Little Messes Everywhere

The day I changed.

One year ago, my career as a therapist changed, and I, as a therapist and a mother, changed. Not because I learned a new therapeutic technique or earned another certification, attended a training, or suddenly discovered something after more than two decades of sitting across from people during some of the hardest moments of their lives.

It changed because two innocent teenage girls were murdered.

They were the same age as my teenage children.

In the immediate aftermath, I became the therapist for some of the first responders called to the scene.

I had invested years believing I understood trauma.

As a therapist specializing in working with first responders, I have sat with police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and their families through things most people will thankfully never experience. I understand critical incidents. I understand cumulative trauma. I understand what happens when someone has to walk into a scene everyone else is running away from—and then somehow go home afterward and resume ordinary life. I learned how to give and take dark humor to help them process their grief in a way only first responders do. I also became very good at understanding secondary trauma and taking care of myself.

I knew how to do this work.

Or at least I thought I did.

Then I found myself sitting across from first responders who had been at the scene where two teenage girls—the same age as my own children—had been murdered. I listened to them process. I listened as some of them were delicately trying to process without upsetting me with the details. I had to inform them to let go and just process. I thanked them for caring for my mental health as I care for theirs. I reminded them that, at that moment, it wasn’t about me.

And suddenly, maintaining that familiar clinical distance became much harder.

I wasn’t at the scene, but I was sitting with people who were.

I was hearing what they carried away from that scene. I watched people whose job requires them to function in unimaginable circumstances try to process something no amount of training can make normal.

And while I was their therapist, I was also a mother. And it was so imaginatively difficult not to be a mother to them at that time.

That changed everything.

A skill develops after doing this work for so long. You learn how to be present without taking everything home with you. You learn that empathy doesn’t require you to absorb someone else’s pain. You learn boundaries—not because you don’t care, but because you care enough to remain capable of doing the work.

Then something happens that gets through all those carefully assembled walls.

For me, it was these two girls.

Maybe it was their age.

Maybe it was listening to the people who responded to the scene.

Maybe it was going home afterward and looking at my own teenage children.

Maybe it was the awareness that somewhere, two families’ lives had just been permanently divided into before and after.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t neatly file this one in the part of my brain labeled “therapist.”

Because the mother in me had entered the room.

I found myself holding two realities at once.

My job was to create a safe place for first responders to process what they had experienced without worrying about how their words affected me. They deserved that. They needed a place where they didn’t have to protect anyone else from the reality of what they had seen and experienced.

But underneath my professional role was the awareness that these were children.

Children the same age as mine.

I think that was the moment something fundamentally changed in the way I understood this work. More importantly, as I write this, it was the moment something fundamentally changed in who I was, the mother, the friend, the everything outside my office.

Trauma was no longer something happening only to the person sitting across from me. I saw more clearly how trauma ripples outward—from victims, to families, to first responders, to communities, and sometimes even to the people entrusted with helping everyone else carry it.

We talk a lot about the trauma first responders experience. But sometimes we forget what we’re actually asking of them.

They walk into homes, accidents, violence, death, and unimaginable grief.

They see someone’s worst moment.

Then they clear the call.

They go back into service.

Eventually, they go home.

They sit at their dinner tables.

They help with homework.

They drive their kids to practice.

They kiss their children goodnight.

And somehow they are expected to move between those two worlds.

After this tragedy, I understood that transition differently.

Because I was making my own version of it.

I would sit with the aftermath professionally and then return home as a mother.

I looked at my children differently.

I thought about every ordinary goodbye differently.

I thought about the illusion we all live with that if we love our children enough, protect them enough, teach them enough, and worry about them enough, somehow we can guarantee they will always come home.

We can’t.

That is one of the most terrifying truths of parenthood.

And one of the hardest truths I’ve ever had to sit with as a therapist.

For years, I believed being good at this work meant keeping a certain distance. I still believe boundaries matter. But that experience taught me something else:

Sometimes what makes us better therapists isn’t learning how to feel less.

It’s learning how to feel deeply without making someone else’s pain about us.

Not the diagnosis.

Not the uniform.

Not the treatment plan.

The person.

Someone’s daughter.

Someone’s son.

Someone’s spouse.

Someone’s parent.

Someone’s entire world.

And I became even more aware that the first responder sitting across from me wasn’t simply “the officer,” “the firefighter,” or “the EMT” who answered the call.

They were human beings who had witnessed something horrific and were then expected to keep functioning.

I became more patient with grief that doesn’t follow a timeline. More respectful of fear that might seem irrational from the outside. More understanding of parents who worry too much, text too much, check locations, wait for the sound of the front door, or can’t sleep until they know their child is home. This experience deepened my yoga practice; for a time, it became my therapy. Being is a room. Being in my body and listening to my body, sitting with my body, and sitting with my feelings. In the immediate aftermath, I went to a yin class and saw an instructor friend who gave me the biggest hug, and all she said was, “Oh, Melissa”. I cried during that class. Willing my body to let go. I cried in many classes after, willing my body to let go. Because sometimes anxiety isn’t born from imagination. Sometimes it comes from realizing exactly how fragile ordinary life can be. I began learning what mattered most to me. I began trusting myself more, in and out of the yoga room. I began to DO the things

That realization changed the way I practice therapy.

I have spent much of my career helping people understand that we cannot control everything that happens to us. We can only decide what we do next.

A year later, I still don’t have a way to make sense of two young lives being taken.

I don’t think there is one.

Some things should never be made comfortable or wrapped in a lesson simply because humans desperately want tragedy to have meaning.

But I can acknowledge what their deaths changed in me.

They reminded me that behind every clinical story is a human story.

They reminded me that the people who respond to our worst moments carry pieces of those moments home.

So I hug my children differently now.

They reminded me that compassion and professionalism aren’t opposites.

They reminded me that being affected by something doesn’t make me less capable of helping someone through it.

And they reminded me that life is breathtakingly ordinary right up until the moment it isn’t.

And when a first responder sits across from me carrying something they believe is unbearable, I don’t rush to convince them that it isn’t.

I pay attention to ordinary moments.

Sometimes I sit beside them in it.

Because after all these years of being a therapist, perhaps one of the most important things I’ve learned is this:

We don’t always need someone to explain our pain.

Sometimes we need someone willing to witness it.

One year ago, two teenage girls lost the futures they should have had.

Their families were forced into a life they never chose.

First responders walked into a scene they could never unsee.

And I was given the enormous responsibility of helping some of them carry what they brought back out.

Somewhere in that process, something transformed in me too.

I was still a therapist.

But I was a different one.

And I don’t think I will ever practice the same way again.