Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

Police Psychology | Divorce Part 4: Starting a New Life

Posted: April 27, 2017 in Mastering Change
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Police Psychology | Divorce Part 4: Starting a New Life

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

 

So, it’s done!  The lawyers are gone, the courts are played out, the property and kids are separated and one of you is living in the house or it has been sold.  You are situated in a comfortable but “not exactly home” place of your own without a spouse living with you.  What do you do now?

The last time you dated you were really young, in fact in your twenties, if not your teens.  There has been a lot of life since then.  Internet dating has taken off, but we all have heard the horror stories of that.  There is no college bar anymore, at least for middle age people.  Perhaps you already have a girl or guy lined up, maybe even dated them while you were still with your ex.  What problems happen now?  Could this ever work?  The good news is you are free again to remake your life.  The bad news is this is the time people make huge mistakes.  We are all going to deal with this in ourselves, a colleague or a friend, so you might as well read below. (more…)

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Police Psychology: Divorce Part 3

Posted: March 30, 2017 in Mastering Change
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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. (more…)

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Police Psychology | Divorce in Cops and Corrections

Posted: October 4, 2016 in Public Information Bureau
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Police Psychology | Divorce in Cops and Corrections

by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.  ABPP

I just spent the past week at the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology meeting.  I had been the first executive director of the group and was the president the year before that, so I (with two others) totally ran divorcethe organization from October 2002 until this year where I passed the leadership role.  This year I actually got to watch the presentations first hand since I wasn’t organizing a special meal or lost luggage or whatever “hissy fit” complaints come up at a conference.  It is a great conference of law enforcement officers and psychologists.  I suggest you schedule it next year.

I had also helped organize conferences at the FBI academy in the late 90’s to attack some of the myths of policing such as the high suicide rate and the high rate of domestic violence.  Hell, when I started this job, one was led to believe that the world took their most screwed up group of people and gave them a uniform, badge, and gun, then stressed them out to the max and said “protect the public.”   Problem was, I was seeing a lot of cops and they were pretty normal, in fact they were good friends, relatively smart and mostly family men.  I mean, I came across some “players,” but most were doing overtime, complaining about their wives and husbands like the rest of us, and had decent relationship with their kids.  Turns out from the FBI conferences, rates of domestic violence are not that high, in fact below the general population.  And suicide rates are below the general population.  We never got to finish the triad and look at divorces.  We never had a definitive study of divorce.  Until now!  And the real data is not that bad! (more…)

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Police Psychology | Police Divorce Part 2: Hate to Admit

Posted: June 1, 2016 in Mastering Change
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Police Psychology | Police Divorce Part 2:  Hate to Admit

by Dr. Gary S. Aumiller

When I was in my late 20’s and just married, I asked a friend of ours (who was really old, a few years short of 40) what was it like to be divorced?  police, divorce, psychologyDoes it feel different?!  He had an early marriage that didn’t work, and frankly divorce wasn’t in my wheel of experiences then, so I was curious.  He said “it was really rough at first, but looking back now it was just a relationship gone bad, like you had in high school or college.”  I didn’t buy it.  I mean this was a marriage, the sanctity of vows, building a life together, dreams, together goals, and all that jazz.      

So you’ve started the process of getting a divorce.  You’ve stopped blaming the other party.  You’ve stopped envisioning him in a refrigerator box living on the streets or her in a mental hospital, now you have to do something, right?   Time to find some loose women and play the field, or find a real man that knows how to take care of a woman, or play on the other team for awhile and gain some new experiences with your own sex, or become more independent and find yourself by jumping out of a plane, or perhaps stay with that new love that got you out of your marriage and will lead you to eternal bliss.  Let me know how these work out for you.  I’ll be waiting for you to boomerang to the same spot you are in right now.  (more…)

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Police Psychology | Police Divorce Part 1: Shutting Down the Blame Game

Posted: May 10, 2016 in Mastering Change
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Police Psychology | Police Divorce Part 1: Shutting Down the Blame Game

by  Dr. Gary Aumiller, Ph.D.    ABPP

The real cause of police suicide is divorce or marital problems. Internal affairs investigations are a distant second. I would venture to say divorcewhen human error comes into play in car chases, and misjudgments by cops, there is often a divorce behind it. As the rest of the regular world, most officers going through a divorce can think of nothing else in that time. They find they have a hard time concentrating and they lose focus easily. Their emotions are on edge, and deep sleep is a sporadic visitor in their life. Not so bad if you are an accountant, but it can be a killer if you are a cop. Literally. And it doesn’t have to be that way. This series on Divorce is about how to calm down a divorce when you are facing one. The first thing we want to talk about is the Blame Game.

I was a consultant with the FBI and we decided to throw three conferences to find out what was really going on with police officers. They were going to invite the best people in the world for these conferences and give them a place to stay in the academy to discuss issues on the topics. The first was Domestic Violence in law enforcement officers, the second was Suicide and the third was Divorce. The first two came off wonderfully and gave the field the basis for policy and program development. The third was interrupted by an internal transfer and lockdown after 9/11. At that conference most psychologists would have stood up and presented internet quote of the police divorce rate being 60-70% (in the general population, somewhere around 45-50% deal with a divorce in a lifetime). A psychologist from Virginia named Mike Aamodt would have gotten up and presented a very logical technique to show that the divorce rate was the same as the general population or that there was no good research on it in policing (he actually did that research anyway using census data). I would have gotten up and presented an innovative treatment program which would have been ignored by mostly everyone for ten years.  There is one thing I can tell you for sure, a cop is much more likely to go through a divorce than shoot his weapon at an assailant in his career, but most academies train how to shoot repeatedly and going through divorce not at all. So let’s begin by learning how to treat a divorce in policing. (more…)

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