Welcome to Resilience Development in Action with Steve Bisson.

This is the podcast dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, fire,

EMS, dispatchers, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their teams.

Let's get started.

Okay. their teams. Let's get started. And we're back. And Emma Irwin, I got to get your name, right, on resilience development

and action. We're talking about suicide. We're talking about we were just having a conversation about finding someone who was hanging. It was just known as a death. And suddenly you show up as a hanging with young kids and you never cry on scene. And it sounds crazy, but that was difficult for you and whatever. Like that's the issue I had, yeah. Okay, so let me start off.

And this goes not just for you. I'm talking to the audience, too. Because a lot of them are first responders, but I'm going to look you in the eye. Of course, it's not fucking crazy. You just saw someone who died and on their own in front of their fucking kids. Sorry. And I would say that to someone else. Yeah, I would say that to someone else. It's a normal response.

It's a normal response to an abnormal situation.

And yes, civilians may not like would be, I get that they would be really, because they're not used to that stuff. In your particular case, it's something that you deal, but it's an abnormal situation. One of the things that people do is like, oh, it's an abnormal situation I reacted normally to, therefore I'm crazy. It makes no sense to me what's so other. I think it's because in our roles, there's a frontline work at firemen, police, paramedic, whatever you are, I think you're, you sort of have this, what's the word I'm looking for you don't expect to react that way you're

expected to deal with it and to manage it and to be calm and to be calm for everyone else on

scene and I think I wasn't embarrassed it wasn't that I was embarrassed about crying because I know

that I'm allowed to get upset about things I think it was the fact that I got emotional so suddenly,

like I didn't have time to leave the room. I was in front of people and I wasn't expecting

the like overwhelming emotion. And I only found out that this was the cause of, I'll tell you

some of my symptoms I had after, but I only found out during therapy, I had EDMR therapy,

which is the sort of rapid eye movement therapy.

The MDR is something I do myself, so I know exactly what it is.

Yeah, so I had that, and I only needed one or two sessions because it was that one episode.

It wasn't lifelong trauma.

Not that I want you to have one, but so lucky it was just one.

Yeah, I only had a couple of sessions, and we addressed the, so after this event,

for a couple of weeks, I was sort of okay.

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