The Unbroken First Responder with Rick Ruppenthal

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Rick Ruppenthal worked for 30 years as a paramedic and knows intimately the challenges that come with that job. He also knows that every human can rely on the innate resilience and well-being that are part of all of us. And how seeing Thought for the temporary, moving energy it is, can help first responders with their work and their response to it.

You can find Rick Ruppenthal at RickRuppenthal.ca.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

• Experiencing the paramedic field as a calling
• On the stress typically associated with the paramedic field
• How we’re always doing the best we can with what we know at the time
• Teaching first responders that they are not broken
• Working with first responders to teach them the role thinking plays in stress and PTSD

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• Micheal Neill’s TedX talk, Why Aren’t We Awesomer?
• Sydney Banks’ book The Missing Link
• The Unbroken Hero Project

Transcript of Interview with Rick Ruppenthal

Alexandra: Rick Ruppenthal, welcome to Unbroken.

Rick: Thank you for inviting me.

Alexandra: My pleasure. It’s great to have you here.

Tell us about your background and how you got interested in the Three Principles.

Rick: Okay, well, I won’t go too far back. But primarily my focus has been on my paramedic career. So I’ve just, although I keep saying recently, it’s been almost six years now that I retired from being a paramedic, and I spent 30 years of it, bits and parts mostly in the Lower Mainland, a little bit on Vancouver Island. And eventually, I also took on roles of supervisors, supervision, roles, managerial roles, and also as an educator. 

I also had a wonderful opportunity to travel around the province of British Columbia, and meeting different all the paramedics and having an opportunity to not only train and teach them, but also I had a team of instructors also that we were part of putting the paramedic program together the three principals. Everybody, I think, that has ever come across the three principles is from a, from a seeking point of view, like searching for something, something we feel is kind of missing. And I got a brief and I’ll just call it a brief understanding, almost 40 plus years ago, through a workshop that I had taken that was, at the time very controversial, very, very cutting edge kind of a thing. 

What they were doing was they were pointing to this thing that we were more of a thought created world. And how our experiences are being generated and things like that. I really embraced what they were teaching at that point and started to experience that as a reality for myself. And when I got into Paramedicine, I often reflected on how different everybody’s experiences were with the work. 

It was so fascinating, because part of my education they pointed to how stressful the work was, how tough the work can be, that we were going to witness a lot of different, we were going to see people in, in most cases in their worst time of their life. I didn’t have the experience, the reaction, I would say, or the response that I thought it was going to have, as I continued on my career, while others were having not so good experiences, like I really enjoyed every moment of it, the good, the bad. And I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but what I mean, it’s hard to explain, but I took it as a calling. 

When I first my very first patient, I was able to after the training that it was my patient. I remember kneeling down and reaching over and checking the pulse of this elderly lady. And it was sort of like a spark, just something within me said this is what you should be doing. This is exactly what you should be doing. And so I just got so involved in in it and wanted to continue to have that same feeling. So I caught myself a few times chasing the feeling. 

But long story short, I had noticed, I really would have considered myself to have thrived through the experience of being a paramedic, as opposed to others that have survived and some that have not survived because the suicide rate in the first responder field and I don’t know why but particularly in the British Columbia area is actually quite high in comparison to other places in the in the North America. And the unfortunate part is the stats are not well informed in that so to look for information I want to confirm a lot of things. It’s just not there. Because a lot of lot of what we’re experiencing when it comes to post traumatic stress and suicide and things like that there’s sort of it’s not attributed to the work itself. So it wouldn’t be a WorkSafe issue. Now, trauma and PTSD. Yes, it’s a work workplace issue. But, but the results of are not sort of thing. Well, it’s work related. 

Now, in fire medicine, they’re just starting to get a lot of like cancers and things like that being associated with the work and workman’s compensation is looking at it. When it comes to mental health and mental illness as it’s being labeled, it’s just a different ballgame. And that’s another rabbit hole. But when I retired, because the work gave so much to me, like I had so much experience from the work, I felt I wanted to give back. I’m still in the scheme of things, I consider me relatively young. So I started to put workshops together I was because I was in education. And I was part of that I had an opportunity of training hundreds of people in a Jung based workshop on behavior studies and what makes you an introvert, what makes you an extrovert in which things like that. 

