TIP Time: Surviving on the Frontier
How do you shoot yourself twice?
That’s what the two slugs retrieved from the floorboard and ceiling indicated. That’s what the bloody footprints said.
Fifteen-year-old Darren had come home from school to find his eighteen-year-old brother, Sean, on the bathroom floor, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face. The fifteen-year-old, who was with his grandmother, “lost it” and ran screaming from the house. The grandmother was a strong lady who did what she could.
Conflicting details made the circumstances of this death bizarre. They just made no sense, not that any suicide does. It seemed that Sean had shot himself in the midsection first, while sitting on the toilet. He didn’t quite kill himself, so he walked into his father’s bedroom, got another gun, went back into the bathroom, and finished the job with a shot aimed upward, beneath his chin.
My name is Bob. I’m a TIP volunteer. This is what I encounter. The Trauma Intervention Program was created to deal with the “Second Injury” victims, those people closest to the trauma victim whom nobody has time for. There wasn’t much to be done for the deceased, but the brother, grandmother, and parents were now in harm’s way from the emotional trauma they were dealing with. My job is to protect them from the system, well-meaning but toxic friends, and themselves.
This was a very tragic and convoluted situation. I arrived at the condominium complex in Reading, Massachusetts, on a midsummer afternoon. The light rain had stopped. Flashing police lights led me to the scene, where I stepped under the yellow police tape connected to the three-level clapboard buildings. They were painted a bright yellow with green trim and had attractive window boxes of peonies and purple and green coleus. Adolescent shrubs below that marked it as a recently built upper middle-class community.
The air was damp and misty. I decided to focus on the father, who stood like a large stone in the street. As soon as I saw him, I knew where he really was.
Physically he stood in the middle of the cul-de- sac with his hands jammed in his jeans, shoulders hunched, head down. I approached him as I was trained.
“Hello, Michael, I’m Bob from the Trauma Team. I’m here to help get you through this night.”
No recognition, response, or acknowledgment. I took three steps back and gave him space. He had heard my voice. I was sure of that. What was there to say in response? Somehow I had to enter that small little room he was in. The one with no windows or doors. The darkness. The silence with only an echo of your own thoughts—bad thoughts.
But how?
The only tools right now were patience, my Trauma Intervention Program training, and the dozen calls I had already been on in the last five months.
I shadowed Michael from about five to ten yards for most of the call. For me it would last seven hours and forty-five minutes. It was the second call of my twelve-hour shift that would make this a nineteen-hour day. One of three I spend each month. It was unusual, but not unexpected.
“Every call is different,” we were told. “You’ll never know what you’ll find when you get to the scene. Listen to the First Responders. Ask questions and observe.”
TIP volunteers go through nearly sixty hours of intensive training over a two-week period, with nearly two hundred pages of collateral readings done as homework. We’re well oriented to the system. We know what the police need to do and what they want us to do so they can be more effective. We know what the firefighters need to do, the paramedics, and the coroner. In fact, in cases of death (80 percent of our calls involve a death), the coroner is in charge of the scene and the body of the deceased. All of the municipal employees have their jobs. But no job includes looking after the emotional health of the Second Victim: the spouse, parent, or sibling of the deceased; the neighbor who witnessed the death, or the close family friend who may have been godmother to the deceased.
When you are witness to a traumatic death or have close ties to the deceased, you suffer some level of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). It’s not always immediately apparent, not always crippling, but it’s always there. One human being does not witness the sudden traumatic death of another without its having a resounding psychological echo. Those reverberations must be dealt with in the most caring and efficient way to enable the Second Victim to survive the incident with the minimal amount of psychological damage. TIP volunteers are trained to understand and recognize what is going on in the minds of these second victims and to provide the emotional first aid necessary to get them back in touch with reality, their responsibilities, and their loved ones that remain.
The father, Michael Logan, had not spoken to his current wife. She was there at the scene. He had not spoken to his first wife, Sean’s mother. She was there also and being helped by Sarah, my TIP partner. Michael had not spoken to his son, Darren, who had discovered his brother, Sean. Michael was not speaking to his own mother either.
He was just standing straight, shoulders a bit hunched with that stare. Eyes wet. While shadowing him, I also engaged the wife, the son to a limited degree, the grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousin, and Sean’s mother, who had also arrived. It was another rather disjointed family.
Michael was four years into his second marriage. The information I gathered told me that he was a recovering alcoholic who had been suicidal when he was drinking, but he was three years sober. His father had been extremely abusive during his childhood until the father killed himself. Sean, the deceased son, had been a brilliant kid who hadn’t seemed to fit in well socially and couldn’t figure out why. He had just been kicked out of high school a month before, enrolled in a new high school, and kicked out again after just four days. He’d had a lovely girlfriend. There were many signs of suicide potential, but too many conflicting things that would contradict that. I just don’t know.
I saw that Michael was in serious trouble and spoke to the police about it. They recognized it and removed the other guns from the house. I spoke with Michael’s mother (the grandmother), and she recognized it too. He clearly blamed himself and was emotionally locked in that small dark room. During the first two to three hours, I got Michael to respond to me through a few very simple requests, such as the retrieval of keys.
The police officer in charge of the crime scene called me over and told me that they were removing the guns from the house, and they would fill out the paperwork required to show their responsibility for the property. I was to tell Michael. I nodded and approached him from an angle, as we were trained.
“The police want you to know that they are taking custody of your two guns and are filling out all the paperwork needed so you know where they are and how to retrieve them.”
“What?” a strong challenge.
“Why are they taking my guns?” a tinge of panic. Hazel eyes with pupils constricted focused on me. Still a handsome if pained face. We were engaged. And so it began.
“The officer didn’t give me a full explanation of why. He just described the two guns and the ammunition and wanted me to tell you what they are doing.”
“Why? Why are they taking my guns? What paperwork? I want to know why they are taking my guns and what paperwork they mean.”
“I’ll go and get the officer and have him talk directly to you. Will you stay right here?”
“Yes. I want to talk to the officer. I want to know why they are taking my guns.”
Part of our training directs us to provide as much information as we can to our clients—accurate, simple, and responsive. When at all possible, we connect them with the professional who has that information, be it the police, the fire chief, or the ER physician. Clear, concise communication with no chance of misinterpretation. We facilitate communication. We try not to pass on secondhand summaries.
It was midevening now, around 8 PM. The police officer walked with me through the shadows to where Michael was standing just outside the glow of the streetlight. It was a midsummer night with fairly mild temperatures. Michael was wearing long sleeves, but looked a bit cold.
