Gaining perspective on police trauma

After a road traffic collision in 2009, I had very adverse reactions – the incident triggered earlier trauma memories. It was only when my therapist asked me to 'float above' the accident scene, look down on myself and describe what was happening, that I gained any genuine relief and made real progress.

Interestingly, the most prominent new recall was that of a bystander who had offered me help. I also found I'd picked out some of the seemingly dull detail of the situation – the fact that it was a day when I had run out of yoghurt at breakfast! This intrigued me. The whole experience of trauma, re-triggering, spatial processing, seeing the compassion of others, the banal and then relief: what on earth was going on?

My therapist certainly knew what he was doing and smiled knowingly, but I needed to know more.

I decided to go back to school and conducted four years research with the NHS, military and police to better understand how we make sense of trauma in the mind. The result – my first book, The Policing Mind – has revealed to me the machinations of human minds put in extraordinary situations, on a daily basis. Yet this time spent listening to thousands of police and military voices has also demonstrated the beautiful simplicity of any one of us being able to gain a little more perspective on whatever we experience.

The power of the hippocampus

The hippocampal memory system is integral to both spatial processing and trauma processing. Unfortunately, our stress response restricts our hippocampi from being able to make sense of the very stress that is damaging it. The upshot is a vicious cycle that can spiral into long-term cognitive impairment and psychological distress. 

Police officers, perhaps like other Emergency Responders (such as paramedics and firefighters) need to process traumatic incidents on a regular basis and on the front line. Opportunities to talk through and contextualise an incident (that is, activating declarative memory) before moving on to the next job can be few and far between.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our more recent study of UK policing revealed that around a third of officers without clinical levels of traumatisation still reported symptoms of traumatisation including exaggerated startle, hypervigilance and dissociative behaviour – likely due to the unprocessed incidents they had accumulated over time in the job from which they were unable to gain perspective or move on. Musician Nick Cave sums up this stasis well in his depiction of the traumatic loss of his teenage son: 'Time is elastic. We can go away from the event but at some point the elastic snaps and we always come back to it' (One More Time With Feeling).

So, how do we fix this? Neuroscience has long demonstrated that practicing a form of declarative, hippocampal spatial processing called allocentric processing can not only strengthen neural pathways in this region but grow them, increasing hippocampal density, volume and therefore integrity.

Consider the famous London taxi driver study, where completing 'The Knowledge' has this effect. Thinking that hippocampal processing in policing could do with a boost, we conducted a Randomised Controlled Trial with Greater Manchester Police after the Manchester Arena terrorist attack to ascertain whether practicing spatial perspective-taking techniques can help with processing difficult and potentially traumatic events. 

The results were unequivocally positive, and further data collection two years on confirmed that manipulating trauma memories using spatial processing results in more objectivity, decreased unease and improved recall of events. What was even more striking was that these effects were achieved in-session, during the 45 minutes of undertaking the pen and paper exercises.

In that Police training room was self-directed neuroplasticity in action in front of our very eyes. Could a new era be emerging, one where we can translate neuroscience into operational policing and demonstrably improve individuals' psychological wellbeing and personal resilience at scale?

Towards techniques

My book offers a range of cognitive techniques based on the latest neuropsychology which help to build agility and proficiency in new ways of thinking for the policing mind. Techniques which employ allocentric spatial processing (namely 'The Satellite', 'The Drone' and 'The Witness') and episodic processing (namely, 'Dawn to Dusk', 'The Buzz Back' and 'The Time Traveller') are not unique to those in high-risk professions but are accessible and beneficial to all. A straightforward example would be the rotation of an overhead view of a scene, mapping it from a different angle. Such exercises may already be familiar to forensic psychologists working with cognitive interviews and lie detection.

The more these techniques are shared across thousands of officers, staff (and their families, thanks to the charity Police Care UK), the more we realise that all of us can extend perspective taking to other realms of everyday life – be it upsetting family arguments, exam stresses, car-park fracas or unnecessary conflicts with senior management. We can all use such techniques to move on from contracting egocentrically around that which feels intensely personal.

By applying allocentric perspective to contextualise memories, we place them in a 'bigger pot' of our life experience – a pot which includes the positive, the neutral and the dull (as well as the traumatic). We can begin to fully appreciate that life events are not actually 'all about us' and that (whether we like it or not) our experience is integrated into a larger field of space and time.

These practices may then encourage us to reach out and connect in adversity – and it is this ability to see human experience as a shared experience which is increasingly considered to be where humankind finds its true resilience.  

See Policy Press for more information on the book.