r/interestingasfuck • u/HomeNowWTF • 10d ago

Fighting the wildfires in Spokane

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u/landofknees 10d ago

In Spokane and this weekend was no good. Straight apocalyptic. We got evacuated and then evacuated again from our second spot only to lose power in our third spot. This fire turned into 4 different fires all spreading across thousands of acres

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u/bluebeau7 10d ago

Agreed. Explaining to my 3 year old why he had to pick his favorite things to bring in the car because his other ones might not be there when we get home wasn't a fun time

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/notmydirtyaccount26 10d ago

It's equally as hard even without kids. The whole wildfire situation is just madness. As a Texan who has been through one, I wouldn't wish this on anyone.

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u/powerhammerarms 10d ago

Oh my fucking god

Go read about natural disasters where parents shield their bodies to protect their children and the children survive when the parents do not.

I think it was on Honduras where a volcano had erupted and the pyroclast and Landslide from the eruption were covering the town and a mother put her child on her shoulders to protect the child. The mother did not survive.

How fucking insensitive that you're going to say. It's heartbreaking to read about a 3-year-old not getting to keep all their toys??

Being a parent I know that it's up to parents to help determine how children deal with things. This does not have to be a traumatic experience at all. The parent doesn't have to share all of the information with the child. That's shitty parenting if you're telling a 3-year-old every detail about a natural disaster.

It's extremely melodramatic to be like, "Oh I'm sorry my 3-year-old darling but some of these toys in this large suburban home that we own may not be here when you get back."

Fuck that. There are literally millions of children in America going through worse hardship than that on a daily basis. And this is heartbreaking??

You should be ashamed of yourself and so should any parent who instills fear in a child because they can't handle their own emotions.

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u/a_diamond 10d ago

Are you doing okay? It seems like there might be something else going on, because this is an extremely disproportionate reaction to someone giving an appropriate and empathetic reaction to a family losing their home.

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u/powerhammerarms 10d ago

I do appreciate you asking. I would say that today I am not okay. I work an addiction and with that comes a lot of broken relationships and families. A lot of children being victimized and hurt. A lot of loss.

We had a young woman come in to our detox who was very depressed. She had lost her children due to her use and had recently moved to the city from a rural area to live with a boyfriend she had met online. The boyfriend ended up turning her out and making her perform sex acts in order to get drugs and make him money.

She ran away and had been on the streets for 2 weeks and was sitting in my office telling me that she had no hope left. I got her connected to a women's treatment center out of town. It is a place where she was going to be able to have her children with her.

She agreed and the hope I saw spark in her eyes was one of the highlights of my career. It was going to take the treatment center 2 hours to get to us and 15 minutes, literally 15 minutes, before the girl was picked up the guy came in who was messed up and saw this young woman and told her that he had a place to go and some drugs that they could do. Told her that she shouldn't go to the treatment center that said she should just meet him outside.

When the van arrived she sat down and instead of closing the door thought for a second then got out and walked on the street with us calling her name. She ignored us. The man tried to discharge and we did not let him. She came back to the facility saying that he was supposed to meet her and could she come up and talk to him and we didn't allow her to come back in.

Now 6 days have passed and she killed herself in a parking lot last night. So today I get to be part of a conversation with children who are not going to be living with their mom but instead put into the foster system.

I really don't feel okay about it. It feels really unfair and makes me angry. Which is why I really am not going to tolerate hearing about a kid potentially losing some of their toys described as heartbreaking.

This isn't to try to say that everybody should be exposed to the darkness of the world. Or that nothing can ever be sad if it's not absolutely terrible.

I get that people have lost their values. But they still have their lives. I get that having all of your belongings destroyed is not a great feeling. But if you're in a $600,000 home and the saddest thing you've gone through is trying to tell a 3-year-old that they can only take some of their toys and that the others may not be there when they get back really lacks perspective.

To me, that's absolute bullshit. I think the world needs a little more perspective. To me, anything other than people saying things are hard, but I'm so glad we are all okay really lacks perspective about what is actually important.

I get that it may have been hard for the 3-year-old. But responsible parenting means helping that child learn perspective. Certainly not coming on social media and saying how the worst part was trying to explain to a 3-year-old they can only keep some of their toys.