“Michael, this is Officer Bellflower. Can I get you a blanket?”
“Why are you taking my guns? What are you doing with them?”
As the officer began his response, I stepped back out of the halo of the street lamp and listened to what I could. The officer went over the paperwork and responded in a calm way to Michael’s pained queries. He went over some things twice. Michael seemed to understand, if not agree. Officer Bellflower moved away, expressing his sincere sympathy to Michael, and nodded to me. I moved back a bit closer to Michael, in his peripheral arc of sight. There began some body language that indicated he accepted my being there as I followed along with him, not in his face, just in sight.
I spoke again with his mother, the grandmother who had discovered her grandson’s body. She reminded me very much of a junior high school principal—strong, tough, no-nonsense, but with a guarded sensitivity accustomed to being in charge. She had told me a great deal about Michael and his difficult childhood and what an abusive beast his father had been before he killed himself. She seemed to express a balance of remorse and relief in describing that period. Now she was very worried about Michael.
We acknowledged the obvious danger of his taking his own life. She asked me to help him.
“What are you going to do?”
Without too much thought, I responded that “we” needed to help him. What could we do?
She had asked him repeatedly where he was going to stay that night. We had been in the street all this time because the home was a crime scene and they couldn’t go back in, not that they ever would have wanted to. Scorsese minimizes the blood spilled in his violent deaths. A theater audience would not accept the gore of reality. Michael would never live in this home again. He would not respond to his mother’s question other than with a shake of his head. His wife had asked the same question with the same response. This was a man who wasn’t thinking about where his bed was going to be that night. Or maybe that’s all he was thinking about. The grandmother was not giving up. We were a team.
“His son Darren needs him,” she said. And that was my answer.
That was the strategy. Darren was planning to go home with his aunt and her family, where he had actually been staying for the previous few months. It had something to do with his school district and not wanting to change in midterm. His cousin, who was about his age, was with him this night, and they had been pretty much inseparable, except when the police had to question Darren about what he had seen. Darren was an extremely fragile teenager who had been emotionally shattered that afternoon.
My TIP partner on this call was Sarah, a middle-aged woman who had experienced a suicide in her own family. She was more skilled at dealing with children. During the course of the call, we had formed a tacit agreement as to who would concentrate on which victims. We each had contact with all of them, but she was clearly better at working with the children and the distraught mother while I focused on the father and the grandmother. We each worked with the other family members to a limited degree through the night. Working as a team isn’t easy or always successful. This night it was. We had no conflict and had a complementary intuitive sense of what needed to be done.
One of the key ingredients in our TIP training is the strategy of distraction and redirection. If our clients seem likely to do something that would be injurious to themselves or others, we are instructed not to argue with them about their choice but just to help them reprioritize. In a gang shooting, there might be a primary urge to retaliate, to go out and get the guy that did it. We are told to point out that “Right now, your family needs you here. There’s time for everything, but right now you need to help your mother (or brother or other grieving family member).” Don’t argue, just redirect and reprioritize.
“Darren needs him,” the grandmother had said. And that was the redirection. It was just past 9 PM. I approached Michael again, but this time at an oblique angle from the rear. He could see me coming, but not directly at him. I wanted to be physically close to him without being confrontational.
When I was standing about two feet from his left shoulder, I said, “Michael, Darren needs you tonight.”
His head moved just a fraction in a kind of foggy acknowledgment. I stood silently. He did not respond further. I stayed closer than I had been and remained silent but present. I did not go more than six feet from him for about the next twenty minutes. He seemed to be moving away from me. He walked slowly around in the courtyard of the condominium complex.
A neighbor came up to express her sympathy. Michael was nonresponsive at first, but then lifted his head and said. “Can I use your bathroom?”
He seemed to have a goal in his eyes. I felt uncomfortable.
“Certainly, Michael. Right inside the door. You know where it is, just the same as your house,” the neighbor replied.
I felt a little yellowish red pain in my stomach. I couldn’t follow him in, but I couldn’t just let him go off. As he was walking over to her door, a policeman stopped and asked him a question. He responded and asked a return question. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of conversation. I couldn’t hear the details. As long as he wasn’t moving any farther away from me, I decided to keep my distance. The police officer kept him engaged for about five full minutes. Then he nodded and walked away with a glance at me.
I’m not certain, but I believe the police are just as aware of that “distraction” strategy as we are. Everyone on that crime scene knew Michael’s history and what we were all afraid of. I believe that police officer was reacting on instinct, as I was. Michael seemed to have forgotten about the bathroom and began wandering back to the curb. I trailed at my five to six foot distance and then approached closer.
“Darren needs to be with you tonight. You’re his dad. He needs you.”
“Darren is going to his aunt’s house. That’s what he wants to do. He needs to do what he wants.”
Okay, there it was. We were involved in a sensible discussion. We were back to safe ground. I said nothing more and walked over to where Darren was sitting on the curb with his cousin. I squatted down directly in front of Darren and put my hands on each of his knees.
“Darren?” He raised his head halfway up. “Darren, you need to be with your dad tonight.”
“I’m going to stay with my aunt, with Jimmy and my uncle, in Reading. That’s where I used to stay.”
“Darren, tonight you need to be with your dad. You should be together tonight. He needs you.”
“All right.”
I squeezed his knees and touched his head as I rose and walked back to where Michael was standing.
“Darren wants to be with you tonight.”
He looked up and met my eyes for the first time. I held his glance for about five seconds, maybe ten, and then he lowered his head again. He stood there silently.
Then
“Where’s Darren?”
“Over there by the curb.”
He walked halfway across the grassy courtyard toward the curb.
“Darren?”
No movement. Then slowly Darren’s slight figure unfolded from the curb and turned to face the voice of his father. They looked at each other for a moment and then each walked very slowly toward the other. Within five to six mutual paces they met, wrapped their arms around each other, and just stood there silently for a very long time. Then they shifted their grips to be side by side and walked away, out of the courtyard. I did not follow. I didn’t feel worried.
I walked over to the crowd and began making my rounds again. The grandmother had been watching. She didn’t say very much but gave me a halfhearted hug, or at least tried to. I spoke to Michael’s wife and told her I thought that Darren might be staying with them tonight. She told me she thought that he was going with his aunt.
“Things change,” I said. “Will it be a problem?”
“No. No problem. We still don’t know where we’re going to be. Probably just find a motel somewhere nearby. We’re just not going back in there. Not ever.”
“Can I make some calls and try to find you a room?”
