Posts Tagged ‘police psychology’

Police Psychology | Apples to Orangutans: Life’s Comparisons

Posted: November 12, 2015 in Mastering Thoughts
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Police Psychology | Apples to Orangutans: Life’s Comparisons

 

Police psychology has to constantly deal with comparisons cops make. It is essential to cut them off before they get to be a big problem. What comparisons you ask? “I can’t believe that every day I have to deal with Skylar Police Psychology, oragutanswhining constantly and not listening. You do something about her!” his spouse says as she throws her hands up in the air. The cop thinks about the body he just pulled out of a car and applied first aid until the paramedics came. Or, how hard it was to keep a domestic incident out of the kitchen earlier in the day because that is where the knives are. Or, the three hours of paperwork either one of these situation caused and thinks a little kid whining just doesn’t compare.

Everyone in the world makes comparisons. She’s prettier than me. He’s smarter than me. Her house is bigger than mine. His kids are more respectful than my kids. She’s taller than me, and I’m taller than him, if she wears heels, I will be embarrassed. We tend to compare everything in our own lives to other situations. It helps us put our own problems in perspective. It helps us rank our own successes against other people. It gives us something to which we can measure applesourselves and see if we come out on top. It even helps us know what to expect in the future. This is a very natural thing to do, and it can even help you improve by demonstrating which areas you need to focus on and which areas are already your strengths. However, there is one major downside to such comparisons (aside from the obvious blow to your self-esteem), your “comparison” scale can become incredibly skewed, especially when you encounter a wide range of situations, each with a different level of concern. Also, you can invalidate another person’s problems and create stress for yourself. Nothing in real life can measure up to a catastrophic world full of people real problems. This is especially the case when it comes to police psychology and police stress.

Police Psychology: Cop Comparisons

Cops make the same comparisons everyone else make: his partner is better than my partner; he gets paid more than I get paid; his gun is bigger than my gun (okay, maybe not so much that). But they also take these comparisons one step further. They look at every problem they encounter and measure it up against previous situations they’ve been in. For instance, a shoplifting case that a cop is confronted with seems relatively trivial compared to the fatal crash he had to solve last week. Dealing with a man who ran a red light seems so insignificant when compared to the rape last night. Because cops experience some of the most extreme situations out there, their comparison scales get completely messed up. The high-end of their scale is much higher than a typical person’s scales. This becomes a significant problem when they come home from work and take the scale with them.

At home, they are forced to measure average, day-to-day problems against the larger one’s that law enforcement personnel deal with. When this occurs, the typical “home” problems definitely fall short. Killing a bee that got into the house is a small problem when compared to the company’s finances collapsing, or the shooting they witnessed that morning, or even the domestic abuse they had to put a stop to. And because of this, it becomes much easier to brush off such a problem, or say no to a request.

This mindset can pose a serious problem both to their mental stability and their home life, creating a lot of police stress. When they compare every single situation at home to a problem they encountered while on the job, of course their home problems will seem smaller. It is important for cops to understand that their spouse and their kids don’t have the same scale of comparison. When your wife gets upset that you left the toilet seat up, and you brush it off as, “no big deal” compared to the other things you’ve had to put up with this week, it sends the message to her that you don’t care about her needs. Or you might hear “you’re not validating my feelings” if they have been watching a lot of TV therapists. You end up belittling the things that she finds concerning. When your kids ask you to pick them up from school, and you forget to get them on time, they can’t brush it off as easily as you can. Sure, a cop can think, “What’s the big deal running a few minutes late?” But to your kids, this can be huge.