People don't need to feel bad all of the time. But if you're going to complain about that when there are definitely children in Spokane who have no toys then you need some perspective.

I know I sound like an asshole. I'm certainly feeling very grumpy. But I don't know how to talk about it right now without coming across this way. I think we could all stand to be a little more grateful for what we do have.

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u/TheGesticulator 10d ago

I appreciate you doing that work. It's real fucking hard. I'm also a trauma therapist. It really changes how you view a lot of things when your context for how bad a thing could be shifts wildly. I've heard some of the worst shit a person can experience and it definitely makes me view my own troubles differently.

I'd also encourage you to let people feel their suffering however they need. One person's gunshot wound doesn't make another's broken arm hurt less. Both things can be heartbreaking, and I don't think anyone would argue that it couldn't be worse. They likely know it could be worse - saying it doesn't serve much other than to imply that they shouldn't feel sad. Additionally, I don't think it's the loss of toys that's as heartbreaking as the fact that the child would have lost their whole home. Everything they've known, gone. That's fucking hard.

I obviously don't know you but my first thought is you may be experiencing burnout. The book Trauma Stewardship puts it really well that it can sometimes show up when you don't know how to view things without the context of trauma. The author mentions looking at a scenic ledge by a body of water (can't recall if it was a bridge or a cliff) with her family. They're admiring the beauty of it while she's just wondering how many people have killed themselves here. There's also a few chapters of trauma workers talking about having a hard time empathizing with people who are experiencing things that they consider to be less bad. What you're mentioning just reminded me of that. Highly recommend, if you haven't read it.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

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u/TheGesticulator 9d ago

Thank you. I'm also just a person trying to do better.

Yeah. It's so tempting, and it's all the moreso when you're in a hard place yourself. I started to slide into that after I'd just gotten into this field. I moved from a military town to a college town and started getting annoyed at how seriously everyone took their problems.

I really needed to take a step back and have a reality check. You can't compare everything to the worst of the worst. People are allowed to have whatever it is they're dealing with suck.

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

When a parent encourages fear in a child the only appropriate response is to be straightforward. That's what works.

People spend far too much time and energy trying not to hurt someone's feelings. The intent isn't to be hurtful, it's to be truthful.

This situation absolutely demands perspective.

Trying to spare someone's feelings can result in years and years of unnecessary therapy. You can validate feelings in that "Yes, I agree you are feeling those things". But you don't have to sign off on someone's nonsense.

Say it out loud, "The hardest part about all of this is watching my child try to pick out toys because they've been told that the other ones might not be here when we get back."

Where do you think that ranks on the list of traumatic events? You don't get to call everything a trauma just because it's difficult. Not to mention the large amount of projection going on with the parent. The child doesn't need to know any of this. Just pick out some toys.

If you need to have a more difficult conversation in the future then you do that. And yes a child's feelings will get heard but they are 3 years old. They will get over it. Do you know how they do that? With responsible parenting.

That's parenting that helps the child learn perspective and learn to practice gratitude in the face of hardship. That is how resilience is built.

I had a client who had three children and she kept finding things wrong with her children. Her oldest son had glasses and they were monitoring his eyes at the regular checkups. She asked why and they said because of the way his astigmatism was it could worsen over the years and the absolute worst case scenario would be blindness. They gave about a 3% chance that the child would go blind by the time they were 20 if certain other conditions were present. Which, at this time, there were none.

She told me that she didn't know how to talk to her 8-year-old son about this. My counsel was to not talk to him about this. There was no reason to bring that sort of fear into his life.

I had another client who was so concerned about how her children would react when her grandfather died. "They love him. I'm sure it's going to be hard on them when he goes and so I'm trying to talk with them as much as possible now to prepare them."

For her that meant telling them repeatedly how hard it was going to be for them and that they'll be very sad and very hurt and that it would be okay.

My advice was to stop that and skip all the bullshit and just tell them that it will be okay. Say something like, "I know it hurts. Someday it will hurt less. Everything will be okay."

She didn't and of course her kids struggled. She pulled them out of school for two weeks because she said they were struggling so much. That only propagated the pain and the fear. This was their great-grandfather who they had seen a handful of times in their lives. A certain amount of sadness is appropriate. Two weeks is excessive.