“No, better wait for Michael. I don’t want to do anything without Michael.”
“Okay, fine.”
That’s kind of what TIP volunteers can do. We can find some lodging, make arrangements, but we can’t transport anyone in our cars. Insurance liability and all that. But we can help out with logistical details. We can find a hotel room, a pet boarding facility, or an open pharmacy. We even contact the hazmat cleaning crew that comes to a crime scene after the police are done to clean up all the blood and body parts that may remain. In fact that is exactly what we would do later, before we left the scene. It can be a very expensive service, but your homeowners policy usually covers it. If not, we know of some companies that will actually work gratis (for free) in some situations. My partner and I discussed this service with the wife while Michael and Darren were off by themselves. I was able to explain our Resource Guide to her as well. She was the most in control and understood what I was saying. We gave her the coroner case number and other information. She agreed to let us take care of making the call to the clean-up company.
It was well after 10 PM when Michael and Darren came back around the corner of the courtyard, still with arms around each other.
Michael approached his wife and said, “Darren is staying with us tonight.”
She nodded. That was that. I caught the grandmother’s eye. What a team!
Michael’s wife asked if we could retrieve some toiletries and other things from the house to take with them wherever they would end up. I told her I’d check and then walked over to the officer in charge. He told me it would be all right for them to enter the condo, but they had to stay on the first floor. They would not be allowed upstairs—nor would they want to go there. But if there was anything they needed, they could tell the officer inside, and he would fetch it if he could.
I told that to Michael’s wife. She spoke with Michael, and the three of them walked slowly to the front door and entered. I followed.
Michael and Darren stretched out on the couch, nesting inward. Michael’s wife spoke to the policeman at the foot of the stairs and described what she needed and where it was. He confirmed with me that nobody else would go upstairs and then went to get the needed items. It was quiet. He came down shortly with everything that had been asked for. Michael and Darren were curled up on the coach together. Darren had his eyes closed. Michael didn’t. I think they were just catching their emotional breath. We all stayed where we were for a while.
Then Michael gently unwrapped himself from Darren, stood up, and announced to me that he had to go in the garage and get something from his truck. His chin seemed tilted up just a fraction. Courage? Defiance? Resolve? It was the loudest he had spoken.
My heart kind of froze. I felt I could not follow him into the garage. I knew I should, but I felt it insulting. I felt that we had made a connection. He made the statement to me, and I just didn’t know what to do. Was he calling for help? For me to stop him? I didn’t. I just walked up to the inside garage door he had gone through, which he closed behind him, and braced myself for the sound of a gunshot.
He came back in after a moment or three and kind of laughed. He looked at me and said, “Wanna see something funny?”
“Sure,” I said.
He took me into the garage and showed me his truck. The front bumper was jammed against the wall.
“I guess I pulled in kinda hot!” He grinned a bit.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I grinned back.
“I think I just want to back it off an inch and not permanently dent the wall.”
He got into the truck, turned it on, and backed it up an inch. Then he turned it off and got out. We left the garage, and he told his wife what he had done. Back in the world.
My partner, Sarah, collected some additional clothes the policeman had missed and handed the bag to Michael’s wife. The cleaners we had called finally arrived, and we walked out with the family. Sarah with the wife, Darren with his birth mother, who had been waiting outside the front door, and me with Michael.
I stopped on the porch with Michael and gently put my arm on his, came close and said, “Michael, at eleven this morning, I sat with a dad whose son had used a needle to end his life. It doesn’t matter whether they choose a needle or a pistol or a bottle of pills. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. It’s a terrible sickness, and it’s not your gun that is to blame.
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t do anything else for you tonight. You need to stick close to Darren. You need to listen to him. We’re both dads, and I’ve learned more from listening to my son than I ever did from listening to my father. You need to be there for Darren. Don’t leave him tonight.”
Again our eyes locked. He said nothing.
We all paused at the curb. Sarah gave hugs to Darren, the wife, and the mother. Then Michael looked up and just reached out his hand to me, which I took. I guess it was a guy thing. He wasn’t talking, but he had Darren in his sights.
I watched the three of them drive off in search of a hotel room and then said good night to the grandmother and the rest of the family while Sarah also said her good-byes. She checked to be sure the cleaner knew what to do with the key when he was done. It had been an eight-hour call on top of the four-hour call I’d had that morning. It was my busiest day yet. I don’t expect to have another like it.
I don’t know how much a recovering suicidal alcoholic whose father and son both committed suicide can endure. But he would get through this night. I believed he would. That was my job. I’m a TIP volunteer.
TIP is a national organization that serves hundreds of cities with over 1,500 volunteers. In 1991, it won the prestigious Innovations Award cosponsored by the Ford Foundation and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2000, Attorney General Janet Reno presented the Crime Victim Service Award to founder Wayne Fortin. Awards and national recognition reinforce the real rewards felt by the TIP volunteers every day, on every call. They just want to make a difference.
Why do ordinary people do this extraordinary work?
What kind of people choose to put themselves in the middle of a human disaster? Certainly the police, fire, EMT, and ER staff all make that choice. It’s a respected vocational path. But each of those professions has its own significant barriers to entry.
The overwhelming answer given by TIP volunteers to the why question is “To give back to the community.” It’s heard so often; 90 percent of my training class responded that way. But the words lose their meaning. What did this community give them that they feel some obligation to “give back”? Is this the real answer or the facile one?
In my limited experience, a TIP volunteer is most often a person who has suffered his or her own catastrophic personal loss: witnessing a stepfather murder a younger brother, coming home to find your son has committed suicide with your gun, watching helplessly by your wrecked car as life slips away from your wife while your son asks, “Daddy, what’s happening?”
It wasn’t just the death of a relative or close friend, but a horrific and traumatic death experience from which they need to heal and reconnect with the world. What many TIP volunteers express when questioned further is that being a TIP volunteer is part of their healing process. And healing doesn’t just happen.
There’s no end to the personal tragedies that occur every day in every town in the world. You can’t relate to Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, or even the Holocaust. They are just words, pictures, stories told. You watch the NewsHour, see the pictures, and read the list of young soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. You might recognize a town or a uniform, a smile. But it’s just for the moment. Then dinner is on the table.
Waking up to find your husband of fifty-four years lying in bed next to you, lifeless, will stay with you a lot longer than Katie Couric’s nightly vignette. It has much more impact than the thousands of Iraqis or hundreds of thousands of Rwandans and Darfurians. When the coroner leaves after the body of your spouse has been “transported,” you are left alone in your home. You’re more alone than you’ve ever been in your life, and who is there to help you through these moments of disconnected insanity when your world has been vaporized?
