In my profession as a criminal investigator, I not only gained insights into criminal machinations, cruel acts of violence and the dynamics between perpetrators and victims in the environment of domestic violence, but I was also confronted daily with crises, conflicts and states of emergency that often reached a traumatic quality for those affected. Everything that constitutes an outstanding, terrible caesura in other people’s lives, I looked at every day and plunged in where others, according to their natural instinct, ran away, put on the blinkers or – rightly – distanced themselves in a healthy way. I stopped, looked at everything and went even deeper in. That was my job, after all. In my role as a criminal investigator, I was the one who shed light on the darkness and took a neutral perspective to find out the truth. I investigated and exonerated the perpetrators and used my police powers to protect the victims from further crimes. This involved operations in which we forcibly entered homes to search for sharp firearms or dangerous situations in which the victims had to be saved from certain death. On the one hand, all this challenged me in my professional, legal and tactical competence, and on the other hand, it shaped my personality. I had to learn to always keep a cool head, no matter how much chaos was raging around me, and I had to make decisions and ensure order in the turmoil that everyone could orientate themselves by. Through this very specific job, I was able to develop and sharpen my leadership skills, learned defensive and de-escalation techniques in operational training over the years to ensure my survival and that of others in an emergency, and kept a neutral outlook in the midst of all the cruelty of my day-to-day job. Today, I pass on all that my police profession taught me for over 14 years in my workshops, trainings and seminars on safety for women.