Introducing tools of Spirit'l Survival to LE Depts

[Cary Friedman]

A PROPOSAL FOR INTRODUCING
TOOLS OF SPIRITUAL SURVIVAL TO
LAW ENFORCEMENT DEPARTMENTS

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

A young police officer enters the academy full of energy and hope for the future. He is motivated by idealism and a chance to make a difference in this world. His family is proud of his accomplishment and encouraging of his selflessness. Fast forward to ten years later: The officer has been exposed to years of human suffering, a critical and unappreciative public, corruption, and injustice. All of these experiences take a heavy toll. Our officer is suffering from depression, his marriage is in trouble, he’s started drinking too much and he is suffering from gastrointestinal issues. He has lost all idealism and hope for the future. Atypical? Not at all. Unfortunately, this scenario plays itself out thousands of times per year with the best and the brightest of our profession.

We are all aware of the dire statistics of dangerous behaviors that some officers develop as a reaction to their daily encounters. Alcohol and substance abuse, domestic abuse, infidelity, divorce, organic illness, depression, despair and suicide are all more prevalent among LEOs than they seem to be in the general public. Over the years, the alarming statistics on police officer stress have resulted in countless initiatives to address the ailments that plague our departments. Among these initiatives are mentoring programs, counseling, emotional tools and the like.

One area that has not been the subject of enough attention is spiritual survival tools. True, many departments have a chaplain associated with them, and many of these chaplains are extremely talented. Chaplains play a very significant role in individual counseling and spiritual advising for those who take advantage of their services. However, the chaplain’s services are not always accessed by LEOs and are sometimes perceived to be associated with religious dogma. This perception can make chaplaincy unappealing to officers who are not receptive to a message with religious overtones. What is necessary is a way to provide spiritual sustenance and fortification for the difficult spiritual challenges that officers face, without having to enter into a discussion that might have a religious overtone.

FINDING SPIRITUAL SOLUTIONS

Many times a LEO is suffering from a spiritual malaise that cannot be adequately addressed by the offerings of today’s police department. In addition, when a spiritual crisis hits (brought on, say, by a death in the line of duty, a natural catastrophe, or a terrorism attack), the resources that are made available to the department might be numerous and all encompassing, but very often they are coming too late. Without a certain amount of spiritual fortification, many officers cannot withstand the crisis. Tools for spiritual survival must be in place before the department is facing a crisis. If so, the jobs of chaplains and trauma experts will be that much easier, and their message will be better received when officers have been trained in spiritual survival.

Many officers routinely grapple with such spiritual questions as:

Why am I doing this profession?
What is my place in the larger universe?
Why are people so evil?
Why do the innocent suffer?
What happened to my youthful idealism?

When crisis occurs, either on a personal level or on a departmental-wide scale, these musings can escalate to emergency proportions.

Officers with strong religious affiliations can get their spiritual needs addressed by attending church, synagogue or mosque, developing closer relationships with a clergy person of their choice. Their spiritual needs might be met outside of the department. But what of the less religiously affiliated officer who do not have that relationship with clergy or might be uncomfortable with organized religion in general? Is there a way to address spiritual concerns that arise on the job within the department?

Spiritual survival tools provide an approach to spirituality – one that addresses the larger concepts of evil, suffering, the role of each human being in the universe – without being attached to a particular religious belief system.

For many officers these questions are not being addressed and the traditional departmental methods that have been used for decades are not completely effective for the needs of a 21st century LEO. For these officers, spiritual survival tools are critical in being prepared to confront the realities of a career in law enforcement.

SPIRITUAL SURVIVAL FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT

While it is all well and good to provide emotional solutions to emotional problems and physical solutions to physical problems – the only effective solution to a spiritual problem must be spiritual in nature itself. What follows is a sampling of the tools that are currently being used to train law enforcement officers in the spiritual survival skills that they need for maximum spiritual health. The purpose of these tools is to train officers to find their own reservoir of spirituality so that when a crisis occurs, they have internal spiritual fortification to look to for protection and strength.

