The Echoes of Violence in the Police Family
Page 5

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One might think that Detective B would share this experience with his wife or another person close to him. More often, however, officers are reluctant to talk about the horrors they see. As one officer put it: "I'd find myself sitting at the dinner table with nothing to talk about that didn't frighten my wife." There are several theories as to why this is so. I shall offer the following for the reader's consideration:

1. Police officers take their roles as "protectors" very seriously. Losing one's innocence through traumatizing events is bad enough without exposing one's family, those dearest to the officers, to the trauma.

2. It is easier, in the short run, for officers to "stuff " their pain. Why talk about it? Talking about it brings back images and pictures that arouse pain and hurt feelings about the traumatic incident. The officer may feel guilt that he was unable to save a victim. "If I had only gotten there sooner," is an often-heard phrase.

Because spouses do not understand this aspect of policing, so often they misperceive the officer's sullen moodiness for other things. "Maybe he/she doesn't love me anymore. Maybe he/she is having an affair and doesn't know how to tell me." Remaining aloof, unfortunately, is one of the few responses that becomes tenable for an officer. In order to remain unaffected by the suffering and pain an officer confronts on the street, it becomes necessary to keep feelings and emotions under rigid control. So often officers who enter therapy express their long-held fear that once they let their emotions flow, they will be unable to control the deluge that would follow. The "wall" that officers build around themselves soon becomes impenetrable. Even the officers themselves are unable to get past it. One release is in the use of the grotesque humor that becomes so much a part of the police mentality.

"You make cruel jokes. You make light of the fact that people are dead. But you wouldn't last six months if you didn't do something like that," says Detective Joe Quantrille.

Police officers become more comfortable with anger and humor, less comfortable with tenderness and displays of affection. Often they may replace "requests" with "demands." For instance, an officer might order his child to "buckle up your seat belt or we're not going anywhere." What motivates this show of anger? The officer cannot relate to his/her child stories of dead children pulled from car wrecks. He cannot communicate to his child how frightened he is at the thought that this could happen to his child. Police officers know that horrible things happen to good people - not just to strangers one reads about in the newspapers. Officers are more apt to command, order, and direct and less apt to discuss and request with their spouses and children. Wives complain that their husbands sometime speak to them as though they were criminals. Children relate how their police officer parent is unapproachable and distant. To separate the role of "cop" from that of "parent or spouse" is a monumental task at best. Far too many officers succumb to this role conflict.

It is little wonder that police marriages suffer as they do. Healthy human development requires balance - so do human relationships. Virginia Satir, experiential family therapist, stated that, "Communication is to relationships what breathing is to life." Unfortunately, the quality of interactions with spouses in police marriages is sorely lacking. They are of short duration, sporadic and with faulty or poor communication. The couple grows apart leaving the spouse of the police officer feeling unimportant and rejected. How can an officer switch roles after eight hours of being a cop, especially if he/she has just watched someone die."

In 1991, I testified before a House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families regarding stress and police families. Among the many professionals who testified was Lenore B. Johnson, Ph.D., associate professor of family studies at Arizona State University, who reported the results of her study "Work-Family Stress among Police Officers." The study was conducted in the early 1990's and is the only empirical study regarding police families in recent years. In the study, Johnson surveyed and interviewed 728 officers in two East Coast police departments and 479 of their spouses. Seventy-seven percent of the spouses were above the scale mean in reporting stress from their mates' jobs. Coping problems included alcohol abuse, divorce, family violence and suicide. Alcoholism rates for police officers exceeded the mean by 17%. Forty percent of the police officers surveyed reported that within the six months before the survey, they had behaved violently toward their spouses or children.

Johnson offered the following factors as contributing to family strain:

ROTATING SCHEDULES: "Not surprisingly, 71 percent of the spouses believed that the police administration does not take family life into consideration when making policies which may affect families and 51 percent agreed that a police officer's career could be hurt if his family voices any special needs or frustrations.

HOME LEADERSHIP STYLE: The spouses complained that officers were unable to leave the job at work. Instead, they expected the last word in family discussions and were seen as overly critical.

EMOTIONAL AVAILABILITY: Many spouses reported that the officer did not communicate his/her feelings.

IMAGE ARMOR COPING STRATEGIES: The rugged individualism, being tough, was seen as a typical coping strategy that often leads to depersonalization of citizens. It's equally detrimental to marriage and family life.

LACK OF SOCIAL SUPPORT: The absence of social support from all sources (squad supervisor, spouse, and friends) has an influence on police stress. Dr. Johnson's data suggested that those officers who did share work problems with their spouses or non-police friends had lower burnout. While this was true for male officers, it did not hold true for female officers who were married to non-police officers. They claimed that their husbands did not want to hear about their wives' jobs.

In reporting individual and family pathology, Johnson stressed the seriousness of the problem whereby nearly 90 percent of the police spouses felt that the police department should provide for the officers and their families both marital and psychological counseling, while 75-82 percent felt that alcohol rehabilitation and stress reduction programs should also be provided.

