As a result of collating, reading, and rereading the data, sometime after writing the initial reflective entries, I identified units and then categories from the data. Nine key categories emerged from data analysis. Categories one to six directly reflect the GABCDE model popularised within REBT; G = goal; A = activating event; B = belief system; C = cognitive, emotional, and behavioural Consequences; D = disputes or discussions to reveal engagement of the irrational belief system; E = presentation of rational and effective new beliefs and their resulting consequences (Ellis & Dryden,
1997). For B, there is a focus in the present paper on irrational beliefs, which are beliefs that are dogmatic, inflexible, inconsistent with social reality, and hinder long term goal attainment, whereas rational beliefs are flexible, consistent with social reality, and aid long-term goal attainment (Turner,
2016). In the first category, I expand on G; goals and include values and motivations as a more representative description of my experience and way of working. Categories seven to nine felt important to include separately as a narrative of my experiences of professional challenges, my growth as a practitioner, and my ideas for the future.
Goals, Values, Motivations (gs), and Contexts in Policing
An emphasis on client goals, values, motivations, and context. In my practice, I have found it important to explore the goals, values, and motivations of the people that I work with, the importance of which is mentioned frequently in REBT theory and research (Ellis,
1994; Turner et al.,
2020). The stressors and psychological challenges that people face in policing can often be linked to their goals, values and motivations. Emotional reactivity in the form of activating events occur when there is a perceived incongruence between expectations in terms of goals and reality (Chadha et al.,
2019; Ellis,
1994). In this section, I reflect on the topic of exploring goals, values, and motivations in policing and within an REBT practice philosophy.
The values of policing and behavioural expectations of police employees in England and Wales are currently set out through the College of Policing’s Competencies and Values Framework (CVF; COP, 2016). It espouses that the core values of policing are impartiality, integrity, public service, and transparency, all of which are grounded in the Police Code of Ethics (COP, 2014). Personal and organisational values alignment has been significantly related to anxiety and work stress (Posner,
2010), with poor personal and organisational values congruency correlating with higher work stress and anxiety. Many officers and staff that I encounter express intrinsic motives for joining the police service. That is, they sign up for reasons that tend to fall in line with giving to one’s community as opposed to gaining wealth, fame, and image (Kasser & Ryan,
1993). Without exception they tell me their motivation for being in policing is to fulfil a drive to “make a difference”, but on closer examination “making a difference” is rarely the only life goal at play. Extrinsic motivators such as buying a house, looking after a family, and earning a secure and decent wage are also important.
The goals landscape becomes more crowded when you consider the complexity of policing, including the rising demands of policing, the cuts to police numbers, and the politics that swings policing priorities. While perhaps at the start of a policing career values are strongly in line with making a difference, that important intrinsic goal is often trumped by extrinsic aspirations. These extrinsic foci tend to include, maintaining a positive image in front of others, gaining respect, being promoted, making it to retirement, and drawing a generous pension. Such extrinsic foci are a facet of modern society and are by no means poor or immoral goals, but their presence builds complexity into the picture of goal achievement creating a prioritisation challenge for individuals to manage and an important area for focus in applied practice. The contents of goals are then coupled with how an individual is motivated in pursuit of their goals. Often the extrinsic goals of maintaining a positive image are coupled with introjected regulation or self-pressure and they can be experienced as having to do as one is told which is an external form of regulation. Both introjected regulation and external regulation are known to be associated with poorer goal achievement and psychological wellbeing outcomes (Ryan et al.,
1996). Assessing the content and process of goal pursuit is therefore an important focus of applied practice also.
The complexity of goal focus is further compounded with the desire to avoid catastrophic policing mistakes. The goals of many of the individuals I work with tend to be about self-survival within policing (e.g., “I cannot/must not make a mistake, because mistakes can be catastrophic”). Such internal conflicts can be explained by an approach-avoidance conflict where individuals are both motivated towards and repelled from high-risk goals as there are elements of such goals which have positive and negative qualities (Ito & Lee,
2016). There is a lot of evaluation within and of policing. The word “scrutiny” is common parlance, often resulting in mindsets focused on egoic survival over masterful effectiveness. Motivation research has demonstrated that dominance of a performance/egoic motivational climate which is predominantly focused on results and performance outcomes predicts that individuals will fear judgment and failure and so are likely to experience increased stress, alternatively, the dominance of a mastery motivational climate which is predominantly focused on continually improving skilled task performance predicts that individuals will experience lower stress (Nerstad et al.,
2018). In my experience, the dominant motivational climate in policing is a performance egoic motivational climate. This possibly stems from the high risk, high-profile nature of the context where performance failures can carry catastrophic consequences. The realities of the risks carried by those who work in policing coupled with their drive to protect the public can lead to an extreme, yet predominant mindset of contingent worth, in that if individuals fail to solve all crime and perfectly protect the public they will be wholly bad people who have failed victims of crime. Developing the confidence to deliver effective police performance is a key reason for seeking psychological support.
