What if I told you that allowing yourself to be more vulnerable is the key to long-term mental health in your 911 career?

To be clear: I fully realize what I’m suggesting and to whom I am talking.

We are literally taught to compartmentalize and essentially deny how we feel to master the difficulties of the job that we do.

Dispatchers are often emotionally obstructed by a strong suit of Teflon-like “sensitivity armor” that, while frequently necessary, tends to completely circumvent the normal human emotional experience to the point that actually dealing with feelings can seem flat-out illogical.

Put another way: we become more Spock and less Kirk.

I’m not suggesting that you openly embrace the type of naked vulnerability that has you plaintively weeping along with callers or demanding that police officers who are ill-mannered on the radio call in so that you can share how they’ve upset you.

Elements of the job that require us to construct an impenetrable “compassion barricade” in order to best remain calm, efficient and effective are legit.

Trust me, I get it – but therein lies the rub.

As professionals who measure our success by the manner in which we pilot others through various stages of anguish, we slowly, subtly (and necessarily) learn to curtail the way we feel while doing so – but like so many other skills we learn on the dispatch floor — from the way we listen to the way we eat – these learned traits don’t just revert to the way they used to be once we leave the comm center after shift — they follow us home and begin to define the way we always see and react to the world around us.

Minimizing the way we feel and process emotions, initially a difficult exercise, ultimately takes hold. We often literally, over time, stop feeling and processing at all.

Fact: suppressing or failing to process emotions over the long haul can be injurious to mental health – but minus an actionable warning sign, such as chest pains foreshadowing a heart attack, the damage is done over an extended period, behind the scenes, often without our noticing them.

It’s more a process of erosion which tends to be slow, subtle and difficult to see or feel in real time. The result can be a gradual loss of happiness, a slow change in personality and attitude or an inability to derive joy from the things we used to love. Sometimes, it’s all of these.

Which brings us back to where we began: What if I told you that allowing yourself to be more vulnerable is the key to long-term mental health in your 911 career?

It starts and stops with being truthful with yourself about how you feel – or in some cases, why you don’t.

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable means taking the time to get emotionally introspective. It means asking yourself – and honestly answering – questions like these:

• Am I doink ok?
• Do I have fulfilling relationships?
• Do I experience joy in my life?
• Am I happy?

The inclination to immediately scoff at such an exercise is the reflexive auto-response of a public safety first responder – but that knee-jerk reaction doesn’t make asking and answering these questions any less valid.

You deserve a ‘yes’ answer to each. Anything less threatens to compromise mental health over the long term.

Teflon armor aside, answering these questions in the affirmative should continue to be our overarching objective:

• No matter how much our work selves have come to inform who we are at home
• No matter how selfish it may feel to engage in self-care
• No matter how illogical experiencing and processing emotions has come to seem

Make no mistake — working in 911 can be fulfilling and affirming — but it can also extract a heavy emotional toll when we aren’t paying attention.

It’s time to start paying attention.

Allow for some vulnerability and honesty about who you are and who you may have become over time.

Dare to open yourself up again, even when it seems antithetical to who you think you are expected to be.

It’s great to be skilled at a job that so few can do well — but not at the expense of the person that you have always been and deserve to remain.

Being vulnerable means dropping your guard and letting yourself feel. It isn’t remotely selfish to do so.

Protecting others as a career doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Protecting yourself should always be an equally important part of the equation.

It’s time for a little more Kirk and a little less Spock.

About Kris Inman:

Kris Inman is the Director of Program Development for The Healthy Dispatcher. A 30-year veteran of 9-1-1, Kris retired in July 2023 as Director of Springfield Greene County 9-1-1 in Springfield, MO. An awarded speaker and instructor, Kris has delivered standout educational sessions, keynotes, motivational talks and yoga instruction to dispatchers across the country. He is also a long-time college adjunct instructor, teaching courses in communication and public safety leadership. Kris holds a Master of Arts in Communication and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Media from Missouri State University. He is also a registered yoga instructor.