After Trauma

Lessons on Overcoming from a First Responder Turned Crisis Counselor

Ali W. Rothrock

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506480633
• eBook ISBN: 9781506480640
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology

From a young age, Ali Rothrock fell head over heels in love with firefighting. But when she entered the fire service, she was ostracized by those who weren't willing to accept a girl into their ranks. Constant microaggressions, overt sexism, and instances of sexual violence wore her down until she no longer believed she could safely exist in the world. The trauma of her experiences eventually resulted in a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that diagnosis was a first step toward healing.

In the years since, Ali has worked as a domestic violence and sexual assault counselor, an advocate for abused children, an inspirational speaker, and a crisis counselor for first responders. On her journey of recovery, she has collected other people's stories of resilience. After Trauma explores the fallout from trauma, the ripples those experiences have on our lives, and finally, a path toward healing.

After Trauma is a story of adversity, grit, defiance, choice, and hope. Each chapter offers a lesson to help readers overcome their own trauma, including concrete and actionable advice on how to re-story a life after adversity. We all have the ability to re-define ourselves, to feel hope about what lies ahead, and to choose our own way forward.

Part I

And when you go through the valley

And the shadow comes down from the hill

If morning never comes to be

Be still, be still, be still

If you forget the way to go

And lose where you came from

If no one is standing beside you

Be still and know I am

—The Fray

1

Forgive Yourself for Not Seeing It Coming

Compromise where you can. Where you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say “No, you move.”

—Christopher Markus

I’ve been able to recite my story with crystal-clear accuracy for over a decade now. I could always deliver the entire thing chronologically, with the events laid out like a sterile and tidy timeline of trauma. I thought that was my mark of overcoming—that being able to tell the story with no emotion meant I was carrying no burden. But the narrative I’d been telling was only half realized. The black-and-white timeline was just the backdrop, the bones. A question mark hovered over the events, casting a shadow that hung itself over my shoulders and crawled inside my mind like a parasite.

I had internalized a quiet blame, an attempt to find order in the chaos that had come from a long-lasting violation. I clung desperately to an old belief that impending trauma was always preceded by omens or warning signs that would signal one to change course to avoid the impending catastrophe and that I’d simply missed mine.

I felt anger at myself for being careless, and this made me feel complicit in the choices others made to hurt me. It took time and intention for me to see that the shadow of blame never belonged on my shoulders. I didn’t miss any prophecy. Not having a crystal ball to see the danger ahead didn’t make me an accomplice. This realization shone a light on the shadow and made it dissipate like smoke. Occasionally, when I’m speaking in front of a crowd these days, I talk about this realization and my voice starts coming out of me in waves. The appropriate emotion is present now, and it feels like the empowering antithesis of the shadow I shed. I shed the shadow by going back to the beginning, by going back to the place where I’d lost her, my younger self.

It was the summer of 2014. I remember it being cool for late July. I walked through my grandparents’ house, looking at the toys my cousins and I had played with during our past summers there. I stopped in the doorway and suddenly felt a sense of all the time that had passed since I considered myself a child. Some of us grow up gradually, arriving at adulthood slowly and through a culmination of our experiences up to that point. My growing up occurred suddenly, almost violently, like a sudden, soaking thunderstorm.

When my sibling Julia and I were younger, I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility. While at the roller skating rink for a birthday party, I would crane my neck to keep Julia in view.

“There are adults there,” my mom would tell me beforehand. “You can just have fun. It’s the adults’ job to look after you both.”

I still believed her words when I walked into the fire service. My privileged sense of security had never been challenged. I willingly stepped into my new world at this first firehouse, having no concept that danger was staring right back at me. My thirty-two-year-old self can see that what was coming was clear from the very beginning. My sixteen-year-old self thought that their smiles meant I was welcome there. I had no idea smiles could mean something else entirely.

As a girl, I was often asked, “Ali, what do you want to do when you grow up? Who do you want to be?” and I would get worried, as if I was going to go to sleep one night and awake the next day as a different person of my choosing. My mom says I was often concerned because I didn’t know how I was ever going to make that choice. I wanted to be a hairdresser, then a singer, a teacher, a veterinarian, a marine biologist, and an Olympic ice skater. Then after ice skating, I became obsessed with the movie Twister and wanted to be a tornado chaser with my best friend Matt. But then I found firefighting, and every single thing in my life aligned. Firefighting was my missing piece. I felt like we’d always been looking for each other.

My great-grandfather, Carl James Peterson, was the fire chief of Stanford Hose Company in Corry, Pennsylvania. During a fire in the late sixties, he found the body of a little girl who’d been suffocated as she hid in a closet. He carried her body out of the fire and, as my Uncle Terry wrote in his biography, “the emotion of that incident stayed with him forever.” Then on Easter Sunday, 1970, five Stanford Hose Company firefighters were killed at the Sherwin-Williams paint store when it exploded during a fire. Great-grandpa CJP was burned on his hands, arms, and face as he worked to save those firefighters. I always thought that my desire to be a firefighter came out of the clear, blue sky, but when I learned about my great-grandfather, I felt so proud that I was carrying on this tradition. His love for firefighting skipped two generations until I found it again.

