OFF SCRIPT: The Blue Light Blur #24

Learning to trust yourself again

When trust shifts

There is a fine line that gets crossed when inauthentic environments become normal.

I remember the cumulative events that led to my decision to leave policing, and beneath most of them was a huge shift in trust. Trust in the organisation. Trust in the people around me. Trust in the idea that doing the right thing, in the right way, would be enough.

But perhaps most painfully, trust in myself.

I have tried throughout this series to avoid writing in a way that sounds bitter. That still matters to me. This is not about rewriting an entire career through the lens of its final chapter. But there are some examples that cannot be ignored because they did not only affect my professional life. They had a deeply personal impact too.

Being neurodivergent in policing already came with risk. I had taken the chance of openly disclosing my diagnosis, and thankfully that decision did allow me to unmask at my own pace. There was care. There was caution. There was also a growing awareness in me that my understanding of justice, fairness and right versus wrong was not something I could easily switch off.

And then, in the final years, my trust was rocked to its core.

When doing things right is not enough

In the final twenty-four months of my policing career, I was subject to spurious internal complaints that were independently investigated. I was exonerated.

On paper, that should have been the end of it.

The conclusion was clear. My decisions, actions and work had been pulled into question, examined, tested and reviewed. I had acted professionally, respectfully and with justification.

Yet when I challenged things in return, I was told to draw a line under it and move on.

That left me reeling.

Because if the process said I had acted properly, but the response to that finding was simply to move on, what was I supposed to do with the damage caused along the way? What was I supposed to do with the period of questioning everything I had done? What was I supposed to do with the feeling that my actions could be dragged into doubt, but my own concerns were something to be quietly closed down?

That is where self-trust begins to erode.

Not always in one dramatic moment.

Sometimes it is chipped away by contradiction.

The damage of being made to doubt yourself

When accusations are thrown at you, you do not simply shrug them off, especially if you are someone who reflects deeply.

You go back through everything.

Every decision. Every conversation. Every email. Every meeting. Every moment where you might have spoken too directly, challenged too firmly or missed some invisible cue that everyone else apparently understood.

You tell yourself you know what happened.

Then the doubt creeps in.

Did I read it wrong?

Was I the problem?

Was I too intense?

Was I really the person they were trying to paint me as?

That kind of narrative can be corrosive, especially when the people involved understand exactly where to press. When your reality is questioned often enough, even evidence can take a while to feel like reassurance.

Being handed paperwork that confirmed I had acted properly should have been the validation I needed.

But instead, I was still left trying to work out what I had done wrong.

The answer, in the end, was nothing.

But it took time to believe that.

The neurodivergent layer

When you add years of self-doubt to that, the impact deepens.

Before diagnosis, I had spent most of my life knowing I was different without always having the language to explain why. I had learned to mask, adapt, soften, perform and study other people’s expectations. I had learned to question myself before anyone else did it for me.

Was I too direct?

Did I misunderstand?

Was I reading too much into it?

Was this an autism thing?

Was I being difficult?

Once that pattern is established, environments built on ambiguity and social politics can become brutal. You can be right on the evidence and still be made to feel wrong in the room. You can raise legitimate concerns and still be treated as though the issue is your tone, your persistence or your inability to let something go.

That is not healthy reflection.

That is erosion.

Reflection is not the same as self-doubt

There is a huge difference between self-reflection and self-doubt.

Any leader, or any human being, who walks through life believing they are always right is either blind to the truth or ignoring it by choice. Reflection is necessary. Growth requires it. Learning requires it. Accountability requires it.

Not a single day goes by where I do not reflect on what I have done, how I have handled things, and whether I could have approached something differently.

That is healthy.

But self-doubt becomes something else.

It becomes destructive when the rhetoric around you is so skewed, so persistent and so misaligned with the evidence that you begin to question yourself even when deep down you know what happened.

Healthy reflection asks, “Could I have handled that better?”

Destructive self-doubt asks, “Did I imagine the whole problem?”

