but that's okay. If they do good treatment, that's fine. But they have to be willing. That class is brutal, as you know, and has well-placed in it, and you really get to hear what our folks are feeling. So somebody who's willing to do that, that's basically all we ask, and then you know they can be on it. We do have a list of people who have expressed an interest in, or want to to do this kind of work. You asked me in the beginning, though, before the mics came on, which I didn't address at all. You know what other issues besides the trauma are these folks focusing with? And I should first should say Massachusetts does have that list of the seven deadly sins, based on that early survey by Mitchell, which was not he doesn't say it was good science, it was paper pencil questionnaire, but he did want it through the computers and we got a good order.
Speaker 3:Exposure to line of duty death, without doubt, was the worst for any department, because we all have that fallacy of uniqueness it can happen to thee, it can happen to thee, it's not going to happen to our department. And that was the worst. And they also said it was the worst for their families, because their families get used to seeing them going out the door. They get a little bit inured to the danger and all of a sudden the worst happens and they realize, holy shit, what my loved one does for a living can really bite. We could lose them. The next interestingly, thank you for my news rank second was suicide of a working partner. And it's not like it is with civilian suicide where we often get a lot of warning.
Speaker 3:There's gestures, overtures, cross-cutting, giving away of terrorist objects. We don't get any of that. They just quietly go down some country road and hang themselves. They go around the cellar and swallow the block. They overdose with the opiates after wasting some drugs in the ambulance. It's so lethal. We have to move in so fast if we see signs and symptoms that we lose people. The third one was death of a child during the course of any emergency services operation. And why is that ranked right up there with the top three? Because we all have children or we don't. We're close to our nieces and nephews or we're close to our partners. We've been invited to Thanksgiving, maybe over, because they're young. Children aren't supposed to die, we're supposed to save them. I was supposed to save a little Kimberly Child. I said I'm shoveling her into a body bag. So that's ranked three. And of those top three, steve, we say we're stripped of our usual mechanisms, which is scowl's humor.
Speaker 3:We can make a joke out of anything and if we're not giving shit to each other, we don't like each other. You can't make a line of duty death, suicide of a cherished partner or death of a child funny. And we have our class clowns. That are great. We love them in the station. They can blunt any trauma with the joke. Watch what happens if they try to make that funny. Next, I'll be brief because we want to get to the other issues, which are the marriages and the betrayal and the administrations. But to be very brief, the next is pro longfield rescues.
Speaker 3:We have extended time on scene. You do everything. You know how you come back to your chief and say our ship didn't work, we did everything. We know how we couldn't save that person or whatever. The next and it also has to do with length of exposure that prolonged that PTSD taxi meter flag is down Sight, sound, smells. You're absorbing way too many. This is not what we call a scoop and school or a low and go. This is way too much exposure.
Speaker 3:The next is multiple casualties, the incidents. Not that we can't handle those. It doesn't have to be the marathon. It can be any time the incident exceeds your departments ability to handle it, like Lewiston, maine or whatever. But it's when you're first on the scene. It's okay if you arrive when incident command is set up. We got a command car. We got a life-flight coming in. We got the fire department washing the blood off the highway. The vehicles have been separated. The ambulance has transported those that are viable.
Speaker 3:This is when you arrive on scene and you're first. You got an offset head-on. You got a 13-year-old sitting in the medium still, as can be a little bit of cerebral spinal fluid coming down. She's gone. Then you got the mother bleeding out. Facial injuries bleed a lot. She's screaming but she's going to make it. The medics are calling on the radio. What do you got? We're just basics. They want to know how to set up the truck. It's raining, some life-flight's not going to be able to land. You got nothing and you're a little EFT firefighter arriving first on scene. People remember multiple casual incidents when they were first on the scene. Because it was a cluster. They had nothing to accept themselves and they're overwhelmed. They got through it, but they remember those. The next is anytime. You know the victim. I'm almost done. Victim known to respond.
Speaker 2:Small towns, small towns especially.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. You know the big cities that might be your district. It's a brother, police officer, firefighter, somebody's one of those trapped in an MVA, but in the small towns, you stop even referring to it. By streets, you know, you say, hey, doug, get the ambulance go down to we got a baby not breathing, call. I said is it down by where that? Where in the cul-de-sac, where the old guy was smoking and he's on oxygen parts, his parts he blew himself to suit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's where it is.
