We have all worked in a toxic work environment due to the workplace culture, co-workers, supervisors, or the work itself.    

Stephanie Kiesow is a former law enforcement officer, cop kid, and cop’s wife.  She saw how work impacted her parents, their mood, and in turn the family.  She started her career in law enforcement at 18 and in 2011, when her fiancé had a pending IA, lost him to death by suicide.  This kicked off what Stephanie calls her obsessive curiosity about suicide and how the workplace contributes to the permanent decision.  

Stephanie is currently working on her PhD in Organizational psychology.  Through her research and education, she found contributing workplace factors that impact mental health and cause death in a perceptual sense or literal sense and coined the term workicide.    

Stephanie’s goal is to help people mitigate a work-related decline in their mental health and increase their overall well-being so they can enjoy work and love life. She has written the book Workicide to help others do just that.    

This is a deep topic but you will want to hear her research and her solutions for our law enforcement culture.    

In this podcast episode, host Cyndi Doyle interviews John Blumenthal, a Retired Master Sergeant with the Oklahoma City Police Department. Blumenthal shares his personal journey of struggling with trauma and making poor choices, which led to the deterioration of his relationships with his family. He emphasizes the importance of prioritizing wellness and seeking help. He discusses his involvement in peer support and wellness programs, including his work with the Warriors Rest Foundation and the National Cops Program. Blumenthal encourages law enforcement officers to seek support and make positive choices to improve their well-being and relationships. 

We all know that this lifestyle means long hours and lots of stress. Loss of sleep only impacts stress further.  When does stress become burnout?  

Burnout is oftentimes a precursor to more serious mental health issues. If we could catch burnout or even work to prevent burnout, officers would be safer on the job and relationships are potentially more stable. If spouses could catch burnout, they might continue to have patience and compassion.  With burnout, we all wear a little thin.   

How do we identify burnout?  How is law enforcement burnout unique?  What can we do if we already realize we are in burnout?  How can we reverse the impact? 

Deana Kahle, LMFT, shares her story of burnout after serving to support mass multiple incidents.  She shares the impact, her story of recovery, and how you can address it if you are amid burnout or want to prevent it. 

Katie Bingner is a counselor in Maryland, a law enforcement spouse, and a communications coach for law enforcement couples. I just assumed that her wife worked in Maryland. I was wrong. She works in Washington, DC. That led me to ask about January 6th and come to find out, her wife was in the thick of it. What started as an interview about connection and communication in law enforcement couples ended up being a conversation about how they were both impacted by the incident on January 6th. Katie talks about how their previous struggles that almost tore them apart made them stronger as a couple. It's something that she now credits with helping them to understand what they each needed as they moved through the trauma and multiple officers' suicides as a result of that the January 6th insurrection. 

There is a holiday song that always makes my husband and I laugh. It is Bob Rivers singing "The Twelve Pains of Christmas," and it's funny because it is sadly and hilariously true. The lyrics are the first thing about Christmas that's such a pain to me and he goes through a list. The first one is finding a Christmas tree, rigging up the lights, and hangovers. The fourth one is sending Christmas cards, five months of bills, and the sixth one is facing in-laws. He goes through other stressors as well like finding gifts, crying kids, charity donations, crowds, parking, you get the point. We all know that the holidays can be stressful and overwhelming. Let's add on the pressure for families to magically get along and you have a very dysfunctional bow on a very stressful holiday package. 

There can be conflict within your own family around supporting law enforcement, pressures to visit people, making the perfect dinner, and looking just so perfect for that event that you have to go to. At times, family and friends don’t really understand that you as an officer, or your spouse can't just survive on two hours of sleep to go to that family dinner or be present at the exact time that everybody's getting together. 

So how do you get through the holiday without overwhelming anxiety or anger? 

How do you be with people who know just the right thing to say to trigger you?  

Maybe you wind up feeling incredibly small or maybe you want to blow up and tell them off? 

How do you support your spouse when you know that they're triggered by your family or theirs?  

Let's talk about some of the conversations to have as a couple and how you can learn to respond to those people who know how to push your buttons so you can get through your own happy holiday.  

You may or may not know who Dr. Ellen Kirschman is, but you’ve certainly been impacted by her. I think of Ellen as the godmother of police psychology. She has paved the way for many counselors and spouses with her books, I Love A Cop and Counseling Cops. She was one of the first, if not the first, to offer workshops for spouses to understand their officer. She's passionate about helping officers heal from trauma and continues to volunteer her time to do just that. In my interview with Ellen, I get her thoughts on how the blue family has changed over the years, trauma, PTSD, her books, and her love for writing fiction mystery novels based upon the stories and experiences she has had in the police world.

Before I met Allison Uribe, I came across her book, Cuffs and Coffee: A Devotional for Wives of America's Law Enforcement Officers. When we met in 2019 at a conference in Ohio where we were both speaking, I realized that Allison was not only a lot of fun but that she had grit. She will fess up to not handling situations the best way possible early on in her relationship and that she and her husband haven’t always had smooth sailing in their marriage.  What saved her relationship was when she started walking her “faith walk.” She realized she needed to behave differently in her marriage and when she turned to faith, it impacted her and then her husband. Today Allison shares her story of struggle and how faith changed her and now allows her to impact many others in law enforcement as a Chaplain in San Antonio.  

