Seeking Discomfort

In our last article we began exploring the psychological dangers of social media, and how social media shapes and influences what and how we think, organizes us into communities of identity and interest, and often leads us down roads where real and perceived opposition and hostility to our worldview and experience seem to surround us.  The response is just as often hostility, defensiveness, and paranoia as our perspective skews.  In response we seek like-mindedness, resisting intellectual novelty and personally challenging ideas, and even lash out at those whose perspective and beliefs differ from our own.  In doing so we sacrifice opportunity to listen and learn, categorize people we might otherwise find interesting and likable into enemy camps of our own imagining, and find comfort by embracing the confirmation bias we all possess to some degree. 

Of course, it is possible – likely, in fact – that social media merely enables a preexisting drive to organize into tribes of common culture, and that common culture organizes around shared beliefs, values, and defined morals.  The problem with social media is that it seems to magnify this drive in such a way that isolation is not only possible but preferred, the ease with which large yet highly specialized communities can build up around narrow shared ideologies and interests, and how quickly and angrily the community will band together to attack and discredit challenges to its cultural biases. 

Law enforcement is one such tribe of common culture, and one that often feels under attack.  It is also one whose members are prone to seeking like-mindedness, often resistant to novelty and challenges to accepted dogma, and tend toward thought norming.  We are comfortable saying this having lived life as an officer and police spouse for more than 22 years, with half of that time researching, writing about, communicating with, and training in the police culture.  We are also comfortable saying these tendencies are problematic for individuals who embrace them uncritically, and the profession as a whole when the culture shuts out and shouts down challenges.

Growth and improvement comes when we seek discomfort.  Physical strength is built through exercise, intellectual expansion through study and challenges to the mind, and psychological resilience through facing fear and pain.  We become better people – and better cops – when we open ourselves to discomfort.  The profession improves and grows more responsive when we collectively face the discomfort of criticism with humility and a heart for public service.  Social media organizes us in these tribes of common culture, and allows us to isolate.  Social media can also be a place we take the pulse of public opinion – even when we intuitively disagree! – and decide to learn from it.   

Seeking discomfort with openness and calm may help us bridge the very chasm between law enforcement and the public we serve.

Listen with a commitment to receptiveness

In other words, be committed to actually listening to beliefs and perspectives different from your own with openness.  This is a naturally difficult task; our impulse is to rely on our own experience, perspective, understanding, or adopted ethic and dismiss those that differ or create cognitive dissonance.  Being receptive means understanding that others might have very different – and equally legitimate – experiences, perspectives, understanding, and even ethics. 

Being committed to receptiveness of others’ perspectives doesn’t mean yours are wrong or should be discarded, or that what differs must be accepted uncritically.  It means you are willing to simply consider their validity, as well.   

Listen with a commitment to curiosity

Curiosity is the gateway to receptivity; without it, we default back to the acceptance of our own beliefs and perspectives to the exclusion of others, unable or unwilling to accept that someone else’s reality is valid.

Police officers learn that curiosity is necessary for fairness, to ensure they don’t fall in step with the first story they hear or theory that grows out of it, and to drive skepticism and thoroughness.  They also know so many of the general public fail to look beyond the obvious, stick to the first interpretation they hear, and refuse to consider “the rest of the story.”  Still, even some cops are quick to do the same when curiosity challenges entrenched understanding, or leads to the possibility what we know is all we should about ourselves, our peers, or our profession.  Embrace curiosity with the understanding it may lead us to uncomfortable places and with the willingness to be uncomfortable with what we learn.

Listen with a commitment to discomfort

In fact, be committed to discomfort itself. 

Growth often comes through pain.  No serious athlete has ever achieved a thing without embracing physical and mental discomfort.  No accomplished academic has ever mastered their subject without first acknowledging what they don’t know and then pushing the prior limits of their knowledge.  Discomfort is the prerequisite to breaking through boundaries. 

All good cops – the honest, the dedicated, and the hardworking – know there are exceptions, and that sometimes those exceptions bloody the reputation and standing of everyone who wears a badge.  Acknowledge it with discomfort, and let that discomfort push you to represent the best the profession has, while owning and condemning the worst. 

Listen with a commitment to empathy

Empathy is simply placing yourself in the shoes of another, working to understanding how they feel, especially when what they feel is pain, fear, anger, disappointment, or marginalization.  We can all empathize with joy and happiness, we tend to resist and deny the painful emotions. 

This might mean understanding the experience of fear many people of color have when confronted with the police, even if it is merely seeing a cop and wondering if they are being judged or sized up as a criminal, or if proximity might turn to contact, and how it will all turn out.  Empathy also means understanding others’ feelings are not about you, per se, but you might represent the very source of those feelings.  

The point is not to blindly accept but to listen.

Speak with a commitment to respect

And, when you speak, speak with respect.  Speak with the understanding that how you respond will go far in confirming or dispelling biases and prejudices other might have about you in particular, and the all the honest, dedicated, hardworking cops in general, and that for most people respect given commands respect returned. 

__________

You’ll notice we haven’t mentioned demanding or expecting the same consideration from others you are communicating with, whether one-on-one, in groups, online, or any other setting.  Model the behavior, take the high road, and worry about how you project yourself instead of how others respond to you.   You will represent yourself and law enforcement well and honorably.