Theoretically, when people can identify and perceive that they act/live in line with their goals, values, and motivations the distress that they experience is minimised (Deci & Ryan,
2000). In such situations, the volume of activity in pursuit of goals can appear to be extremely high. For example, during high-profile criminal investigations, there is often a relentless motivation to deliver justice and is experienced as “just doing the job”. In those circumstances, the officers and staff seem fully connected to “making a difference” and don’t tend to report high stress levels. Alternatively, I have examples of individuals experiencing extreme distress due to failure to reach the goals that
others had suggested for them. For example, an officer not being promoted into a position after being asked to apply for that position. When we explored the distress of this individual, we discovered that they “didn’t even want the job in the first place” but that they experienced a great deal of personal shame in not getting what they were told they would get. Exploring “who’s goal was this anyway?” seemed to help the client recognise the reality of the situation and resolved their distress to a certain extent. Doing so allowed us to reflect on their shame through an REBT lens too. I think this makes the case for the importance of assessing goals, values, and motivations within the REBT framework. Clients’ goals, values, and motivations can be assessed against the contents of goals (Ryan et al.,
1996), the motivation types that are influencing clients, and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (BPNs; Ryan & Deci, 2008) and in conjunction with critical activating events (A) and consequences (C) (Ellis et al.,
2001) with all hypotheses striving to identify irrational beliefs (B).
I draw on REBT and SDT theory to explore a client’s choice of focus and goals. I think that raising awareness of what is important to humans (their goals and values) along with understanding what drives them (their motivations), and if what drives them is healthy or unhealthy is an important part of the therapeutic process. SDT also situates individuals in their social context and makes sense of human experience through the dialectic between the two. REBT theory does address goals, values, and motivations but does not explicitly focus on their importance as “disturbance factors”. REBT theory is in agreement with SDT that a person’s goals are preferably constructive, and intrinsic (Ellis,
1973).
When good goals go bad. I think the following reflection illustrates the complexity of competing motivations as experienced in policing. The most common police value that I think is misinterpreted is the public service value of selflessness (UK Government, 2014). It states that holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest. It seemed in many of my early one-to-one meetings with police officers and staff through Socratic examination of their “overdoing it habits” that this argument seemed the most solid reasoning that they would give for compromising their wellbeing to the extent of burnout and breakdown. Those who seemed to suffer most “could not believe” how others could take a break adding to their emotional disturbances about not matching up to apparent superhuman levels.
While practising within policing I came across the concept of public service motivation (PSM; Perry & Wise
1990). PSM is a person’s predisposition to respond to motives grounded in public endeavours. Four dimensions are reported to be empirically associated with PSM, these are an attraction to public policymaking; commitment to the public interest and civic duty; compassion; and self-sacrifice (Perry,
1996). It seems to explain, to some extent, how the habits of overdoing it can happen in policing. Being public service motivated extremely and dogmatically, i.e. where one believes that they absolutely must be committed to serving the public at all times may be the causal route of negative outcomes associated with the construct.
While having PSM is thought of as positive to foster (Ritz et al.,
2016) my immediate thoughts were how would that lead to detrimental wellbeing and performance outcomes. I could see that it might be possible that reducing resources would perhaps have a psychological effect on strengthening intrinsic motivation which might ignore the signs of burnout because the work being done was for the greater good. Indeed, in the initial formulation of the concept, there were concerns that PSM could produce negative outcomes through overcommitment (Perry & Wise,
1990), a point that was largely ignored as the concept gained research momentum. More recently the darker side of PSM has been researched (Schott & Ritz,
2018). The compassion and self-sacrifice components of PSM have been shown to foster resigned satisfaction (Giauque et al.,
2012) and as an overall concept PSM has been positively related to stress (Gould-Williams et al.,
2013); burnout and job dissatisfaction (Van Loon et al.,
2015); involuntary or long-term absenteeism (Koumenta,
2015); presenteeism (Andersen et al.,
2016), and negatively to physical well-being (Liu et al.,
2015). This is bleak reading for researchers and practitioners who focus on purpose and values as key to motivation. It seems that an over-emphasis on PSM could be detrimental to wellbeing, particularly if we see and promote motivation as a unidimensional construct and focus solely on the goals and values of public service which are easily interpreted in extreme and dogmatic ways.
