Confessions From Working at a Warmline (Long and Heavy)
tw: secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, mental health, grief, caregiver burnout, predatory behavior, child abuse, elderly abuse, terminal illness, discussions of death and dying, homelessness, poverty, food insecurity, suicidal ideation, crisis, substance use, relapse, loneliness, social isolation, job loss, defunding, systemic failure, moral injury
A warmline is a peer support line where you hold space for people going through hard times and offer resources. It is not a crisis line nor emergency intervention. It is typically a call before a crisis starts. Someone who usually needs to tell their story to someone who will listen.
When people say “the work you do is truly hard” they usually mean it kindly. And I know that and appreciate it. Appreciation and feeling understood are two different things and I have had a lot of experience with the first and very little of the second. It is generally coworkers from different departments who say it. People who are in the same building, same organization, but worked on the other side of it. They saw me walk in and out every day and they mean every word of the phrase. However, they just saw the door and not what came through it. I don’t blame them for that. I just don’t know how to say the phrase is not enough without sounding ungrateful so I mostly don’t say anything at all. How can you describe the complexity of the secondary trauma this work instills to you during a water break with someone from a different department?
All you can do most times is go home, run a bath, and sob profusely with the gravity of what you carry everyday.
A lot of the work I do feels invisible and I want to try to describe that. I think about other people in my position who may not have the outlet nor language to express their experiences. So this is my shot at that.
I worked at a mental health warmline for a year and a few months. The warmline occupied one side of the building whereas all the other departments — people teaching children about mental health, running support groups, doing outreach with other organizations, building something visible and front facing. It was work that had a name and looked like hope from the outside. On my side there was a phone. The full unfiltered spectrum of human suffering coming through a line. People in debt so deep they couldn’t see out. People who lost their housing. People who were elderly and alone and whose bodies were failing and who didn’t want to die, but didn’t know how to keep going. People who were cheated on and blindsided by partners they never thought would hurt them. People grieving pets, grieving people, grieving versions of their lives they thought they were going to have. People who simply just needed to talk because they had nobody else in their life who would listen.
The gravity of those two different sides of the organization in the same building is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around. And when you carry that weight and absorb that much darkness on one side of a building while the other side looks more hopeful, people will tell you to practice self care.
Take a bath. Go for a walk. Spend time with the people you love. Light a candle. Watch a show. I understand the intention behind that advice but I honestly think it addresses plainly nothing. One bath does not simply retrain a whole nervous system. A bath does not touch on the fact that your body has learned to brace itself before you consciously registered it was doing that when the phone rang. A bath does not reach the place where you stopped being able to differentiate between the performed self and the real one.
That can happen when you fake certainty enough times. On easy calls, you can perform warmth and competence genuinely and it flows like butter. On harder calls — the ones you don’t know how to hold and the ones that genuinely stump you — you have to perform groundedness from inside your own ungroundedness because the caller needs an anchor and you are the anchor and that’s not optional. It’s like they’re trying to aboard a raft that they don’t know is sinking.
I’m not sure what that experience is called. It’s not imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is feeling like a fraud even though you’re qualified for the work. What I do know is that the callers often expect you to be the authority, especially on hard calls. The nature of the role projects expertise you may not have at a given moment. They call a line, someone picks up, surely they must know what they’re doing. The harder the call the more certain you have to sound. The more certain you sound the more they trust you. The more they trust you the more alone you feel inside the gap between what they think you are and what you actually have to work with. A young recent undergraduate with two weeks of shadowing and no certified framework trying to hold the line between a person and their worst moment.
There were calls I still don’t know exactly how to put down. Calls where something in me recognized, without being able to name it cleanly, that the person on the other end may have been harming someone I couldn’t see or reach. A child. An elderly person. Someone vulnerable who couldn’t defend themselves. No training prepared me for that. No shadowing covered it. I was left in real time with questions that had no certified answer: how do you hold space for a suspected pedophile or elderly abuser? How do you stay friendly and keep them talking when everything in you wants to be anywhere else? How do you hold someone’s emotional need for support alongside your terror for a victim you cannot see or reach? I made those calls alone, on instinct, with no certified framework to fall back on. I still don’t know if I did it right. I may genuinely never know. The phrase “the work is hard” has never once come close to touching the experience of having an extreme moral weight put on you where you have to make decisions in real time, with real consequences, without a certified framework to hold you or guide you through it. That is another reason why the phrase doesn’t sit well with me.
