Last week, I participated in an active shooter conference covering topics related to mass casualty events like school or church shootings. The audience was filled with administrators of police departments and Sheriff's Offices around the Mountain West. The last presenter, somewhat off-handedly, mentioned post-traumatic growth as a way of dealing with tragedy. He asked who in the room had heard of the concept, and to my shock, only about six or seven people raised their hands. The leaders of law enforcement agencies across an entire region had never heard of a concept that's been studied and publicized for three decades.
Once the shock wore off, I was reminded of an observation I made pretty early in my second career: There's a lot of weird things about being a cop. One of the weirdest, though, is the mystery of the ideological time-warp. In the law enforcement industry, there seem to be some topics, concepts, or ideas that appear frozen in time. Specifically, most seem to come from 1990.
There's a lot more to this time-warp idea, but two examples are obvious. The first is teaching methodology. Based on almost every training or academy experience I've encountered around the US, cops use teaching methods that were popularized around the late '80s, so much so that my academy instructors didn't wear socks. Take this analysis with a grain of salt, though, because teaching was my first profession. I was expected to extremely well-versed in how to teach. In law enforcement, "how to teach" isn't a concern on the operational side, so there's no reason it would be emphasized. Officers have too much to learn already.
And if you got the socks reference, I love you.
Anyway, a lot has happened in our understanding of how humans learn, especially under the kind of conditions inherent to law enforcement. If the industry radically updated its teaching methods, we'd be able to develop more effective officers more efficiently. It would radically change the field by giving every cop on the street the knowledge and ability to adapt to whatever conditions they're facing in any given moment, and to make split-second decisions under incredible physiological stress. But it's a huge lift. Most departments don't want to take such a radical risk when failure means putting people's safety, and lives, in jeopardy. So we stick to the status quo, and officers are still taught the same way the officers who beat Rodney King were taught. I'll probably write more about this teaching methodology problem in the future, because I think it's the foundation of the first real evolution of law enforcement since the profession adopted its assembly-line, paramilitary structure in the 1930s.
The second example hits a lot closer to home. Law enforcement really struggles with officer wellness, and the consequences are catastrophic. The modern behavioral sciences, the same ones that figured out better ways to train and educate, have made remarkable strides in two areas that should be of direct interest to law enforcement: developing emotional and psychological resiliency, and post-traumatic growth.
Both concepts didn't arrive on the scene until the '90s. Based on my time-warp hypothesis, that tracks. It's not a surprise these concepts are largely unknown. Which is tragic, because we could probably be saving a lot more lives if they were.
Resiliency
Let's start with resiliency. Resiliency is our ability to take a punch from life, shake it off, and keep moving forward. As such, it's a preventative measure. Resiliency is relatively easy to develop, but it requires deliberate effort. Interestingly, pretty much everyone in law enforcement already uses two of the core tactics: stress inoculation and controlled breathing.
Stress inoculation, as a preventative resiliency skill, is simply a matter of intentionally exposing yourself to stressful situations. I accidentally stumbled onto two great methods, ultramarathons and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (MMA works too). Both require dealing with extreme discomfort, intrusive negative thoughts and emotions, and moments where you have an overwhelming desire to quit. But since these are voluntary, recreational forms of adult "play," our framing of the events prevents negative psychological consequences. There are lots of ways to inoculate for stress, but the "play" angle is remarkably effective.
Controlled breathing, which most cops know as "box breathing", is just one tool from an extensive toolkit that sport psychologists have identified for managing our parasympathetic nervous system (the "fight or flight" response). In law enforcement, we almost always teach this as a means of calming down in high-stress situations. It's incredibly effective in those chaoetic situations. But it's also incredibly effective during quiet moments.
There's a weird "barefoot running effect" at play here. Barefoot running is an effective way to learn proper running form because it provides immediate biofeedback, you suddenly pay close attention to how everything feels. Awareness.
With controlled breathing, slowing your breath does two things simultaneously: it activates your parasympathetic nervous system and shuts down the adrenaline response, and it forces you to pay attention to your own arousal state. You start to develop a real sense of how ramped up you actually are. Once you're aware of that, you'll start noticing when anxiety creeps in throughout a normal day, and through conditioning, you'll automatically start breathing in response to that awareness. It's a genuinely cool effect.
This can be made even more effective by adding a secondary reinforcer, which is a classically conditioned association that triggers the calming response on its own. To do this, I chewed spearmint gum. Preferably Mentos brand.
When running and rolling in jiu-jitsu, I'd chew this particular flavor of gum. In both sports, a major goal is efficiency, competition in both is essentially a war of attrition, and calm is efficient. And thanks to evolution, the act of chewing itself has a calming effect. Our ancestors only ate when they were safe from predators. This is also probably why campfires make us feel safe and help us form closer social bonds. Probably also why we all have a "fireplace and bearskin rug" fantasy. Anyway...
The Other Tools
Smart people who like to tinker with human behavior have developed some other powerful tools for improving officer wellness. A major one is learning to reframe narratives.
We see seriously horrific, tragic things on a regular basis. We see people in what they will later describe as the worst moment of their lives. And we see the people who victimize others, individuals whose capacity to cause harm is limited only by how aggressively the justice system pursues them. In short, we see a lot of shit.
What isn't widely understood is that we can edit the story our brain constructs from these events. When something unfolds in front of us, our brain attempts to make sense of it by building a narrative. Our personalities and life experiences shape how that story gets told. But human memory being what it is, we're capable of changing the story when we replay it. All we have to do is deliberately shift what we focus on when we recall the memory.