Speaker 3:We don't even refer to the street number. We do it by the incidents, because when you've been on long enough and I know you've treated some people who have there's not a street in the town you haven't been to for something. It might be a well-being check, or it could be an ambulance call, it could be a chimney fire, but that's how you remember the calls. And the last one which is why I'm grateful you put up with this long list, dave right last by first responders, as the least important was any incident where their personal safety was unusually jeopardized. That's what they share with combatants achieve the goal, not the glory. They're mission-oriented.
Speaker 3:They don't like medals they don't like to be called heroes. If another police officer says he did a great job, that's good. If a shrink like me says it it doesn't mean anything because I don't do his job. I don't carry a gun, so we can help. I don't mean that we can't help, but you know that peer support is fabulous.
Speaker 3:Now that was the list. That is the list in Massachusetts that we use for the 2014's as a uh-oh kind of if that happened, we'd better keep an eye on it. We have three kids murdered in Duxbury, uh-oh, now just let's keep an eye on that. We don't ambulance chase, we don't chase after it, but it's perfect that we have a CISM trained police officer embedded in that department. That's great.
Speaker 3:Right that as you said, ain't what's happening predominantly now? It's cumulative stress, it's marital issues, it's relationships bombing out. We roughly have a 68 to 72% divorce rate, or I should say rate of relationship breakup, not necessarily divorce. In first relationships, the first marriage is in first response. Second marriages tend to go much better, especially if both are in the field, because they just understand it.
Speaker 3:But it's a killer. It's a killer on the kids, it's a killer on the family and self-medication goes right with that. And then, on top of that, why don't we have a chief? You come in, you just lost the kid and he says, yeah, I want you to take a few minutes and get back out there. I've got another call for you. Um, excuse me this, this gal is toast. This guy's got the thousand miles to tear, he's someplace else. You don't want him answering that call. He's not emotionally fit. So, yeah, what we call administrative betrayal.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately and I'm not saying I think I made it clear definitely not all chiefs or all deputies or all captains. We have some that are stars. They never forgot where they came from, and I could give you names, which I can't, but. But then we have a lot that when they get up where the air is thin. They got stars and bars and stripes. They forgot where they came from. They become instant assholes and they do harm. They hurt people and it's not. It's not hard to hurt our people if you tell them that they're not doing a good job or they didn't do enough. You know.
Speaker 3:If you tell them that they fucked up operation or they need to go back for retraining and this or that. Yeah, okay, I got that. You tell them like you didn't care enough, you're not doing enough, you're not doing your job. That kills us, because that's all we have is our identity as a first responder. The rescue personality rescues. It doesn't lose people. So, yeah, that's a bit. You're absolutely right. Relationship problems, addiction problems, administrative betrayal are just as serious as any critical instance. In fact, they are critical instances.
Speaker 2:You know this is a. We had a private conversation prior to this and it's something that I tell people. I said you know, if you really want to know how great your department is and name police or fire and I'm not naming names and I'm not pointing out any departments the chief that's going to go. Hey, you know what, got a few phone numbers and we'll call them. Call them, but that would be helpful. That's trauma-informed, that's like hey, look, we thought about it.
Speaker 2:We see that you're disturbed or someone is like my personal favorite is the best departments that I've ever seen are the chiefs. There's a small town where my kids go to school, in Holtdale here, and I love, once in a while, the chief of police and the chief of fire or right in the community maybe doing the directions or just talking at the school or like just doing those little things, and I'm like that's the chiefs that I want. And I'm pointing out hey, mark Tom, you don't need to thank me for anything. I'm not fucking doing this or that. I'm doing this because I truly believe it is that for me. That's what embodies what's missing.
Speaker 2:When you're in a town like Worcester, you're in Lawrence, you're in Boston, I get that the chief may not be able to be as Anzahan because it's such a big district. But if you're, like I say, like under 25,000, you got to catch the chief at the school once in a while and catch the chief or the deputy, or the sergeants or captains for those who have them just doing little things in the community. And to me what that says is I haven't forgotten where I got these bars and that's when I start on the bottom. But that's my two cents. I'm just a mental health counselor and I'm not just.
Speaker 3:No, you save lives and careers when you intervene like that and they'll tell you that. The guy that worked with me absolutely saved my life, and he's part of why I got sober. I was in the toilet, marriage down the tubes, living by myself in a one-room apartment. Sober though at least I got sober. I had to start over, and that strength absolutely saved me. No question about it. Along with CISM, too, no question about it, and I think what I tell people, too, is.