In police psychology, we need to understand that this problem stems completely from the fact that cops and other people in law enforcement have an entirely different scale of comparison, not because they lack sensitivity. To them, a “big problem” is a murder. To an average person, a “big problem” is when the pilot light goes off and the heat shuts off so you don’t have hot running water for your shower in the morning, or when you can’t do laundry because your spouse forgot to pick up detergent from the store last night. Because this scale is completely different, it is hard for cops to translate other people’s concerns onto their own scale. While putting the toilet seat down may fall high on their wife’s scale, it would barely make it onto a cop’s scale when put in the context of the rest of the problems he/she encounters. When you can learn how to adjust your scale to account for different degrees of work-problems and different degrees of home-problems, you are taking an enormous step in the right direction for your own mental health and your relationship.

Police psychology: simple steps3 Simple Steps: The Importance of Different Scales

  1. Compare the two scales.  So, sure, when you compare murder to picking up the socks you left on the floor last night, the latter problem doesn’t even seem worth mentioning. But bear in mind, on your spouse’s scale, “messy house” may be high up there if she is a concrete-sequential person. It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that really deserves your attention. In order to confront this, cops really need to learn how to adjust their scale to account for “simpler” problems as well. A problem is a problem. On a sheet of paper, create two different scales: your work scale and your home scale. Put down the major problems you have encountered in each setting. Then read them. It will be hard to see the two lists as equal, but you must do that. It can save your marriage.
  2. See the Present, Project into the future.  Brushing your teeth every night may not seem like such a big concern of yours when you compare it to the work problems you have. But, believe me, if you ignore that problem long enough, it will slowly pick its way higher up on the “problem scale.” Things that are ignored have a way of affecting your life.   Look at your list and keep it in the present. Which of these things are affecting your life right now and in the future?  For example a domestic affected your life at the time, but does it affect your life right now. Brushing teeth may have a huge affect on your life in the future. Measuring future impact may change the values of some of the work things you have handle already.
  3. Who am I dealing with?  Before frustration and subsequent anger, ask yourself “is this person trying to hurt me?” Amidst the problem of raising kids and living day-to-day we forget that at one point we picked the person we are with because of certain individual qualities they had. Is their scale of problems really important in the grand scheme of things?    If your answer is yes, figure out how you are going to separate yourself. If it is no, then let them have their tragedies at whatever level they want, and move past it. You will be a better person because of it.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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Police Psychology | Sleep

Posted: November 2, 2015 in Mastering Resilience
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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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Police Psychology | Emotional Labor in the Workplace

Posted: October 29, 2015 in Rank and Leadership
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Police Psychology | Emotional Labor in the Workplace

 

Police psychology has to deal very often with an ultimate question: does the person really like being a police officer?   For the most part the answer is “yes…but” with the “but” usually being something about a boss. Everyone Police psychology: frustrated girllikes to complain about his or her job, yet when you really think about it, does your boss expect too much of you? When the average person asks this question to him or herself, the common considerations that you would judge would most likely be: “Does my work keep me ridiculously late? Are my quotas realistic? Am I being paid corresponding equally to the amount of work I invest in my job?” There is actually something much more important to consider. Put the physical labor you invest into your work on hold for one moment and consider something much less tangible: emotional labor. Taking emotional labor into account, ask yourselves once more: are our jobs expecting too much from us?

The Managed Heart

In order to understand this question fully, we need to explore exactly what emotional labor means. Early psychologists and sociologists focused on the rational, enlightened individual, ignoring emotions and feelings altogether. That great for “rational, enlightened individuals,” I think I even met one once many years ago, but what about the rest of us normal people? In fact, even when normal individuals begin exploring emotions, they tend to do it on a societal level, ignoring how emotions are involved in personal, day-to-day interactions. Arlie Hochschild, a renowned sociologist, discusses the concept of the “managed heart.” In this exploration of emotions, she explores how they relate and are expressed in social interactions among individuals, sort of a real thing.

