Flash Point: A Firefighter's Journey Through PTSD by Christy Warren My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Christy Warren’s Flash Point: A Firefighter's Journey Through PTSD (2023) from Berkeley’s She Writes Press carries the same simplicity, gripping readability, active description and emotional urgency as does Khan-Cullors’ and bandele’s Terrorist, but in a somewhat different venue.
Warren had a “chaotic” youth, familiar with “child neglect and parental anger” who earned praise, respect and a captainship as a Berkeley first responder and “loved the job;” but eventually slid into perfectionism, hyper-vigilance and uncontrollable anger that barely covered her relentless self-blame, despair at “never being good enough,” exhaustion, increased alcohol consumption and nightmare flashbacks in which she “became completely overwhelmed.”
I recognized her “magical thinking” family position immediately, as well as her constant internal “images” of her assumed “failures” where “I was supposed to fix and save everyone whose life intersected with mine,” “never-show-weakness” stoicism, self-punishing agony of “this shouldn’t be happening to me” and “Whatever I did, I was always letting someone down… I based my self-worth on making everyone happy.”
Luckily, my extremely visceral reaction to the “wound cleaning” video in our nursing assistant class “weeded me out” from being a first responder. Other choices I’d made about my strength, heroism in matters of childbirth, health and parenting and shame and fear about “weakness” in the face of huge odds had not always been so clear-cut!
The difficulty of seeking help, accepting her subsequent PTSD diagnosis, leave of absence, support, therapeutic, group, legal and peer counseling sounded like it took years from the perpetually resistant interior monologue in Warren’s head, but actually was less than that. “My heart wanted to get better, but my head did not believe I deserved to.”
Mental panic, “ruminating” and “I can’t do this” eventually waffled back and forth with “Stop minimizing everything you’ve been through,” “Give yourself the very same grace you give others,” “letting go” here and there and accepting “I was the one who had to find hope… No one else could save me. I had to save myself.”
Role models of her fellow first responders’ shared stories of visceral horror, guilt, shame, struggle and survival alongside how they and folks like Anthony Ray Hinton, 30 years on death row finally exonerated “survived…by monitoring the dialogue in his head” encouraged her to keep going, “do something,” “Behave your way out. Take action.”
“PTSD leaves a path of destruction,” she admits, but she was “lucky,” active, healthy and well-positioned enough to RECOGNIZE she had a problem, REACH OUT and do pretty well at ADDRESSING it.
At least I and quite a few other people not only think she did VERY well, but maybe spectacularly in a humanity and support groups where almost “Everyone… had a craptacular childhood. I had been protecting this great secret of how I was raised, when so many others held onto this same secret that grew into a garden of shame.”
One wise person I came in contact with in this past decade of self-analysis called self-help, trauma healing and therapy “figuring out and finding ‘where the corpses are buried’ personally and ancestrally; inspecting, holding and re-interring them with more understanding, depth, respect, caring and dignity.”
In that and for Warren, “I am not alone in this” was a recurring revelation and gift. Gratitude, kindness and compassion became her watchwords – for others AND herself. “I was going to catch myself when I didn’t want to ask for help. I was going to stop myself when I lacked self-compassion.”
She did not go back to her job, but wrote this WONDERFUL memoir pertinent to and accessible by pretty much EVERYONE.
Next book on our list: The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté?
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