There’s something particularly disorienting about not having language for what is happening to you while it’s happening. When I first started the job last year, trauma informed care training materials didn’t exist yet in our organization. They were found this year, shared informally and optionally. Better late than not having it at all. That means for most of my time at the job I was doing the hardest calls of my life without the framework I should have had from the beginning. I didn’t have words for what was happening to my body and my mind while it was happening. Secondary traumatic stress. Vicarious trauma. Somatic response. The way the nervous system learns to brace. I carried it all without having a proper name for it. And what you can’t name you can’t process. What you can’t process accumulates.
I was already someone who had trouble resting before this job, thanks to my ADHD. For the last few months I’ve been knitting, making music, and writing more than I have in quite some time. But none of those are stillness. They are compulsions, processing, and movement. My hands have to always be doing something. My brain has to constantly be working through something. I didn’t really know how to properly rest and allow myself to exist without producing anything before I started this job. This job just gave the inability to rest even more material to run on. You constantly have to stay alert. Have to stay emotionally regulated even when you’re not on a call. Because a call can come through at any moment and it’s your responsibility to handle it, so your body stays in survival mode. More reason to keep moving.
It was quite recently this last month that I noticed that the callers are a sort of mirror.
This was my first big job. It is because of this job that I know better what my calling is and what approach I want to take in life. I am grateful for that. However I’ve spent a whole year on the phone with a lot of people where that isn’t the case. There was one caller in particular. Elderly, alone, body failing, watching themselves deteriorate the same way cancer had taken loved ones before them. Their doctors were telling them their body couldn’t handle the procedures they needed. They were not ready to die. They didn’t want to die. They were afraid the stress of it all would give them a heart attack. And that when they did die no one would know for quite some time. No one would come to check on them. There was no resource that could really help them and they couldn’t afford the ones they needed. They called back month after month, returning to the same fear, pain, and isolation. I held space because it was all I was equipped to do. I did the best I could. And my best, without a certified framework, was my ceiling. There was nothing telling me how to properly not have that type of call affect your outlook on life.
That caller changed something in me that I am still reckoning with. I am almost 25 — old enough for life to stop feeling like a warm up and start feeling like the real game. Where you begin to reckon with what your career will be, what your future looks like, and what kind of person you are becoming.
It wasn’t just that one caller. I spent a year on the phone with people who gave me more data on failure than I ever asked for. They gave me a real glimpse into what life looks like when everything falls apart and the rug you’re standing on gets swept out from under you. Real people, with voices and life experiences and outcomes. You absorb enough of those stories and your aspirations stop being aspirations. They become a suit of armor. I feel like I’m not building towards something great anymore for the purpose of ambition. I am building away from something. I am genuinely terrified of becoming like them. This job has genuinely changed my outlook on life, success, trust, relationships, and ambition. I’m still trying to figure out a way to undo that mindset.
And here is something else nobody tells you about this work. Most callers don’t call back. You hold someone’s story, their worry, their suffering, and you offer space and send a resource into a void, and then you get on your next call. Most times you never really know if the caller called the resource you gave out. You don’t know if you helped. Most times you don’t know how the story ends. You just did what you could and they’re gone and you keep going onto the next call. I’ve learned that a lot of this work requires you to operate on genuine optimism and faith.
And very rarely someone calls back and something has shifted. You can hear in their voice that something moved. Or someone directly tells you that the resource you gave them got them to a goal they were trying to reach. Although they were quite infrequent those are the moments that kept me going. To know that throughout all the darkness, being there for them actually mattered and changed something.
Working at a warmline can feel like being in a trauma bond. Characterized by extreme lows with rare extreme highs that keep pulling you back. But the highs are real. This isn’t a romantic relationship where you feel great having fun with your partner. This is someone who finally got their first job in years after being homeless because you connected them to a shelter. Those two things are not comparable in the slightest. The highs are genuinely worth it but hard to come across. That just makes the trauma bond more severe.
I also want to talk about one side of personal guilt I’ve experienced. This role asks you to care but also to create distance when needed. You create distance to protect yourself from burnout and trauma so you can keep showing up for the next caller and be okay. It means you learn how to ration care. To dial it back. To give enough but not too much. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around when you’re someone who is generally intense and cares a lot. When you do that enough times the care starts to feel like a performance. As if it’s manufactured. You start to feel like a horrible person because you can’t give what you actually want to give, and you feel like the caller could benefit so much more if you gave more presence and care.