PSM theory does not account for contextual factors and is a theory that has developed independently of broader social psychology. SDT is a broader and more empirically supported motivation theory and posits that contextual factors are vitally important (Ryan & Deci,
2000). This means that there is more than one way to be healthily motivated and while a person’s PSM may be high, other sources of motivation may add to or come into conflict with the drive that they experience. External and partially internal types of motivation may factor into the equation. For example, an officer may have a strong sense of public service motivation (intrinsic motivation), along with a desire to please their boss (external regulation) which clashes with the importance they would like to give to their home life commitments (identified regulation) all topped off with believing that they ought, should, or must meet all of their goals and that they are terrible people if they do not (introjected regulation). Each motivational element can be supportive of psychological wellbeing so long as officers’ basic psychological needs are satisfied and not frustrated in the process of managing the progress towards achieving their complex goals and values in complex contexts. It is my view that managing progress towards achieving and maintaining psychological wellbeing can be achieved through applying many of the principles of REBT. Of particular importance is motivation through introjected regulation which seems to be the clearest alignment of SDT and REBT theory. Irrational beliefs are created when people elevate their goals and values to dogmatic absolutes (e.g. I must achieve my goal). This, in turn, creates the setting for events to become activating (As) which consequently trigger stressful emotional disturbances (Cs).
If PSM is generally thought of as having a positive impact on individual performance through healthy motivation (Perry & Wise,
1990) because individuals scoring high on PSM measures are expected to perform well due to the meaningfulness of their work (Petrovsky & Ritz,
2014), how does PSM contribute to stress and burnout? It has been argued that those with high PSM suffer due to the discrepancy between what they think should be the outcome of their work and the actual outcome of their work (Koumenta,
2015). From an REBT perspective, it is the demandingness applied to the achievement of outcomes that is the causal factor in stress. Stress in these instances results from the fact that individuals cannot meet the high demands they have set themselves (Schott & Ritz,
2018).
We have seen that in other contexts, for instance, sport, overly- high self-expectations lead to poor athlete wellbeing outcomes (Tait et al.,
2020). In policing self-expectations play out against a backdrop of real and potentially traumatic events regularly. Making a stand for rational emotive behavioural mindsets is arguably even more important in policing contexts. In general, the irrationally stressed police officers who believe that they “must” make a difference can be stoic in their stance. Disputation has been difficult in some cases. The evidence for the apparent irrational “They or I must perform more or better or I am not protecting the community that I serve” can feel difficult to counter. The psychological collisions that my clients and I discuss in sessions of political policies, public safety, and personal resilience are challenging to navigate. It’s hard to convince a committed police officer to be less self-sacrificing. Initially, I felt that I was teaching police personnel to care less about the work that they do. Ethically doing this felt wrong, however, through self-reflection and exploratory supervision conversations, self-disclosure and honesty with my clients I came to rest in the notion that REBT doesn’t challenge us to think less, believe less, feel less, or act less. Instead, it challenges us to think effectively, believe effectively, emote effectively, and act effectively in relation to our important goals and values. The message that has stuck with several of my clients in policing is
not to care less, but to
care differently, to care in a way that helps for now and for the long-term and that an effective formula for quality care is adopting a rational approach.
Typical Activating Events (as) in Policing
Activating events (As) represent perceptions of objectionable or unfortunate occurrences (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). Specifically, “As” represent the feature of a situation that a client is most troubled by (Dryden,
2009). “As” may be an external environmental stimulus, i.e., an event that has happened and/or an inference about reality. There are a wide variety of potential activating events reported in policing including working in negative social situations such as crime and suffering (Henry, 2004), along with organisational red tape (Queirós et al.,
2020). My experience has echoed those reported but also extends to issues of inclusion within the organisation and personal matters such as relationship challenges. The most prevalent activating events that clients have reported in my practice emphasise personal internal pressure to perform, self-confidence and organisational issues. It seems that operational matters are less overtly activating, although the carrying of risk seems to be a prevalent activating event. In this section, I offer a brief description of the typical activating events or stressors that I have noticed in my tenure in policing so far.
Performance confidence Some of the most prevalent activating events in policing are associated with an individual’s relationship with their performance. These range from questioning one’s skills and abilities within policing to feeling frustrated that time and resource constraints do not allow for individuals to deliver quality performance where individuals are likely to experience competence and autonomy frustration. Transitioning into new roles brings activating events associated with imposter cognitions which may also frustrate an individual’s BPNs. Frustrations also arise when people feel disconnected and ignored which connects with the frustration of the relatedness need.
Functional performance conversations. For many talking about performance in the policing culture is an activating event, as the word performance is often interpreted as poor performance, blame, and punishment. Moving the climate forward where performance conversations are a welcome exploration of collective goal achievement is a challenge. A functional performance conversation is an opportunity to reflect on the performance processes of an individual to support future performance optimisation. Individually and privately, officers and staff make evaluations of their performances and are so overly concerned about their abilities and capacities, that functional performance conversations are often avoided. This is probably the biggest contrast that my work in policing has with my work in sport. In sport, there is a relentless appetite for performance evaluation. While subordinate staff found it difficult to challenge upwards due to a lack of psychological safety there was also a range of stress associated with challenging poor performing individuals by line managers. This sort of awkward conversation was often avoided by those who found tackling such issues uncomfortable which in turn led to greater and more breadth of activating events as the poor performances perpetuated. Often line managers felt held to ransom with their fears that tackling poor performance would result in individuals falling sick and placing a greater burden on an already stretched service.
