I'm a Cop... Yes, I Had a Love Affair

By Safe Call Now

Yes, I have to admit it.  I had a torrid, sensual and illicit love affair.  It lasted for 23 years and I thought it would never end.  At the beginning it was so incredible, so romantic and so sensual and towards the end it was so hard to conceal and cover up with lies.  My love affair ended up destroying my marriage, my children, my career and my life. I will explain more later… 

So you’ve read this far, you must be interested… There are many studies out there that indicate that first responders have a much higher divorce rate than the general public.  I always have to ask myself why is this???  You truly are healthier than the general population when you are hired, you are vetted out to be so.  Somewhere along the line (usually the 7-10 year mark) studies and my experience tell me that there is the potential for us to start to lose our way.  As I travel the country I find it very interesting that there is so much help for the first responders and how to “love” them and how the family learns to adapt to their new jobs.  It just amazes me, why does the family system and dynamics have to change for the first responder?  Who made up that rule?  Talk about reinforcing dysfunction.

One definition for a love affair is “a romantic relationship or episode between lovers”…  Oh I had this incredible affair for so long and I thought it was wonderful.  It wasn’t with a woman, it was with my job and addiction (alcohol and pills).  She was a seductive mistress and I fell hard for her and the attention she gave me.  As I got more and more into my life as a “Cop” and detached from my family I attempted to fill the void of my inability to have healthy interpersonal relationships with those I supposedly loved.  I had great superficial relationships with those that I worked with and had their backs.  Actually looking back on it, they were all pretty fake relationships.  But the job and the drugs fed my ego, they loved me and they were always there for me.  So I thought...

All the studies were right I thought and just like they told me at the academy, you’re more likely than not to get a divorce.  It’s normal, they told me so.  Reflecting back on it, that’s the biggest piece of bullshit advice I’ve ever been given.  I still hear it at academies today in their family programs and I challenge anyone out there in the first responder community to engage me on this subject and make sense of why it has to be this way.

A Cop, PTSD, Suicide & Treatment...

By Kevin Hagen

You could say my story with my mental illness began several years ago (maybe 15?), but I chose to ignore the signs and figured it was just me. I was bullied in high school and that had an impact on my self-esteem as I was growing up and even in my adult years. I was married for 20 years and for most of those years I was told what a bad person I was and that I was not a very good man. After hearing such things for that long, I started to believe them! I have had tragedies in my life like most people, and some that affected me for many years, like the death of my mother. I believed that I was not worthy of being happy and that I was meant to just be that way so I should live with it. I managed to struggle through life like that for most of my adult life.

My job as a police officer added to the issues I already had. I have seen some very terrible things in my career, and some of them stick with me no matter how hard I tried to forget them. Because I chose to ignore my problems, they just got bigger and bigger: the 800 pound gorilla in the room, if you will. I managed to stuff my feelings and tell myself, “Hey, this is what I deserve, so I just gotta suck it up.” I ended up getting divorced, and I figured that was the answer to all of my problems. Obviously it was not. I went from bad relationship to bad relationship, always finding women that needed help; that way I could be the hero and fix things for them. It never worked that way. I just ended up taking on more and more problems, more and more debt, and finally I could not find happiness in anything, but I figured that is what I deserved.

I felt I had successfully stuffed my problems, but then all of the sudden, I was not ever happy. I lost interest in most things I enjoy; I ignored my children who I only see every other weekend; I pushed my friends away and just isolated myself in my home. 
One night everything came to a head. The hopelessness overwhelmed me. The nightmares came every night, so I was scared to go to sleep some nights. All I could see in front of me was a black wall, and in my mind it was all hopeless and I was lost.