We Need To Be More Resilient: Embrace Resiliency As A Concept
/By Lt. Joseph Pangaro, CPM, CSO
Many years ago, when I started writing about police work and the rigors of a life as a law enforcement officer, it was clear to me that we needed to view ourselves and our work in a different way. In today’s world, that concept is even more apparent. In a world that wants to de-fund us, fire us, indict us and hate us simply for doing our jobs, we need to look inward to put all of this into perspective.
It’s no secret that law enforcement officers are under stress, not just the stress of doing our work as we kind of accept and get used to those stresses of answering calls, chasing criminals, working shifts and dealing with the worst people have to offer. No, I’m talking about the kind of stress that can kill us.
This stress comes from trying to do this very mentally and physically demanding job, and having to overthink so much of what we do so we don’t offend anyone, or appear to be indifferent to the suffering of the people in our communities. The stress from seeing the horror of what people can do to each other, the stress of seeing a child abused to the point of death, the stress of dealing with the hatred and lies that are thrown at us every day. That is the stress that can kill us, slowly and quietly.
The idea of police suicide is nothing new to the men and women of law enforcement, almost all of us know someone on the job who has killed themselves. It is a tragedy each and every time it happens, and we are in a tailspin as a profession trying to get a handle on this terrible specter that stalks us. Statistically, right now, some of the officers reading this article will take their own life in the next year.
Why is this?
Greater minds than mine are trying to figure it out, to save our people, to save ourselves. While I may not have all of the answers, there are a few things I know innately just from spending 27 years in the profession and many more on this planet.
The first article I ever wrote was called “The Tragic Toll of Police Work.” It appeared on these pages as well as in the FBI magazine and several other international publications. It struck a nerve with many people because I identified what I thought was one of the factors that lead an officer to make such a dark decision. That factor was the cancer that grows from seeing human tragedy over the course of an entire career and not being able to vent it, release it, and expel it from our souls.
As human beings, we are creatures of light in many ways. We are made to love other people, care for other people and in our case as law enforcement, serve other people. The action that built in a drive to love and care for other humans has a DNA to it and a contract. We expect to get that love back and have others care for us. When that contract is broken by seeing the horrors people do to other people it doesn’t fit, it feels wrong and those feelings linger and lurk in our hearts but we push them down, we ignore them and we pretend it is normal. This disengagement from what we see and live is a coping strategy that we develop so we can survive the job and so we can put the pictures of pain out of our sight and go on.
Unfortunately, this mechanism is something we create, but it is not natural, it is not part of the DNA of a healthy human being. It is this conflict that acts on us inside, in places we can’t always identify or see and where the cancer grows.
As a profession we must adapt to this new reality by developing new paradigms for coping with the ugliness we see and have to wander neck deep in for 25 or 30 years. We must take a proactive approach to combating these new concepts. We have to abandon the “gallows humor” and the “put on a brave face” and move away from strategies of the past. They don’t work. We kill ourselves sometimes years after retirement because the ghosts never go away and they live in us unless we find a way to exorcise them.
The good news is that we can!
We can change the way we see and deal with stress and the darkness of the work we do. We can become resilient. We can become better.
This does not mean we become touchy-feely snowflakes. In fact, to do this we have to be stronger than that, braver than that, and fearless in our desire to live. We must accept that seeing a horrendous crime scene can be emotionally draining and devastating, even if we seemingly move right through it without so much as an acknowledgement of the trauma in front of us. Because on the outside we can throw out a joke about the deceased in the old gallows humor mold, and we can put on that brave face that it doesn’t mean anything to us so we can deal with it or we can recognize that it really does mean something that it is horrible and ugly and painful and worthy of our sadness and pity. This is our true nature, to see it for what it is. This is how we become more resilient, this is how we purge it from our souls, by acknowledging its evil nature.
It is getting to this new place that is the hard part. Change is always hard. Giving up old ways is hard. But think about one of the most hated phrases in all of law enforcement: “That’s the way we have always done it.” Don’t we all recoil at that statement when we want to do things differently than in the past and someone in authority says that to us? Yes, we do. Same thing here, if we want to change things up we have to buy into the changes.
Here’s my suggestions: Every agency should have access to a mental health professional and every time there is a traumatic call or incident, everyone involved from the officers to the dispatchers should have a debrief with the mental health person. As a team we should vent the feelings and clear the pictures from our heads and put the incident into perspective. Our job is tough, we have to run into danger, we have to help the weak and the innocent, we have to document the blood, the mayhem and the actions of bad people, society needs us to do this. But by putting it into that light, by accepting that we are doing a valuable thing we can take the power away from what we see, we build our resilience. We save our lives.
Next, we have to change how we believe a professional officer deals with terrible things - it is OK to see them for what they are and acknowledge that it is hard to see them sometimes. I knew an officer who saw a young child killed in a car accident. The scene was particularly gruesome. That officer told me a few weeks later over beers that he saw his own child’s face when he worked that scene and it stayed with him. That is a normal response, pushing it down into our guts and not acknowledging it, that is not normal; and this is the model for change. Instead of seeing this officer as weak, we can see him as human and very brave for saying how it affected him, for coming to work the next day, for acknowledging that we, too, can have fears. This is the essence of the resilience movement, it makes us stronger and it empowers us.
Find a resiliency professional and bring them in on an in-service day, I know some people that do this, reach out to me and I’ll connect you. Together we take our profession where it needs to go.
Ours is a noble profession, we do good, we serve an important function in a civilized society, and we are good people. President Franklin Roosevelt said “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” This is who we are, we are human, with all of the human emotions that make us unique. Denying this part of our nature is what hurts us.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines resiliency as “an ability to recover or adjust easily to adversity or change.” This definition is the goal, we must embrace resiliency as a concept and create opportunities to enhance our resiliency so our people can bounce back, thrive, live healthy lives physically and emotionally, and enjoy the gift of life we all have been given. If we do this we can save our brothers and sisters… and ourselves.