Vicarious stress. One Detective Inspector (DI) described what he saw as vicarious stress. Vicarious stress can be compared with experiencing secondary traumatic stress and vicarious traumatisation which is common in policing (Conn & Butterfield,
2013) In this example the critical A was that the team leader experienced that his colleagues were stressed about the stress that they observed or perceived others were experiencing. Another DI spoke about how others’ descriptions of experiencing “dark” or suicidal thoughts which were catalysed by the volume of work faced by an individual felt like his responsibility for having asked that person to take on the cases that were duly his. Feeling responsible for his team’s wellbeing led to his observations of stress within his team and his colleague’s disclosure of suicidal thoughts becoming activating events which, through the activation of associated irrational beliefs, created a sense of debilitating guilt.
Big As (something bad happened) and Little As (nowhere to park). Managing risk, the high volume of work, dealing with personal challenges are all common activating events in my experience of policing. There are some typical activating events associated with “the little things” which have been referred to in research as hindrance stressors (Lockey et al.,
2021). Hindrance stressors don’t need to and are not causal of stress but if there are small blockers to efficiency and effectiveness organisations would do well to address them. These often included, in my experience, email volume, lack of car parking spaces, the quality of the estate, and the Wi-Fi connectivity to name a few. Such “little things” are easy to overlook but each is a potential activating event within the police context with chronic stress as a consequence in such cases.
Equality and inclusion – from ignorance to awareness. As a practitioner equality and inclusion emerged as an important source of activating events and adversity throughout my time in policing. As awareness is raised within our societies of the biases that lead to institutionalised inequality and exclusion, those that make a stand can experience those inequalities as distressing adversities. On the other hand, those who are perhaps unaware of how institutionalised racism and exclusion affect their behaviours are distressed and surprised when they are blamed as a whole for racist and exclusionary acts. Activating events emerge as not being listened to or supported when raising concerns about issues of equality and inclusion and alternatively being seen as a symbol of a biased and prejudiced part of society by being a police officer.
Rational and Irrational Beliefs (B) in Policing
The activating events described in the previous section can activate a range of irrational beliefs that underpin psychological distress. Irrational beliefs are beliefs that when examined are absolute, dogmatic, rigid, illogical, inconsistent with reality, do not support goal achievement, and lead to dysfunctional emotional experiences (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). I am particularly interested in the extent to which the quality (irrational or rational) of a person’s beliefs helps or hinders them in pursuit of their goals (G) in the face of activating events (A). Within REBT activating events can generate up to four core irrational beliefs. These are demandingness, awfulising, frustration intolerance, and global evaluations. Demandingness is an absolute expectation of events or individual behaviours (e.g. the beliefs that events absolutely must be congruent with one’s expectations), awfulising is the extreme exaggeration of the negative consequences of a situation (e.g. it is terrible, even catastrophic that events do not live up to expectations), frustration intolerance reflects beliefs of coping ability (e.g. the belief that one cannot tolerate or survive a certain event), and global evaluation beliefs imply that humans and complex life events can be rated or judged at solely good or exclusively bad (e.g. that a person or the world is wholly bad in the face of expectations not being met). There is a range of typical context-specific IBs for each belief type. In this section, I reflect on each belief type in turn. In my experience, irrational beliefs are rarely singular and occur within a complex network of associated beliefs, some of which are irrational, and some of which are rational. For ease of reflection, I review each belief category in turn.
Demandingness. Based on the typical activating events discussed in the previous section there is a range of beliefs that are characterised by demandingness, which appear within two broad overarching categories; demandingness associated with performance, and demandingness associated with professional relationships. The demandingness associated with performance can be directed at the self, colleagues, and the system and include unrealistic expectations based on how one would want to respond versus how one does respond to performance-related activating events. For example, performance drivers which may be underpinned by irrational beliefs (e.g., I must perform well) are ineffective/inefficient decision making (particularly in making prioritisation decisions), managing time, and feeling able to meet organisational goals. In particular, there is a prevalence of believing that one can perform beyond one’s limits in terms of time capacity and volume of work. Unfortunately, there is a constant imbalance of work volume and one’s time and ability to respond to that volume. Officers and staff typically believe that they must be able to respond to all the work that they are faced with. Working towards promoting effective new beliefs (i.e., I would like to, but I do not have to, respond to all the work that I am faced with) is important so that individuals can explore functional ways of meeting the realities of the volume of work that they face. This is to say that staff should not strive to meet their work commitment, rather, staff should work towards limiting the demand to meet work commitments and strengthen processes that make successful performance more likely.