When Hochschild refers to the managed heart, she is referencing an idea she calls emotional labor. Emotional labor, much like physical or mental labor, requires effort, especially when done in public or for an institution or organization. Most people create a public façade that is in line with the expectations of society. They say when a cop puts on the uniform, they put on a “cop personality.” But that happens with others too. For instance, a flight attendant is required to smile, regardless of how they are really feeling inside. This requires tremendous effort, particularly when they are tired or upset about something, or just having a BFD (bad day). This problem, when there is a disjunctive between how a person really feels and the emotional display necessary for a situation, it can lead that person to feel isolation from their emotions, like their emotions are just a “thing” used for work and not something very private and very personal. In short, they can feel alienated from their own emotions! This is what is called isolation of affect. Isolation of affect can wear you down and cause your job to have emotional labor. Now if you followed all that without drifting off, you got a really important concept down. And if you drifted to a Caribbean beach, with bikini clad women or hunky men (your choice) , take me with you next time I need a break.

kid tantrum, police psychologyHochschild refers to the idea of transmutation to explain that things that we normally manage in private (like our feelings and emotions) are now being dictated by organizational rule books. In general, people apply latent feeling rules to all situations, changing their emotions based on how they think they should react to situations, but now, with the advent of emotion as a form of labor, people are required to socially engineer their emotions based on company policy or social requirements. So now, an employer is feeling like they not only bought your physical labor and intellective skills, but some emotional labor as well. That sort of sucks!

Companies value communication and interactions with other individuals and, above all, social appropriateness. This is significant because if you are feeling emotionally drained while working on a machine, you didn’t used to need to hide it, but now depending on the company you might. The rules change from company to company, and sometimes it is hard to know what the rules are until you “mess up.” When you are working with people, there is always an expectation that you will manage your true feelings and only display that which is appropriate or acceptable for the situation (ie. smiling on the job, being sad at a funeral, etc…). (Unless you are a lawyer, then you have no rules). The labor of controlling your emotions is now a large part of the job and a part it takes people some time to understand.

Instruments of Labor

Darwin considers emotions instinctual; Freud considers emotions as part of libido. Hochschild differs in her understanding of emotion because she sees emotion as being constructed by individuals through interactions with others. This concept of emotion also differs from our typical understanding of emotion in human jargon, in which emotions are seen as sensual, angry, sad…essentially extensions of our inner beings. But Hochschild converts emotion into an “instrument of labor”—a commodity bound by the laws of supply and demand. This suggests emotions and emotional management is no longer private, individualized, but instead structured according to rules and external expectations.

Although Hochschild’s study was with flight attendants, the idea behind emotional labor is not limited to that profession. Any time you need to put on a fake smile for your job, anytime you need to be falsely cheerful, or pretend to commiserate with a client, you are using your emotions as a form of free labor. If your boss has ever demanded of you good cheer regardless of how you’re feeling, or if you’re a waiter or waitress dealing with particularly rude customers and you’re still expected to put a smile on your face, you’re using your emotions as a form of free labor.

In police psychology, you have to be well attuned to this as cops are major emotional managers. I see this concept fairly frequently in my therapy sessions. Sometimes I will ask someone how they feel about something going on in their life, and instead of getting an honest answer, I can tell these people are telling me what they think I want them to feel. In other words, they are managing their emotions based on perceived “rules” of therapy and society. I don’t let them get away with that. I usually use a very graphic, creative, and often times funny way of embarrassing and causing pain to someone when a cop hits me with an appropriate way of dealing with someone who has frustrated them with emotional labor. I usually get a laugh and an agreement, then I can go into the concept of emotional labor with them. A Chris Rock version of police psychology, I guess. It works!

Now consider the emotional labor you invest in your work and once more ask yourselves: is your job expecting too much of you?