I spent a lot of time internalizing that guilt as my own but it is not mine. It’s a side effect of being put in impossible situations. More broadly it is a side effect of a broken and underfunded mental health system that is incapable of meeting the actual scope of human suffering it is supposed to address. I’m not blaming my organization — they were working with the scarce resources they had. The conditions that put an undertrained young specialist on a phone with a predator, or with a dying elderly person, or with someone in active grief were created by a system that has never properly invested in the infrastructure this work requires. I know this is not a personal failure. It is a systemic one. I know that more clearly now than when I started. But you can intellectualize something all you want and logic still isn’t the same as emotion.
And then there’s the loneliness. This role is quite lonely in nature to those who aren’t in your shoes. You can’t talk about it specifically enough for people to understand it in a short amount of time. Most times you don’t have more than a short amount of time. Since you don’t talk people don’t know about the problem so they can’t ask the right questions. And that loneliness of feeling alone in your own experience becomes its own weight on top of everything else.
And then you lose your funding. Not all of it. But enough to be without a job.
On a personal level I’ve known about this for the past two to three months. I have one more month until it’s over. But I’m not plainly worried about being unemployed. It’s more so that the program gets to stop but you don’t. You keep going with the experiences you’ve encountered while working. The organization doesn’t. I’m sitting here with a year of that work living in my body — the hypervigilance, the guilt, the substances I reached for just to get through a hard night off shift and the guilt for relapsing, a nervous system that already finds resting hard and has now learned to brace itself on top of that. The thing that created all of those conditions will be gone in a month. Or barely even there. And I will still be here with everything it made of me. The program gets to stop but I don’t.
And then there are the callers. Enough funding was lost to kill off a fourteen person crew down to one supervisor, one paid specialist, and three new volunteers. The calls will have to be shorter because of the shortage of staff and resources. The warmline still exists on paper but it will no longer be what it was. I don’t know how long it will last operating the way it will operate in a month moving forward. And I wallow and cry when I think about the callers who called frequently as well as the ones who called once but expected us to be there. Someone who doesn’t have a bed to sleep in. Someone without shelter from the rain. A family without food. An autistic person who has a hard time making friends who we connected to a neurodivergent club where they can find their people. Someone with mental illness who has no support system who we pointed towards a place of community that helps them update their resumes and gives them volunteer work to put on applications. People whose lives don’t change just because our funding did. People who call in for a lifeline that isn’t there anymore. And may not be there in the future. I will leave here carrying that.
I don’t know yet exactly what this year has done to my baseline permanently or at least long term. I don’t know if the irritability, the hypervigilance, the anxiety are temporary or whether they’ve been written into me. I don’t know if the terror underneath the ambition for my future will eventually become pure ambition again or whether I’ll be unlearning that for years. I wonder — say in a few years I’m working in an office and the work phone rings — if my body will have the same bracing response it did during my time at the warmline. If it will brace for something that isn’t coming anymore. I genuinely don’t know and I will have to live to find out. That’s another weight of its own.
What I do know is this. I am genuinely indebted and grateful to the experience that this work has given me. I know I’ve been harping on how scared I am of what it has done to me long term. That fear is definitely real. But I could not have learned any of this from a textbook. It needed to be lived. I watched the system fail people in real time. The callers who became mirrors didn’t just cost me something. They gave me a gift. And so did the broken system itself. I have a better picture now of how the gaps that broken system has created have affected people — not statistically but qualitatively. That carries me forward. I will use it as propulsion in higher education. When I’m stressing about grades and having a hard night I can look back on the warmline as my purpose to keep persisting. It has given me a picture of what kind of researcher I will be. It has given me a clearer sense of what my calling in life is supposed to be.
I try to remind myself to hold both the fear and the gratitude. It’s a cost and a gift. I tend to gravitate towards the former but I try nonetheless.
So when someone says “the work you do is truly hard” I still say thank you. I still mean it when I appreciate the kindness. But now you have a glimpse of what hard consists of from inside that room. How your nervous system braces itself when the phone rings. How you learn to ration your care and feel terrible by doing so. How calls typically don’t end with resolution, and when they do, it becomes a vicious trauma bond. How there are callers who are still out there calling for a lifeline that isn’t what it was. How the guilt you feel was never yours to carry but you still do. How the person you were before you walked into that room is someone you are still trying to locate on the other side of it.
The work is genuinely hard. And to me, that phrase will never be enough, not even in a lifetime. I understand why I could never say such things out loud over a water break. Because this is just a mere glimpse into what it would have taken to explain it. Look how long it took.
I’m 24 going on 25. I genuinely don’t know yet what this year made of me. But I’m choosing to carry all of it forward anyway.