The demandingness associated with professional relationships also stems from unmet expectations. Those expectations can be of oneself and others. For example, when aimed at the self this can be the belief that one must not let others down, particularly the victims of crime. When aimed at others typical demands are associated with the expectation that a team member “does what they are told” in a disciplined service or that a senior leader is fully aware of the realities of being a police officer on the frontline. From a systems perspective, the capacity of the service to respond effectively to the growing volume of work demand of policing is a source of systematic and cultural irrational demandingness beliefs. There is an expectation that the government invest more in policing, and that the service is armed with enough resources so that it can respond to all the calls from the public. This expectation is often elevated to demandingness which leads to stress and demotivation. There are expectations on police, and demands placed on them, however, a key feature of irrational demandingness is that the preference for meeting expectations is transferred into a demand, which is activated by an event that may prevent expectations from being met. Of course, police personnel want to meet public demand but elevating that “want” to a “must” creates stress if the resources simply do not exist.
One defining characteristic of an irrational belief is the rigidity with which it is held. In my experience, the irrational demandingness beliefs individuals hold are, often, so rigid that when change occurs which may address some concerns, such as modernising the promotion process, providing support for wellbeing or effectively implementing change programs, those holding demandingness beliefs are unaware of steps being taken to address the real concerns that they raise. I often experienced this in support sessions in which individuals complain of a lack of support from the organisation, the very thing that I was providing to them at that time. My observation seems to concur with REBT literature which highlights the discrepancy between expectation and reality as causal of emotional arousal (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). While people may not try to solve a problem that they believe should not exist, it could also be that through selective attention people do not see that the problem that is distressing them is being addressed.
In police stress research a distinction is made between occupational stressors (stresses arising from how the organisation functions, like red tape and people management) and operational stressors (stresses relating to operational policing such as exposure to traumatic events). My observation is that irrational demands are more prevalent when individuals focus on occupational stressors. There is a view that occupational challenges like red tape, people management, working with HR, emails, and car parking spaces are easy to fix and so should, must, or have to be fixed easily. Invariably, in a public service organisation, this is not the case. In contrast, when faced with the extremes of violent crime there seems to be an operational and professional ability to cope with the job. It seems that when reviewing a crime there is a tendency to respond rationally even in the most traumatic of cases and there are support services in place which can be used to support the processing of traumatic events. It seems that police professionals know, to a certain extent, when it is vital to draw on their cognitive coping abilities and that this occurs when events are inherently stressful. This may be because procedures, processes, and training support preparation and coping in this domain. I think there is a difference here in terms of what is expected to be stressful. While the principles of REBT can assist with coping in both scenarios, organisational stressors which are the result of irrational beliefs are in danger of being trivialised and not problem solved.
Frustration Intolerance. While demandingness is at the core of emotional disturbance (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013) stress can be experienced in policing through the route of frustration intolerance (FI, Ellis & Dryden,
2007). Tolerance beliefs seem to play an important role in the production of dysfunctional stressful reactions. FI beliefs are beliefs associated with how much frustration and discomfort humans can tolerate (Ellis,
2003). A person can have rigid expectations about their ability to sustain effort, survive, or continue in the face of frustration, discomfort, or pain. I have found it useful to apply the theoretical categories of FI (Harrington,
2005) when exploring FI with clients. These are emotional intolerance (e.g., the belief that emotional distress is intolerable and must be avoided or controlled, and uncertainty reduced), entitlement intolerance (e.g. the belief that desires must be met), discomfort intolerance (e.g. the belief that life should be easy, comfortable, and free of hassles and effort), and achievement frustration (e.g. the belief that it is intolerable to perform below ones best). While the cognitive process is fundamentally the same in FI it is thought that the above categories lead to different emotional and behavioural experiences. This highlights the importance of fully exploring the content of IBs with the people I am working with.
Policing comes with a unique set of challenges to tolerate and often officers and staff are required to tolerate more than the average person as they are exposed to inherently stressful realities as well as extremes of work volume. Specifically, my practice has covered tolerance of stressful police-related incidents, tolerance of risk, tolerance of high workload, tolerance of one’s limits, and tolerance of system constraints. Stressful police-related incidents are an accepted part of the job in policing but there is a requirement to be able to withstand the details of police incidents. Achieving positive outcomes for the victims of crime often means that officers and staff focus on tasks that are inherently frustrating and uncomfortable with a core assumption that they can tolerate doing so. Tolerance of risk seems to be a more challenging task to achieve. Often officers describe living with a feeling of discomfort due to the risk of crimes being committed and their responsibility to prevent them.
