Many years ago now, people didn’t have companies who specialized in Trauma Remediation of structures. Families were left to beg, borrow, or steal anyone they could get to help clean up from suicide, homicide, or an unattended death scene. It didn’t matter to the families then who came out to help, they just couldn’t find it within themselves to enter those scenes and do what seemed an impossible task, as it would be for any of us.
That’s why companies like Crime Scene Cleaners KC exist. To provide a trained but detached resource who is properly trained, and yet has the compassion to give of themselves, in helping families and businesses recover from these losses. We called it bio-cleaning, bioremediation, bio-recovery, crime and trauma scene clean up, even forensic restoration but, what it really means to those who are in need of the service, is compassionate help.
I can’t image what it would take to walk into a room where my loved one died in traumatic ways and have the strength and fortitude to start and finish the task at hand and I’ve been doing this work for over 25 years. In the early days, as I look back through my mind’s eye and memories the work we did was so elementary to how we perform today. The processes have evolved, the chemicals have changed and this has now grown into a fulltime career for many people.
But the mission has ALWAYS been a constant.
“No One Should Be Victimized Twice.”
When our company grew large enough to start hiring and training technicians we found we have to hire certain kinds of people. This work is not for everyone. First of all they have to be mentally stable. Another is they have to show they have a servants heart, as we put it, someone who wants to serve people and help families who are hurting. Not all people who apply for this work can meet that criterion. Some who apply are folks who want to be involved in sensationalized work; they want to see a real crime scene up close and personal. Some people apply who want to satisfy some macabre itch; they want to see real blood and gore. Most of those we are able to weed out of our hiring process but what aren’t as easy is the “empathetic” person. You see there is a fine line between Sympathetic and Empathetic or Sympathy to Empathy.
A sympathetic person can show compassion for others going through stressful horrid times in their lives. They do this by sharing feelings of pity and compassion, but they are able to carry on their work in behalf of the hurting individual or family members. Whereby, an empathetic person is one who transfers someone’s feeling and emotion onto themselves; this state of mind cripples that person’s ability to do the work as needed.
Here’s an example we’ve all seen. Picture a women is in heavy labor having a baby. She cries out in pain and her body writhes with pain. In the movies the husband is not by her side coaching her through this hard time but rather shown crumpled in a corner of the room holding his own stomach and perhaps even crying out in pain. In the movies this is funny and they call it incorrectly “sympathy pains,” when in fact, by real definition it should be called empathy pains.
What kind of husband then provides help to his wife having that baby? The Sympathetic husband who can mentally understand his wife is hurting but that he can help through his coaching and hand-holding or the Empathetic husband who is completely useless crumpled in the corner focusing totally on himself and his own supposed pain. Does this make sense to you?
It’s important we hire people who have a servant’s heart with the great capacity of being sympathetic as it is for us to reject the empathetic applicant. It is just as important to the empathetic applicant we reject them, as it is for them to find the right type of job. The reason being…an empathetic technician can end up with PTSD after months of struggling to get
through their work and this serves no one. If hired the empathetic technician would end up being hurt through the work. We’ve seen what PTSD can do to people over the years, many of the homeless veterans suffering from PTSD because it prevents them from properly engaging their loved ones and society in general.
So, through our hiring practices, we are also living up to our motto, “No one should be victimized
twice.”
BY DON M. MCNULTY © COPYRIGHT 2019