A World of Wonder Press

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By Noelle Dodge | October 6, 2026 | A World of Wonder Press

Touch a hot dish and your hand pulls back before you’ve had a single thought about it. That’s your nervous system — faster than thinking, older than language. It remembers heat, and it protects you from it.

Now here’s what nobody tells the families: it does the same thing with emotional pain.

A cop who hasn’t faced his worst call in years can walk into a routine traffic stop and feel his heart hammer, his hands shake, his jaw clench. Nothing is happening. Everything is happening. His body is pulling its hand off a hot dish that isn’t there anymore.

The Gas Pedal and the Brake

You don’t need the textbook explanation, here’s a simple one.

Your nervous system has a gas pedal and a brake. The gas pedal floods you with adrenaline, quickens your breathing, sends blood to your muscles, and shuts down digestion — everything you need to fight or run.

The brake does the opposite: it conserves energy, digests food, calms the heart. Rest and heal.

In a healthy body, the two take turns in a rhythm. Danger comes, the gas pedal fires, danger passes, the brake eases you back down. And here’s the beautiful part nobody talks about: when the body comes down safely, it discharges the leftover energy — trembling, crying, laughing, even burping as digestion switches back on. Those aren’t signs of weakness. They’re signs the system is working.

Trauma breaks the rhythm.

Stuck on High

Sometimes the gas pedal gets stuck. The body stays mobilized for a threat that’s over. That’s hyperarousal: irritability, impatience, the short fuse. On the job, that edge has its uses — it overrides fear and gets people out alive. Off the job, it has a name every family recognizes: the hot head.

He’s the officer who goes from zero to aggressive over a minor incident — a taillight, a tone of voice. His family learns to read the room before he walks in. His partner learns which version of him showed up today. It looks like a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that never got the message that the danger ended.

Sometimes the opposite happens: the brake slams and stays slammed. That’s shutdown — numbness, isolation, going flat. The firefighter who used to be the life of the station now sits in his truck twenty minutes before going inside. He doesn’t feel much of anything, and feeling nothing starts to feel safer than feeling everything.

The Unnecessary Risk

And then there’s the one that looks like courage.

The firefighter who takes the unnecessary risk — who goes in when he doesn’t have to, who volunteers for the thing nobody else wants. Everyone calls it bravery. Sometimes it is. But there’s a quieter truth worth saying out loud: for a responder whose system is stuck, whose pain has nowhere to go, dying on the job can look like a hero’s goodbye — a way out that doesn’t carry the shame of the word suicide.

I want to be careful here. I’m not saying every brave act is a death wish. I’m saying we should be honest that the line exists, because the people walking it can’t ask for help with something nobody names.

The numbers back up the urgency. A widely cited 2018 white paper from the Ruderman Family Foundation found that first responders are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. Let that land: the job’s most lethal threat isn’t the fire or the suspect. It’s what the job leaves inside.

Why Alcohol

Alcohol quiets the gas pedal. That’s the whole terrible appeal. For a nervous system stuck on high, a drink turns the volume down — temporarily. But it doesn’t restore the rhythm; it deepens the dysregulation. And the research is blunt: alcohol abuse combined with PTSD sharply increases suicide risk. The thing they reach for to feel normal is the thing that moves them closer to the edge.

The Way Back

Here’s what I need the families to hear: the system that got stuck can learn rhythm again.

The discharge — the trembling hands, the tears that come out of nowhere, the laugh that bubbles up at the wrong moment — isn’t breakdown. It’s the body doing what it was built to do: releasing what it held to survive. When a responder can shake, cry, and breathe through it in safety, the brake starts working again. The resilient zone, that place where you can feel things without drowning in them gets wider.

It doesn’t happen alone, and it doesn’t happen by white-knuckling. It happens with trauma-informed help, and with people who understand that the hot head isn’t a bad person and the risk-taker isn’t just brave.

“Never underestimate the pain of a person, because in all honesty, everyone is struggling. Some people are better at hiding it than others.” — Will Smith

First responders are some of the best hiders we have. It’s time we got better at seeing them.

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If you or a first responder you love is struggling, call or text 988 — the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, 24/7. For responders specifically: the Fire/EMS Helpline at 1-888-731-3473 and CopLine at 1-800-267-5463 are staffed by people who understand the job.

Sources: Ruderman Family Foundation, “Mental Health and Suicide of First Responders” (2018); concepts drawn from the trauma resiliency work of Laurence Heller and Elaine Miller-Karas.

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