Awfulising. Explaining and disputing awfulising beliefs in policing is challenging. Awfulising beliefs are beliefs that are magnified negative evaluations about specific situations or people including oneself (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). When working in policing I have deliberately emphasised the survivability of socially awful events and have taken a great deal of care to handle awfulising disputes sensitively and with empathy and validation of my client’s beliefs. It tends to get to a point where I articulate that I agree with the awfulness of the traumatic events that are reported in policing but then challenge my clients to explore whether they are adding to the awfulness through the perspective that they choose to take. I feel that the timing of this sort of conversation is very important. In addition, it is possible to not disagree with a person’s evaluation that a situation is awful, whilst also questioning whether holding onto this belief is helpful for them (Dryden,
2009).
Beyond the traumatic incidents that occur in the daily work of police officers and staff, there is a societal culture where the extremes of language are used to describe situations that might be experienced as bad but that in reality are peripheral to one’s goals. Such situations include being late for a meeting. Using extreme language to describe daily challenges tends to lead to an exaggeration of the negative consequences and can be extremely disruptive in many ways. One example I recall was of a senior officer losing patience with his children because it would be awful to be late for the first meeting of the day. The frustration that ensued caused upset at home, and disrupted his ability to focus on the long term goals that within his role.
Global Evaluation. Global evaluation beliefs describe a philosophical stance that when events, performances or behaviours do not meet expectations the individual will tend not to accept, approve, or regard themselves, others, or life positively at all (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). This then derails one’s focus from what could be done to correct or improve performances or behaviours in the future. This fourth irrational belief is also referred to as a depreciation (Dryden & Branch,
2008). These negative global evaluations are negative evaluations of human worth which can be directed at one’s self, others, and life. REBT theory recognises the complexity of humans and life events and so holds the position that humans cannot be rated as wholly good or of worth or wholly bad or worthless, however, I observe that there is a prevalence of the philosophy of contingent worth within western society, where success is seen as a sign of human value. The belief that a person should be competent and failure-proof to be able to be considered worthwhile has been a core observation of irrationality since the first inception of REBT in the 1950s (Ellis,
2002).
Fearing failure and believing that failing equates to a global evaluation of one’s self, others or the world has been voiced by many of my clients within policing. Policing is a high-risk context where overlooking small details can impact the outcomes of cases in major ways. As a result, many officers and staff develop performance-related anxiety underpinned by global evaluation beliefs that affect their sense of self-worth and self-confidence. As described earlier, typical activating events such as focusing on performance, examining failure, challenging others, and feeling responsible for the wellbeing of colleagues can activate global evaluation beliefs.
Discussions about fear of failure centre on a range of topics from failing operationally to failing to perform in a promotion board or meeting, and letting others down, particularly the victims of crime, team members, and senior leaders. Furthermore, there is a pattern of frustration and disappointment in others who are perceived to have failed to perform. Layering on to this there is also a pattern of expectation that others should change rather than change being a self-responsibility and self-led. I have encountered this in group sessions which have led to little change for individuals and merely provide a space for venting one’s stresses to the group. When I have tried to challenge irrational beliefs in these cases and encourage self-responsibility there has often been resistance to adjusting the focus of change to one’s self. I elaborate further on this point in the “challenges” section of this paper. REBT theory suggests that demands for high standards may reflect self-worth along with FI. Indeed, it may be a functional goal and value to be a high performing and caring police officer, however, when failures occur they can become activating events that trigger global evaluations of one’s self and, in turn, lead to unhealthy negative emotional distress.
Typical Emotional, and Behavioural Consequences of Police Work (C)
In REBT theory the “C” represents the emotional and behavioural consequences that are experienced about particular activating events. In my work in policing, I have dealt mostly with stress and have observed a wide range of emotional and behavioural consequences which hinder both an individual’s wellbeing and performance. Stress and anxiety are currently the most commonly cited reason for absenteeism in policing (Cartwright & Roach,
2021). In this section, I briefly reflect on the common emotional and behavioural consequences that I have experienced in my practice within policing.
Anxiety. In terms of emotions most prevalent are feelings of anxiety related to being able to deliver on expectations. Here when the goals and values (e.g. to be an effective performer) of an individual are disrupted by conflicting realities (e.g. high volume of work) and expectations are not met, irrational beliefs create unhealthy anxiety, which is characterised by catastrophising related to fear of rejection, fear of failure, and fear of anxiety itself (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). Many individuals I have worked with experience anxiety and associated cognitions centre on identifying with imposter phenomenon (Clance & Imes,
1978), the feeling that one is not qualified to take on the responsibilities of a role and that they will soon be “found out. Any expectation of performance evaluation, in this case, can become an activating event and trigger demandingness (i.e. I must perform well) along with associated awfulising (i.e. it will be a disaster to fail), frustration intolerance (I can’t stand failure), and global evaluation (If I don’t perform well it means that I am a truly incompetent and bad person, cheating everyone who thinks that I am capable), which in turn leads to further distorted cognitions and unproductive behaviour (e.g. procrastination, over-preparation). It is common to observe further dysfunctional negative emotions when people fall beneath their perceived performance expectations. Such emotional consequences including guilt, shame, and hurt tend to stem from global evaluation beliefs (Dudău,
2014).