There was so much value out of that, people were really tuned into it, they hadn’t heard a lot of these things before. And it opened up a lot of new thinking for people. And so I thought I, I think between what I experienced 40 plus years ago in that one workshop, and what I was seeing with this behavioral type workshop, like Myers Briggs, it wasn’t Myers Briggs, but it was like a Myers Briggs. And it resonating, so I thought that that would be something to offer people. 

So I did a couple of them outside of out of work, and they were okay. But I always felt there was something missing. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I did a search. And like so many others have came across Michael Neill’s work. I came across a YouTube video, Why Aren’t We Awesomer? And I thought, What a great question. 

Because given what we have available to us, particularly now with the internet, why aren’t we doing better? We’ve got these treatment plans. We’ve got this going for us. We got libraries full of self-help books. How is it possible that, according to all the stats that everybody’s presenting, we’re doing worse than we were before? It makes no sense. So I really I started to really listen deeply to what he was saying. And I had to look at it a couple of times. 

Two things caught my attention. The first thing was, it was resonating. The second thing was the slides that he was using was matching up some of my slides that I was putting together already for a workshop. Because it was about perspective. It was about how we were creating things like that. And I thought, okay, there’s got to be more. And then of course, he started to drop hints about certain people. And I had to go and investigate who these people were. 

So I got more into Michael Neill’s work. And he talked about the Pranskys and Bill Pettit. And then he mentioned Sydney banks. And it’s like, and Sydney banks lived on Saltspring. And I lived on Saltspring in the 1970s for several years, and never knew about this guy.

Although a bit of an anecdotal story, I believe I actually met him on a ferry back and forth and actually had a conversation with him. Based on what I’ve been told from some of the elders, it sounds very much like a Syd thing to do. 

He just casually walked up to me. I was I was in a suit, I was on my way to my new job as a banker, this is back in the 70s. And, and he just started casually talking to me like because I stuck out like a sore thumb. People on Saltspring don’t wear suits, at least very often. And so what were you up to? And I said, Well, I’m going to my new job. And then he says, Well, what’s worrying you the most about this new job? And I said, Well I’m curious about the people that I’m going to meet. And then he says, Well, what kind of people are you hanging around with now? Wonderful, I says, we’re, we get along together and yada, yada, yada. And he says, Well, I got a I got a feeling you’re going to find the same people on Saltspring. 

Yeah, I didn’t know I was part of a Zen story at that particular moment. But it stuck with me because I went back to my wife that evening, and I said, the strangest thing ever happened to me out of the blue. This guy comes meet me on the Saltspring ferry. And it’s a small boat, right? And, and when it was all over, I turned my back. And then I looked back at him again, and he was gone. It was almost like he was an apparition like, just dropped in on me. 

And, anyway, so I started to really get into The Missing Link. And it truly was the missing link. What I was kind of searching for was filling the gaps of what these workshops and how I felt I needed to contribute to not only the first responders, but to anybody that was more than willing to listen to me. I’ve never really looked back. 

As I keep going deeper and keeping involving myself it’s interesting, because when you’re dealing with education, you’re looking for techniques. And I’ve got a whole library of techniques and how to do the presentation how to do this and agendas. And when I started to hang around the coaches and listening to other people in the community, I couldn’t hear anything about techniques. I heard this thing about intensives. But nobody would ever point to what the intensives were at. And so it was really strange to try and look for something that never really existed, but was hinted to and then later have a have a sort of an enlightening discovery about them. 

What we’re pointing to when it comes to the three principles. It was really changing. And at that point, I saw a real big shift in in everything that I was doing in how I was approaching the subject, how I was engaging others in a conversation. Like everything shifted, everything shifted. Yeah, it was quite remarkable.

Alexandra: Up until that point, I imagine you had been training other paramedics with a lot of techniques to, among other things, deal with trauma and PTSD. Is that true?

Rick: When I first got into it as a paramedic, we had labeled it more like burn-out. That was our terms that were picked up from previous wars. Paramedicine is actually was first started in the Vietnam War. Where they had medics in the field that would go and treat people before it used to be it was a scooping run kind of a thing. And then it discovered that people actually had a more of a survival rate, if somebody could do something immediately, and then take them to the hospital. The concept of what we term as a stay-in-play scenario is actually relatively new. A lot of things are done through protocol. So when you see something, this is what you do kind of thing. So you run a you run a script. Because at that point, that’s the best knowledge that you have of what works. 

