Why saving strangers can feel easier than staying connected at home
In a recent Friday Truth, The 30 Years Inside the 80, Kory Pearn makes the point that meaningful work is one part – not the only part – of building a meaningful life.
What strikes me most about his reflection is the distinction between the kinds of trust that shape us.
Many first responders, military personnel, and other service professionals spend their careers immersed in continuous peak experiences. These are moments of extraordinary intensity where we must make decisions with immediate consequences – and often with life-or-death stakes.
There’s a reason these experiences exert such a powerful pull.
We often focus on the adrenaline rush. This is what’s most obvious to most people – this massive chemical release that comes with jumping out of an ambulance and running toward someone whose life may depend on what happens next. The same heightened feeling that comes when cutting someone out of a crushed vehicle. The spine-tingling reward of arriving on a scene where chaos transforms into purpose because you’re there.
The Magnetic Pull of High-Stakes Trust
In combat, the experience can be even more amplified. There are moments when the responsibility placed on your shoulders feels almost unimaginable. Imagine the feeling of protecting people you would willingly sacrifice yourself for. Or standing between unarmed people and extreme violence from brutal terrorists high on drugs. In the quiet moments, many service members have acknowledged feelings of almost God-like power at times. These experiences can leave an imprint on identity because they combine purpose, belonging, trust, and intensity in a way few other professions can.
But there’s another aspect that often receives less attention.
It’s the experience of being trusted. This is where I’m pulled to go deeper.
When someone calls 911, they’re entrusting their life to a stranger. As Kory mentioned, most people will never experience that level of trust from another human being. Yet firefighters, paramedics, police officers, nurses, physicians, and military personnel encounter it repeatedly throughout their careers.
It’s not just the adrenaline rush that changes us. Being trusted at that level also changes us.
When Trust Becomes Part of Identity
The moments of intense trust in the work are paired with urgency, adrenaline, and immediate reward. The environment creates the conditions. The mission demands it. The nervous system responds accordingly.
What is much more difficult for us is recognizing and valuing the slower forms of trust that ultimately sustain a meaningful life. In other words, experiencing “hits” of intensely intimate trust can make it harder to see how trust in the rest of our lives is built slowly, incrementally, over many years.
Consider caring for an aging parent whose health is declining. Consider the work of building a marriage over decades. Consider raising children who continue to come to you with their fears, mistakes, hopes, and questions long after they no longer need you for survival.
Sirens don’t call us into this kind of trust.
And building trust in our closest relationships doesn’t produce the same surge of adrenaline or dopamine. This kind of trust is earned over time. It’s built through thousands of small moments of presence. A difficult conversation. A promise kept. A moment of emotional honesty. A willingness to listen without judgment. A long string of evenings over many years when you choose connection over distraction.
Earning Trust
Unlike emergency response, where trust is often handed to us by circumstance, trust in our closest relationships must be intentionally cultivated. We must become the engine that creates it.
Ultimately, the capacity to thrive across a long career is not simply about resilience. It’s about elasticity. Elasticity, as I’ve defined it in my work and writing, is flexibility and range of motion in our nervous system, identity, and relationships – expressed through the capacity to move intentionally between different states of being.
To answer the call when intensity is required and then return home capable of connection.
To develop not only the “fast twitch muscles” that help us perform under pressure, but also the “slow twitch muscles” required to sustain intimacy, family, friendship, and purpose over decades.
Without this elasticity, the default in most cases is that our profession will consume us. The nervous system becomes trapped in overdrive. Adrenaline becomes the baseline. Relationships receive whatever energy remains after the job has taken its share. Eventually this will lead to adrenal fatigue, systemic exhaustion, burnout, moral injury, and profound disconnection. In some of us, this will also lead to addictions, divorce, infidelity, or grief related to losses we accrue that could have been avoided.
Developing the Capacity for Elasticity
Much of my work focuses on helping people strengthen the capacity for elasticity, so that one part of our story doesn’t become the entire story. Not because the profession is the problem, but because the profession has an immense gravitational pull on our identity and decision-making. And the default for many of us is that it can consume us.
The goal is not to love the job less. The goal is to build enough flexibility in our identity, relationships, and nervous system that the people who matter most are not sacrificed along the way.
The greatest measure of a successful career is not simply reaching retirement.
It’s arriving there with a partner who has become your soulmate through decades of earned trust. It’s having children who still seek your counsel because they know they’re emotionally safe with you. It’s possessing a life rich with connection, purpose, and belonging beyond the uniform. And creating this kind of life is also the best protection against experiencing retirement as a potentially fatal identity crisis.
The capacity to hold deep trust is one of the most important skills any human being can develop. The fire service provides repeated opportunities to experience intimate trust under extraordinary circumstances. The challenge, and ultimately the greater legacy, is learning how to cultivate that same depth of trust in the quiet moments that make up the rest of our lives.
Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY.