Not the nice police officer who responded to your 911 call. Not the EMTs who did their best to restore a life that had been so entwined with your own. Not the coroner who was kind and gentle and patient with you in explaining how you could claim the body of your loved one after they had completed the autopsy. And yes, “Here is the coroner’s case number for your reference. You’ll need to give it to the mortuary to claim the body.” The mortuary? The body? The deceased? My God, it was my husband, Bill, not remains. And then you are alone, sitting on the couch with a scrap of paper with a coroner’s case number printed neatly, and that’s all you have. That and the silence. And what do you do next?
What kind of person volunteers to stop his or her own life to be there for you, to help you get through those moments of unreality? That surreal feeling of emptiness, confusion, and anger. Floating above the room while your heart is nailed to the carpet, bleeding. Who is this TIP volunteer, and why is he there for you?
One answer is simple. Because there’s nobody else in the system whose job it is to care for you. Sure, you should have family and friends, and that’s what friends are for. But they’re not there at that moment, that worst moment of all when you first realize the loss, the change that has altered your world forever. 9/11? Don’t bother me. Katrina? A bad fairy tale. This was MY life that just ended. My life. What am I going to do now? Who am I living for now? Who do I make plans with, dinner for, complain to, hold?
The TIP volunteer has an enormous sense of compassion and has been rigorously trained to be dispassionately compassionate. The TIP volunteer understands the “pit” you’re in and is ready to get down there with you and gradually help you back to the reality of the world as it now exists. Why? Why do these people volunteer to inject themselves into the worst moments of somebody else’s life?
Because they care? Yes, they do. Why? Because in expressing their compassion and their sincere caring, they often help themselves heal from their own horrific loss experiences. By genuinely caring for another human being, you somehow refill that emotional void in your own life. You fight back at the evil with just your own small effort of good. Little by little.
We understand the feeling of loss, but they also understand that we can’t know how you truly feel in your uniquely horrific experience. It was your life. Your husband or child or parent with whom you had your own unique relationship filled with love and conflict and hope and resentments is gone. The TIP volunteer can’t know what those details were or the individual regrets you have or hopes that have vanished. Just that they too had hopes lost, regrets forever unresolved, world imploded. The TIP volunteer knows that what you need right now and what they can offer is someone who genuinely cares about you and only you.
How does this help heal their own loss? It’s hard for me to explain that to you here. Maybe a trained therapist can try, but the clinical rationale is less important than what I see: the genuine human warmth that comes through that fog of overwhelming sadness, remorse, anger, confusion, and frustration. Human compassion and caring can prevent the “second injury” that occurs so often to the survivor. The second injury that is so much akin to PTSD. The injury that results from clumsy insensitive people who just want to say the right thing, but don’t know what it is. The neighbors that say,
“He’s in a better place.”
“I know how you feel.”
“You’d better buck up and face reality. He’s gone, and the sooner you deal with it the better.”
“You need to be strong for your kids.”
“You need to contact the insurance company right away!”
“I have a friend who can help you with the financial side.”
What you really need to do is to grieve for the most important person in your world who is now gone. You need to feel the anger and sadness and loss. You can blame yourself, your dead wife, or God. You can feel whatever you want to feel without filter. And you need somebody there who understands loss and won’t judge you. Somebody who can listen and feel your anguish and validate it. Somebody who can support you and help you make your own decisions about what to do now—but not right now. Someone who can help you dial the phone to contact your children or your sister or brother. Someone who can protect you from the system that can be so callous. Someone who understands that you don’t really need that sister-in-law who comes rushing in to embrace and cry with you for a moment and then gets down to meal planning and cleaning your house and making arrangements for you and insisting that you have to come stay with her because “You can’t sleep here alone tonight” and just further removes you from the reality that is now your life.
Yes, there is a place for the helpful relative and close friend who can help you through these horrible times, but treating you like a helpless infant isn’t always the best course of action.
TIP volunteers want to do good things because they understand that doing good things makes their world a little better, just a little. But that’s all they can do. And that’s enough for now. They aren’t Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, but we can help just one person survive just one personal disaster on this one day and stop the cycle of hurt.
That helps us believe that the world is a little bit better place and helps us heal and believe that our own personal loss is somehow counterbalanced just a bit. There’s no protection from inevitable loss, but there is the opportunity to prevent the needless second injury.
Why do some people choose to be a TIP volunteer and others choose to strike back and attack when they are hurt? Some say that the healing we encounter is a reflection of the thought that “Yes, I once suffered a horrendous loss, but that was years ago. Others are suffering right now. Just for today, this person is in worse shape than I am, so it makes me feel better by comparison. At least I’m not her.”
Jayan Conily is the executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of TIP. Talking with her gives some clearer insights.
Just belonging to TIP is another way of healing. The essence of the insanity that takes us over during these crises is the disconnectedness to the world. That feeling of abandonment. “Nobody knows or could possibly feel the loss that I feel today. I am forever separated from society.” But belonging to the TIP group helps us reconnect with people who understand the loneliness of the crowd. We rejoin society one small step at a time, and our monthly training meetings reaffirm our connectedness with this group of caring and compassionate people.
It may be that each of us in our quest to heal looks at each TIP call as another opportunity, an opportunity to return to that moment of our own when we were disconnected, scared, and helpless. We each climbed out of that ball of conflicting emotional confusion to try and reconnect with the daily reality of life. But we never really quite made it all the way. Our lives have been forever altered, and we just want things to be the way they were “before.” By entering that moment in someone else’s crisis, we may hope to revisit our own personal portal and try one more time to pick up the thread that had held our lives together. Each TIP call is just another chance to reconnect by going back to the source of our own departure.
Maybe not...
And maybe the whole world is not such a terrible place after all. And maybe it’s up to us, individually, to carve out the good little niche that we need to exist in.
Ask Wayne Fortin, the founder of TIP, and he’ll tell you that some people say, “Because I can.” They have a gift, and they feel responsible to use it. Many of them know they are good at doing this, and they like doing what they are good at.
Wayne will go on to tell you that others say they are “privileged” to be with people who welcome them into a very personal time in their lives. There is a positive aspect in being able to establish a relationship with people who are being “real” with all of their “stuff” stripped away.
“I want to prevent what happened to me from happening to others” is another quote Wayne will share. Learning about the human condition is another motivating factor.
Why does a person join TIP?
“To make a difference.”
