As the critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) ended, the officers got up from their seats, said their thank-yous and meandered over to the spread of cold cut meats, cheese, coffee and sourdough bread. (First rule of a CISD: Bring food. Second rule: Bring coffee. Third rule: Know what the hell you’re doing.) As the officers finished their eats and went their separate ways, the department peer support team and I stayed back to debrief the debrief. I remember saying to one of the peer team leads, “What you said about therapy was really profound. I think the comment was well-placed and a lot of people in the room took notice.” He looked at me, smiled and said in his gruff, undercover-beardy, SWAT-guy, knuckle-dragging tone, “You know, Doc, I’m about six months away from retirement myself. Maybe I should give this therapy shit a try, huh? I make it sound good…”

I paused and weathered the impulse to shove my heel up his ass — thankfully, the moment was fleeting — and then I felt a bit of sadness. Here we are again: these guys say all the right things to take care of everyone else and yet don’t put their words into action for their own well-being.

My response to him was simple: “You’ve said you’ve got the next three days off. Take your pick; I’ll send you the address of my office.”

In this profession all the “stuff” (smells, sounds, images, memories) tends to surface when it gets quiet. Retirement can get quiet.

I have many friends and patients in law enforcement nearing retirement. Most are starting to make big travel plans with their families, put out feelers for their encore careers (if they don’t get the next promotion, anyway) and wonder what it’s going to be like to not have to be tied to the radio, do the paperwork or wear a gun belt for 40-plus hours a week. The thought alone might be intoxicating (or terrifying), but it deserves focus and attention regardless. If you think you’re going to retire Friday and be bright eyed and bushy-tailed Monday, ready to fully embrace life as a civilian, you might just be setting yourself — and your family — up for failure.

When was the last time you took off a few days in a row? More than three? For most cops, the first day off is a complete and total wash. You’re exhausted, physically, mentally and sometimes emotionally. That’s because the hormones and chemicals that pump through your body to help you maintain situational awareness and hypervigilance need time to exit your system (so to speak), sometimes taking up to 18 hours. Now let’s transpose this concept of it takes time to decompress onto a 25-year career of running and gunning, stress and trauma, politics and departmental theater, and you think that putting your badge in a shadowbox is going to make it all go away? Now, I get it — there are varying degrees of resilience and a myriad of factors that play into whether the transition to retirement will be successful or not, but what is true for everyone in this profession is all the “stuff” (smells, sounds, images, memories) tends to surface when it gets quiet. Retirement can get quiet. Oh, and you wouldn’t hit a house without an ops plan.

The silence is deafening

One of the good things about work is that sometimes it’s hard to think about anything else. If you’re pushing a black-and-white, it’s damn near unsafe to be thinking about or processing the call from two days ago. As a cop, you are trained in the art of compartmentalization, a
psychological mechanism in which thoughts and feelings are kept separated or isolated in the mind. Compartmentalization is a superpower, allowing you to go to the next call and the next call while putting those thoughts and feelings into some storage container in your brain. When you are off duty, that storage container tries to relieve some of the pressure and starts to leak. You start remembering what the barrette looked like, or you start feeling the anger or sadness associated with the incident. Sometimes these feelings and thoughts are uncomfortable and overwhelming, so, naturally, you might try to distract yourself. House projects, kids’ sports, Netflix marathons and overtime are all ways to get out of your head — at least until you go back to your days on. 

In retirement, you have no days on to go back to. Maybe you have an encore career lined up, but it’s likely not as engaging as working patrol, in the sense that your situational awareness and hypervigilance aren’t as necessary. The consequence is that your brain is less busy and has time to wander. What I want for you is to enjoy the quiet and the calm in retirement when you choose to. I don’t want you enduring a 25-plus-year career only to spend your first year away from it finding yourself desperate to separate yourself from your thoughts and feelings and looking for your answers in a bottle, in a brothel or down a barrel. So, what’s the answer?

You wouldn’t hit a house without an ops plan

Think of retirement as an operation. You know the mission
(enjoy your time as much as possible with minimal residual turmoil from the job), the target (you), the location (your mental, physical, psychological, spiritual and social well-being), the operators (your family, therapist, personal trainer, friends and other support system personnel) and the potential problems/blind spots (finances, unprocessed trauma, spousal drama, boredom). What you need to come up with are where to put your operators and when to call on them, contingencies for when problems arise, and a way to measure the mission success or failure. Sounds like a big op — and not one you would plan only a day or two before
execution. Think of your mental, physical, psychological, spiritual and social domains as separate locations. You may want certain operators to help with specific problems; you may want to hit all the locations at once or one by one over a period of time…. Look, I’m a psychologist, not a SWAT operator, but you get the point. 

Relying on what you’ve learned from the job and applying it (the good parts, not the choir practice stuff) to your home life is not just about having a superpower — it’s about using it. What makes retirement scary for a lot of cops is that there can be a lot of unknowns. That is a solvable problem. 

It takes you months to prepare to be a cop, and more months (or years) to become a good one. The same is true of the transition to life without the badge. It’ll take some training. It’ll take some guidance. It’ll take some hard lessons — but you will be stronger and be successful if you put the work in. You just need the ops plan and the discipline to execute it.