Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology: Divorce Part 3
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
“At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side.”
So starts the 70’s anthem song about the breakup. Gloria Gaynor in 1978 found silver, gold and platinum, and became the singer of the only song to ever win a Grammy in the Best Disco Song of the Year category (it was only given one year 
before disco died in the charts). It spoke to every woman “thinking how he did me wrong” and she “grew strong” and learned she had to survive. It was excitement, passion, and most of all, something a large part of the record buying population could relate to. And it was for men too. Not too shabby for the “B” side of a small record by a Newark “New Joisy” girl.
Why did so many people relate to it? It was a theme of recovery from a bad breakup and the mantra “I Will Survive” rang out for anyone who has had the experience of the severe wrenching pain when love turns into despair. Survival is the most important thing through divorce. Survival through terrible emotional ups and downs, through some severe depression, through grief. What happens when you don’t survive? You become bitter towards others. You check out at work or overemphasize the role of work in your life, and you may not be ready for another relationship in your whole life. Most suicides, especially in police populations, are stimulated by relationship breakups or relationship problems. So, surviving a divorce is very important, in fact it is paramount to your future as a healthy individual. How do you survive and how do you help your friends or a person that works for you survive during this most critical time in their life? Let me give just a couple of principles of survival during divorce. Read the rest of this entry »
more then anyone in the room on the topic and when I left the room, everyone was supposedly impressed as hell. Then I came back in the room, and was told that they felt I was too obsessed with the topic and I needed to learn how to live instead of just the science. See my mom had died in my first year of graduate school, and I had finished a five-year program in 3 ½ years, and my dissertation was three times the size of most of the dissertations they had seen. The committee gave me an exercise in the book The Magic of Thinking Big and said I wasn’t finished my school until I did the exercise. I was in shock, but I went home and absorbed the book before I went to sleep (I guess I did tend to obsess) and the exercise was to make a “wish list” of the things I wanted to do in my life. My list should be 100 items long and I was to think big.
and shouldn’t be used. In fact, you are hard pressed to even begin to find one article that says it worked once in the history of man. That bothers me. Why is it even considered if it hasn’t worked once in the entire history of the world? Can’t anyone except Donald Trump say something positive about torture?