The Crack and the Crumble

Note: This article is brutally honest about a few things and therefore comes with a trigger warning. It is however a vital conversation that needs to happen. The feedback I've had from others in the industry tells me just how much this conversation is needed.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m not sure about specific word counts but I know a picture can tell a story if we but have the eyes to see and interpret it.

I saw it.

I saw my story in one picture. It was a picture that told me just how broken I was. I say was because I am healing. I’m not there yet, but I’m on the road.

My story is one of cumulative trauma, far from unusual in my line of work. For over a decade I have worked in maximum security women’s prisons. I have seen and responded to incidents and events that most people never will need to. It takes a toll. Cumulative trauma is a thing. It has been documented in research in a wide variety of circumstances. The phrase describes the gradual, yet ongoing impact of repeated or continual exposure to trauma. It is a condition that can result in exhaustion, compassion fatigue, empathy deficit, depression, PTSD and numerous other mental health challenges. It is something to which I can definitely relate.

Those of us who work in the corrections system experience a much higher rate of exposure to psychosocial hazards, than the average person. This type of hazard refers to a risk factor that results in increased workplace stress and an increased chance of experiencing psychological or physical harm.

Think about it for a minute. You go to work, go home and that’s life. We go to work and hope to go home in the same state of health as we were in when we arrived there.

Prison Officers are the forgotten first responders. We are a jack of many trades. In my career I’ve responded to medical emergencies, violent incidents, suicide attempts and successes, and fires. On any given day we fulfill mundane functions and must respond in a number of capacities the same as paramedics, fire fighters and police. We are the idiots, you might say, who run towards the trouble. For me and others I know it has become a trait that is with us not only when we are at work. It can be a difficult thing to turn off. We see things others don’t, and step in when others can’t or won’t.

We are a unique breed and build up our own coping mechanisms, some healthy and others not so much. We are also often misrepresented, that is public perception of us is often negative – despite them not really understanding what it is that we do. Other first responders are given high status for performing their jobs that benefit society, prison officers are often depicted as bullies or corrupt. People want the criminals off the streets, but they don’t like to think about all that entail. The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) (Assembly, 2015) acknowledges the importance of this job and refers to it as a social service. No-one really cares though.

And it is this lack of care that brings me back to the picture from the beginning. The picture that was the last straw and really forced me to take a good hard look at myself. If it took a couple of months of being away from work and focussing on the things I was truly passionate about to bring a smile to my face that hadn’t been seen in years, then what was going on in my life?

Not only that, but what kind of effect did it have on my family?

Over the years I tried not to take things home, but there were days that required venting or just discussion because processing doesn’t always happen in isolation.

This is a job that can and does inflict a toll on our lives in general. And it can affect our families. My family obviously saw me some days when I was incredibly angry and other days when I just withdrew into myself. They got used to my short fuse when it came to my frustration over certain things, not that it was ever directed at them. What does it say about a job when we simply accept those kind of side effects without question? These negative moments would pass however, and I thought all was good. That equilibrium was restored. As a family we laughed, we gamed, and life went on.

How did I get it so wrong?

How did I not see what was happening until it was almost too late?

Except that isn’t strictly true. I saw it. I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t really know what to do about it. Not in some ways. A little bit ironic considering I was a member of the staff support team, and at one point was our team co-ordinator. I was the staff supporter who broke in the very way they were fighting to ensure didn’t happen to others.

I knew all the right things to do. It’s not that I hid my head in the sand and did nothing. It’s more that I fought with everything I had in me to make sure I could just keep going, one band aid at a time. I’m surprised I didn’t end up looking like a patchwork doll. Perhaps if you could see under my skin that’s what the real me might look like. A person stitched together by all the right coping methods.

All those band aids didn’t stop what was perhaps inevitable, it merely delayed it. They even hid it until it was no longer possible for it to remain hidden. Until that day when the picture looking back at me was the true picture of what I should be, not the patchwork number I saw every time I looked at my own reflection.

Which brings me to the crack and the crumble of it all.

This description of what our mental health looks like at its point of failure came from a conversation with an associate. It refers to the moment we realise something is fundamentally wrong. It is important to note that this moment isn’t the same for everyone. These words reflect two specific types of this moment, and they represent either end of the breakdown spectrum. My thanks go to the person I had this discussion with, firstly for the talk and secondly for allowing me to use their example.