Just a little one. Better than doing nothing at all.
How do you shoot yourself twice?
That’s what the two slugs retrieved from the floorboard and ceiling indicated. That’s what the bloody footprints said.
Fifteen-year-old Darren had come home from school to find his eighteen-year-old brother, Sean, on the bathroom floor, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face. The fifteen-year-old, who was with his grandmother, “lost it” and ran screaming from the house. The grandmother was a strong lady who did what she could.
Conflicting details made the circumstances of this death bizarre. They just made no sense, not that any suicide does. It seemed that Sean had shot himself in the midsection first, while sitting on the toilet. He didn’t quite kill himself, so he walked into his father’s bedroom, got another gun, went back into the bathroom, and finished the job with a shot aimed upward, beneath his chin.
My name is Bob. I’m a TIP volunteer. This is what I encounter. The Trauma Intervention Program was created to deal with the “Second Injury” victims, those people closest to the trauma victim whom nobody has time for. There wasn’t much to be done for the deceased, but the brother, grandmother, and parents were now in harm’s way from the emotional trauma they were dealing with. My job is to protect them from the system, well-meaning but toxic friends, and themselves.
This was a very tragic and convoluted situation. I arrived at the condominium complex in Reading, Massachusetts, on a midsummer afternoon. The light rain had stopped. Flashing police lights led me to the scene, where I stepped under the yellow police tape connected to the three-level clapboard buildings. They were painted a bright yellow with green trim and had attractive window boxes of peonies and purple and green coleus. Adolescent shrubs below that marked it as a recently built upper middle-class community.
The air was damp and misty. I decided to focus on the father, who stood like a large stone in the street. As soon as I saw him, I knew where he really was.
Physically he stood in the middle of the cul-de- sac with his hands jammed in his jeans, shoulders hunched, head down. I approached him as I was trained.
“Hello, Michael, I’m Bob from the Trauma Team. I’m here to help get you through this night.”
No recognition, response, or acknowledgment. I took three steps back and gave him space. He had heard my voice. I was sure of that. What was there to say in response? Somehow I had to enter that small little room he was in. The one with no windows or doors. The darkness. The silence with only an echo of your own thoughts—bad thoughts.
But how?
The only tools right now were patience, my Trauma Intervention Program training, and the dozen calls I had already been on in the last five months.
I shadowed Michael from about five to ten yards for most of the call. For me it would last seven hours and forty-five minutes. It was the second call of my twelve-hour shift that would make this a nineteen-hour day. One of three I spend each month. It was unusual, but not unexpected.
“Every call is different,” we were told. “You’ll never know what you’ll find when you get to the scene. Listen to the First Responders. Ask questions and observe.”
TIP volunteers go through nearly sixty hours of intensive training over a two-week period, with nearly two hundred pages of collateral readings done as homework. We’re well oriented to the system. We know what the police need to do and what they want us to do so they can be more effective. We know what the firefighters need to do, the paramedics, and the coroner. In fact, in cases of death (80 percent of our calls involve a death), the coroner is in charge of the scene and the body of the deceased. All of the municipal employees have their jobs. But no job includes looking after the emotional health of the Second Victim: the spouse, parent, or sibling of the deceased; the neighbor who witnessed the death, or the close family friend who may have been godmother to the deceased.
When you are witness to a traumatic death or have close ties to the deceased, you suffer some level of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). It’s not always immediately apparent, not always crippling, but it’s always there. One human being does not witness the sudden traumatic death of another without its having a resounding psychological echo. Those reverberations must be dealt with in the most caring and efficient way to enable the Second Victim to survive the incident with the minimal amount of psychological damage. TIP volunteers are trained to understand and recognize what is going on in the minds of these second victims and to provide the emotional first aid necessary to get them back in touch with reality, their responsibilities, and their loved ones that remain.
The father, Michael Logan, had not spoken to his current wife. She was there at the scene. He had not spoken to his first wife, Sean’s mother. She was there also and being helped by Sarah, my TIP partner. Michael had not spoken to his son, Darren, who had discovered his brother, Sean. Michael was not speaking to his own mother either.
He was just standing straight, shoulders a bit hunched with that stare. Eyes wet. While shadowing him, I also engaged the wife, the son to a limited degree, the grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousin, and Sean’s mother, who had also arrived. It was another rather disjointed family.
Michael was four years into his second marriage. The information I gathered told me that he was a recovering alcoholic who had been suicidal when he was drinking, but he was three years sober. His father had been extremely abusive during his childhood until the father killed himself. Sean, the deceased son, had been a brilliant kid who hadn’t seemed to fit in well socially and couldn’t figure out why. He had just been kicked out of high school a month before, enrolled in a new high school, and kicked out again after just four days. He’d had a lovely girlfriend. There were many signs of suicide potential, but too many conflicting things that would contradict that. I just don’t know.
I saw that Michael was in serious trouble and spoke to the police about it. They recognized it and removed the other guns from the house. I spoke with Michael’s mother (the grandmother), and she recognized it too. He clearly blamed himself and was emotionally locked in that small dark room. During the first two to three hours, I got Michael to respond to me through a few very simple requests, such as the retrieval of keys.
The police officer in charge of the crime scene called me over and told me that they were removing the guns from the house, and they would fill out the paperwork required to show their responsibility for the property. I was to tell Michael. I nodded and approached him from an angle, as we were trained.
“The police want you to know that they are taking custody of your two guns and are filling out all the paperwork needed so you know where they are and how to retrieve them.”
“What?” a strong challenge.
“Why are they taking my guns?” a tinge of panic. Hazel eyes with pupils constricted focused on me. Still a handsome if pained face. We were engaged. And so it began.
“The officer didn’t give me a full explanation of why. He just described the two guns and the ammunition and wanted me to tell you what they are doing.”
“Why? Why are they taking my guns? What paperwork? I want to know why they are taking my guns and what paperwork they mean.”
“I’ll go and get the officer and have him talk directly to you. Will you stay right here?”
“Yes. I want to talk to the officer. I want to know why they are taking my guns.”
Part of our training directs us to provide as much information as we can to our clients—accurate, simple, and responsive. When at all possible, we connect them with the professional who has that information, be it the police, the fire chief, or the ER physician. Clear, concise communication with no chance of misinterpretation. We facilitate communication. We try not to pass on secondhand summaries.
It was midevening now, around 8 PM. The police officer walked with me through the shadows to where Michael was standing just outside the glow of the streetlight. It was a midsummer night with fairly mild temperatures. Michael was wearing long sleeves, but looked a bit cold.
