Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
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 
when 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…)
open heart surgery, a guy who went through a shooting and explosion, I am a lucky guy to see so much of one kind of case at one time, I guess. All have been depressed, questioning the meaning of life, think life is unfair, all have anxiety, and all have balance problems. You might literally say my patients are bouncing off the walls, as sometimes they are walking like they are on a ship in a rolling sea down my narrow hallways.
Intelligence, counterintelligence, etc. Keeping it Simple is a natural since I wrote it and is always there. I had bought back the rights in the late 90’s because the publisher could keep it in stock and get it to me when I was on the road doing speeches. Cops always pick it up and keep it, which is fine. They should. Processing Under Pressure is the other book everyone picks up and starts to read when I make my hourly trip to the bathroom and then they say “Can I borrow this book? I’ll bring it back.” Cops never bring it back. They talk about it non-stop for three or four sessions, but it never sees my office again. That’s not fine as I have to buy those copies.