Embarrassingly, I use Mr. Rogers' "look for the helpers" idea. It actually works remarkably well. When I recall a difficult event, I picture the citizens and colleagues who, in the face of something terrible, instantly snapped into the mode of helping the victims. It's a primal response I've seen universally... it doesn't matter if you're young or old, male or female, liberal or conservative. People help people.
When I focus on that, it gives me tremendous optimism about the future, for my kids, my grandkids, all of us. And it effectively neutralizes the weight of the bad stuff I witnessed. It's a shockingly effective way to prevent PTSD from taking root.
Another well-established technique is having an authentic "tribe", a small group where trust and communication are strong enough that members can speak openly and honestly, and where a shared culture of honor and accountability ensures confidentiality. This small group, usually no more than a handful of people, allows the person who experienced the trauma to talk through every aspect of what happened. That act of retelling does something we still don't fully understand, the other members seem to "absorb" some of the negative emotional weight. Done a few times, this process significantly diminishes the lasting harm of the event.
I study and write about tribes a lot, and can unequivocally say having a group who you can trust and can effectively communicate with will solve most of the problems we face today. That extends to dealing with trauma.
Some of My Tools
I have a few tools I've developed over the years, and I'm sharing them in case other people find them useful.
The first is curiosity. Whenever I'm on a scene, talking to people, or working through evidence, I'm deeply curious about everything around me. A big part of police work is figuring out what happened from as objective a perspective as possible. To do that well, we need to shift our attention away from the central, obvious thing and notice everything else.
Understanding why that works requires a quick look at how attention functions. We focus on what we're focused on. Our attentional capacity is limited, but what it does focus on gets very high bandwidth. Think of attention as a laser pointer. Most people enter a room and lock that laser onto the most attention-grabbing thing present. Most cops don't work that way. Their laser darts around the room taking inventory before settling on whatever brought them there. This becomes automatic, and it's part of what drives the hypervigilance that plagues the profession.
My strategy involves leaning into what the unconscious brain is already doing. We know a lot about whatever the laser is pointing at. But our unconscious is simultaneously collecting, analyzing, and interpreting everything the laser isn't pointing at, and that's a vastly larger stream of information. The catch is that we can't access it directly; trying to examine it just moves the laser.
What our unconscious does with all that information is genuinely remarkable. It collects, analyzes, interprets, develops a response, and then packages everything into a compact signal we experience as emotion. At any given moment, our brain is sending us these emotional packages. If we learn to pay attention to them and understand what they represent, we can infer what our unconscious is telling us about our immediate situation.
The cool thing is that your unconscious never lies. It's the most honest signal available to us. It can occasionally be wrong, but that's rare. Far more often, we dismiss those signals and end up getting hurt. If you want to go deeper on this, Gavin de Becker's work is excellent.
So... curiosity. Whenever I enter a new environment or arrive on a scene, I shift my attention for just a fraction of a second to that emotional package. What is my unconscious telling me about this situation? First, I'm checking for any danger signal, like fear, or a sense that something is incongruent, that something's out of place or someone's behaving in a way that doesn't fit the circumstances. If the package contains even a hint of that, I go straight into tactical mode. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, the package is almost always right.
If the package signals anything else, I go into "what's going on here" mode and get genuinely curious about everything in front of me.
This curiosity is also a particular form of healthy compartmentalization. It allows me to dissociate from the emotionally-charged empathic, compassionate human reaction to genuinely tragic events, to set that aside and engage with the scene analytically. Of course, we also need the ability to snap out of that when the situation calls for comforting or calming people, but that's a learnable skill too. The compartmentalization is what makes all of it possible. It lets me defer the actual emotional processing until later, almost always by talking to my tribe, and focusing on the helpers when I retell the story.
The other major tactic is what I'd call calibrated expectations about human behavior.
In college, I studied history and psychology, and a significant part of that was the intersection of the two. Specifically, the psychology behind the darkest chapters in human history. We have a long, well-documented record of doing absolutely terrible, cruel things to each other, sometimes purely for the sake of watching others suffer. And we get creative about it. Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram have effectively demonstrated that this capacity for "evil" isn't an aberration confined to monsters; the latent potential exists in all of us. Tweak the conditions just right, and ordinary people become the guards at Auschwitz. The flip side is equally true: humans are also capable of infinite selflessness, heroism, and moral courage. After learning all of this, I've spent two decades teaching it.
In short, I've spent my adult life studying and teaching the full spectrum of human behavior. Nothing I encounter as a cop surprises me, because I genuinely understand what we're all capable of, in both directions. It's what Jung meant when he talked about integrating your shadow. And bad things don't follow some cosmic script that rewards goodness and punishes evil, at least not one I can see. Tragedy is largely random and indifferent.
Accepting those two realities, the full range of human capacity and the randomness of bad outcomes, means that what I witness, no matter how severe, doesn't violate my worldview. It doesn't make me feel less safe or trigger existential dread. That acceptance frees me to do my job: keep people safe, investigate objectively, help victims and witnesses however I can, and make sure suspects' rights are protected. And it makes it a lot easier to stay curious.
Conclusion
In law enforcement, we don't have to stay trapped in 1990. The same blind spots that keep us training like we're preparing for the Cold War keep us from implementing real, effective officer wellness strategies.
Building a toolbox for resiliency, and for processing what outpaces that resiliency, is absolutely within our reach. Hell, we could probably solve most of our problems by reading Ordinary Men and then Man's Search for Meaning, training a little jiu-jitsu, chewing gum, and paying attention to what our feelings are trying to tell us..
We don't have to accept the status quo. We can grow. We need to grow. We owe it to our families, friends, and colleagues. We owe it to the people we serve.
~Jason
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