Police families face special challenges

A couple sits in my office, struggling to make sense of a 10-year marriage gone sour.

Leaning forward, his face intense and his voice full of emotion, the husband attempts to put into words the deep caring he feels for his wife. If you know a bit about marriage counseling, the above probably will seem rather commonplace.

However, if I add that the man involved was a police officer, you might be a bit surprised.

I think many of us often operate with two conflicting assumptions about the men and women to whom we have given the responsibility of ensuring the public safety.

On one hand, we look upon a police officer as set apart, as different from the rest of us. We assume that they are somehow immune to the emotional, physical, even spiritual stress that the rest of us battle. On the other hand, we also expect that these same people can go home to their families and be just like the rest of us, somehow leaving behind them whatever qualities that we imagine sets them apart from us when they are on the job.

In my work with police families, I have learned that neither of the above beliefs is really all that accurate. Police officers are ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary circumstances. Police work can be tedious, boring and mundane at times. It can involve long hours and frequent shift changes.

Yet, this routine can be instantly and unpredictably interrupted by demands that are tension-filled, dangerous and overwhelming.

Police officers must depend as few of us do on their co-workers — not only to back them up, but also simply to understand what their daily lives are like. Fellow officers share a common base of knowledge, common experiences and common responses to the stress that is part of the job.

There is a lot about police work that the rest us really can't appreciate, no matter how many “cops and robbers” movies we watch.

Police officers also differ in the way they look at the people around them — most of us are protected by them because some of us need protecting from.

Of course, we often view police officers in a similar manner, regarding them as both heroes and villains, depending on how they impact on our lives.

Yet, just like the rest of us, these men and women do go home. They have girlfriends and boyfriends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters. They need to love and be loved, to work out the intricacies of living with other people as marital partners and parents, to find time for themselves and for everybody else.

As with most of us, they also aren't always sure how to do all this. Their job, in fact, requires them to “turn off” those very parts of themselves — their feelings of sympathy and caring, their hesitancy to automatically assume they are right, etc. — that make such relating possible.

Leaving all that behind in the squad car or station house is not always easy. Further complicating the transition is the reality that much of what goes on “at work” can't be discussed at home.

“How was your day,” a fairly common way of getting back in touch after a day apart, is sometimes not a question a police officer can really answer. Likewise, the seamy side of life and the people who police often encounter can leave officers jaded toward both.

This underlying attitude sometimes carries over into their lives and relationships outside the job.

Finally, all of us will, in some way, act out the life stresses we experience on the job when we go home to our families. We may be irritable, depressed, withdrawn or overly sensitive. With the special stressors police officers experience, it is no wonder they are especially susceptible to carrying home a good many emotions that are difficult to deal with for them and their families.

It is ironic; the healthy relational life that police officers need to do their jobs often is the first casualty from the stress of that very job.

Marital problems, divorce, troubled children, alcoholism — all are symptoms that we are demanding too much from, and offering too little to, the people we ask to serve and protect us.

There are no easy answers to the challenge of being a police officer or a police family. We do need to realize that they are normal people who must somehow deal with an often abnormal world. They deserve special understanding, and help as they try to do so.