Police psychology: simple stepsThree Ways to Reduce Emotional Labor

  1. Try to compartmentalize emotions and distinguish between “work” emotions and “home/real emotions.” Have a separate space for each. Find friends that you can totally tell everything to about your emotions. Sometimes a spouse is good for that, but frequently they are not because they are so intertwined in your life. Be careful when you find this person because you will become exceptionally close to this person and you don’t want to risk your marriage to them.
  2. Stay in touch with your own emotions by keeping a journal or emotion diary to explore how you really feel about something (to prevent alienation from your own emotions). We don’t want you getting to a point where you can’t laugh anymore and where your built of frustration explodes.
  3. I don’t refer people to the helping professions often, but I will this time. If you can find a therapist to help you sort it out, structure them with the idea of isolation of affect and emotional labor and keep them on task when they are talking to you. You will get a lot out of it.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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Hogwarts and Police Psychology

Posted: October 26, 2015 in Public Information Bureau
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Hogwarts and Police Psychology

by Drs. Gary Aumiller and Scott Stubenrauch (Guest Blogger)

What if we told you that Hogwarts was real and police psychology is used frequently with the new students? What if there really was a Sorting Hat that could define your personality and place you into a specific house? However, instead of four houses (Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw), there are five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). Which one would you choose? Well, if you have a proclivity for adventure and a vivid imagination, you would most likely be sorted into ‘Openness’. Alternatively, if you consider yourself to be more compassionate and empathetic, then 15 points for Agreeableness! Quirky are you? – perhaps Neuroticism.

These five ‘houses’ are actually known in Police Psychology as the ‘Big Five’. These five traits make up what we know to be as someone’s “personality” at least in some theories. You may be thinking to yourself: “Why these five traits? I mean, of all the adjectives we would use to describe my colleague’s personality, none would be so pleasant (and censored) as any of the aforementioned words above. I mean the guy’s a complete jerk. And don’t even get me started on his hygiene…” What? You’re still here…? Oh… this is awkward.  Anyway, to figure out why these five personality traits were picked, we must understand the history of a psychologist named Raymond Cattell, his involvement with factor analysis, and why he is so important to the field of Psychology.

The Importance of Personality Screening

Raymond Cattell was a psychologist who lived in the 1900’s to the 1990’s. He was very interested in how everything was correlated. He used ‘Factor Analysis’, a statistical method used to weed out all the unnecessary variables (factors) that shouldn’tPOLICE PSYCHOLOGY, testing be considered in an analysis. For example, we all know a person’s behavior is comprised of many different factors. Cattell was able to take over 20,000 words that served as descriptors of personality, and through Factor Analysis, he was able to narrow down all the personality traits into 16 relevant factors that make up a person’s full personality profile. In Cattell’s own words, “For psychology to take its place as an effective science, we must become less concerned with grandiose theory than with establishing, through research, certain basic laws of relationship.” Factor Analysis is this complex technique where you throw in a bunch of questions totally unrelated and you get them separated into clusters based on themes, which become a single factor. One of the authors did this on his dissertation, way back when, with computer cards and a couple of days of waiting. Cattell did it with paper and pencil and a slide rule (which is an ancient mathematical torture device that only two students in any class could figure out before computers were around). Nowadays, you can probably do factor analysis on an iPad in seconds.

Thus, Cattell developed the ‘Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF®) Questionnaire’. This test is equivalent to the ‘sorting hat’ of Hogwarts—it can identify your personality, predict which career you would be most likely to pursue, and how well or not so well you may perform in a given position (although it doesn’t sing a catchy song while doing so). Later on, these 16 relevant factors were further narrowed down into the “Big Five” traits as we know them today.

The Institute for Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT), Inc. publishes the 16PF Questionnaire, which is now in its 5th edition. Their clients who use it do so to screen through interested job applicants, identify and develop leaders, provide insights for those looking to explore a college major or new career, and to aid in individual and couples counseling. It has great predictive research and selection reports for police and other first responder personnel. And—in case you haven’t guessed yet—Cattell founded this institution and his family led it until 2007.

