Hyper-Vigilance: Paramedic Dad & Dispatcher Mom
/Some memories are etched in our hearts as well as our minds. One of them is seeing my Dad in dark blue slacks and black boots standing in a circle of similarly dressed young men, bulky, squawky radios clipped to their black leather belts.
O. David, my father, and Uncle Ron, my maternal uncle, were the first two paramedics in Oregon and Washington. In the early 1970s, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) was a new field emerging from the war-torn areas of Korea and Vietnam. Some may remember the TV show EMERGENCY!, a staple in our home, not as fiction, but as validation.
Once, ambulances were vehicles driven very fast by drivers without medical training. The purpose was to deliver injured people to medical care quickly. The evolution of highly skilled crew members and onboard mobile intervention facilities unfolded in my childhood home.
Our house was originally the headquarters for MEDIX Ambulance Service during its fledgling years. Resuci Annie was a sort of playmate for my younger brothers and me. We were fascinated every time she came out of her case. Several young crew members lived in our house while on call, and in those years before the universal 911 program, our Mom, Kathleen, was the dispatcher.
MEDIX has had several styles of ambulance over the years.
Expected to be quiet during a call, we watched as our mom gathered the necessary information, relayed it to the crew on call, and collaborated with other emergency organizations as she continued to monitor the unfolding situation.
The extreme urgency was stressful for her and imprinted a sense of diligence and vigilance upon me as the eldest. I tried to help keep my brothers safe and quiet during ambulance calls to prevent escalating her stress.
I remember a difficult call when she had to stay in the kitchen at the radio. My four-year-old brother had gotten his head stuck in the railing near the top of the stairs. His body on the outside of the staircase was held captive by his head and tender ears that could not fit through. Scared of falling and crying from pain, he tried pulling his head through the iron bars.
Trapped in the kitchen, our mom used the landline to phone the firefighter who lived next door. He came over quickly to get my brother’s head unstuck. The anxiety of being unable to respond to her child’s fear and pain was very upsetting for our mom.
This is not my mom, but can you imagine running an emergency call center from your kitchen with four kids under the age of eight?
By the time I turned eight, my parents had suddenly divorced. My mom relocated us to northern Utah to have the support of her family to raise us. The seemingly abrupt change of condition from “happy” to “broken” family and departure from the lush green of the PNW for the stark, high desert populated by exceptionally conservative people crushed me.
Being steeped in the frequencies of urgency and emergency converging with the pain of loss and confusion created a powerful childhood catalyst. I became a hyper-vigilant scanner.
I became a hypervigilant emergency scanner.
Looking back over time, we identify specific events that catalyzed desperate creation—our inexperienced, under-developed psyches labor to make sense of what our grown-ups do in their lives. Absent available logic, we adopt stress or trauma responses to manage the seemingly unmanageable.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn are common stress responses. The first three are well-known. Fawn is relatively new to the stage, commonly recognized as “people pleasing.”
Passive-aggressive “Control issues” are typically a “Fight” response.
I scan current emotional expressions and “energetic vibes.” I scan facial expressions, body language, implications, subtext, subtle half-truths, tone of voice and inflections, sarcasm, teasing, and implied threats, then compare them against historical experiences to avoid physical and emotional danger.
I scan environments for possible escape routes (flight) or tools of defense against potential hazards (fight). I scan interactions to identify rituals and routines that improve or simplify what is happening for others (fawn).
To avoid pain, rejection, abandonment, and more, I scan.
Chronically. Insistently. Exhaustedly.
Or at least, I did.
Unaware and unhealed, this intense recipe and others like it frequently spawn co-dependent micro-managers who learn to maintain control ingeniously disguised as “safety.” Everyone around us must be kept “safe,” which keeps us safe. Brilliant!
Well, not really.
That level of hypervigilance takes its toll on relationships, dreams, health, and finances. It's not stable or sustainable. Deeply rooted in a “lack mentality,” hypervigilance is inconsistent with the whole truth of who we are.
Aware and healing through what Brene’ Brown calls the “midlife unraveling” process, I began to take responsibility for the dysfunction I learned as a child. Midlife unraveling is a two-sides-of-the-coin process: much of what caused me to develop empathic and intuitive skills (especially hypervigilant scanning) now calls for conscious surrender and healing.
Several years ago, I learned that type 2 diabetes is commonly associated with “control issue” beliefs. Last year, I discovered “chronic stress response scanning” and began working on that.
This year, I found the MEDIX connection. I thought scanning was a stress response to my parent's divorce. It began much earlier by experiencing my mom manage life and death crises in her kitchen. (Gratitude to my sister-in-law Jenni Benedict for helping me make the connection.) I knew I was “scanning”--but hadn’t realized I was living as a human emergency response scanner.
So much energy has gone into chronically scanning everything. It is thrilling to feel it rush back into my life as those old programs and habits dissipate. I am stoked to know better so I can do better.
Ah, but wait, there’s more!
Energy healing techniques allow me to reclaim the energy I poured out in the past, plus shift and heal the point of origin. That is a LOT of energy spent that I can repurpose!
I surrendered the urgent, danger, crisis, life-and-death mode. I surrendered being the scanner. I’m healing and learning to trust Source more than ever to be the Scanner.
Trial and error adaptations to stay safe during the first third of our lives create dysfunction. We spend the middle third trying to heal and purge that dysfunction. I’ve not yet encountered the final third; I hope it is a place of grace and Joy in the Journey.
❦
A little bit of clarity:
My Dad later met and married a fantastic woman. Jill, a dedicated RN supervisor in the Emergency Room, helped him fully develop and expand MEDIX with decades of hard work and love. They also gave me two more brothers who spent their entire childhood and young adulthood blended in with the MEDIX crew. After selling MEDIX and enjoying several years of retirement with his sweetheart, my Dad passed in 2016.
