Hypervigilance

Another beautiful autumn is slowly introducing its way over the earth. We enjoy the crisp clear moons showing the way through the early darkness of night. It’s an intriguing season signifying the dualities of life. Autumn is the season, which assures us that summer won’t last forever despite our denials that come into play near the end of August. Autumn also provides us with a speculator transition. This season reminds me that the winter I love will also bring ice storms, icy roads and poor driving conditions.

It always reminds me of a story shared by a firefighter. A senior firefighter, who was a mover and shaker when it came to involving the families of firefighters, shared this story with us. His son’s behavior was beginning to be a problem at home and at school. The parents and the teachers met and were not able to determine the source of the problem, time passed, things got better. The following year similar problems surfaced and again they were unclear regarding the source. Then one day while watching televisions together, with the story of a winter fire and the firefighters responding to it, the young lad broke down and shared that every winter he feared his Dad might fall from the roof of an icy building. His Dad said that he had no idea that this was the source of his son’s seasonal stress.

I share this story as it reminds me that as parents we can be unaware of the impact of our work and our lives on our children. We strive to protect them and keep them safe. For emergency responders who are also parents, there is a duality of roles. Roles that serve to protect the public as well as our own families, at times become so busy that we miss the impact on our children.

Generally children are proud and excited when their parents are also firefighters and the issues that are raised here are not to negate that. Regardless of the chosen profession we know lifestyle choices effect all family members. Children of nurses and doctors have been expected to know what to do in the playground when someone gets hurt. Even adults have occasionally joined in the inappropriate expectation. Children of counselors and police have been expected to be peacemakers. We live in a society where stereotyping is firmly entrenched. This was never clearer to me than when I was walking down the street with a friend whose husband happened to be a dentist, we met another women who upon greeting us promptly opened her mouth wide to show my friend a problem tooth. This stereotyping falls down to our children as well, One of the gifts that we can give our children is the freedom to talk about the things that may be impacting or stressful to them and assist them in finding their own ways to cope with various situations.

Hypervigilance

This is one of the most common reactions to a traumatic event. Hypervigilance is A reaction that may manifest itself in regards to one’s own behavior but often it envelops the whole family. A common reaction is to become over protective of one’s children. At the end of a debriefing we always provide information both verbally and written. At the top of the list is hypervigilance. Families that have been involved in pre incident awareness generally have responders going home to those who have already received this information. Too often that is not the case. Therefore we usually remind parents that if they intend to go home and lock up their son or daughter’s bike and plan on driving them to school for the next while they might also want to tell them that they really are okay. I often tell people to tell their kids that it is a normal reaction to an abnormal event and its called hypervigilance. To let them know they aren’t crazy and it probably won’t last too long.

It’s really important to let kids know what’s going on in an age appropriate manner. Kids need to know their parents are okay. If children think mom or dad has lost it and are fearful that they have fallen apart then that belief will effect them directly. In the case of the young lad we discussed earlier he had internalized fear about his Dad. This may have happen through a number of ways.

The value of including partners in pre incident awareness is that when there is a traumatic incident there is a foundation on which to build. Including partners enables spontaneous networks to develop education to be received and integration in a non-stressful environment. Professional contacts and resources can be shared.

Often hyper vigilance is seen as a behavioral reaction to posttraumatic stress. As a behavior it is similar to not being able to sleep or having the shakes. There is another way to understand hyper vigilance that may be more helpful. First trauma results in intrusions [compulsive thinking about the events, unwelcome dreams etc]. In turn we try to stop these reactions with strategies that typically don’t work [staying busy, drugs, etc]. This energy in turn results in hyper [heightened] and hypo [lowered] reactions often accompanied by anxieties such as fear. In some ways hyper vigilance is another effort to regain control by taking control through extremes in awareness and watchfulness. Some hyper vigilance is good like ensuring we always wear a helmet or always put on a seat belt but that is really vigilance. Hyper vigilance is another expression of fear that results from trauma and the fear of repetition or that it might effect someone close to us. For many families if Dad of Mom is hyper vigilance and they are unaware of the cause of the nature of this shift in behavior it becomes another cause of friction and misunderstanding and often the people who are the objects of this shift in behavior internalize that they must be the cause of it.