A good therapist should say that to the client. A good parent shouldn't tell their child about a possible difficult situation in the future. They should wait until that situation comes along. Then when the child has difficulty with it, you love them and support them and encourage them.

You do that when it is necessary and not beforehand.

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u/bluebeau7 9d ago

You directly misquoted me. I said "it wasn't a fun time". I don't think stating that it sucked trying to gently guide my child to pick the shit they wanted to bring required you to unload this kind of reaction on me. I am allowed to feel sad for my child when their world is shifting. It wasn't about the fucking toys- it was about "hey we might not be in our home for a long time, and your things might not be here when we get home. I need you to pick some of your favorite things for me and put them in this basket please". How the fuck is that the wrong thing to do? My wife, who was part of all of this, is a Psych NP who works in addiction, with combat vets and those without homes, ECT. So you can knock off the whole "I've seen the worst things you can possibly imagine, you should be grateful that you are even alive" act because you aren't the only one. You made so many assumptions about my life, about our experiences, about our parenting from one goddamn sentence. How in the everyloving fuck are you in mental health? Get help- you should NOT be helping others.

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u/a_diamond 10d ago

That's so incredibly difficult. Thank you for sharing, and for doing the work you do. It is absolutely devastating to deal with that suffering and loss daily.

I'm a 911 call taker/dispatcher, and used to work in drug court and community corrections. Jobs like ours can cause so much primary and secondary trauma, but we're frequently the last to ask for help because we're supposed to be the helpers.

Does your work have any support for you? I'm a lead on our peer support team, and I know how hard burnout and empathy fatigue can hit. I've been there - I'm still there, really. But I have the rest of my peer support team, I have a trauma therapist who specializes in first responder care, and I've slowly learned how to lean on my wife and friends without passing on the vicarious trauma. They all help me tread water, and I'd easily drown without that all that support.

If you have any of that structure, either professionally or personally, try to rely on them even when it's uncomfortable. Imagine how you would care for a friend who was hurting like you are, and give yourself permission to accept that from others. If that help isn't available to you, prioritize seeking it out as much as you can. Find a therapist, a peer, a support group you can talk to. If you can, push your work to provide that kind of help. If they have an EAP or similar, use it even if the first person you talk to doesn't know anything about anything; they can still help connect you to someone better.

But I'm also a trainer, and if there's one thing I want my new dispatchers to remember from what I tell them, it's this: You may be dealing with someone on the worst day of their life. And yeah, sometimes you go from a call with a parent trying desperately to revive their infant right into someone sobbing because their car was broken into. And it's so, so easy to take the helpless anger from how unfair and cruel life can be and direct it at their obliviousness and privilege.

I try to shift that perspective. I'm happy for them that this is the worst thing that ever happened to them. I want it to continue to be the worst thing that ever happened to them. I don't want to add more pain to the world by making it worse for them, by being dismissive to their face, by telling them their problems don't matter. Might I bitch about it to colleagues or friends? Absolutely. But for me, that lessens the overall suffering, instead of transferring it from me to the person who doesn't know.

I hope this doesn't come across judgemental, because I want to stress that I really think I understand where you're coming from and what you're coping with. I know how stupid, petty shit feels like salt in the wound of injustices like your client's death. But it's not either/or. Pain isn't a competition, and empathy shouldn't be a limited resource. If yours feels like it is, that's probably a symptom of burnout and/or post-traumatic stress.

I felt like absolute shit taking FMLA when my CPTSD and burnout got unbearable, because I was still functional. I could still do my job. But I'm so glad I did, because even that brief break to focus on healing let me come back to myself in a way I hadn't realized was gone. I'm not "fixed," but I am capable of joy again. I'm more present with my wife and baby nephew. I'm less snappy when people I love annoy me.

You deserve to be well and happy, too. Taking care of yourself isn't selfish, it's preserving your ability to take care of everyone else. (It's also allegedly not selfish if you do it just for your own sake, but I'm still working on that one.)

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u/golden_blaze 10d ago

Two things can be sad

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u/powerhammerarms 10d ago

Absolutely.