If anybody’s ever taken CPR or Heimlich maneuvers and things like that, those are all relatively new concepts. And they were developed through theories and ideas that people had, because other things weren’t working. Now, the way we did CPR 30 years ago is not the same way. Again, new information is always involved, right. But it’s still kind of protocol driven.

What I point back to people in what they’re experiencing right now is that the shift happens when new information comes in. So it’s like, yes, at our level of understanding, that’s the best we did. While we  probably harmed a lot of people that well, maybe we did. But at that moment, that was the best we knew what to do. And we just did it. Today, we can look back at it and say we might have done a little bit more harm than then then good. But again, that’s in the past, we have new information. 

I think our responsibility is to when we have new information is to look at that information from an objective point of view, and say, Okay, what if, and let’s explore. And medicine is an interesting field, especially when you’re trying to bring in actually an old paradigm, because the original paradigms before psychology took over was very much thought based. It was like looking towards like, why are we thinking and now, it’s become more behavioral based. So we were systematically treating as opposed to getting up to the source. 

In medicine, they’re very stubborn, for a really kind of a good reasonable reason, I would say, because the Hippocratic Oath says, First do no harm. And the fear of doing harm, I think, weighs in, when it comes into introducing new modalities, new procedures, and that’s why they research everything so well. They want to make sure that we’ve got it right. Even though their forefathers didn’t worry about that too much. They’re like, well, I guess that didn’t work. Next time, we’ll keep the leg on and see what happens. 

Alexandra: Given the way that medicine is slow to adapt things, what has been the response to your bringing this new / old paradigm to paramedics?

Rick: It’s mixed, because it’s interesting the work of Roger Mills was one of the original pioneers with pot with or was taught through Syd Banks and things like that. And, in one of his books, I was reading he was talking about when a schizophrenic is having an event, and they’re wrapped up in their reality of their thinking, it doesn’t matter what you say. Doesn’t matter what you say. And I find that very similar, right? Not that they’re all everybody’s schizophrenic, although, sort of said, we are all caught in our own schizophrenia. 

We do get caught in our reality. And we believe it’s true, and we will respond according to that truth. So it’s really, and when you’re wrapped in it, particularly with medicine, thinking that everything I’m doing I believe I’m doing it for all the right reasons, and you absolutely are doing it for all the right reasons. To have something so simple being presented to you, which points you in 180 degree different direction is sometimes very, very hard to, to accept. I could understand how Syd felt when he was presenting to psychologists and people like that, particularly a person that wasn’t in the field. It’s one thing for somebody to be in the field and come up with it or a new discovery, saying, well, and that’s how Freud did it. Freud came up with it but I have a new discovery, I got this new theory. It’s called the three egos you know, not the Three Amigos the three egos. And you know, and everybody kind of bought into it. 

First thing, though, is that if you were to objectively look at what’s going on right now, you’d notice that, like, there’s 150 ways of treating depression, there’s all these modalities. The DCM manual keeps growing as we start to fragment. At one time there was trauma, then there was post traumatic stress. And then there was post traumatic stress disorder. And now, now there’s a complex post traumatic so they were fragmenting and that was the one thing that Dr. Mills was really worried about was that we would continue to, because we weren’t getting definitive treatments, or people getting well soon enough, that we would specialize things more and more and more thinking that if we were to dissect it more, we would get better answers, we’d find it and yet, we keep moving ourselves more away from the source than we are going towards the source

Alexandra: Going downstream, instead of going up.

Rick: Go upstream and figure out why people are jumping off the bridge in the first place. You see that in our drug addictions and what’s happening on the East Side [of Vancouver]. You can bring people out of the water, save them from drowning for just for so long before you just get exhausted. But now, from our from a personal point, like getting to an individual, I’m finding that any paramedic that has been willing to sit and remove the judgment that you’re looking at it from an objective point of view, I’ve noticed this remarkable shifts, is the biggest one. 

