Archive for the ‘Mastering Resilience’ Category

Police Psychology | Rising from the Chains of Addiction

Guest Blogger — Law Enforcement Officer’s Child

(name redacted for potential of negative future consequences)

 

The Little Blue Pill.  An instrument of healing that leads to drowning.  My first experience with Oxycontin was gleefully numbing and chemically satisfying.  It served its purpose: diverting pain until the next dose.  Small yet powerful, the little blue pill led to a life of murdered motivation, crippling dependence and cunning denial.  oxycontin, police psychologyConsumption induces euphoria, sedation, itchiness and drowsiness so the bottle says, yet the side-effects not listed on the bottle are much farther-reaching.  These slow assassins can be bought on the street or delightfully delivered by a pharmacist. I spent time, money, energy and shed my dreams in favor of the twisted comfort of Oxycontin.  Addiction is a physical and mental manifestation of chemical dependence, which may well lead to a vicious cycle of denial and self-destruction.  My progression was slow, until it wasn’t.  Lying to myself and others was the first step down the dark corridor of addiction.  Then came the cheating, stealing and desperation.  My story is one of despair and rapid deterioration.

The problems in my life stacked up high. I couldn’t face challenges in my relationships, platonic or romantic, I couldn’t find the motivation to chase my dreams, I couldn’t see the slow decline in my health and most of all I couldn’t see a way out.  Opiates had taken the wheel.  I was driving on autopilot deeper into a slow and lonely existence.  I am the son of a corrections officer and they had a psychological service that saw all law enforcement families.  Eventually, I agreed to see a psychologist to get my family off my back.  He called himself a police psychologist. (more…)

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Police Psychology | ROCKY AND IRMA

 

I spent the weekend in California with Rocky and Irma Kalish, and everyone should spend a weekend with Rocky and Irma. I met Rocky and Irma over 25 years ago and we hit it off immediately. They became my writing mentors, f-troop. Police psychologymy heroes, my idols, and we even asked them (and they agreed) to be the adopted grandparents of our Russian-born baby. Rocky and Irma wrote or produced almost every  show you remember as a child. “F-Troop,” “Facts of Life,” ‘Good Times,” “Gilligan Island,” “My Three Sons,” “Family Affairs,” the list goes on and on. Heck, they even gave Edith Bunker cancer on an “All in the Family” episode.  Try writing about cancer and make people laugh at the same time if you don’t think they are skilled.  Hollywood writers and a police psychologist, who’d figure?  (If you were at my wedding or at the 2-day class I taught at Alliant University, they were there cheering me on.) To quote one of their characters, they are DY-NO-MITE!

Well, I learned a lot from Rocky and Irma over the years, and maybe even taught them a thing or two. “Always entertain,” they would say, “if they aren’t listening, you can’t teach them anything.” Or, when I was feeling I had little impact on life, Irma would tell the story of a friend of hers across the country who was dealing with a mastectomy and said she got strength from the honest talk of Edith dealing with cancer on “All in the Family,” not realizing Irma had literally put the words in Edith’s mouth. “You never know who you are going to effect,” she would tell me. But there was one thing Rocky and Irma would say that almost daily rings in my head – “NEXT! (more…)

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Police Psychology | A Toe for Mickey

 

Mike went down to the floor a couple of times. Doubled over, holding his stomach, wrenching, trying to catch a breath between the strokes of theanxiety, Police Psychologysword that was ripping out his insides. Mike had a serious anxiety disorder compounded with a quadruple vial of hubris. He didn’t listen when I told him not to go back to work yet. “Life takes awhile to heal; medicine takes awhile to fully work,” I said. He didn’t listen when I said “your mother had this and you brother had this, it might be in your family.” Rather he listened to a boss who said “get back on the horse, psychologists don’t know about being on the job.” He got his medicine and had a flight to health, a flight that made a quick stop in the “relapse zone.”

In police psychology, we understand that some accidents and injuries are to be expected. People get injured all the time. Whether it’s stubbing your toe against a stair, twisting your ankle while stepping off the sidewalk, or accidentally walking into clear glass doors (just me?), the occurrence of accidents is largely inevitable. This same phenomenon can extend to larger (more…)

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Police Psychology | THE SHORT LIST OF HUMAN PROBLEMS

Marla W. Friedman Psy.D., Board of Directors-Badge of Life

Immediate Past Chair PPSS/ILACP,  Booklight@att.net

 

In the last 35 years I have provided psychotherapy services to a wide range of patients, in both inpatient and outpatient settings. I have worked with people from every profession. However it is my experiences with veterans, law enforcement and public safety personnel that have been some of the most challenging and satisfying work that I have been involved in.

Over the years I have compiled this list to distribute to patients who are in public service so they can see that they are not alone in their struggles. I do not give the list to every patient, as I want to protect law enforcement from repercussions from the public, as some of the issues should remain private within their profession.

We can all identify with some of these statements but some are unique to under cover agents, dispatchers, firefighters and police officers.   As a result of my good fortune to work with these remarkable and brave women and men I developed this list I call, “The Short List of Human Problems.”

I have bad credit.

I can’t afford the life I’m living.

My job consumes my life.

I don’t know how to set boundaries between my job and my personal life.

I have family conflict that is getting worse and worse.

My relationships with my significant other and children are deteriorating daily.

I can’t feel emotionally close to anyone.

I have dropped my friends.

I feel (more…)

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Police Psychology | Sleep

By Doug Gentz, Ph.D., Psychological Services

Chapter 1 of the excellent book on sleep Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M. by Richard M. Coleman describes the police psychology sleep“biological clock” that all organisms have built into their nervous systems. Research indicates that the biological clock in a human being’s brain operates on a 25 hour day, about an hour slower than the 24 hour rotation cycle of the earth.

Well designed, frequently replicated experiments

show that if a human being is placed in an environment (think of a cave) without any time cues and left to their own devices regarding when they sleep and wake up, he or she will reliably go to sleep an hour later every night and then awaken an hour later the next morning. So if our human subject goes to bed at midnight the first night we can assume he will wake up about 0800 the next day. That night he will tend not to go to bed till 0100 and then sleep till 0900 followed by going to bed at 0200 and getting up at 1000. On day 12 our subject will be going to bed at noon and waking up at 2000 and on day 24 he’ll be back where he started. This natural tendency is called “free-running” and will continue as long as the experiment goes on.

This tendency, while real and ever-present, is weak. It can easily be overcome by the presence of time cues (light, dark, clocks, etc) and self-discipline. It will have a noticeable effect when sleep cycles become irregular. If a subject who goes to bed during the work week at midnight stays up an hour later (0100) on his Friday and then an extra two hours later on his Saturday (0200), then counting the extra hour, he probably won’t want to get up on Sunday until 1100 and won’t feel like sleeping till 0300 that night. When the alarm goes off five hours later at 0800, he’s three hours short of sleep and may feel a little jet-lagged. Every time a person has to “reset” their biological clock there is an uncomfortable adjustment of some degree ranging from having a hard time waking up to the actual disorienting jet lag experience people have when crossing time zones, especially going east. These adjustments have the short term effect of degrading performance and have long term negative effects on health.

The counter measure to those negative effects is to interfere, to the best of your ability, with your natural tendency towards “free-running.” The most effective way to do that is to do your best to get up at the same time every day, within an hour, seven days out of seven. When you get up turns out to be much more important then when you go to bed.

 

Blog by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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