1. Developing spiritual motivators
A law enforcement officer has the greatest likelihood of success, and the greatest protection from spiritual stressors, if he has the right kind of motivation, and is clearly aware of and in touch with that motivation. Part of spiritual survival skills is to train the officer to be in touch with his own spiritual motivators, and to gain sustenance from those motivators in times of crisis. Human beings have endless spiritual reservoirs, which need to be tapped into in order to be effective. However, someone else’s spiritual motivator is of no value to an officer. Spiritual survival tools train an officer to learn about his/her own unique internal motivators. What are the images, ideas, people who motivate him to do what he is good at and to do it well? Spiritual motivators are powerful tools if they are used properly. They can provide fortification even in the most despairing moments if the officer is trained how to utilize this resource.

A spiritual motivator can be a picture, a writing, a memory, a principle, a song. An officer needs to be trained to know what motivates him or her. Each person’s motivators are unique and are a product of his/her own unique spiritual makeup. The role of a spiritual mentor is to help an officer identify exactly what will motivate him spiritually to be the strongest person he/she can be. What sometimes happens, instead, is that the well-meaning mentor attempts to convince the officer to adopt the mentor’s own spiritual motivator, to the detriment of everyone involved. Spiritual survival training assumes that there is no one correct spiritual motivator that works for everyone – rather, it aims to connect each officer with the spiritual motivators of his/her own life.

2. Recognizing the inherent goodness of humanity
“Officer safety” requires that an officer view every other person in the world as a potential criminal or threat. It is difficult to live a fulfilling spiritual life with the sense that evil lurks behind every corner. However, this perspective is a given for police officers even though it has dire consequences for the spiritual life of an officer. Family life and relationships suffer when an officer is constantly looking out for potential violence in strangers. Healthy human beings recognize that, while there is evil in this world, most people are basically good at heart. Officers need to be trained to bounce back and forth between a perspective of vigilance, which is necessary when on duty, to a perspective of seeing the good in other people, which is necessary for living a psychologically and emotionally successful life.

A goal of spiritual survival is to help an officer to integrate these two opposite approaches to life, and to call upon the appropriate perspective as the situation requires. This involves exercises and training. Over a period of time, officers can be trained to bounce back and forth between these two states, and to call up the appropriate response that the situation requires.

Spiritual survival tools teach officers to recognize the decency of other people, albeit without undermining officer vigilance, and to become proficient at bouncing between these two states of existence – one necessary for the job, and the other necessary for psychological and emotional health.

3. Developing a spiritual identity
An officer enters the field out of a desire to help people. Developing a spiritual identity involves developing an identity that includes policing, but is also larger than that. Policing is one aspect of a multifaceted personality. Being a spiritual human being encompasses policing and other aspects, too. Spiritual survival tools provide training to officers in developing spiritual aspects of their multifaceted identity. The goal is not to see oneself as “just a cop,” but rather a human being who chooses to do Good in this world through, among other channels, the profession of law enforcement. The badge and the gun do not define the person. Rather, they enhance the greatness of what the LEO is capable of accomplishing in this world.

CONCLUSION

Police departments are confronting crises that are on a magnitude never experienced before. There is a great need for fortification for our law enforcement officers. Spiritual survival is one aspect of training that is sometimes overlooked. Our officers deserve the most protection that we can offer. Offering training programs in Spiritual Survival is one way of keeping officers healthy in the face of the spiritual onslaught that they face in their professional lives.

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Chaplain Cary A. Friedman is a consultant to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and New Jersey's Cop2Cop, and a popular motivational speaker for the law enforcement community. A member of ICPC and ILEETA, he was a Chaplain at the Duke University Medical Center and the FCI-Butner in Butner, NC. Most recently, he has been a congregational Rabbi in Linden, NJ. Chaplain Friedman is the author of five books [including Spiritual Survival for Law Enforcement (Compass Books, 2005) – see www.spiritualsurvivalbook.com] and numerous articles [including "Spiritual well-being for police officers" in The Gazette (Vol. 68, Issue 3 2006) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police]. He can be reached at [e-mail].