Poor boundaries and personal issues are the biggest risk factors in my field placement through the social work program. I work with incarcerated individuals from the South Bend Community Re-Entry Center, a work-release program that houses over 200 inmates who work in the community. Unity Gardens employs two Re-Entry members full-time whom I work closely with and hosts dozens of volunteers from the center on a nearly weekly basis. Over my time at Unity Gardens I have observed several similarities between corrections inmates and people I used to work with in the fire department... and in myself. Some of these traits are very useful in the game of life.
I have found that incarcerated people from the center tend to be very observant, hard-working, driven, passionate, witty, and gut-wrenchingly funny. They can also be very impatient. I watch those guys brainstorm problems like we would on the fireground and carry those plans out quickly and efficiently. They tend to be impatient with people who move slower or are less organized. I have also noticed a crossover between the fire department and the prison system regarding boundaries. I often notice the guys employed with the garden from the Re-Entry Center not noticing how close they get to other people physically. This statement seems paradoxical regarding them being observant. They are very observant of others, less of themselves.
I noticed this a great deal in the fire department. It was our job to push other people's boundaries and to observe them with a watchful eye. Just not our own. We went into houses without permission, took unconscious people from their homes without permission (exercising implied consent), and did a lot of things because we thought or knew they had to be done. It adds a layer of perspective when I tell the joke "Do you know why the mafia exists? So the government can look at its reflection in the mirror."
When I was picking my son up from his friend's house the other day, I had to stymie an urge to just walk in when the kid's sister opened the door a little bit and asked "Are you looking for someone?" I was in my own little world and when she opened the door, perhaps some familiarity of a time when I barged my way into a house on an overdose call or something came to the surface and I felt compelled to proceed. I didn't do it, but that experience messed me up a little bit. Had I done what my brain suggested, I would have embarrassed my son at best and probably looked like the most inconsiderate jerk for walking into someone's house without known pretense.
I'm aware of some of these boundaries I lack. I believe that is what drew me to clinical work and if I am truly worth my salt, perhaps my contribution finds its teeth there. I ask difficult questions because I ignore a lot of social boundaries that civil society suggests we shouldn't ask one another. The way I use my tongue has developed over the years and I believe I have good "checks" that anchor the situation to how I choose to speak. The puzzle remains out of sorts though. I have so many gaps in my memory from the past 15 years... places I was, calls I went on... the things I saw. I just don't remember a lot of it. It doesn't necessarily pain me, I just don't remember. A lot of context occurred during my career in the fire service. I still have so much to unpack and I find that when I brush those lost memories aside, some of them have come back in ways that do not serve me or the people around me.
I have also noticed negative patterns in myself from my time there and from my life before. The way I respond to negative feedback, fear, and the gravity I place on myself for making mistakes (everything was stressed as life and death there, everything we did). I don't dream and haven't substantively in years. Loud noises bother me that used to not. And I get in my own way and create distractions from my work, almost like I'm recreating the calls that would interrupt me every twenty minutes from an assignment or project.
One of the last things I said to people at the fire department when they would press me as to why I was leaving was this: "I can't be with you while I'm here with you." And now that I'm not there, I'm learning which habits make me more efficient with the rest of the world and which ones must be left with my past. If a woman builds a boat to cross the river, would she carry it with her once she makes it to shore on the other side? Exactly.
Now I work with guys who remind me so much of the people I used to know and love and spend my days with. I feel a sense of kinship and brotherhood with these men. And therein lies the conflict. I am not a firefighter anymore. I left that boat at its shore. And I am not incarcerated, either. Now I find myself straddling two paths with one foot in my torrential past and another as the clinician who must see beyond my own subjective experience. To not remain cognizant of my position in this agency and with these gentlemen would be to negate what I said to the firefighters when I left.
I didn't say that I couldn't be with them though. I said I couldn't remain with them in the rampant cycle of Samsara1 that work and the environment I was in bore on my soul and on my body. I left so I could learn how to be with them in ways that did more than trauma-bonded. I already did that part... In the 2006 film Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone's iconic character offers this advice to his adult son. "If you stay in a place long enough, you become that place." When I moved to this town I didn't know anyone except firemen. That's who I raised my kids with here, went out with, and saw the world through. For as wide of an aperture as that is in the business of being observant, it is narrow in its reach and integration with regular people who are largely sheltered from the painful and traumatic realities of life.
I have told my friends who have also departed from the fire department that it is our obligation to other human beings to learn how to talk about what happened there. People need that framing to recontextualize their own lives sometimes. When someone asks us about that job "Did you like it?" it's so easy to take the low-hanging fruit and make a joke that obfuscates that reality or just simply lie about it. To provide context is the challenge and the hard work. Our approach is often poorly received and if we can look past our own feelings about rejection, abandonment, fear, and personal pain, perhaps we can be of service to people after that work has finished. Maybe just once. Maybe that is why it is so important to do this work and learn how to share my experiences or to simply be present to someone else's.
As I am finding from working with incarcerated human beings, there are many crossovers between the people from my old life and my new therefore a risk of countertransference. I see the people I used to work with in the faces and personalities of the people I am with now. They are not them, though. And I am not there. I am here now. I often reorient myself with the mantra
"That was then, this is now."
I will repeat this in my head until I am anchored back into the present reality that my mind and the 10,000 things that emanate attempt to pull me from. My reflections through writing have been my greatest asset as those ideas and thoughts are then worked through with the support structures in my own life, sharing one experience to the next. One thing that work showed me for sure is that this life is so very interesting. So many ways it can go. If our lives were a movie, would you watch it? What arcs or plot twists would it include? Maybe the best part is just getting started. What a wild ride.
Buddhists conceive of the world as a suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end, known as samsara. Beings are driven from life to life in this system by karma, which is activated by their good or ill actions committed in this life as well as previous lives. Liberation from samsara is the raison d’être of Buddhism, and thus, in a sense, every resource in the Oxford Bibliographies Online for Buddhism could be said to relate to this entry. In the earliest conceptions, samsara seems to have had five distinct realms: hells, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, and heavens. The latter realm eventually split into the two realms of the devas and the asuras to form the six-realm scheme common to all contemporary forms of Buddhism. Of these realms, the human realm naturally receives the lion’s share of attention in traditional commentaries on Buddhist practice, while the hellish, heavenly, and hungry ghost realms are particularly important in the literary, moral, and ritual spheres of Buddhist activity. Saṃsāra is contrasted with nirvana, the state or realm of peace that lies beyond suffering, ignorance, and rebirth.
-Oxford Bibliographies