This person is someone who had been in the job a couple of years longer than me. They had an amazingly bright personality that shone through in so much of what they did. They were passionate about the work, and they enjoyed it. As strange as that may seem to an outsider. There was a lot to like about the job. Then one day they vanished from my social media feeds. I knew something had happened, it was pretty obvious, I just didn’t know what. Slowly they appeared again, sharing elements of their journey through their mental health struggles.

A little while later we reconnected over lunch, both of us in new temporary work environments. We talked about a wide range of topics, including the darkest days to do with our mental health. This was when we both discovered that there was a definite moment when we knew something was very wrong and change was necessary if we were going to come out of this on the other side healthier than our starting point.

For them it was the crack.

That is how it felt. They told me they were sitting in a meeting one day, trying to discuss a way forward after something had gone catastrophically wrong, and at a certain point in the conversation it was as if something in their brain snapped. They described it like the moment when a glow stick is cracked. It was that clear. More than a dozen years working with what society considers the worst of the worst and one day, after a perfect storm of events, the brain just decided enough was enough, and it cracked.

What came next was the struggle to get out of bed. Not just for work, but even if the only thing they had planned for that day was one of the myriad of things that used to bring them joy. Knowing the way forward was with assistance didn’t seem to make a difference. Each time an appointment rolled around, not only was there the expenditure of effort to get out of bed but also to get into a car. It took great effort to drive to the location, to get out at the other end and to walk into that office to try and accept the help on offer there.

Baby steps.

It has taken baby steps for them to start to get back to finding some semblance of normality of who they used to be. Who they are working towards being again.

Then we have me.

I would be the other end of the spectrum. I am the crumble. An erosion if you will.

I believe it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say I was very good at my job. Just being good at something doesn’t mean you’re unaffected by certain aspects of it. Like with the crack, the incidents build and build. Piling up, one on top of the other.

Threats to kill my family.

Having my hair ripped out.

A swing to the head that gets blocked.

A situation that should have been avoided but essentially ended with sexual assault, because that is what unwanted groping is.

Fights, assaults, fires, suicides and self-harms.

Oh, and a kick to the head that nearly breaks the jaw.

Some days it is all you can do not to sink into a bottle. That is why coping mechanisms are important. And I had them; exercise, martial arts, axe throwing, writing, nerdy things. Along the way though, all the things you see, the abuse you are subject to, the things you have to deal with, have an effect and cause a change. Little by little so you barely notice it.

Remember the story about putting a frog in boiling water and it jumps out but if you slowly turn up the heat…

The more incidents you experience, the hotter that water gets.

Piece by piece I lost parts of me. The cookie that was my life began to crumble. Each thing that happened, each incident, was like having a piece of me chipped away until I reached a point where I knew one last thing would see me crumble. There is only so much structural damage that can occur before catastrophic failure.

This is why the discussion about the effects of mental health for those who work in corrections is so important. It is a strange world we inhabit, and it comes with its own preconceptions and set of unspoken rules. A main one being ‘I will not look weak in front of anyone.’ The only problem with that rule is the word weak is open to a lot of interpretation. Weak can mean someone is physically unable to do a task, or they are unable to face a challenge or task in front of them.

What if we turn that word on its head and say it is weak to adhere to a nonsensical status quo that causes us harm. What if it was considered strong to stand up and say no regarding something that has a negative effect on your mental health and admit you may just need a little time out.

That is real strength. I know it is.

Sometimes you just need to step away from a situation. It is no different really to how we deal with an escalating situation. If you are involved in an incident that is getting increasingly heightened and the other person is fixated on you, the smart decision is to take yourself out of the situation. It gives others the opportunity to de-escalate and stop a problem from getting worse.

The cumulation of trauma is the same. If you remain in the same place, you have no mental or emotional release, and as the pressure builds you put yourself in the dangerous position of possibly hitting a point of catastrophic failure. This point of failure can manifest in tragic ways. The number of suicides amongst corrections professionals is shockingly high.

Cumulative trauma is a serious thing. I know I am the poster girl for it. That and empathy deficit – where you find yourself unable to feel or understand someone else’s feelings, it dulls your ability to care. For me that didn’t flow to my friendships, but everyone else was on their own. I didn’t care.