Unhealthy Anger. In other cases, client’s present with unhealthy anger. Unhealthy anger which can be categorised as hostility, rage, or contempt interferes with goal-directed behaviour (DiGiuseppe et al., 2014). Often unhealthy anger and frustration stem from the expectation that others act in a way that is fair and supportive which, disappointingly, may not always be the reality that individuals are faced with. Hurt and anger can also occur when there are generalised negative judgments of police conduct that are regularly reported in the media. Research has demonstrated that those that work within policing are vulnerable in terms of their long term mental health (Jetelina et al.,
2020). Such adverse mental health outcomes associated with policing include occupational stress, anxiety, depression, psychiatric symptoms/psychological distress, burnout, and suicidal ideation (Purba & Demou,
2019).
Moral Injury. Trauma exposure over a career in policing can have a detrimental effect on an individual’s psychological health and motivation within policing. Primary and secondary trauma exposure also has long term insidious effects on individuals which impact their health and enjoyment of life. One area of research within the field of police wellbeing that may explain some of the emotional and behavioural consequences that happen over time in policing is known as moral injury (MI; Jinkerson
2016). A construct with its roots in spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions and traumatic exposure, moral injury is a particular trauma syndrome that can emerge following perceived violations of deep moral beliefs by oneself or a trusted individual. The emotional consequences of which are reported as dysregulated feelings of shame, guilt, contempt, anger, and disgust. Beyond emotions, MI seems to challenge a person’s sense of self, spirit, trust, core beliefs, meaning and purpose (Lentz et al.,
2021).
Moral Distress. Moral distress (Jameton,
1984), a related concept, is defined as a negative experience stemming from a sense of knowing what the right thing to do is and being prevented or blocked from doing the right thing due to institutional constraints (Papazoglou & Chopko,
2017). Such institutional constraints include high workloads which equal a lack of time to provide adequate attention to detail. Beyond this, there is a culture of wanting to attempt to respond effectively to all emergency calls, and be able to support all those that suffer as a result of crime and feelings associated with failure sometimes ensue if this expectation is not met. In recent months these concepts have come to my attention as prevalent “C”s in policing. As yet no research examines the impact of REBT on moral distress or moral injury although through the application of REBT within policing I believe that REBT could play a preventative and therapeutic role.
Disputation, Strategies that Bring About Philosophical Change in Policing (D)
Disputation of irrational beliefs is a central change mechanism within REBT practice (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). In my work within policing the targets of disputation are those in REBT in general. That is, I focus on targeting irrational and rational beliefs (demands/ preferences, LFT/FT, awfulising/anti-awfulising, depreciation/unconditional acceptance). In this section, I reflect on my disputing process within my work in policing.
Disputing in the context of long-term goals. REBT theory states that disputes tend to fall into three categories, empirical, logical, and functional. What seems to be less focused upon in REBT literature is that disputation takes place within the context of the long-term goals of the client. This, I think, is of particular importance when exploring the functional nature of irrational beliefs. Holding the goal within conscious awareness within the process seems to yield efficient functional results. Specifically, when I dispute a client’s irrational beliefs I continually refer to the long term goals of the client and ensure that we test the belief in terms of its relationship with the goal. Interestingly Ellis (
2003) referred to functional disputes as both pragmatic and juristical which may hint at the importance of the contextual aim of holding certain beliefs. Of course, the pragmatic quality of a belief can only be assessed against progress towards goals making awareness of goals an important foundation upon which disputation of irrational beliefs takes place. When working with non-clinical populations I think it is more challenging to know if emotional reactions are healthy or unhealthy due to fact that they may be low in intensity and relatively transient. So, I tend to rely on assessing the functionality of a belief in terms of how it aids progress towards a goal. That way I think it is possible to recognise the junction between rational and irrational beliefs and how the consequences of either may be untangled and categorised.
Context relevant disputation. Along with disputing
strategies explored above several, disputing
styles have been identified – Socratic disputing, didactic disputing, metaphorical disputing, humorous disputing (DiGiuseppe,
1991), along with self-disclosure, and enactive disputation (Dryden,
1990). In my practice, I regularly combine Socratic and humorous disputing by playing the role of a detective and using context-relevant comparisons. I think that using context-specific criminal justice-related language can help strengthen the disputation. By asking a police detective “do you think that (the evidence that you have given) would stand up in court?” about rational or irrational beliefs, it seems easier for clients to assess the rationality of their beliefs. I also adapt this presentation of disputation for different contexts. In the world of sport I might refer to the rules of a game for example.
