What Keeps You Alive Might Kill Your Relationships

By: Tracy Hejmanowski Ph. D.

You're not an asshole and they aren't pains in the ass.

Chances are you take pride in what you do, how you do it, and how it's regarded by others. After all, your professional persona as a firefighter is what you hang your helmet on at the end of the day. But what about your family persona? Do you take the same amount of pride in that?

Is your family persona as squared away as your professional one?

Just as you conduct preventive checks on your turn-out gear, you should conduct an internal check-up – essentially a software reboot – to make transitioning between work and home smoother for everyone. It sounds easy, but is more complicated than you might think.

As a firefighter, depersonalizing and compartmentalizing allows you to wall off emotion in order to remain mentally and physically competent. It allows you to think in go or no-go ways, to be closed off and disengaged from everything other than what simply needs to get done. You are an excellent “human doing” – it’s the “human being” that may need improvement.

You might be kick-ass at work but your loved ones may feel controlled, insignificant, mistrusted, excluded from problem-solving, embarrassed, undervalued, ineffective, unwanted, incompetent, and unable to share or garner sympathy. Why?

Your work strengths can kill intimacy and likeability.

Because the very skills that make you so good at your job might just kill intimacy and, most importantly, likeability. When that happens, there’s a tendency to simply double down on work commitments, which keeps the cycle going. Loved ones walk on eggshells, sadly accept coming second and lower their expectations. They plan around rather than with you, make excuses, worry, and feel frustrated or resentful that others get the best version of you.

Work gets everything your family craves.

Work gets all the qualities your family members – especially your kids – crave: availability, reliability, predictability, consistency, and stability. Instead, they get the leftovers: a gassed-out you who is all out of F’s. So they wait and try to figure out how to interpret you, studying your exhaustion, frustration, confusion, isolation, and avoidance –all in hopes of taking care of you.

It's not easy to flip between two worlds. At work, you cope with others’ pain, suffering, trauma, tragedy, and transgression. At home, you deal with hectic family schedules, complexity, struggle, and helplessness. You may feel emotionally heavy and confused and so might your loved ones. You may not know where the heaviness comes from and your family

It’s not easy to carry around a hardened heart, muddled mind, restless body, and unsettled soul. And it can be damn-near impossible to sort through and talk about it, but there are ways to maintain strong connections with loved ones. At the end of a call, a shift, or even your career, those who have been waiting in the wings, eager to nurture you, will still be there. No one wants to blow up or burn down what and who they value most in life.

Strengthening your connections with family requires attention and effort.

Hot wash at home

Find a way to share the impact of calls without talking about the specifics. When you think your family doesn’t “get it,” you’re right. They can’t, if you don’t share anything and they won’t if you pretend that nothing has an impact.

Share the category of your exposures (e.g., sorrow about tragedy, anger about transgression, anxiety about threat, confusion about helplessness) and while you won’t have to relive details with your loved ones, they might begin to understand how to buffer your stress for the rest of the day. Walking into the house and saying it was a “tragic” or “sorrowful” day might be enough to let your loved one know you need a minute to regroup. Develop this shorthand so your decompression and downloading can be brief and useful.

Notice how the issues above might reveal a theme for you.

Such as horror, fear, preventability, absurdity, injustice or inhumanity and how full each theme-silo has become over the course of your career. That will impact how patient and tolerant you are.

No one knows which call will be a tipping point, the final straw, or a trigger. Knowing when your cup is overfull serves as a security program for your mental and emotional software. When you don’t “defrag your hard drive,” you can’t regroup your stressors and create space for more. It’s then that your relationships slow down, freeze up, or crash.

Pay attention to the shift that's necessary between work and home.

Realize that you may often be neither “on” or “off” duty, but instead “between.” Leftover firehouse thinking and behavior doesn’t usually work at home. Catastrophizing, making assumptions, having rigid thoughts, and lacking forgiveness for others’ naivete, laziness, ignorance, or slow pace won’t be appreciated by the ones you need most. The goalposts of your experience and exposure as a firefighter are very wide – you’ve seen it all – and your perspective may be skewed in a way that can be unrelatable for those closest to you. You’re not an asshole and they aren’t pains in the ass. There can be a lack of communication but if you start paying attention to your files, your inventory and your glitches, you can recover from the damage before it’s catastrophic.

Assess whether you are as stellar and commendable at home as you are at work.

This will require a metric ton of humility to get an accurate answer. It takes a lot to build up and maintain your home front ethic and ethos, especially when you’re also bearing the burden of work. Do you put as much effort into your loved ones as you do your performance and promotions? Are you the best version of yourself despite being stressed? Do you sometimes ask for space, but don’t always remember to re-engage? Do you feel entitled to feel and behave as you do because your job is more stressful than others? Are you as calm under pressure at home as you are at work?

GETTING STARTED: Why not show this article to your loved ones and see what they think?

Most people agree that relationships take effort – they can’t simply exist on auto-pilot but that effort can seem exhausting when you’re already shouldering so much at the firehall. By understanding how the nature of work influences outcomes at home and by putting mechanisms into place to stay in prevention mode, you can ensure that your relationships grow with greater harmony and humanity. Look inside, make changes, assess outcomes and reap the rewards. You and your loved ones deserve it.