“Michael, this is Officer Bellflower. Can I get you a blanket?”
“Why are you taking my guns? What are you doing with them?”
As the officer began his response, I stepped back out of the halo of the street lamp and listened to what I could. The officer went over the paperwork and responded in a calm way to Michael’s pained queries. He went over some things twice. Michael seemed to understand, if not agree. Officer Bellflower moved away, expressing his sincere sympathy to Michael, and nodded to me. I moved back a bit closer to Michael, in his peripheral arc of sight. There began some body language that indicated he accepted my being there as I followed along with him, not in his face, just in sight.
I spoke again with his mother, the grandmother who had discovered her grandson’s body. She reminded me very much of a junior high school principal—strong, tough, no-nonsense, but with a guarded sensitivity accustomed to being in charge. She had told me a great deal about Michael and his difficult childhood and what an abusive beast his father had been before he killed himself. She seemed to express a balance of remorse and relief in describing that period. Now she was very worried about Michael.
We acknowledged the obvious danger of his taking his own life. She asked me to help him.
“What are you going to do?”
Without too much thought, I responded that “we” needed to help him. What could we do?
She had asked him repeatedly where he was going to stay that night. We had been in the street all this time because the home was a crime scene and they couldn’t go back in, not that they ever would have wanted to. Scorsese minimizes the blood spilled in his violent deaths. A theater audience would not accept the gore of reality. Michael would never live in this home again. He would not respond to his mother’s question other than with a shake of his head. His wife had asked the same question with the same response. This was a man who wasn’t thinking about where his bed was going to be that night. Or maybe that’s all he was thinking about. The grandmother was not giving up. We were a team.
“His son Darren needs him,” she said. And that was my answer.
That was the strategy. Darren was planning to go home with his aunt and her family, where he had actually been staying for the previous few months. It had something to do with his school district and not wanting to change in midterm. His cousin, who was about his age, was with him this night, and they had been pretty much inseparable, except when the police had to question Darren about what he had seen. Darren was an extremely fragile teenager who had been emotionally shattered that afternoon.
My TIP partner on this call was Sarah, a middle-aged woman who had experienced a suicide in her own family. She was more skilled at dealing with children. During the course of the call, we had formed a tacit agreement as to who would concentrate on which victims. We each had contact with all of them, but she was clearly better at working with the children and the distraught mother while I focused on the father and the grandmother. We each worked with the other family members to a limited degree through the night. Working as a team isn’t easy or always successful. This night it was. We had no conflict and had a complementary intuitive sense of what needed to be done.
One of the key ingredients in our TIP training is the strategy of distraction and redirection. If our clients seem likely to do something that would be injurious to themselves or others, we are instructed not to argue with them about their choice but just to help them reprioritize. In a gang shooting, there might be a primary urge to retaliate, to go out and get the guy that did it. We are told to point out that “Right now, your family needs you here. There’s time for everything, but right now you need to help your mother (or brother or other grieving family member).” Don’t argue, just redirect and reprioritize.
“Darren needs him,” the grandmother had said. And that was the redirection. It was just past 9 PM. I approached Michael again, but this time at an oblique angle from the rear. He could see me coming, but not directly at him. I wanted to be physically close to him without being confrontational.
When I was standing about two feet from his left shoulder, I said, “Michael, Darren needs you tonight.”
His head moved just a fraction in a kind of foggy acknowledgment. I stood silently. He did not respond further. I stayed closer than I had been and remained silent but present. I did not go more than six feet from him for about the next twenty minutes. He seemed to be moving away from me. He walked slowly around in the courtyard of the condominium complex.
A neighbor came up to express her sympathy. Michael was nonresponsive at first, but then lifted his head and said. “Can I use your bathroom?”
He seemed to have a goal in his eyes. I felt uncomfortable.
“Certainly, Michael. Right inside the door. You know where it is, just the same as your house,” the neighbor replied.
I felt a little yellowish red pain in my stomach. I couldn’t follow him in, but I couldn’t just let him go off. As he was walking over to her door, a policeman stopped and asked him a question. He responded and asked a return question. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of conversation. I couldn’t hear the details. As long as he wasn’t moving any farther away from me, I decided to keep my distance. The police officer kept him engaged for about five full minutes. Then he nodded and walked away with a glance at me.
I’m not certain, but I believe the police are just as aware of that “distraction” strategy as we are. Everyone on that crime scene knew Michael’s history and what we were all afraid of. I believe that police officer was reacting on instinct, as I was. Michael seemed to have forgotten about the bathroom and began wandering back to the curb. I trailed at my five to six foot distance and then approached closer.
“Darren needs to be with you tonight. You’re his dad. He needs you.”
“Darren is going to his aunt’s house. That’s what he wants to do. He needs to do what he wants.”
Okay, there it was. We were involved in a sensible discussion. We were back to safe ground. I said nothing more and walked over to where Darren was sitting on the curb with his cousin. I squatted down directly in front of Darren and put my hands on each of his knees.
“Darren?” He raised his head halfway up. “Darren, you need to be with your dad tonight.”
“I’m going to stay with my aunt, with Jimmy and my uncle, in Reading. That’s where I used to stay.”
“Darren, tonight you need to be with your dad. You should be together tonight. He needs you.”
“All right.”
I squeezed his knees and touched his head as I rose and walked back to where Michael was standing.
“Darren wants to be with you tonight.”
He looked up and met my eyes for the first time. I held his glance for about five seconds, maybe ten, and then he lowered his head again. He stood there silently.
Then
“Where’s Darren?”
“Over there by the curb.”
He walked halfway across the grassy courtyard toward the curb.
“Darren?”
No movement. Then slowly Darren’s slight figure unfolded from the curb and turned to face the voice of his father. They looked at each other for a moment and then each walked very slowly toward the other. Within five to six mutual paces they met, wrapped their arms around each other, and just stood there silently for a very long time. Then they shifted their grips to be side by side and walked away, out of the courtyard. I did not follow. I didn’t feel worried.
I walked over to the crowd and began making my rounds again. The grandmother had been watching. She didn’t say very much but gave me a halfhearted hug, or at least tried to. I spoke to Michael’s wife and told her I thought that Darren might be staying with them tonight. She told me she thought that he was going with his aunt.
“Things change,” I said. “Will it be a problem?”
“No. No problem. We still don’t know where we’re going to be. Probably just find a motel somewhere nearby. We’re just not going back in there. Not ever.”
“Can I make some calls and try to find you a room?”