Even with all the work around the mental health of corrections professionals, there is still the prevailing thought among us, that I can’t look weak. It is more than just the appearance of looking weak, it’s that we don’t want anyone to think we can’t do the job, because if we can’t do the job, then what can we do?

This isn’t something I’ve heard in any of the mental health sessions I’ve been involved in, yet both my friend and I have struggled with this question. I heard once that if you worked in my job for four years you were no good to work anywhere else. Four years then, anecdotally speaking, is a long enough time for all the stuff we deal with, to have an irreparable change on your psyche.

This job hardens you. Your tolerance for bullshit is severely decreased and your ability to say no increased. Both these things limit what you can do after ‘the job’. A lot of industries don’t like employees using the word no. Not to mention you often can’t say things like ‘don’t be an idiot’ or ‘stop wasting my time’ and you certainly can’t swear. I bet that isn’t something you thought of, your vocabulary changes. You use the words the prisoners use; you acclimate to life inside.

It is also a job that makes you more aware of what is going on around you, or it should. And you find you are geared to respond to things that happen even outside of work. When you’re so used to solving problems or dealing with issues, being told to ‘back off’ or ‘leave it’, makes you feel incapable, and it makes you feel less worthy. When your job is busy and you’re used to filling up a twelve-hour shift, moving to something as mundane as office work can be a struggle.

You’re used to a work environment most couldn’t understand, and many would consider inappropriate. Your sense of humour is dark because if you can’t make a joke about the person huffing petrol while smoking and the inevitable happens to them, then how do you process all the miserable stuff you have to deal with daily? The fact is, your frame of reference is now so different from civilians, that they really don’t understand you for the most part.

Unless you are lucky like me. My two best friends do their best to understand. The first few times we went out to eat they thought it strange that I was so particular about where I sat. Now they accept and ask. If I can, my back is to the wall with a good view of all entry points and exits and everything going on. It is an adjustment working in a job like mine.

Cumulative trauma is very real. It is documented but we don’t really have anything to counter it. You don’t get an increase in available leave the longer you are in the job. You still only get the same number of days off when you’ve worked ten years as you do when you start. There is long service leave, but every industry gets that. The best we can manage is to tell people to hold on to as many leave days as they can when first starting so that they have a buffer later on, when they might need them.

The challenge of working as an officer is compounded by the fact you work with civilians. A prison is a microcosm of, at times, opposing goals, even if you are sort of heading in the same direction. You might think we would all be on the same page or come with the same understanding. We don’t. Officers are treated very different to the way civilians who run programs are. And sometimes we see each other as the enemy.

Let me demonstrate. A program coordinator once took issue with me once. They pulled me up on my refusal to allow prisoners to be given the same items given to staff during a mental health event. It was the same mental health event that I had refused to speak at because there were prisoners present. This woman insisted it shouldn’t matter because the prisoners had trauma too. I told her that was a fact I was well aware of; I was in no way denying that. What she needed to understand was that the bulk of an officer’s trauma comes from dealing with offenders in all manner of situations, so to treat the trauma as the same isn’t helpful and could in fact be damaging. I firmly believe there needs to be some kind of separation allowing staff some semblance of acknowledgement that their trauma matters. This program coordinator simply couldn’t get her head around it. I guess that’s because no-one ever threatened to get their man to rape her, or kill her family, burn the house down with her kids in it, or tried punching her in the head.

So, what do we do about this?

What happens when you finally realise you’re no longer coping, that you’ve cracked or crumbled, but you still have bills to pay and you are convinced no-one else will hire you? Many don’t leave the job because they don’t see what else they can do. The trauma, and the job, give you edges others don’t understand and quite honestly not everyone can transition from prison to civilian life easily. We talk about prisoners being institutionalised but maybe we need to consider that definition could apply to staff, and we need to look at what we can do to combat that.

Despite the lack we need to keep talking openly about it. To keep the conversation going. We need to continually acknowledge the risks inherent in the job and learn to recognise the signs of cumulative trauma and compassion fatigue. We need to build on what we do and explain that there is a spectrum of ways our mental health responds to our situation and the break can happen all at once or slowly while we are busy thinking we’ve got it all under control. And when necessary, we need to find a way to help staff have a life after prison.

Endnotes

Assembly, U. G. (2015). United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules) In. New York: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

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