Seeking Help...

I decided to take a big step, for me anyway, and started going to counseling.  It took a lot of soul searching on my part, and a lot of prodding from my wife, but I had my first visit last week.  I have another in a couple of days.  I think it is going to be helpful long term, I certainly felt better for a little while right after I left the first appointment although it did catch up with me later in the day and several times since.  I went there with the intention of talking about my newly found family and the whirlwind of emotions involved in processing it, and while that did come up, we spent most of the time talking about my childhood.  That makes sense of course; it is how I got to this place, at least in a sense.  Near the end of the hour I told him that I felt like I was in mourning for the death of the person I was supposed to be.  He told me that made sense but what I should really be saying was that I was in mourning for the person I could have been because there is nothing wrong with who I am.  My response to that was he might be right but I felt like it was “supposed to be” not “could have been”, so perhaps that at least gives us a place to start.  

I think adoption will always be front and center in my life as an issue I have to deal with and work through.  That doesn’t make it my only issue.  I have a lot of law enforcement related stuff, sixteen years’ worth, that I have never addressed.  Police work tends to be about a lot of little traumas that build up over time, not about major incidents that knock you down all at once (although some cops are “lucky” enough to get both).  As such, they tend not to get noticed, or at least that was my experience.  I’d been a cop for about twelve years when I noticed that I got angry a lot more easily than I ever did before.  It was often about stupid things that didn’t matter at all and wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest in the past.  Police work being what it is and me being who I am it didn’t even occur to me that perhaps I should seek some kind of help; I just went on and tried to keep my temper in check.  

I feel the need to tell a little story here to drive the point home about how different of a job law enforcement is from what most of us are making our living doing.  A while back I was riding somewhere with a couple of coworkers and we were discussing the various different kinds of suicide calls we had been to.  Yes, morbid I know, but law enforcement is different.  During the course of this conversation I made the statement that I had never been to a gunshot suicide.  They both thought that was odd given how common those are.  It wasn’t until quite a bit later that I realized that my claim I had never been to a gunshot suicide wasn’t true.  In fact, I went to one about two years prior to this conversation where the victim was still alive (he died at the hospital) and still holding the gun.  I had to take the gun out of his hand (since he had a brain injury I didn’t want him to start convulsing and fire the gun again), while at the same time trying to keep his girlfriend calm and away from him (she was there when he did it), and keep the brand new officer I had with me (who I was training) from screwing up the scene, generally freaking out, or losing her dinner.  I didn’t block this event out because it was so traumatic, though I won’t deny it was traumatic, I just didn’t remember it because it was simply not that unusual of a day in police work.  It was one of those “little traumas”.  Now, multiply that by sixteen years, they wear you down.  

I’m hopeful that it will mean good things for me.  At the same time, as positive as it seems to be going in, it can’t solve my major problem.  That is of course the physical separation.  It doesn’t get easier with talking.  I suppose it just comes down to wanting my mommy, as childish as that sounds.