Police Psychology:  Dehydration

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D  ABPP

My head was beating, one of those really bad headaches that only come every once in long while.  This one was different though.  I had a little vertigo when I stood up, so much so that I was having trouble standing and needed to lie back down.  My heart was racing: I was extremely tired, in fact all I wanted to do was sleep.  My thinking was all messed up, like I was in a fog and couldn’t concentrate.  I was craving a roast beef and tomato sandwich from a street deli back home.  I hadn’t been to the bathroom in a long while, a couple of days.  I wasn’t going now because I couldn’t stand.  My joints were badly aching.  I was sure I was coming to the end of my life as the century had just turned and I was 43 years old.  My father only made it to the ripe old age of 45.  Besides, I felt I was needing to die to feel better.  With help, I made my way over to the infirmary at McMurdo station, where a physician’s assistant diagnosed me with the Antarctica Crud, a sort of flu-like disease people seems to get on first visiting the continent.  I went to the bathroom on the way out and noticed the tiny drops of urine were deep yellow, almost brown.  Then a thought occurred to me.

“Um, excuse me,” I asked the infirmary staff.  “Could this all just be dehydration?”

“Not if you are drinking your 6 liters of water.”  They snapped back.

“Six liters!!  That’s a little more than eight 8-ounce glasses I was always taught.”

“This is the coldest, driest pace on earth.  You need three times as much water.  Didn’t they tell you that?  People die from dehydration here.” Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology:  Emotional Extortion

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

 

A baby cries in her bed.  The parents run in and comfort her.  She cries again, and they comfort her again.  She never experiences crying alone because when she cries – she is comforted.  The parents may even stay in her room or move her to their room to make sure she is comfortable and doesn’t cry.  The parents do so to be good parents and it is sort of common.  After a while, the parents say (or their doctor tells them) let her cry and she will learn she isn’t going to be comforted every time.  The crying pains them, but they do it and eventually the child learns to fall asleep without crying.  But, maybe the parents never let the child be alone and when she is a toddler she throws a tantrum, or when she is a pre-teen she throws an emotional fit and the parents come running to comfort her.  They are locked into and controlled by their child by simply being a good parent.  They are trying to keep their child calm and steady, making sure they don’t have too many negative emotions or maybe just trying to keep calm in their own life.  This is one of many ways Emotional Extortion starts and it is painful when you are on the wrong side of it.

Now, given the Aumiller rule of “few things have a unitary cause,” this isn’t the only way for Emotional Extortion to start.  Basically, when a person gets emotional and causes others to acquiesce, and it happens repeatedly, over and over again, that is Emotional Extortion.  So, the parents who want to keep their kids calm or make it so they don’t get embarrassed by a tantrum is one way it happens, but it happens adult to adult as well.  The guy who doesn’t want to hear his wife’s tirade for being home late or because he didn’t do something the way she wanted, that is Emotional Extortion.  If he changes his behaviors, it is Emotional Extortion.  The wife that tires to not upset her husband because he goes into an anger rage and thus she changes her behavior, that is emotional extortion.  The key is that when you change your behavior to keep the other person’s emotions in check and it happens repeatedly – those are the factors that make it Emotional Extortion. Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology:  The Police Brain

by Gary S. Aumiller. Ph.D.  ABPP

 

What if in the hiring process for police officers you could pick someone resistant to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, have the best ability to function under pressure, make good quick decisions with better accuracy than normal people, and someone who can control bias against minority groups.  At the same time, you could pick people that are good at setting priorities, good at organizing events, good at weeding out distractions, and good at orchestrating outcomes.  In shoot-no shoot situations, they get better scores and make better decisions on protecting themselves.  Sounds like that might be valuable, huh?  This was the presentation at the IACP Psychological Services Section by a brilliant psychologist named Dr. Mark Zelig who advocated for some level neurological testing as an addition to the standard battery for testing policemen for departments.  It also happens to fall in line with some of my thoughts.  What if neurological testing could actually help predict who is better capable of doing the job? Read the rest of this entry »

Police Psychology: Can We Sense Danger?

Posted: February 2, 2019 in Stories

Can We Sense Danger?

Gary S. Aumiller Ph.D.  ABPP

I was working with my daughter on a science fair project for fourth grade.  She laid out five different colored pieces of paper and put a treat on each, then separately let go of our cat and dog and recorded which color they went to eat.

Human vs. Dog sight

She did that five times to see if our pets had a color preference.  In doing the research for the project, we came across pictures of what a dog sees and what a cat sees.  The dog, of course could only see the color green and some shades of blue, and the cat saw at night, but  the pictures were very blurry.  My 10-year old daughter said “wow my Fluffy and Pinwheel really can’t see me, I wonder what we can’t see.”

She might has well turned on the start switch for some crazy Rube Goldberg machine that goes through 1879 mechanical stages to pour a cup of coffee.  I was obsessing about that statement for days.  What is it that we cannot see?  Perhaps we can’t see ghosts or floating spirits.  Perhaps not auras around someone’s head or the body radiating sexual interest.  There are certainly people who think they see those things and talk to ghosts, but are they just charlatans looking to catch us in a moment of wanting to believe anything?  What is just below our perception level, and what is way below our ability to perceive?