Speaker 2:They ask me what's the best. Why are the clients? You mentioned something earlier which is extremely key and for my colleagues in my field, whether it's social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, mental LMHCs, whatever you want to call me, I can't forget about my buddies at the KDAC, the Certified Alcohol and Drug Counsel. Absolutely Can't forget my buddies there too. But they ask me what's the most effective thing? I said, whenever you get a call from a first responder, return the phone call within a 48-hour period. That's true, and if you don't, you have fucking lost them. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3:And they say how do you?
Speaker 2:know that I said I'll 20-something years of working with this stuff. You know the guy who I call right back. Most of them they go oh, I didn't think you'd call back, I'm sorry to disappoint you guys and you always laugh because they're like oh, no, it's just that. And at the end of the day, it's not you using the vernacular, but you need to know what they go through. If you don't know what roll call is, then don't say you're an expert. If you don't know what it is to be around the table after a hard call at a station, get informed, ask some guys, but don't like oh, yeah, I know what that means. I'm like no, that means a little more than what you think. And knowing that that's there and that thousand mile stare, people are like oh, that's typically trauma and I'm like it could be trauma.
Speaker 2:But your intervention may keep it as a stress versus just that of trauma. And it may not even be about like to help people. It's not about the dog on the side of the road. It's about blankety blank from the past. That's not even dead. It was just a loss of a relationship. As a first responder, you go through so many things that you start melting these dots together and you go. I don't know how they get there. But I say, if you logically listen to them, you'll know exactly how they get there, Exactly.
Speaker 3:And that's. You know, when you mention latex, we have four at the onsite and they're absolutely fabulous. I mean I'm in AA and they're all up to date on substance abuse and alcohol abuse and IM. So we're looking for that next wave, you know, the next generation that's coming along. Like you said, we want both peers and clinicians to get involved in this, get intrigued by it, to want to do it. Our place, absolutely our goal, is our staff. Without our staff we wouldn't have any program. They are fabulous.
Speaker 3:Most of them not all, but most have lived through it and have been first responders and I know you know some of them and then went on to get their degrees and now do trauma counseling and trauma work with us. But it's a powerful program. It's not for everybody. It is a hardcore trauma approach and when they come in on Monday you know they got to meet and greet and meet each other. A little bit of urine, urinary Olympics, you know who's done what and where have you been. And then they get right away. They get a great class on trauma in the brain by Collina, who's our clinical coordinator, and she's an Air Force professor. She grew up in the military and she connects with them instantly and it's in layman's terms. They understand the impact of trauma and why it affected them.
Speaker 3:Then in the afternoon they got Charlie Popp, who's head of the whole CI7 network across the state, along with Jimi Leary. Charlie's the fire side, jimi's the police side. Charlie goes through the seven deadly sins. We did Like, okay, just you and me. I know you think this shit doesn't bother you and I'm well, you don't think. That's why you're here. You're here because of the marriage. But if I can just ask, have you been exposed to? And you see the head start to nod.
Speaker 3:And then we ask them just to write down just a little bit by the time they finish that they're toasts and that's just the first day. Second day, right out of the box, got to look in the eye of the tiger. You pick your index incident. Whatever you want to talk about, that's up to you and as a group, the staff debriefs them. They used to have a different incident. In the morning they get yoga to burn off some of that stress from a yoga instructor who only works with first responders. So she's great first responders in the military.
Speaker 1:But the rest of the day.
Speaker 3:Just tell the story. We're not going to cycle, babble it, we're not going to interpret it, just get it out like oils through the surface of water and you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, but we kind of encourage you to. We don't retraumatize people, but usually by the third day we got them because everybody else is doing it. You get that peer pressure.
Speaker 2:And then I'll. I'm just gonna stop you. I've got why you have shared this with you Cause I thought I think you would appreciate this more than anybody else. There's a fellow therapist in mind who says you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That's true, but you can make him fucking thirsty to drink that goddamn water. That's exactly right, and that's what you're doing. So I go ahead. I just had to, right.
Speaker 3:We try to make them thirsty to get at the trough for sure Right, and everybody else is, you know, sharing the worst shit you can imagine.
Speaker 3:And then we get to in the afternoon on Wednesday. The old man is here and after they've done the emotional bloodletting, then it's my job on Wednesday and I have three people helping me who are fabulous and they're all experienced trauma counselors and some are ex first responders ex cops, have been through their own issued incidents, whatever times to talk about. Okay. So what did this do to you? You got it out, did a great job yesterday. Oil to the surface of water, beginning middle and what this thing was like to you. We got it. What did it do for you? And they give their thoughts about it afterwards, some of the worst images.