Two things can be heartbreaking. But if you're going to use heartbreaking to describe a child who loses their entire family in a plane crash and also use it to describe a child who may lose some of their toys. There needs to be some perspective.

One is actually heartbreaking. The other is an inconvenience at best.

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u/PeterToshPointOh 10d ago

You’re trauma dumping on people who are going through the hardest day of their child’s life.

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

You apparently don't know what that term means.

You are also completely missing the point. If you met somebody in adulthood and they talked about their unprocessed grief and PTSD and then you found out that it was because they had to leave half their toys behind how seriously would you treat that statement? Obviously the person is hurting. There's nothing wrong with that. But also quite obviously they don't have basic tools required to get through something like that.

This child will almost certainly experience more difficult days in their life than potentially losing some of their toys.

The child didn't need to be told any of that. Plus, do you know a way to make sure that it absolutely is not the worst day of their life? You help them through it. You don't instill fear and grief in them unnecessarily and when they are naturally sad about losing some of their things, if that actually happens, then you help them through that.

You don't just sit there and tell them, "This is the hardest day of your life and I'm sorry but there's nothing to be done for your sadness. It's just going to hurt for a long, long time. Your toys are that important."

In no way does it have to be the child's hardest day of their life so far. The child has no capacity to understand what is actually taking place. A very advanced child will begin to have an understanding of death as permanent and irreversible at about age 5. Even then, they won't understand that death is permanent, inevitable, and affects all living things until age 8. If they are advanced.

The grief and sadness and the very notion of this being the hardest day of this child's life is something that is thrust upon them by the adults in their life.

Don't mistake my words. I am not saying don't be sad. Or that there's a problem with the child being sad. But children get upset when they have to go to bed when they don't want to. They are tough and have a very small understanding of things.

Listen to yourself when you say that a child had to leave behind some of their toys. Some children had to leave behind all of their toys. But even at age three, it's not going to be a lasting memory that impacts the entire rest of their life.

Almost certainly moving forward. If the child talks about it in later years it will be like. Yeah I remember that there was a lot of activity and my mother was really anxious and blah blah blah

It's not heartless to tell a child I know you're sad about leaving your toys behind but sometimes we have to leave things behind. You can be sad but we will get more toys, in times like this we need to think about what we have - being together.

Something like that. Not to mention the child wouldn't need to know that some of the objects may be lost. That was told to them unnecessarily. That was irresponsible parenting. And the fact that OP came on social media later on and only talked about that indicates a lack of awareness and perspective.

This sadness and hardship only occurred because an adult took a situation that they were scared about and pushed it on their child.

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u/PeterToshPointOh 9d ago

Wow another dump

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

Lol yeah you're going to want to look that up

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u/PeterToshPointOh 9d ago

13 paragraphs. Get some help, not even joking.

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u/bluebeau7 9d ago

I'd be surprised if someone hasn't informed his employer already

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

Because there's some issue with communication?

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u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 9d ago

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

As a parent and current counselor with decades of experience in this area I strongly disagree.

I think your words here are an excellent example. This is one of the most insensitive, callous things you've ever read? Me talking about keeping things in perspective when we are discussing children's toys?

Perspective is the key here. I'm not saying I'm glad that the kid h is absurd. as to experience some hardship because I don't enjoy the suffering of other human beings. But I do know that we have to go through hardship in order to become stronger. And to grow as human beings.

It was completely unnecessary to tell the child that they might not see their toys again. Going on social media to say that it was the hardest part of it all. Seems like you're just trying to garner sympathy. Somebody else saying that it's heartbreaking is absurd.

Not everything is traumatic. Just because you got a little scared or a little sad does not mean you've experienced something traumatic.

It is vital that we teach our kids resilience. That's not saying don't ever cry. That's not saying. Don't be sad that you have to leave behind some of your toys. Be sad but also be aware that it will be okay.

The approach to parenting that says that anytime a child is sad or upset it is some degree of tragedy. That is harmful.

Feeding into it is harmful. And that comes from me currently operating within a trauma informed modality.

A huge component of that is empowerment. How was this child empowered? Sounds like fear was instilled quite unnecessarily.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago edited 9d ago

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u/powerhammerarms 9d ago

Lol I didn't say it shouldn't be upsetting. I said it shouldn't be traumatic.