Use of humour. Humour can play a major role in the processing of emotion, is a common antidote to distress (Samson & Gross,
2012; Strick et al.,
2009) and is a hallmark of REBT (Digiuseppe et al.,
2013). Humour can also be a source of distress both deliberately, and accidentally. What has been perceived as acceptable “banter” is now recognised as discriminatory. The effective use of humour in practice is underpinned by a sense of a robust working alliance. I think it is important to recognise that humour may role model irrational beliefs. When I reflect on my style of practice, I have leaned on the use of humour frequently. I remember a client telling me that once during a presentation they watched me encounter technical problems to which I responded with humour and was unflustered. Something that they would find difficult to do. I also use humour to build rapport and to meet client resistance effectively. Coupling assertiveness and using humour has helped me to do this on several occasions. One occasion that stands out to me occurred within my first month in the role. The use of humour in that session enabled me to ground myself with the group and foster engagement. I reflected that I didn’t need the group to like me, but I wanted them to listen to me and using humour to build rapport meant that the group were able to let go of resistance and engage in the session.
Self-disclosure and self-comparison. Self-disclosure and self-comparison have also emerged as key disputation styles for me. Much has been written in counselling and psychology literature about self-disclosure and I tend to take caution when using this. I think what assists some of the people I work with is that they can observe me in executive leadership meetings, giving presentations, and so on and in sessions I can reveal irrationalities that might occur for me and use a self-comparison technique. What I mean by this is because I have had parallel experiences within the hierarchy, I can disclose my stressful emotional consequences and show them how I use REBT to navigate these myself. In this sense I role model rationality (and being human) via my behaviour. What is common is that people assume that I am never irrational and that I don’t get stressed about anything and that “it’s easy for me” but I can demonstrate and talk about my similar experiences.
Effective New Beliefs, Philosophical Change and Effective Policing (E)
The effective new beliefs that are constructed through the REBT process must be assessed against the long and short term goals of the client. In this section, I reflect on the process of developing effective new beliefs in my work.
Goal focused effective beliefs. As noted in the previous section on goals, there may be several competing goals and the one to one environment has been the easiest place to explore an individual’s goal priorities. Sometimes there is a strategic goal of building a relationship or tolerating a “difficult” personality that becomes most salient and stress-provoking for a client. By far the most challenging effective new beliefs to build, in my experience, are those that involve unconditional acceptance when personal and policing core values are challenged. For example witnessing the underperformance of others, witnessing prejudice, and accepting one’s limitations in the face of the extreme demands of the job seem particularly challenging for individuals in this context and can lead to moral distress. However, when the therapeutic work undertaken articulates the process of acceptance effectively, i.e. that unconditional acceptance beliefs represent beliefs that lead to active problem solving towards long term goals rather than passive continued suffering in the status quo then effective new beliefs can ensue and lead to, often, profound change. This can, sometimes, take time and it is my view that I will continue to articulate the benefit of therapeutic sessions until I can see that the client can apply REBT theory at a philosophical level. I have been lucky that my role has afforded me the freedom to do this.
Philosophical change. Witnessing philosophical change is a privilege of working using REBT as a framework and focusing on goals, personal values, and mastering performance (in whichever way that shows up for an individual) seems to be an important part of the process in my experience. When people weaken and relinquish their rigid beliefs they can often realise that the choices that may have a major impact on their lives are theirs to make. It seems during the process of recognising that they do have a choice some have felt empowered to change their careers and their lives. It felt to me that their philosophical freedom seemed to play out in behaviour immediately and sometimes perhaps before they had the opportunity to explore these decisions fully. For example, when one senior leader in the organisation recognised that they didn’t “have to” experience the stresses of the job they felt empowered to resign from their post following some post-session reflection. Later they reflected further are recognised that resignation was not the right decision for them but that drawing on better coping skills, such as building rational beliefs, and negotiating better working conditions was a more optimal way of problem-solving for them. Another client described feeling very different and uncertain about his new philosophy. Although the philosophy brought positive change they felt that it was important to continue to explore the breadth and depth of their new way of seeing the world. I recognise this pattern of behaviour as a catapult effect after change. It was described to me by one client as almost a rush of rational motivation. Having noticed this pattern along with feedback from clients about how strange it can feel to embody their new philosophies I feel that it is important to support a full transition until the client’s new philosophy is integrated into their lives. Once experienced there can also be a need to support the maintenance of changes in mindset and this can be achieved through continuous personal reflective practice and continued rational correction. I think it is possible for people to fall back into dysfunctional thinking patterns and so I help clients to develop strategies to stay aware of their thinking patterns.