I grew up in the fire service. I don’t mean literally. I haven’t been around fire trucks my whole life, and I’m not a legacy firefighter unless you count my great-grandfather, which no one ever does. I grew up in the fire service in the sense that once I joined the fire service, I grew up.

On an October day in 2005, I walked into that first firehouse as a sixteen-year-old and felt like I finally had an answer to both of the questions posed to me as a child. Firefighting was what I wanted to do, and a firefighter was who I wanted to be. It was National Fire Prevention Week—a time when most firehouses have an open house. At this station, they’d set up a mock house fire, complete with a burning hay bale, and were offering members of the community the opportunity to put on fire gear and put it out.

To the surprise of my entire family, I eagerly stood in that line and waited my turn. To this day, I can’t tell you what made me do it. I put on gear that was way too big and followed a firefighter with a white helmet (I would learn that this signified he was a chief) as we crawled forward with a hose line in our hands to put out the fire on the small bale of hay. In disbelief, Julia snapped some pictures as I was waiting to put out the fire, and when I look back on them now, I see a look on my face that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. It was determination, focus, drive. Putting on that fire gear, even though it was two sizes too big, made me feel at home.

As soon as I’d taken the gear off, I eagerly wanted to do more. The chief smiled and told me that they were running out of hay and that I couldn’t have another turn, but did I want an application to join their fire company? I’ve asked myself many times in the years since, Why did he offer that to me? Did he expect that I would fall in line with what would end up being expected of me? Did he want me around for entertainment? Did any part of him see the passion I had for firefighting as something he wanted to nurture or was it always just a joke? As I filled out the application and handed it back in to the appointed firefighter, I remember the look on that man’s face. It seemed as though I had made him really angry, but I couldn’t figure out why. Looking back, I now see this as my first indication of what was coming, the first trickle of blood on a wound that had been festering for generations.

I came home, found a half-full journal, and jotted down a few lines about what I had done and who I had met. That became a habit. Every day I came home and wrote down what I was learning. I thought it would be important to be able to look back at those beginning days and remember what falling in love had been like. I wanted to always be able to relish that feeling, and I wanted to remember every single thing I learned there. I felt so incredibly lucky that I had found my purpose at the age of sixteen.

In those first few months, I learned so much. I learned how to pull 150 feet of folded hose line off the side of a fire engine and place it on my shoulder. I learned how to lift ladders up and “throw them” against the side of the firehouse. I learned how to run up to a fire hydrant, wrap it with the dry five-inch hose, remove the cap with the clunky hydrant wrench, flush it until the water ran clean, hook up the hose, and charge the line. I learned how to get dressed in my gear as fast as possible and cover up every speck of skin to protect it against flames. I learned how to train my ears to make out every single word of the sometimes garbled dispatcher voices as they alerted the firefighters to an emergency. I bought firefighting shirts, books, and a silver Maltese cross necklace that became my most prized possession.

But I also learned to resent my body and view it in a way I never had before. This new environment told me it was too feminine, that it gave me away, that it had no place in this masculine world. I hated how I couldn’t hide my body because some men saw it and wanted to own it, to dominate it because it was way too much and yet nowhere near enough.

A few weeks after I started, I sat on the floor of the engine bay one night with an air pack (what firefighters wear on their backs to bring breathable air into fires where the superheated gases could sear your lungs immediately) on the ground in front of me. I had my fire gloves on, which fit me like giant oven mitts. They did not have gloves that fit me and hadn’t bothered to order any, so I got the same size every other guy was given. I was practicing changing the air cylinder on the back of the air pack, as I knew that, in the event of a fire, replacing people’s spent air cylinders with fresh ones was an easy skill I could perform before I received much other training. Removing the cylinder required dexterity, which I did not have while wearing those oven mitts, but I knew that if that air pack was in a heated environment, the metal could be hot, so the gloves needed to stay on. So I sat on the floor and practiced. Cylinder in. Step 1, 2, 3, it’s ready for use. Step 3, 2, 1, cylinder is out and ready to change.

It was quiet. Peaceful. Almost reverent. I was always hoping for a call, ready to move at the slightest squawk from the small black pager I clipped to the back pocket of my jeans. And then a nameless firefighter walked by, paying no attention to me. I called after him, asking a question about some fire call scenario I’d made up in my mind. I wanted to know exactly what the protocol was, what role I should play on the scene if this made-up emergency happened. He turned back to face me but paused long enough for me to think he didn’t hear me. I was about to ask my question in another way when he responded and forever changed the way I saw the world and my place in it.