Speaker 3:And then we say, okay, does this relate to anything? Just the theme, not the details of the incident. But when my strength did that for me, the theme was failed rescue and Kimberly Jolly related to something that I didn't succeed in doing when I was eight years old. We're not trying to do psycho analysis, it just I can't tell you the belief it was to me to say, okay, I'm not nuts. There's well, I'm not any less, no more nuts than anybody else doing this stuff. But there's a reason why that child incident and the loss of that child in that building fucked me up to a fairly well. So that's Wednesday. We got a great AAD meeting in the evening. Only for those who wish pretty walkers. It's a badge meeting All people who are in the job. Not that we're some special brand of alcoholics, dave.
Speaker 3:We're asked to go through just badge meetings. Sometimes you can go to a civilian meeting and there's a 19 year old kid next to you who's newly sober, just got just kick heroin and he says something that just blows your socks off. It's got so much genuineness to it. But this is a meeting just for people with a badge, because they don't always want to be sitting next to somebody. They just cuffed and stuffed the night before or they intubated on the way to the hospital and then Thursday, almost done is all one to one. We would do the rapid eye movement stuff, as you know, and some other eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, which is a great tool for trauma.
Speaker 3:Thank you sir, and we also do TFT, Thought Fuel Therapy. Oh yes, I had been training it, but I don't. I'm not the best at it. No, we have Larry Brown, who's an ex-Boston cop.
Speaker 2:Oh, you got a right. I hate to say that. Yeah, he's fabulous. I heard great things about Larry too.
Speaker 3:He's unbelievable, but he's one of the best substance abuse counselors we have. He connects with people. We have IFS, internal Family Systems Valerie, my wife, who's the boss of the agency. She does that. She's trained it all free, so she's pretty unbeatable. And that's Thursday, really hard work. In the afternoon you get acupuncture and you get chair massage if you so wish for my paramedic who's fabulous at it. And then Friday we just can't open up anything new. I've made that mistake. It's a disaster.
Speaker 3:There's a reason why it's so slow. It is five days and it's a phased process and not everybody can do that. I get that, but if you are willing to really clean out the wound, friday we've got to put it back together. Friday's the road back and you write yourself a letter which we mailed to you six weeks later. Dear Hayden, this is what I learned at happy camp. The guys from Oklahoma City called us happy camp happy camp.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 3:Y'all ride is, ride is hard, but you don't put us away wet. That's a farming especially.
Speaker 2:I love it, I love it, I love it.
Speaker 3:And six weeks later is about the length of, you know, a new year's resolution. You got this letter that says oh, I promise to go to the gym three times a week, I promise to do a date night with my wife, I promise I spend more time with my kids. Huh, what happened to all that? Anyway, that's, that's it, my friend. We have a discharge plan that is kind of detailed. That was is better than anything I did at any other agency. It covers eight major areas. They all do it together and by that time you can't bullshit or bullshit. They've all gotten to know each other. They give each. They won't let each other get away with anything. But you know Brian, our director of the residential services, who's a retired whole firefighter and Navy vet. All week long he's making sure that the environment is conducive to their feeling of privacy and safety. He cooks kick-ass meals. He does do anger management with them and he's a great AA counselor. So Brian's kind of the rock of the place in terms of the life space, what they, where they live.
Speaker 3:A lot of people joke with us and tell us you know, the real program starts when all you staff get the hell out of here after dinner, when we're with each other. And lastly, the thing they all fill out an evaluation of us. When they leave, it's anonymous, but someone on watch put their names to it. What do you think they write as the best feature? This is over 30 years, over and over, because we do research on our own program. They write one thing as the most powerful thing for the whole program. We all looked at the first set of data. You know. Look at what's the DMDR, what's it the debriefings, what's it AA? What's it the health and wellness stuff? What's it the food? No, it was peer support. Now that's humbling.
Speaker 3:I don't understand why other group or other agencies that work with first responders don't get that joke. Of course what you do is important. Of course what I do is important. We're not bumps on a log, but it's a peer clinical alliance. You don't have trained peers doing that. You're going to get minimal impact and most of the other programs and I respect them. Do you respect them? Do you know we work a lot together. We cross your firm. You know some of them. Some of them are hospital based. Sorry, vermont, if they're not peer based and clinically guided, it just doesn't have the same impact.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you, hayden, what I've said in this podcast and when people ask me, I've been asked, as a therapist, what's the best therapy out there. And I always respond with the same exact thing the therapeutic alliance. If you get along with your therapist or the person who's talking to you, they can do CBT, ifs, they can do DBT, they can do psychoanalytic. It don't matter what they do, but if you have that therapeutic alliance, it will work out great.
