Working in police or defence: when the job stays with you
Written by drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
In high risk professions, functioning under pressure is not a special achievement, it is the baseline of the job. That is exactly why it often takes a long time before someone notices that something has started to shift.
Why it takes so long
On average people in the Netherlands wait more than forty weeks before seeking help for mental health symptoms. In the security and care sectors it is often longer still, and the reasons are fairly consistent.
The symptom comes with the job, is the first. You were hired because you can handle this, so if you cannot handle it, that is on you. The second: your colleague went through the same thing and simply carries on. The third is more practical: you worry about what it means for your medical clearance, your service weapon or your deployability.
That third reason is real, and it is not a good idea to wave it away. It does help to know that a programme at a private practice runs outside your employer and that we share nothing without your explicit consent.
What changes on the inside
- You keep scanning at home, even when nothing is going on
- You sleep lighter, or wake with your heart pounding
- Certain streets, smells or call outs are ones you would rather avoid
- You have become shorter with your family
- You drink more, or train harder, to flatten things out
- You notice you feel less rather than more
Moral injury: when it is not about fear
Not everything that lingers is fear. Part of what we see has to do with what happened on the level of right and wrong. You made a decision you had to make within the rules and it turned out badly. You did not intervene because protocol said not to. You saw something you could not stop.
That is called moral injury, and it responds differently from ordinary anxiety symptoms. There is usually shame or guilt underneath, and sometimes anger towards the organisation. Being told "it was not your fault" rarely helps, because the problem is not that you see it wrongly.
What does help is working on the conclusion you drew about yourself, and on what has happened to your values since. That is slower work than a single incident, but it is very much doable.
Recovering an overloaded nervous system is not a sign of weakness. It is professional maintenance on your most important instrument: yourself.
What a programme means in practice
Eight sessions of an hour, in Amsterdam city centre or online, schedulable around irregular shifts. For EMDR you do not have to describe in detail what happened, because it works on the image you call up for yourself. For many people that lowers the threshold considerably.
Employers in the security and care sectors regularly cover such programmes in full, from an occupational health or prevention budget. The invoice then states that a programme took place, with no content.
drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
More than 25 years with people, behaviour and the stories people have come to believe about themselves.