As we’re sure you know from reading previous blog posts on this site, those of us in police psychology are very concerned with the various personality traits of our uniformed personnel. It is crucial to know how a policeman would react in a high-stress situation; would he run away or into the fray? (What is a fray, by the way?) Call his mom? Take a selfie? Curl up into a fetal position and cry? Break the law? Enforce the law? None of the above? As it turns out, tests have shown that ‘protective service officers’ are more likely to be cool and collected under pressure. But we don’t limit these personality tests to police officers. If one’s personality isn’t properly understood, he/she could end up in the wrong profession. This is why Raymond Cattell’s 16PF Questionnaire is so important—to ensure that you don’t hire a vegan to be a butcher, an agoraphobic as a public speaker, or the local drug dealer as your pharmacist.  And IPAT, the company started by Cattell (did we tell you that?) has an assessment tool that is perfect for predicting law enforcement officers success on the job. No wonder we like IPAT so much!

Harry Potter changed the world of wizards and muggles when he killed Voldemort (He-who-must-not-be-named). He was a wizard with special power and a vision to be able to defeat Voldemort and return the balance to the world. The author, J.K. Rowling, used tremendous creativity to make you constantly say to yourself “How did she think of that?” Cattell, too, had a special power and a vision. He had the power to see personality characteristics as having a problem of content validity (making up the content arbitrarily) and the vision to apply a complicated mathematical concept to solve the problem. He also had creativity as he created not only the 16PF Questionnaire, but a Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the concept of crystallized and fluid intelligence, and numerous ability tests. And he created the company IPAT to keep his tests alive and to allow the police psychology world to have a choice for testing.

So, similar to Hogwarts without Harry, we do not know what police psychology would be without Raymond Cattell. What we do know, his name covered three questions on the most recent Psychology GRE; IPAT is an essential publisher of testing in police selection; and we are still writing about Cattell years later. He must have had something going for him.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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Police Psychology | Why Do I Do That!

Posted: October 22, 2015 in Motives and Opportunity
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Police Psychology | Why Do I Do That!

 

Police psychology is sometimes very complicated, but sometimes it is not. Let’s spend today’s post back to the Psychology 101 classical conditioning roots. The funny thing is, this whole discovery and all its implications was actually the result of an accident. Pavlov set out to research digestion, but in Police psychology, dog salivatingthe process of his experimentation, he noticed his dog began to salivate when he heard a bell ring because he had learned that that meant food was coming. Thus began classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is a tremendously large field that we can’t possibly hope to cover in one post. Today, we will begin with some classical conditioning basics.

Briefly, classical conditioning is when a formerly neutral stimulus, or conditioned stimulus (CS), such as the tone of a bell, becomes paired with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS), such as real food, so that the neutral stimulus produces the response meant for the UCS. The more the neutral stimulus is paired with the UCS, the greater the conditioned response. This is a very delicate balancing game: the CS neutral stimulus must be presented closely enough in time to the UCS so that the individual learns to associate the two with each other. Have I lost you yet? I can’t stand initials.

Classical conditioning is often associated with fear conditioning. In one seminal study, Watson trained a little boy, called Little Albert, to fear a white rat that he initially loved. How? He paired the presence of the white rat with a sudden, loud noise. Little Albert learned to associate this scary noise with the rat, so eventually he came to fear the rat itself, because it was now associated with the aversive noise. With more trials, this fear then came to be generalized, and he soon learned to fear all things furry, like cats, and hamsters, and even a Santa Clause mask. What no one will tell you is there was a big controversy whether our buddy Little Al really was a well-functioning kid, and whether some of this result really happened at all, but that may be a reaction to Watson sleeping with a grad student and leaving psychology to invent some classic marketing strategies and themes that netted him a lot of money, but for now let’s say it happened as the books tell us.

Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life

Classical conditioning is a lot more common than you may think. In fact, many emotional and physiological responses you experience in everyday life are actually the result of classical conditioning, even if you are never aware that your brain has made any associations! Here are some examples: have you ever heard scary music play in the background of a movie or TV show and you instinctively knew something bad was about to happen? Or have you ever looked over at the clock and noticed its noon, and all of a sudden your stomach starts growling when you weren’t hungry a few minutes ago? And I’m sure almost everyone here can attest to the fact that when they see a pretty girl or guy, they experience an emotional and physiological reaction almost immediately. All classical conditioning.

Here are a few hypothetical questions: do you think you would be willing to eat chocolate fudge formed to look like dog feces? Or would you be willing to drink a cup of apple juice that a sterilized cockroach had been dipped into? Or do you think you’d be willing to drink a solution with sugar that was taken from a container with the label “poison” on it, even if you were told the label was incorrect? Rozin & Fallon (1987) posed these very types of situations to participants and noticed that even when participants could logically understand that nothing was wrong or unhealthy about these items they were told to eat or drink, emotionally, they just could not force themselves to get passed their level of disgust associated with dog feces, bugs, and poison. Conditioned responses are not created through logical and conscious thought. Because of this, it is very hard to force people to consciously separate responses they think are reflexive or natural or autonomic, even though in truth they are really responses learned through unconscious conditioning.  

Published in one of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader was a strange classical conditioning  Santa Coke, police stressstory about Santa Claus. It talked about how an artist named Haddon Sundblom drew the current image of Santa in his red, white with a black belt in the 30’s to look like a Coca Cola bottle—and it stuck. Santa was many images before that in different colors, but the Santa in Coke corporate colors is the one most of us think of.   Haddon Sundblom was hired by none other than Watson when he was in advertising. Nah, I made that up about Watson, although it was in the same time. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But the Coke bottle Santa Claus thing is argued by many, so who knows.

Classical Conditioning and the Media

Classical conditioning is a powerful force, but it’s not always negative. In the advertising world, companies try to exploit our responses to unconditioned stimuli, like our arousal when we see a pretty woman, or our warm feeling when we see people laughing and smiling together, and try to pair that with their product, the neutral stimulus. They don’t hire ugly girls to do Viagra commercials. Their hope is that we will learn to associate these positive feelings with their products, so that when we see a beer bottle, a car, chocolate, or even a soda can, we automatically feel aroused or some sort of emotion toward the object. This is like a form of subliminal messaging. Classical conditioning is also explored in different books, movies, and TV shows. For example, in Clockwork Orange, the violent main character named Alex undergoes a treatment in which he is injected with a drug to make him feel nauseous just as they sit him down to watch a number of violent videos. He thus learns to associate extreme nausea with violence, and so when he is later put in situations in which he would have formerly acted violently, he does not do so because of the negative associations he now has with violence. This is a form of classical conditioning called aversion therapy.

One last note on classical conditioning: often there are unintended side effects. For example, Pavlov noticed his dogs learned to salivate when they heard the tone of the bell because they knew that meant food was coming, but he also noticed they began to salivate when they heard footsteps (because the food was also always accompanied by footsteps of his assistants walking into the room), and when they saw white lab coats (because that’s what their feeders wore). Similarly, in Clockwork Orange, during the violent videos that Alex was forced to watch while feeling nauseous, Beethoven was playing in the background. Thus, not only did Alex learn to associate nausea with violence, but he also learned to associate it with Beethoven. Doesn’t happen in real life you say! What is your association with steel drums or Reggae? Heck, just the mention has me salivating for some Jerk Chicken and a Bahama Mama.

So let’s bring it into police psychology. Ever have an officer say they just had a bad feeling about a situation they watched across the street while in a restaurant? It’s most likely conditioned in them by a bad situation they were in before. Or how about a cop associating the treatment they got from their spouse to the way they were treated on the streets by some bad guys? All emotional reactions connected to classical conditioning and as someone working in police psychology or if you are an officer yourself, you have to be aware of it. Time to take an inventory to make sure the classical conditioning in your life doesn’t make you puke to a good thing like a Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven).

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.

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