Speaker 3:Right, and without that you got nothing, as I say.
Speaker 2:And then at the end of the day, I tell people like we're all humans who want to connect to each other, right? So if you get a good therapeutic alliance, the next best thing is to have a community of like people. They don't have to be perfectly like you, they just have to be like you. And having that like you know, I joke around that the reason why my type of therapy that I do gets along well with a buddy of mine who is a police officer is that we think kind of the same, like get off your fucking ass and do shit. And we don't always say it in those words, and I think that that's what makes there's days where I got to look at myself in the mirror and am I doing this? No, this is what works for me and that's that alliance with a friend. And maybe that's why I work well with first responders in general, because for me it's like you're right, all this is bad shit and I agree with you. What are we going to do to get out of this shit? And I'm not going to let you sit there, exactly, and I think that for me, at the end of the day, learning to teach people about the community, the therapeutic alliance.
Speaker 2:I like that. You have acupuncture yoga and one of the things that I've told people is that it doesn't matter what you do as activity and if you don't like yoga, that's fine. Then no breathing exercise. You don't like that, go do Pilates. You don't like that, go through a spin class. I don't give a crap what you do, but you got to move. You're not going to get better mentally by not moving.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I feel like I took over but I'm looking at the time you didn't take over at all.
Speaker 3:No, that was a great point. Just to add to it, we didn't used to have that Right, because we work with combat, but we have a weekend every six weeks of folks that are in emergency services, but they also went through the military. They're kind of that's another duly diagnosed group, and so they came up. One of the earlier groups we started this in 2005, the tip of the spear. One of the early groups around 2009-2010 they came to. So you guys, this is a great weekend, we've enjoyed it. You guys doing a yoga? Oh no, we don't do that shit.
Speaker 1:Oh, did you have any acupuncture?
Speaker 3:No, we didn't do that. Did you do any like chair massage or something like that? Because the body tenses? Up during combat and all that stuff. No, we don't do that. This is a Marine. He looked at me, said well, I got to tell you something. We have that at the VA and somehow I think if it's good enough for the US Marines, it probably should be good enough. The on-site academy I said oh, oh shit. So now we have all those modalities because they're important, they're part of wellness.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and in my mil we can talk about like we're running out of time. I just realized that we've been talking all this time. No, no, why are you sorry? This is great, but you know I want to thank you and if you want to go talk about the military, I'd have another hour in me of just military stuff. Because, even though it's similar to the first responders. There are differences.
Speaker 3:That would be an honor. I'd be very happy to do that on behalf of those folks.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, we went over an hour, almost an hour and a half, and I'm going to split this up in two interviews because I think that people will absorb it significantly better. But, as you know, I'm not going to say it's an honor, because I know that makes you blush. I want to thank you for everything you've done. I thank you for your service. I thank you for you know, as a Canadian, thank you for being there for the firefighters who went through hell and back in the last six months to a year, which people tend to forget.
Speaker 2:They complain about their, their, their clouds here and I go like, yeah, that's, you don't understand how big these things are. You have no, you can't fan them in. But anyway, thank you for everything you've done and I appreciate that you thank me for what I do One day, hidden. Not only am I going to, we're going to probably try to do this on the military a little bit at least.
Speaker 2:I'd love to go to on-site and see if I'd be an honor, but I'll never impose myself because I know some guys want their privacy and I respect that 100%.
Speaker 3:We love to have you Friday afternoons, as everyone generally do the visits. So, as they say, swine in the bienvenue, mon ami.
Speaker 2:Yes, I will thank you up on that offer, but I just want to thank you so much and we'll definitely get back together soon.
Speaker 3:No, thank you for the opportunity Very important, but I appreciate it. Have a great day, steve. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, this concludes episode 134 of Finding your Way Through Therapy. Dr Hayden Duggan, thank you, thank you, thank you Probably one of the most honest goodness supportive, and we talked about mental health, we talked about first responders my two of my greatest passions through for the last two episodes and I hope you guys enjoyed it. But episode 135 is also going to be very interesting because it will be with Malka Shah. Malka Shah is going to talk a little bit about her experience, also on 9-11, which I know that Dr Hayden Duggan talked about, but we're also going to talk about the Kesher Shalom projects and a little bit of anti-Semitism stuff, and I hope you join me then.
Speaker 1:This number is available in the United States.