It’s so apropos that that your podcast is called Unbroken. I came up a couple of years ago with this idea of The Unbroken Hero, because that’s been the biggest significant impact on any first responder who is hurt it is they’re not broken. I’ve had paramedics come to me because and say, nobody has ever told me that. Nobody is ever said, I’m broken. As matter of fact, I am broken, and I’ll never get fixed. And like things like that. And it breaks my heart. Because that’s not true. 

But when you’re wrapped up in that reality, you can’t see it. And when you’re really living that reality, and when I say wrapped up in that reality, you are always acting at the level of your belief. So if that’s what you believe to be true, you’re naturally going to act that way, you’re going to naturally act unbroken, you will do things under the guise of I’m going to have to somehow manage with my pain or manage with my illness. And learn about the struggles and do you know, like, all the different things that they have to do. And it’s as sad as it is. It turns out that suicide is the only option based on that level of understanding. 

If I am so broken, and I have to learn to live with it, whatever it is. I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t get put on this earth to have that. And it becomes truer and truer that that’s your whole world. What else would you do? It sounds unreasonable. In some ways, it’s a reasonable thing to do. And it’s interesting that the in Canada we have MAID. Medical Assistance In Dying. People who are in good frame of mind, who happen to have a disability in the sense of a terminal cancer and from all indications they’re probably going to have a very uncomfortable ending, and they have some kind of sanity, for lack of better descriptions and words, that they choose to have a more meaningful death, where they can celebrate it with friends and family and things like that. I really get that, I really get that part. 

And then it sort of expanded its criteria to look at disabilities, like physical disabilities. And this is just some something recent that I’ve discovered that I think over the last year or two years they’ve included so if you’ve got something that is diminished your quality of life from a physical disability side, and, again you’re deemed sort of rational that you could ask request for a medically assisted death. As I was researching some of this, because what ended up happening, it was just recently, and now they’ve stopped for more research. They wanted to include mental illness, as part of the criteria. 

From everything that I’ve been able to get my hands on and research, both from the Principles side of the equation and others, is that the community is split. There’s nothing definitive when it comes to, like, we can’t even agree on which what is the correct treatment for. We have treatment guidelines when it comes to producing drugs and giving people things like that. But when you look at all the different modalities that are out there and everybody’s saying that they have the answer. But nobody’s has the answer in the sense of a consistent result, right? It’s not like two plus two equals four in the psycho, C world. And we, they would love it, we would all love that. Right? 

So I’ve been writing a lot of letters to my member of parliament, and both the opposition and who’s in power now explaining that this is too much of a slippery slope. First of all, if we agree to include it in this type of service, what are we saying about the psychology field? What are we saying about mental illness? Are we saying that mental illness can’t be cured? Thosse are curious questions I’m asking. 

But in my experience, we’re not broken. Our thinking system works quite well, as a matter of fact, maybe too well. You see it for what it is when you see it and, and I just use my life as an example, because how can I go through something that everybody else can’t seem to go through? My partner will have a different experience to me. 

I know you live out in the Tofino area. I don’t know if you remember several years back, there was a tragic ambulance accident at Kennedy Lake. Both were to my crew members. And it was probably the most intensive three weeks that I’ve ever spent. I spent three weeks in Tofino, not only through the recovery, through the investigation, through putting the ceremony together, and laying them to rest was on my shoulders. 

And even though I had not had a formal Three Principles understanding at that point, I knew enough of when I was getting stressful, and I knew enough to understand my feelings, and how they were creating a situation that if I kept holding on to that paintbrush, that’s how things were going to get painted in a suit says like our thoughts are the paintbrush, and that’s why it was so missing link because every time everything I heard, I go yes, I’ve experienced it. Yes, I know that I see that. And when my team, all said at the end, like it was a they said, because I was calm that you know, that calming force.

But just having that context of knowing that, if we can keep it at this level, we could do a whole lot better. And there were so many tough decisions to make, that if I had gotten into my head, there would have been a lot more struggle involved in it. And there’s so much wisdom and guidance in and we talk about that in the impairment and then in ambulance calls. Like we talked about being in the flow of a call, we teach people not to rush into scenes, not to get involved in the anxiety of the scenes. So intuitively, we’ve been teaching this for a long time. We just didn’t do the connection between the post traumatic stress and the mental illness in the in the unrest that was happening afterwards, as being part of the same equation, we just kept pointing towards the when you’re in a flow state, you’re going to perfect balance between what you know what to do in the right timing and things like that. 

