I was supposed to be having dinner with my wife and some friends. Instead, I was driving from bar to bar in Rockaway, Queens, looking for a firefighter who had disappeared a couple of days earlier.
His pregnant wife was in labor, and nobody knew where he was.
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I had been working with her husband through the FDNY Counseling Service Unit, trying to help him address a serious drinking problem. When she called, I did what seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I called a friend, and we went looking for him.
We searched for hours without success. Eventually, his wife asked if, because I couldn’t find her husband, I could at least walk and feed their dogs while she was in the hospital. I said yes.
So there I was, having canceled dinner with my wife, taking care of another man’s dogs while his wife was having a baby and he was likely somewhere drinking.
When the firefighter finally surfaced, he wasn’t particularly grateful: “Get out of my life, man. I don’t want or need your help.”
He resented that I’d been there for his wife when he wasn’t. He felt I’d shown him up. His wife wasn’t especially happy with me either. She had needed her husband, and I hadn’t found him. Somehow, despite my best efforts, I had managed to disappoint everyone. I remember feeling like an absolute fool.
There are limits
You might think an experience like that would have taught me something. It did, but not nearly as quickly as it should have. I continued doing much the same thing for years. When someone was struggling, I got involved. If the first approach didn’t work, I tried another. If things weren’t getting better, I worked harder. It’s what I knew how to do.
Most of us spend our lives solving problems. Whether you’re working in a bank trying to reconcile a set of numbers or standing outside a burning building, there’s usually some relationship between effort and results. You identify the problem, apply what you’ve learned and get to work. But people aren’t problems waiting for someone else to solve them, and that was something I had a difficult time accepting.
One of my earliest mentors in behavioral health, FDNY Lieutenant Jimmy Burke, tried to prepare me. He told me that no matter how hard we worked or how deeply we cared, some of the people we tried to help were going to die. If I couldn’t learn to accept that possibility, he suggested I find something else to do.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of encouragement I was looking for. I had spent much of my professional life believing that determination and hard work could overcome almost anything. Now someone I respected was telling me there were limits to what we could accomplish, regardless of how committed we were. I understood what Jimmy was saying. Accepting it was another matter.
Peer vs. clinical support: Different approaches to help
As the FDNY Counseling Service Unit expanded and we began bringing in more professional clinicians to work alongside our peers, the differences in philosophy became impossible to ignore.
Our peers were accustomed to answering calls at all hours, visiting homes and becoming personally involved in people’s lives. We didn’t spend much time worrying about professional boundaries. The clinicians certainly did worry about those boundaries. In fact, they were appalled by some of our practices — and I wasn’t particularly impressed by some of theirs.
Our clinical director and I had some memorable arguments, almost always behind closed doors, about what it meant to help someone. I couldn’t understand how professional boundaries could take precedence over the needs of a firefighter in crisis. From my perspective, when someone needed help, you did whatever it took. She saw the limitations of that approach far more clearly than I did.
I viewed her concerns about boundaries as constraints on our ability to help. She understood that an unlimited willingness to get involved didn’t necessarily make us more effective. Neither of us was particularly inclined to surrender our position.
It took several years of disagreement, experience and occasionally uncomfortable conversations before we began finding common ground. I give her much of the credit.
The clinicians came to appreciate that traditional approaches needed to be adapted to the culture and realities of the fire service. Our peers began to recognize that boundaries weren’t necessarily an indication of indifference. A peer could help establish trust with someone who might never have sought professional treatment. A clinician could provide knowledge and skills that made the peer more effective. Neither approach was sufficient on its own.
How to measure help
Somewhere in those years of disagreement, I began to question something I’d long taken for granted: Was the amount of effort I put into helping someone really a measure of how much I was helping?
That question followed me as my work increasingly took me to disasters around the country.
I met extraordinary people willing to leave their families, interrupt their lives and travel great distances to help communities facing unimaginable circumstances. Their intentions were genuine. Their generosity was often remarkable. But I began to notice how frequently we arrived with ideas about what people needed before we’d taken the time to understand what they were experiencing.
Sometimes we were so eager to put our resources to work that we overlooked what was already there.
Over time, and through more disaster responses than I can count, I began to appreciate that our role wasn’t simply to provide help but also to strengthen the people and resources that would remain long after we were gone.
That realization led me to develop an approach that would have seemed almost absurd to the younger version of myself: Whenever I boarded a plane to respond to a disaster, I began planning my departure before I even arrived. Not because I wanted to leave. There was simply no point in building something that depended on my staying.
Who were the trusted people in the community? What relationships and resources already existed? Who understood the local culture and the needs of those affected? What could we do to strengthen those connections so support would remain after we were gone?
How long I stay depends on the circumstances, but my focus has increasingly shifted to what happens after I leave.
Shifting from response to recovery
We have a tendency to judge our success by what we do for people, when perhaps we should be paying more attention to what we’re helping people become capable of doing for themselves.
Have we become so good at responding to emergencies that we sometimes struggle to recognize when it’s time to stop directing the response and start supporting the recovery? During an emergency, there are times when taking control is absolutely necessary. People may be in immediate danger, overwhelmed or unable to act on their own behalf. But the skills required to manage an emergency aren’t always the same ones needed to support recovery.
So, whether working with an individual or a community, I began asking different questions: Who have you turned to before? What helped you through a difficult time? What strengths and resources does your community already possess? Who will still be here when we leave?
The answers often surprised me. I’ve been continually amazed by the strength of individuals and communities facing terrible circumstances. People who appeared overwhelmed or helpless sometimes possessed remarkable resources and relationships that simply needed to be recognized and supported.
Of course, not everyone has those resources readily available. Some people need considerable assistance, sometimes for a very long time. And I’ve also witnessed heartbreaking outcomes despite extraordinary efforts to help.
Jimmy Burke’s warning was never far from the truth.
Learning to let go
I wish I could say that learning where my responsibility ends makes leaving easier. It doesn’t. I rarely leave a disaster feeling completely satisfied with my own efforts. There’s always another person I wish I could have seen, another problem that needs attention or another conversation I wish I’d had. Meanwhile, the responsibilities I’ve left behind continue to accumulate at home. Work is waiting. Family moments pass that I can’t get back.
I’ve become better at recognizing where my responsibility ends, but I haven’t necessarily become any more comfortable accepting it.
I suspect that tension is familiar to anyone who has tried to help someone they care about. We want to know that we’ve made a difference, and when someone continues to struggle, it’s difficult not to question whether we could have done more. But I’ve learned that sometimes our determination to help can get in the way of understanding what someone actually needs.
I haven’t lost my willingness to show up, work hard or do everything reasonably possible for someone who needs help. What has changed is my understanding of what that help should accomplish. I’ve learned to measure my contribution less by how much of myself I give and more by whether my efforts help people regain some control over their own lives.
I sometimes think about that night in Rockaway and how I might respond today. I would have answered her call, but rather than immediately setting out to find her husband, I’d first acknowledge how difficult it must be to be having a baby without him by her side. I’d ask whether there was someone she wanted to contact, someone who could be there for her, and what else I might do to help.
I can’t say whether any of that would have changed what happened that night. Her husband might still have been missing, and she might still have been disappointed. But perhaps I would have spent less time trying to solve a problem I couldn’t control and more time understanding what she needed from me.
And I suspect I’d still wonder afterward whether I could have done more.