He shone the first light on my cage—a cage of expectation that existed just for me, a girl. This nameless firefighter finally spoke: “I hear your question and I will answer your question . . . but first I want you to go into that closet where [guy’s name] is waiting and let the light stay off. Let whatever happens happen and don’t tell anyone. And then I will answer your question.”

Back then, I didn’t have all the words I have now. But I knew that it was a disgusting suggestion and was simply something I wanted no part of. I put the air pack away, walked out of the station, and drove home, my world tilting slightly off its axis.

When I tell this part of the story in front of a crowd, I always pause right here. I want to see people’s faces as they process this in real time. I want them to think about what this means, about what our world can ask of women and girls and of what he was asking of me. They shake their heads slightly, they wrinkle their noses. The men look at me with pity; the women look at me with a knowing.

Another time, I was told someone was “waiting for me” in his car, in the part of the parking lot where the cone of light from the streetlight didn’t reach. I was invited to go “talk” to him. All of this was asked of me so they could make it “easier for me there.” They said it with mischievous laughter in their eyes, telling me that it was my way to freedom when really it would have just solidified my bondage.

It was an offer for an exchange in a context they understood. My compliance, my silence, and unprotested access to my body were the currency. Follow our rules, they told me. Laugh when we make a rape joke. Smile when we talk about how your “young boobs” would look during a wet T-shirt contest. Continue to make eye contact when we speak graphically about the mechanics of sex and when we play porn on the TV in the lounge. Don’t look away. Don’t ever look away. Make dirty jokes back at us so we know you aren’t a prude. But stay pure enough so we can say, “Ali isn’t like those other girls.”

This was my payment for acceptance into their world. Only then would my existence be allowed. I am forever grateful, truly and deeply grateful, that I knew this treatment was wrong. All my life, I’d grown up with the antidote to it. My mom and dad were true partners in every sense of the word. Life wasn’t split into roles based on gender in my house. Julia and I were taught how to use a socket wrench just as much as we were taught how to use a garden trowel. I’d seen the way my parents treated each other with love and respect and was taught that I deserved that in all my relationships too, so when this started, I was able to fight so hard against it because I knew it didn’t have to be this way.

An older firefighter sent me thirty-five text messages in two days, saying things like “I just need to remind myself how old you are” and telling me that he was sitting outside of my house in the middle of the night. In passing once, someone told me that they knew which window in my house was my bedroom. I wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret that. Were they going to come crawling through it one night as I slept in the same room as Julia? None of this felt like it was up for debate. It just was. I was trying to rapidly understand this truth. It was a life-altering and irrevocable truth that I could never unlearn or unsee. Once I saw it, once I truly understood the reality of this situation, I could never again close my eyes to the cage I was being asked to live in. As soon as I stepped out of the cage—a cage where I was confined by their expectations—I was no longer the sum of myself. I was seen as an antagonizer. A brazen outlier. The reasons I joined the fire service didn’t matter. I was no longer me to them. They didn’t want who I was. They wanted someone who would coyly roll their eyes but not open their mouth. Refusing the cage meant that, in their eyes, I was entitled, spoiled, prudish, a tease. “Go ahead and call the cops,” I was told. “That’ll just make it worse for you.”

I never bartered. I never traded myself for better treatment or an easier passage, because that too was a lie. Nothing was ever going to be easy for me there. My looks had never been so complimented. But even back then, I saw the explicit flattery for the trap that it was. It was all so thinly veiled even to my sixteen-year-old self. I wrote in my journal after just a few months there, “They told me I was beautiful in a way that knows no freedom.”

I displayed defiance by simply existing there. Just showing up for calls or to training or to vote at a company meeting was seen as “disobedient” within their narrow definition of female obedience. I never wished I was different, never wished I could just be happy in my cage. No, I thought, these men are wrong. This world is wrong. Their expectations are wrong. This cage is wrong. I am not wrong.

“I was just kidding.”

“She can’t take a joke.”

“She’s so sensitive.”

These comments were usually made as the harasser was smiling as if they were telling a joke I just didn’t understand. And that was always their excuse, anyway. I was being aggressively gaslit before I knew the term. I didn’t have words to describe what was going on there, and explaining it to anyone but the pages of my journal felt humiliating: “They talk about what they want to do to me . . .”

After all, firefighting was what I felt put on this earth to do. Coming to the terms with the environment I had to do it in felt like just another thing I needed to learn. For all I knew, this is what firefighting was like everywhere. Years later after this trauma had ended, I would stand on a very public stage and say, “Being a part of that fire house felt like a zero sum game, like I had to make a decision. I could give it all up and be rid of the environment that was hurting me or I could put up with it all and keep doing this thing that I loved. I felt like I had no good options.”

After just a month there, my inaugural fire call came. It was the first ahead of hundreds of others, but it was easily the most significant. It showed me the power, beauty, and significance of emergency services. It takes some firefighters years to arrive at a call like this one, but for me, I got it right out of the gate. I think back to that night often, but not for the reasons people might think. I can still see the little girl there, her black skin standing out against the white sheets of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Resources