Alexandra: You touched on the Unbroken Hero Project. Can you tell us a bit more about what that and what it entails?

Rick: I was in a Three Principles workshop that was being conducted in London, live on stream. And I started to listen to the testimonials of people that were taking the Principles, the understanding into prisons, and youth, organizations and things like that. And something struck me and I came up with this Unbroken Hero idea. 

It just made sense because I know there’s a lot of connotations around being a hero has been in the first responder field is very lot of culture. We’re still living the macho man type of reality, although there’s a lot of females in the in the field and they’ve been bought in there. I did a podcast on this one time around, like the females coming in, are taking on that same mindset, that they have to be mentally tough, they have to be the tough ones now, and forget about their feminine side kind of thing. And the guys are going well, I don’t want anything to do with my feminine side and forgetting that we’re all just this one bundle of energy and experiences. 

So they’re trapped in the macho game, they have to prove themselves, which is even more extra thinking and more extra thought added on to the whole layer of things. So not only are they being judged constantly on every call and everything that they do, and they know that right, so I you know, hats off to any female that wants to get into the service. Because, yeah, unfortunately, it’s getting better as, but there’s still a long ways to go. But it’s all layers of thinking, it’s all layers of thought. And that’s what’s getting in the way of doing good calls. 

When we’ve often know that we often say things like, you can’t take the last call you did into the next call. I never told them why. It’s intuitively but, but it just goes to you won’t perform better. You have to treat every call fresh and new. Regardless if this is the 10th call you’ve done today. And so, it’s interesting, there’s so much of the and I’ll just label it as principles, but because the principle is universal, but when you when you have that understanding and you have that bit of a lens, you start to see the evidence of how the principles work, everywhere, we’re just not calling it that. We’re just not pointing people to that. 

And yet, the more we point people to those things that particularly the responders, like you’re you already understand what flow means, you already understand not taking past thinking, we don’t call it we say your past call into a call you, we’ve got all that in place, we just haven’t bundled it properly. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing is kind of bundling the experiences of being first responder. I’ve also got firefighting experience. I spent a lot of years in the streets, lot of it downtown Vancouver, very busy call volume. Did I have tough days? Were there days where I was totally exhausted at the end? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But here I am today, and there’s a reason for that. That’s not because I’m special, it’s just that I have a little bit of information, a little bit of an understanding, for level of consciousness as to what’s going on. And that’s all it takes. It doesn’t take a big leap. It really is dropping, and getting curious, letting go of what you think can be true. And just be curious about? Well, maybe, maybe there is something different.

Alexandra: How do you bring this to paramedics and other organizations? 

Rick: I have less of a strategy than I had at the beginning. Because at first I thought, Okay, I’ve got to get into the academy, because I see the benefits of and I still do, I absolutely still do. There’s no doubt about it. Because what we’re teaching people nowadays, and from what I’m hearing is, it’s not if you’re going to have post traumatic stress, it’s when and if we’re starting to teach people to be in that mindset, you’re going to be the creator of your future. And that if that’s kind of what you’re being taught, then it’s no question that you’re, we’re seeing a rise of it. 

And to get that understanding that it’s not the work that’s causing your stress, it’s the thinking about the work that’s causing your stress. I had this great little metaphor I was sharing with a client a couple of days ago. I just happened to be looking at a at a napkin holder. And the napkin holder was the kind that had a bit of a weight on the on the top. So there’s little roller on top and a bunch of napkins that are holding the roller up. I said it’s like this napkin holder. The napkin is the layer of thinking that you have about the situation. And I said, What happens when you take that thinking away, and I physically took it away and the roller dropped to the bottom. 

What do you think happens with that? And he says, Well, the problem kind of goes away. And I said, absolutely. Because the only thing that’s holding that problem in place is the layer of thinking, the layer of thought that’s there. When we identify ourselves with that layer of napkins, as being our reality, we forget the fact that we are the napkin holder are the ones that are holding the napkin in place. So it was funny; a light went right on just like that. 