Those are not the same question.

Reviewing without disappearing

I still believe conscious awareness is key.

In policing, the National Decision Model teaches us to gather information and intelligence, assess threat and risk, consider powers and policy, identify options and contingencies, take action, and then review what happened. It is a useful model, especially when applied honestly.

Review matters.

The problem comes when review becomes selective, when evidence is inconvenient, or when the conclusion people want matters more than the truth in front of them.

The Code of Ethics sits at the centre of that model, at least in theory. That is a discussion for another day, because in practice ethics can become far more malleable when careers, reputations and aspirations begin to cloud decisions.

I saw that many times.

I also called it out many times.

And that came at a cost.

What others saw

To those around us, these situations often show up as a change in behaviour before they are understood as damage.

I was talking with my parents recently, and they reminded me how horrible I became in the last eighteen months of my career. Not venomous. Not cruel. But changed.

On edge. Frustrated. Sharper. Harder to reach.

Deep down, every fibre of me was being questioned, re-questioned and left exposed, while nothing meaningful was being done to protect me.

That kind of pressure has to go somewhere.

For some people, it becomes silence. For others, it becomes anger. For others, it becomes exhaustion, withdrawal or over-explaining. In my case, it became a version of me I did not particularly like, but can now understand more clearly.

That understanding does not excuse everything.

But it does explain more than I was able to see at the time.

Still proud

Even with all of that, I still look back with pride.

I am proud of what I achieved in policing. I am proud of the people I helped. I am proud of the officers I trained, mentored and supported. I still help people prepare for applications and career development within policing, which some may find ironic.

I do not.

Policing needs good officers.

It needs good leaders.

It needs people who care about the purpose of the work, while also recognising that the purpose of policing cannot come at the expense of the individual officer.

That balance matters.

When I coach or support people moving through that world, I remind them to reflect often on what parts of themselves they may be losing. If they reach the point where the imbalance becomes too great, I hope they do not bury it and allow it to consume them.

I hope they act with conscious thought.

Rebuilding self-trust

Despite leaving, and despite how much improved almost immediately, my self-trust is still rebuilding.

Some things changed quickly. The pressure lifted. Creativity returned. My body and mind began to settle in ways I had not realised they needed.

But other things take longer.

It is hard to shake the feeling that you are only useful as a servant to others. It is hard to unlearn the belief that lower rank means lower importance. It is hard to step into a world where autonomy and trust are given freely when you have spent years feeling as though your every action may need defending.

In my own personal ventures, I can now see how self-doubt corroded my progress. The quiet belief that I was not as good as I thought. The fear that my creativity was indulgent, laughable or unrealistic. The sense that I should stay smaller because staying smaller was safer.

But that is changing.

The creativity that was once mocked or ridiculed is taking shape. The imagination that once created “crazy scenarios” has now helped me make a film. My fiction books have sold in countries across the world.

Not bad for a once broken man.

Not an attack

This is not an attack.

It is a reflection.

I reached my limit. Perhaps later than I should have, and perhaps earlier than others do. But that was my moment of decision, and I have not looked back.

What I want people to understand is that they are not alone if they have stopped trusting themselves.

Sometimes the hardest part is not the external decision. It is accepting that you have become lost inside the environment, the role, the culture or the expectations placed on you.

At that point, there are choices.

You can mute yourself again.

You can accept the status quo.

You can take a stand.

Or you can move on.

None of those choices are simple. None should be judged from the outside too easily. But whichever path you choose, self-trust matters.

Because once you stop believing your own judgement, everything else becomes harder.

Mirror moment

If you have spent years being made to doubt your own judgement, self-trust will not return just because the environment changes.

It has to be rebuilt slowly.

Not through arrogance. Not through pretending you were always right. But through evidence, honesty and small moments of choosing to believe what you noticed.

Maybe the first step is not trusting yourself completely.

Maybe it is simply allowing yourself to wonder whether you were right all along.