Ivy Woodward can turn her emotions off like a water faucet. 

It served her well when she worked in child protective services in Hobbs, a small oil town in southeastern New Mexico.

She looks at it this way: “If you give in to emotion, the job’s not going to get done. You don’t process emotion. You walk in on a scene, and the first thing you see isn’t a tragedy. The first thing you see is a checklist of things you need to do to resolve the issue.”

But when Woodward looks back on all the horrible things that she witnessed as a caseworker, the weight of the decisions she had to make is almost too much to bear.