“No, better wait for Michael. I don’t want to do anything without Michael.”
“Okay, fine.”
That’s kind of what TIP volunteers can do. We can find some lodging, make arrangements, but we can’t transport anyone in our cars. Insurance liability and all that. But we can help out with logistical details. We can find a hotel room, a pet boarding facility, or an open pharmacy. We even contact the hazmat cleaning crew that comes to a crime scene after the police are done to clean up all the blood and body parts that may remain. In fact that is exactly what we would do later, before we left the scene. It can be a very expensive service, but your homeowners policy usually covers it. If not, we know of some companies that will actually work gratis (for free) in some situations. My partner and I discussed this service with the wife while Michael and Darren were off by themselves. I was able to explain our Resource Guide to her as well. She was the most in control and understood what I was saying. We gave her the coroner case number and other information. She agreed to let us take care of making the call to the clean-up company.
It was well after 10 PM when Michael and Darren came back around the corner of the courtyard, still with arms around each other.
Michael approached his wife and said, “Darren is staying with us tonight.”
She nodded. That was that. I caught the grandmother’s eye. What a team!
Michael’s wife asked if we could retrieve some toiletries and other things from the house to take with them wherever they would end up. I told her I’d check and then walked over to the officer in charge. He told me it would be all right for them to enter the condo, but they had to stay on the first floor. They would not be allowed upstairs—nor would they want to go there. But if there was anything they needed, they could tell the officer inside, and he would fetch it if he could.
I told that to Michael’s wife. She spoke with Michael, and the three of them walked slowly to the front door and entered. I followed.
Michael and Darren stretched out on the couch, nesting inward. Michael’s wife spoke to the policeman at the foot of the stairs and described what she needed and where it was. He confirmed with me that nobody else would go upstairs and then went to get the needed items. It was quiet. He came down shortly with everything that had been asked for. Michael and Darren were curled up on the coach together. Darren had his eyes closed. Michael didn’t. I think they were just catching their emotional breath. We all stayed where we were for a while.
Then Michael gently unwrapped himself from Darren, stood up, and announced to me that he had to go in the garage and get something from his truck. His chin seemed tilted up just a fraction. Courage? Defiance? Resolve? It was the loudest he had spoken.
My heart kind of froze. I felt I could not follow him into the garage. I knew I should, but I felt it insulting. I felt that we had made a connection. He made the statement to me, and I just didn’t know what to do. Was he calling for help? For me to stop him? I didn’t. I just walked up to the inside garage door he had gone through, which he closed behind him, and braced myself for the sound of a gunshot.
He came back in after a moment or three and kind of laughed. He looked at me and said, “Wanna see something funny?”
“Sure,” I said.
He took me into the garage and showed me his truck. The front bumper was jammed against the wall.
“I guess I pulled in kinda hot!” He grinned a bit.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I grinned back.
“I think I just want to back it off an inch and not permanently dent the wall.”
He got into the truck, turned it on, and backed it up an inch. Then he turned it off and got out. We left the garage, and he told his wife what he had done. Back in the world.
My partner, Sarah, collected some additional clothes the policeman had missed and handed the bag to Michael’s wife. The cleaners we had called finally arrived, and we walked out with the family. Sarah with the wife, Darren with his birth mother, who had been waiting outside the front door, and me with Michael.
I stopped on the porch with Michael and gently put my arm on his, came close and said, “Michael, at eleven this morning, I sat with a dad whose son had used a needle to end his life. It doesn’t matter whether they choose a needle or a pistol or a bottle of pills. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. It’s a terrible sickness, and it’s not your gun that is to blame.
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t do anything else for you tonight. You need to stick close to Darren. You need to listen to him. We’re both dads, and I’ve learned more from listening to my son than I ever did from listening to my father. You need to be there for Darren. Don’t leave him tonight.”
Again our eyes locked. He said nothing.
We all paused at the curb. Sarah gave hugs to Darren, the wife, and the mother. Then Michael looked up and just reached out his hand to me, which I took. I guess it was a guy thing. He wasn’t talking, but he had Darren in his sights.
I watched the three of them drive off in search of a hotel room and then said good night to the grandmother and the rest of the family while Sarah also said her good-byes. She checked to be sure the cleaner knew what to do with the key when he was done. It had been an eight-hour call on top of the four-hour call I’d had that morning. It was my busiest day yet. I don’t expect to have another like it.
I don’t know how much a recovering suicidal alcoholic whose father and son both committed suicide can endure. But he would get through this night. I believed he would. That was my job. I’m a TIP volunteer.
TIP is a national organization that serves hundreds of cities with over 1,500 volunteers. In 1991, it won the prestigious Innovations Award cosponsored by the Ford Foundation and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2000, Attorney General Janet Reno presented the Crime Victim Service Award to founder Wayne Fortin. Awards and national recognition reinforce the real rewards felt by the TIP volunteers every day, on every call. They just want to make a difference.
Why do ordinary people do this extraordinary work?
What kind of people choose to put themselves in the middle of a human disaster? Certainly the police, fire, EMT, and ER staff all make that choice. It’s a respected vocational path. But each of those professions has its own significant barriers to entry.
The overwhelming answer given by TIP volunteers to the why question is “To give back to the community.” It’s heard so often; 90 percent of my training class responded that way. But the words lose their meaning. What did this community give them that they feel some obligation to “give back”? Is this the real answer or the facile one?
In my limited experience, a TIP volunteer is most often a person who has suffered his or her own catastrophic personal loss: witnessing a stepfather murder a younger brother, coming home to find your son has committed suicide with your gun, watching helplessly by your wrecked car as life slips away from your wife while your son asks, “Daddy, what’s happening?”
It wasn’t just the death of a relative or close friend, but a horrific and traumatic death experience from which they need to heal and reconnect with the world. What many TIP volunteers express when questioned further is that being a TIP volunteer is part of their healing process. And healing doesn’t just happen.
There’s no end to the personal tragedies that occur every day in every town in the world. You can’t relate to Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, or even the Holocaust. They are just words, pictures, stories told. You watch the NewsHour, see the pictures, and read the list of young soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. You might recognize a town or a uniform, a smile. But it’s just for the moment. Then dinner is on the table.
Waking up to find your husband of fifty-four years lying in bed next to you, lifeless, will stay with you a lot longer than Katie Couric’s nightly vignette. It has much more impact than the thousands of Iraqis or hundreds of thousands of Rwandans and Darfurians. When the coroner leaves after the body of your spouse has been “transported,” you are left alone in your home. You’re more alone than you’ve ever been in your life, and who is there to help you through these moments of disconnected insanity when your world has been vaporized?
