If you’ve spent any amount of time behind the console, you’ve heard your share of dispatch stress stories—your own and everyone else’s. And you know there’s nothing “secondary” about what you carry. The tones hit, the radio lights up, the call-taker’s voice tightens, and suddenly your nervous system is running the same marathon as every firefighter, medic, or officer headed toward whatever waits on the other end.
People outside the work don’t always get it. Some still use the old language—“secondary trauma,” “secondary exposure.” But nothing about what you hear feels secondary when you’re sitting in that chair.
You hear everything first.
And you feel more than most people will ever see.
Dispatch Stress Stories Are Real—and They Add Up
Researchers studying emergency communications have spent the last decade saying what you and I have known all along: dispatch stress stories matter.
According to research highlighted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), telecommunicators report elevated stress, symptoms related to trauma exposure, difficulty winding down after shift, and cumulative fatigue similar to other frontline roles. NENA has also emphasized that dispatchers experience repeated exposure to emotionally intense situations that significantly affect well-being over time.
But you don’t need a study to tell you that.
You know because you’ve lived it.
You know it in the call where someone’s voice breaks and they try to hide it.
You know it in the long radio silence after units arrive on scene.
You know it in the stories the public never hears—and the ones you can’t shake even years later.
These are not abstract “stressors.”
These are moments that land inside your body.
The Calls That Stay With Us
Every dispatcher has a few dispatch stress stories that never fully settle. It might be:
- The open-line domestic where you could hear everything except the ending.
- The CPR instructions you gave while listening for that first breath that never came.
- The pursuit when a voice you knew well suddenly went quiet.
- The fireground mayday that made the room feel three sizes too small.
These aren’t things you made up or exaggerated. They’re verifiable pieces of public safety history—calls logged, units sent, outcomes written into reports and after-action reviews.
And they leave a mark, even if you don’t talk about them out loud.
Why “Secondary” Doesn’t Fit the Work We Do
Public safety has always wrestled with language. But this one—secondary—never made sense in the comm center.
Here’s why it doesn’t fit what actually happens in dispatch stress stories:
1. We hear the raw version.
Not the cleaned-up report. Not the radio recap.
You hear the full, unfiltered human moment: the sobbing, the shouting, the silence, the background noise that tells you more than the words do.
2. Our bodies react the same way frontliners do.
The National Institute of Mental Health and other research groups explain that the nervous system responds to perceived threat, not only physical presence. When stress hormones surge, your body doesn’t carefully sort out whether you’re on scene or on the headset—it just reacts. Your heart rate, your breathing, your muscles—that activation is real.
3. We stay with the situation longer.
Field units might clear a scene and move on. In dispatch, you’re still logging, updating, monitoring the radio, triaging new calls, answering the next crisis without a breath in between. One call rolls straight into the next, and your nervous system rarely gets a full reset.
4. We don’t get closure.
This might be one of the hardest parts.
So many dispatch stress stories stop mid-sentence. You hand the incident off, send the units, do the work—and then the story disappears into someone else’s paperwork. Your body stays activated long after the CAD incident is closed.
We Carry an Invisible Layer of Stress
There’s a quiet kind of weight that comes with dispatch work:
- The weight of what callers need from you.
- The weight of what responders expect from you.
- The weight of what you blame yourself for, even when it was never yours to carry.
And because so much of the job happens in a room the public rarely sees, that weight goes unnamed—and unnoticed—far too often.
But not here.
Not in this space.
This is exactly the kind of story that belongs in a collection of dispatch stress stories—not as proof of weakness, but as evidence of just how much humanity you bring to the headset every single shift.
What Helps—Right Now, In Real Life
Nothing fixes everything. Nothing erases years of calls. But there are things backed by research and experience that actually make a difference in how you carry your own dispatch stress stories.
Peer Connection That Actually Feels Safe
According to SAMHSA and multiple public safety studies, peer support is one of the most effective buffers against stress and trauma-related symptoms—especially when it comes from people who understand the culture and the calls.
In real life, that can look like:
- A coworker saying, “That was a tough one—how are you doing?”
- Checking in on a partner after a heavy call block or a mayday.
- Noticing when someone who’s usually talkative goes unusually quiet.
Small conversations save people more than we realize.
And when agencies invest in trauma-informed leadership and peer support, they’re not just being “nice”—they’re building the kind of culture described in trauma-informed leadership for public safety.
Micro-Recovery Moments During and After Shift
The CDC and other occupational health sources highlight the value of short, intentional resets for stress: standing up, stepping outside for two minutes, slow breathing, grounding exercises, or quiet moments between calls. This isn’t “woo-woo”; it’s physiology.
Micro-recovery can look like:
- Taking 4–5 slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale.
- Placing your feet firmly on the floor and noticing three things you can see, hear, and feel.
- Stepping away from the console—yes, even for 60–90 seconds—after a particularly heavy call if staffing allows.
Short, honest resets don’t erase your dispatch stress stories, but they prevent your nervous system from staying stuck at a 9 out of 10 all shift long.
Naming What We Carry
The American Psychological Association notes that identifying and naming emotions reduces their intensity and supports regulation. You don’t have to turn every briefing into a therapy session—but giving language to your internal experience is not weakness.
It’s control.
That might sound like:
- “That call rattled me more than I expected.”
- “I’m still thinking about that pursuit from last week.”
- “I’m noticing I’m more on edge with callers today.”
Naming it doesn’t make you less capable. It makes you more human—and more sustainable in the long run.
If you’ve ever had the thought, “I think I’m reaching my limit”, you’re not the only one. Stories like the ones in this reflection on hitting the emotional wall remind us that “too much” is often a normal response to an abnormal workload.
Remembering You’re Not Alone
This job can make you feel isolated—even in a room full of people and radio traffic.
But every dispatcher, everywhere, has their own catalogue of dispatch stress stories:
- The “one” they’ll never forget.
- The year where it all felt heavier.
- The incident that changed how they walk into the building.
That means your experience is not a personal flaw.
It’s part of the culture of service that public safety is finally learning to acknowledge.
A Closing for All of Us Who’ve Sat in That Chair
If no one’s said this to you lately, let me be the one:
You carry an extraordinary load.
What you hear matters.
What you feel matters.
And the work you do is absolutely not “secondary.”
Your dispatch stress stories are not proof that you’re broken. They are proof that you are human in a role that asks you to absorb more than anyone was ever meant to absorb alone.
The headset may come off at the end of the shift, but the humanity you bring to the work stays. And that humanity—your steadiness, your voice, your presence—saves lives in ways most people will never understand.
You are not alone in this.
And your story, your weight, your resilience—they belong here.