Gift of Fear

In a landmark book, The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker said that fear was a gift and that we intuitively know when we are in danger or that something bad is going to happen to us.  He presented that there were all kinds of cues that we don’t openly perceive that tell us we were in trouble and many times we ignore these cues.  He told the story of a woman who noticed a man walking up in her rear-view mirror and ignored it right before she was accosted.  He said if we could somehow make ourselves tune into the cues telling us we are in danger, we would be safer, and that is a gift, thus the title.  He went on to talk about intuition being a series of cues that we don’t necessarily perceive.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about “thin-slicing” in Blink, a book about the intuitive parts of decisions making.  He said there can be “as much value in the blink of an eye than in months of rational analysis.”  He encourages people to not push aside their first thought in favor of getting more information in making a decision.  Some people do seem more intuitive and it doesn’t necessarily go with intelligence or access to more information.  What is it that these people are seeing that perhaps others can’t see?  Or is it a vision question at all.  Maybe one of the other senses is more active.

Spot Diagnosis

My partner and I can walk in our waiting room and do a flash diagnosis on a person without meeting them and we are 90% correct.  In fact, it is so uncanny, sometimes we tell the other person about their patient they have seen for months and when they look into it it is true.  We can tell anxiety, depression, chronic pain, a personality disorder, a critical incident PTSD, even brain damage in a matter of seconds.  It is said some psychologists develop a third eye or a sixth sense for people because we live through so many lives at once.

I’ve noticed a lot of anxiety cases I have get more anxious when the weather changes.  When there is days of nice weather and all of a sudden a major storm is coming to town I see the difference in them.  Cops are always saying that they know they will be busy when they come in and there is a full moon outside.  More babies are born during a full moon.  High tides affect that also.  There are more psychiatric hospital admissions in nights after a full moon.  I’ll go one further, you ever had a big event coming tomorrow and you are really anxious about it, and then your computer fails, or some other electrical thing goes down.  I have even seen when a person is upset that balloons in the house tend to follow that person around.  Is there something there that we are not really seeing?  We can record it or at least what it affects, but damn if we can see it.

There’s a lot we don’t see, runs of bad luck, runs of good luck, times where everything goes right and everything goes wrong all at once.  Single people always say when you have a girlfriend or boyfriend there are tons of other people you want to date, when you are alone there are none.  Sometimes that is just random events, sometimes it happens together for a reason, although we don’t see the reason, it’s there.  As humans, we have this stupid believe that we know the whole world and why things happen.  We believe things generally have a singular cause.  Not so on all accounts.  Not only do things have multiple causes (as I’ve mentioned before), but we can’t explain a lot of our world.  Remember only 5-10% of the oceans life has been seen, and that’s tangible.  We’ve got a long way to go with spirits and auras and fear and tons of other topics.

So Skylar placed in the Science Fair and got a ribbon which is really good for a kid that struggles.  It seems all the parents and teachers were blown away by the pictures of what a dog and cat can see.  By the way, bulls don’t see red either, only faded shades of green and blue, so the red cape is “fake news” (to use the modern term).  To go one better, we all have different levels of the receptors in our eyes, so your red is probably going to totally different from the red I see.  If only everyone could use that measure to be more accepting of others (and others’ politics also) the world would be a better place!

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Police Psychology:  The Accused

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP

This column has been known to cause some stir for the politics being read into it, but mostly the column is apolitical.  However, I am very nervous and followed the senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh closely.  It started for me after the allegations of sexual misconduct when he was a teenager were well in motion.  It wasn’t the sexual misconduct that caught my attention, it was the people with law degrees saying the onus of proof lies on Kavanaugh.  In other words, the accuser should be considered telling the absolute truth and the accused should be mounting a defense, if he was even in the vicinity or can remember where he was on that specific date 35 years ago.  Scary stuff!!  Especially for someone who works with the public.  And to make it even scarier, the senator from Hawaii Mazie Hirono said “he is very much against women’s reproductive choice,” therefore he must have committed the act he is accused of.  That sent a chill down my spine.  He has an opinion against her opinion, so he must be guilty of attempted rape.  Imagine if they believed everything against cops that is thrown out there.  Oh wait, they already do!!

If we have learned anything from Ferguson, or Freddie Gray, or any of the big cases is we must wait for an investigation, or at least the second half of the videotape.  Essentially, a case must be investigated before it is set out in public.  The “rush to judgement” is something cops deal with all the time, and there is not really any training for it at this point that I am aware of.  How do you handle being under such amazing scrutiny and now find yourself going crazy?  It is interesting that the accusers will say you have got some guilt when you falter under scrutiny, but isn’t that normal.  The accusers will say you must have done it when you get angry or over emotional, but again that is a normal emotion to being falsely accused as well.  Then there are those that pile on with other accusation or even made up lies which will cause more emotion and more of the appearance you are just starting to lose it.  We don’t really know the truth in the first place, but the destruction an accusation can do can make an entire life unfold.

Okay, so I have said nothing new.  Now let’s talk about what to do if you are accused.  F. B. Meyer who was a famous Baptist minister in England once said: “We make a mistake in trying always to clear ourselves. We should be wiser to go straight on, humbly doing the next thing, and leaving God to vindicate us.” The cops I know have a different standard: you can tell a man is guilty by the effort they put in to prove they are innocent.  I am not sure either is right, but both should be considered. Read the rest of this entry »