That’s how simple it is. It’s is a simple concept. But we’ve got so much of these complexities and paradigms that say treatment has to be complicated. Things like I was talking today like, we have to have the struggle before we can have the happiness, like who bought into that? But innocently. Somebody that’s how life looks like. And then we sort of say, You know what? I have struggle, I can see that Yeah, okay. 

Istill continue to attract and take every opportunity I can to speak to groups and organizations speak to individuals that reach out to me. And if anybody comes across on my radar, I just automatically reach out. So I’ve been doing it more from an organic type of seeing what comes and then responding accordingly, with not a lot of, sort of, well, I must have must do kind of thing. And my intention is to continue to do it that way. And as people start to have their turnaround, they’re telling other people and, and part of me goes, it’s not fast enough. But it is what it is.

Alexandra: So you work with first responders individually, like coaching?

Rick: Primarily, the bulk of my work is one on one. I have been putting on various workshops, usually at the beginning of the year. And there’s a few things I’ve got on, like, just some thoughts that I’ve put down just as place card holders kind of that I feel in the moment. I’m looking for some more nudges in direction on that, I believe. 

I started a men’s group that was worked out pretty good for a while, and then it kind of went away. And that was an interesting experience to, again, not having any agendas, other than just to bring people together to talk about their shared experiences. I find that most helpful because I think what’s lacking is  their voice. Like for them to be heard more of the silence has to be broken, there has to be avenues for them to speak, speak more. 

And we’re also discovering, within the organization, that maybe the deep briefings are not being as helpful as we thought we were there were first because there was this paradigm was if we relive the experience went over it. Yeah get get it out, get it out, it would be helpful. I’ve had paramedics come to me going I don’t like this treatment plan on going through, they’re asking me to relive everything over again, over again and over again. Until I become numb to it. And I’m not having a good enough experience. 

I said, Well, you do have every right to pick something else. There’s enough of them out there. And that’s the other thing being an agency that’s funded by the taxpayers you hear in the province is that everything has to be bid out. So if you’re if they’re looking for a type of program, then it has to come from the bidder, right. So people present this is what I have to offer. This is the kind of things I do so. One size does not fit all and we know that they know that. 

But paramedics and other first responders are kind of stuck with what the agency has bought. And it’s through their medical doctor that sometimes they can get other treatment plans and get that changed and workman’s compensation seems to be more lenient about well you have to at least try this. And then you get 10 visits and after 10 visits, if nothing works, we’ll revisit it again you know, kind of thing. And there’s so many limitations on upon it like things like you only get 10 visits. If you’re not cured in 10, then what are we going to do kind of a thing, one year to be on this program, and after the year, you’re on your own all those different things like and then, and then we have to throw in this mix. 

Well, if you’re not going to get well anyways, here’s another option, you can ask for a medically induced death. I go, Oh, man, it’s so sad. We can do better. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not going to pretend I know the answers. I’m not going to pretend. But I certainly can point people to an area where their common sense kicks in. And you can see it for yourself. And that’s where I am right now. So in the beginning, it was more like a teaching and educating. Because that’s my path. That was my normal path. Now, it’s more just pointing and supporting.

Alexandra: Lovely. We’re almost coming to the end of our time together. 

Is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share today?

Rick: We’ve covered the good basics. If that’s the one message to really understand and explore the idea, let’s just explore the idea that you’re not broken. And start from there.

Alexandra: Nice. Lovely.

Where can we find out more about you and your work?

Rick: Google me. I’m everywhere. You’ll find all sorts of great things and, and maybe not so great things. I have the Unbroken Hero Project website. I’m on Instagram. I’ve decided to rebrand myself just as regroup and thought it’s much easier that way. 

Yes, I worked with first responders. But I also work with all sorts of different people from all different walks. I recently had some great conversations with some teenagers. I just love being in this conversation, not from a correcting or a healing point of view. I just love having in this being in the conversation, and then you hear what you want to hear. And we’ll go from there.

Alexandra: Thank you so much for being with me here today and talking about your work. I really appreciate it.

Rick: Thank you for offering.

Alexandra: Take care, Rick. 

Featured image photo by Wes Grant on Unsplash