All available data continues to support the belief that what happens to police officers on the job very much affects their families. Dr. Johnson's study did not include interviewing the children of police officers. However, in 1992, the Metropolitan Police Employee Assistance Program joined with the National Institute of Mental Health's Laboratory of Developmental Psychology, funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Childhood Transitions, to study the effects of parental post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the children of police officers.

The phenomenon of "secondary post-traumatic stress disorder" wherein family members, including children, develop symptoms consistent with PTSD, was found in families of combat veterans who were themselves suffering from PTSD (Rosenheck & Nathan, 1985; Scaturo & Hayman, 1992). Children of holocaust survivors have also fallen victim to this "secondary" traumatization as reported by Fryberg, 1980; Kar-Venaki, Nadler & Gershoni, 1985; Perskin, 1981. Similar findings have also been reported by White in 1991 in treating parents of children who were severely traumatized.

In our work with police families, we are finding high rates of this secondary traumatization in children of police officers with PTSD. Many of these children are manifesting serious conduct disorders and high rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This project investigated the possible contributions of parental PTSD to various behavioral and adjustment problems in the children of police officers. The first empirical study of its kind, the results of this project has helped us understand the effects of severe occupational stress that exists in law enforcement. Trauma is contagious and not easily forgotten no matter how hard we try to defend against the aftershocks.

Let us now turn to other factors that contribute to create "overload" for police officers. They are shiftwork, midnight work, and the responsibility for people.

SHIFTWORK/MIDNIGHTS

"…the human adult is an animal whose body is tuned by evolution and training to go about its business during the hours of daylight and sleep during those of darkness. Ask it to work at night and sleep during the day and it does both rather badly." (Wilkinson, 1970)

In order for an officer to meet the demands we have discussed thus far, he/she is expected to be in the best physical condition. Unfortunately, officers do not always eat the right food and, more often than not, do not get proper rest and relaxation.

Working the midnight shift exacts a heavy toll on police officers. Since human beings are not nocturnal, staying awake through the night requires suppressing nature's cycles. This requires energy. It should also be noted that daytime sleep in controlled laboratory testing has been found to be qualitatively different from nighttime sleep and less satisfying (Kroes, 1976). Shiftwork, especially rotating shifts, though a necessary part of any law enforcement organization often wreaks havoc on the officer's body including adjustments in circadian rhythms. As much as shiftwork is difficult for the officer's biological and social adjustment, it also infringes in drastic ways on the lives of his/her family members.

Let us turn to the complicated problem of shiftwork and the difficulty officers have adapting their physiological and psychological rhythms to a new sleep wakefulness cycle.

The 24-hour cyclical rhythm has been given the name "circadian rhythm." If the cycle follows the 24-day/night pattern, it may also be called the diurnal pattern (Kroes).

Circadian rhythms are seen in fluctuations of body temperature; urine flow; renal excretion of sodium, potassium, and phosphates; metabolism; heart rate; skill conductance; cortical and medullary production of adrenal hormones; sleep cycle; and overall mental and physical functioning. Research has shown that practically all physiological functions show circadian rhythm cycles. As one can imagine, shift work conflicts with these circadian rhythms. How negatively this will affect the individual will depend on several factors:

The work environment

The individual's support system

The individual's overall health

The individual's coping style

The individual's attitude toward the shiftwork

In our society, almost all communal activities take place during the day - working, eating, shopping and socializing. When an individual deviates from this societal norm, he/she is cut off from the normal avenues of social interaction. For the young officer who works midnights, there are special problems. It's not easy to pick up his date after he gets off work at 7:00 a.m. When the officer has a family, children are cautioned not to make too much noise; the phone must be answered on the first ring or taken off the receiver. And, of course, the spouse and children are left alone at night. When the officer works 3:00 p.m. to midnight, he/she will only see the children on weekends during the school year.

With changing or rotating shiftwork, the problems associated with physiological adaptation increase. It takes approximately two weeks for the average individual to re-adjust his eating and sleeping patterns. For the officer on a two-week rotating shift, no sooner does he/she adjust, than he/she is forced to change gears to a new shift. William H. Kroes, Ph.D., reported the following results of research conducted with police officers: 93 out of 100 police officers surveyed mentioned disruption of eating habits as a problem resulting from changing shift routines. Over 30 percent reported sleep problems.

There are some officers who enjoy the permanent midnight shift. However, very few of officers are not adversely affected physiologically and psychologically by the midnight shift.

While there are those who would argue that many people work midnights or evenings and that these individuals lead productive, healthy lives, it must be remembered that for police officers, work schedule is only one of the major stressors. In fact, these occupational stressors taken one-by-one may not be so overwhelming; but taken collectively, in addition to typical life stresses, they can be very harmful to officers and their families.

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