Not the nice police officer who responded to your 911 call. Not the EMTs who did their best to restore a life that had been so entwined with your own. Not the coroner who was kind and gentle and patient with you in explaining how you could claim the body of your loved one after they had completed the autopsy. And yes, “Here is the coroner’s case number for your reference. You’ll need to give it to the mortuary to claim the body.” The mortuary? The body? The deceased? My God, it was my husband, Bill, not remains. And then you are alone, sitting on the couch with a scrap of paper with a coroner’s case number printed neatly, and that’s all you have. That and the silence. And what do you do next?
What kind of person volunteers to stop his or her own life to be there for you, to help you get through those moments of unreality? That surreal feeling of emptiness, confusion, and anger. Floating above the room while your heart is nailed to the carpet, bleeding. Who is this TIP volunteer, and why is he there for you?
One answer is simple. Because there’s nobody else in the system whose job it is to care for you. Sure, you should have family and friends, and that’s what friends are for. But they’re not there at that moment, that worst moment of all when you first realize the loss, the change that has altered your world forever. 9/11? Don’t bother me. Katrina? A bad fairy tale. This was MY life that just ended. My life. What am I going to do now? Who am I living for now? Who do I make plans with, dinner for, complain to, hold?
The TIP volunteer has an enormous sense of compassion and has been rigorously trained to be dispassionately compassionate. The TIP volunteer understands the “pit” you’re in and is ready to get down there with you and gradually help you back to the reality of the world as it now exists. Why? Why do these people volunteer to inject themselves into the worst moments of somebody else’s life?
Because they care? Yes, they do. Why? Because in expressing their compassion and their sincere caring, they often help themselves heal from their own horrific loss experiences. By genuinely caring for another human being, you somehow refill that emotional void in your own life. You fight back at the evil with just your own small effort of good. Little by little.
We understand the feeling of loss, but they also understand that we can’t know how you truly feel in your uniquely horrific experience. It was your life. Your husband or child or parent with whom you had your own unique relationship filled with love and conflict and hope and resentments is gone. The TIP volunteer can’t know what those details were or the individual regrets you have or hopes that have vanished. Just that they too had hopes lost, regrets forever unresolved, world imploded. The TIP volunteer knows that what you need right now and what they can offer is someone who genuinely cares about you and only you.
How does this help heal their own loss? It’s hard for me to explain that to you here. Maybe a trained therapist can try, but the clinical rationale is less important than what I see: the genuine human warmth that comes through that fog of overwhelming sadness, remorse, anger, confusion, and frustration. Human compassion and caring can prevent the “second injury” that occurs so often to the survivor. The second injury that is so much akin to PTSD. The injury that results from clumsy insensitive people who just want to say the right thing, but don’t know what it is. The neighbors that say,
“He’s in a better place.”
“I know how you feel.”
“You’d better buck up and face reality. He’s gone, and the sooner you deal with it the better.”
“You need to be strong for your kids.”
“You need to contact the insurance company right away!”
“I have a friend who can help you with the financial side.”
What you really need to do is to grieve for the most important person in your world who is now gone. You need to feel the anger and sadness and loss. You can blame yourself, your dead wife, or God. You can feel whatever you want to feel without filter. And you need somebody there who understands loss and won’t judge you. Somebody who can listen and feel your anguish and validate it. Somebody who can support you and help you make your own decisions about what to do now—but not right now. Someone who can help you dial the phone to contact your children or your sister or brother. Someone who can protect you from the system that can be so callous. Someone who understands that you don’t really need that sister-in-law who comes rushing in to embrace and cry with you for a moment and then gets down to meal planning and cleaning your house and making arrangements for you and insisting that you have to come stay with her because “You can’t sleep here alone tonight” and just further removes you from the reality that is now your life.
Yes, there is a place for the helpful relative and close friend who can help you through these horrible times, but treating you like a helpless infant isn’t always the best course of action.
TIP volunteers want to do good things because they understand that doing good things makes their world a little better, just a little. But that’s all they can do. And that’s enough for now. They aren’t Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, but we can help just one person survive just one personal disaster on this one day and stop the cycle of hurt.
That helps us believe that the world is a little bit better place and helps us heal and believe that our own personal loss is somehow counterbalanced just a bit. There’s no protection from inevitable loss, but there is the opportunity to prevent the needless second injury.
Why do some people choose to be a TIP volunteer and others choose to strike back and attack when they are hurt? Some say that the healing we encounter is a reflection of the thought that “Yes, I once suffered a horrendous loss, but that was years ago. Others are suffering right now. Just for today, this person is in worse shape than I am, so it makes me feel better by comparison. At least I’m not her.”
Jayan Conily is the executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of TIP. Talking with her gives some clearer insights.
Just belonging to TIP is another way of healing. The essence of the insanity that takes us over during these crises is the disconnectedness to the world. That feeling of abandonment. “Nobody knows or could possibly feel the loss that I feel today. I am forever separated from society.” But belonging to the TIP group helps us reconnect with people who understand the loneliness of the crowd. We rejoin society one small step at a time, and our monthly training meetings reaffirm our connectedness with this group of caring and compassionate people.
It may be that each of us in our quest to heal looks at each TIP call as another opportunity, an opportunity to return to that moment of our own when we were disconnected, scared, and helpless. We each climbed out of that ball of conflicting emotional confusion to try and reconnect with the daily reality of life. But we never really quite made it all the way. Our lives have been forever altered, and we just want things to be the way they were “before.” By entering that moment in someone else’s crisis, we may hope to revisit our own personal portal and try one more time to pick up the thread that had held our lives together. Each TIP call is just another chance to reconnect by going back to the source of our own departure.
Maybe not...
And maybe the whole world is not such a terrible place after all. And maybe it’s up to us, individually, to carve out the good little niche that we need to exist in.
Ask Wayne Fortin, the founder of TIP, and he’ll tell you that some people say, “Because I can.” They have a gift, and they feel responsible to use it. Many of them know they are good at doing this, and they like doing what they are good at.
Wayne will go on to tell you that others say they are “privileged” to be with people who welcome them into a very personal time in their lives. There is a positive aspect in being able to establish a relationship with people who are being “real” with all of their “stuff” stripped away.
“I want to prevent what happened to me from happening to others” is another quote Wayne will share. Learning about the human condition is another motivating factor.
Why does a person join TIP?
“To make a difference.”
Just a little one. Better than doing nothing at all.