No one I know is more out in our community as a dual law enforcement couple sharing their story than   Cathy and Javier Bustos. I interviewed them several years ago on episode 46 when they were both still working in law enforcement and growing with their company, That Peer Support Couple. They shared their unique lens on being an officer and a spouse to each other. Now they've both retired and I wanted to find out what it has been like for them as officers and spouses in retirement.  

The holiday season can be challenging for any couple. For law enforcement couples, we know that it's going to bring an absence to regularly scheduled events and rituals. What can be kind of nice is the increased need for off -duty officers at shopping centers and churches, or the overtime that comes with having to work events, or the holidays themselves. That extra dump of income can be really nice and helpful, and even make the separation worth it during the holidays.

It can also get couples in trouble if they plan on the cash to catch them up with bills that they've incurred throughout the years. The OT and off -duty can also have a side effect on officers creating a safety issue and stress and conflict in your relationship.

It's important, especially during the holidays, to decide how you want to take advantage of the situation and honor how you want to celebrate and connect over the holiday season. Overtime and off -duty can be great. Just don't let it be a trap. Today, I'm rebooting one of my favorite episodes with now -retired sheriff's deputy, financial coach, and podcaster Jason Hoshauer, and his wife, Katie, as they talk about the financial trap they've found themselves in and how they recovered.

Resilience is one of those words that gets shared in our community.  But, what does it mean to be resilient, and how do we get there?  Resilience isn’t about “bouncing back” but arriving at the understanding that your life has shifted or changed because of what has occurred.  Resilience is about making meaning from what we have experienced.  In this episode of the Code4Couples®podcast, Kate Pieper, LMFT, talks about how she took her personal experiences and professional expertise to create a resilience model she calls Holding On to HAPPY.  

As a law enforcement officer, you spend a lot of time helping other families during and after a crisis. You spend much of your time arresting people who are driving drunk, using drugs, stealing, or other illegal activities and you've probably called people who engage in those activities "losers", "idiots", "scumbags" or other derogatory names. 

Now, put yourself in a situation where, as an officer, those people are your family. Not extended family but your immediate family: your wife, husband, children, mom, dad, brother, or sister. What then? Doug Wyman, a former chief of police and law enforcement veteran of 32 years, reached out to me and said he wanted to share his story so other officers didn't feel alone. You can do your best to protect those in the community, as well as try to protect your family, but sometimes it is not in your control.   

Doug shares his story of his family's struggles with drugs, sexuality, gender, mental health, and suicide, all while he was helping his community walk through theirs. Doug is honest and open regarding the details of his life so please consider this a warning if any of those topics are a trigger.   

I’ve had Adam Davis on my podcast before.  Several times, in fact, and you may remember that he’s written some devotionals with Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, or maybe even his most recent book, Unconquered.  Adam’s written several books and maybe helped a few authors get theirs published, like me.  I enjoy chatting with Adam, and we support each other in impacting law enforcement. 

This week is a little bit of a spin on that. Adam interviewed me earlier this year, and he came up with some good questions, so the interview was pretty alright. I asked him if I could share this interview on my podcast, and of course, he said yes. Grab a beverage and get ready to share this with people who need to hear the basics of how law enforcement impacts their relationships. 

There are a lot of statistics that go around with law enforcement and domestic violence. “Google 40% in Law Enforcement” or maybe just the comment “40%”. Those are the comments I sometimes get in my posts or in my reels on Instagram. I know exactly what it means when I read it. They are referring to the popular statistic that 40% of Law Enforcement engage in acts of violence against their spouse or their children. What many people do not know or share to care, is that this statistic is from two research articles. One from 1991, the other from 1992. This statistic has not been able to be duplicated since that time.

October is Domestic Violence awareness month making it the perfect time to have the conversation. Not only about DV, but a real conversation about what to do if you think you or your spouse might be unintentionally crossing the line.

To help give some clarity to the line between domestic violence and bad behavior, I interviewed Tabitha Westbrook, LMFT Fellow, LCMHC, and LPC, is an expert in domestic violence and an expert witness in PTSD for this podcast.

Garrett TeSlaa, host of the Squad Room podcast and Lieutenant in Southern California, reached out to me and asked if I had done a podcast on "men’s work."  I had to give him a hard time about men’s work versus women’s work, and we joked around about it, but what he really meant was what I thought. It’s easier for women to do certain things like read self -help books or talk to other women about growth and development. It’s more socially acceptable to ask for help or go to therapy when something's wrong and not working. Garrett has been in cynical and dark places before in his life, and he encourages others with his podcast. Today, Garrett discusses men’s work and his next steps in helping other first responders.   

Garrett considers men’s work the chance to prioritize their personal growth and find out what they want.  His involves challenging some of their current beliefs and identifying habitual patterns used to protect themselves as first responders. Garrett describes men’s work as interactive, purpose-driven, and very individual-driven with the purpose of identifying their “why” and goals which are then aligned with values and actions.