Chaplain Michael G. Christie, D.Min is a Christian minister and a Chaplaincy supervisor with the Connecticut Department of Corrections. He is also a certified mindfulness meditation teacher who offers coaching and training to individuals, non-profits, and corporations on various topics: race relations, stress resilience, conflict resolution, and Non-Violent Communication (NVC). He is currently developing a training program with Law Enforcement to improve community relations. Dr. Christie shares his experiences and insights as a corrections chaplain, a Christian minister, and a mindfulness teacher. In this episode, we discuss:
1. Spiritual fitness and resilience from a Christian perspective and a more universal perspective.Teaching mindfulness in Corrections.
2. Prison chaplains' role is to support and minister to the needs of correctional officers and other corrections staff.
3. How he integrates mindfulness meditation, Non-Violent Communication, and other practices into his Christian ministry and correctional chaplaincy.
SUBSCRIBE to our weekly podcast - available on Podbean OR:
For more info on our training programs visit our Training page.
You can have LIFETIME ACCESS to the Global First Responder Resilience Summit with Audio Downloads & Transcripts, featuring world-class experts in Physical, Mental, Emotional & Spiritual Fitness, and Resilience. Click Here To Learn More!
Mindfulness in Corrections with Rev. Michael G. Christie Transcript
Fleet Maull:
Hi, welcome to another session here on day four of the Global First Responder Resilience Summit, focused today on “Spiritual Fitness and Resilience.” And I'm here today with Reverend Dr. Michael Christie, very happy to have you with us for the summit. Dr. Christie, how are you?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
I am amazing, and it's just a delight to be here with you and to be a part of this really great work that you're doing with these summits. Thank you for the invitation.
Fleet Maull:
Thank you, thank you. And I'm Fleet Maull, one of the summit co-hosts, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation with Dr Christie. So I'm going to share a little bit of your bio with our audience. Let's familiarize our audience with your background, and then we'll just jump into the conversation, okay?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Sounds like a plan.
Fleet Maull:
Okay, so the Reverend Dr Michael Christie is a chaplain supervisor with the Connecticut Department of Corrections. He received his doctorate degree at Hartford Seminary with a study emphasis on new technology and community outreach. He is a certified mindfulness meditation instructor and member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. He teaches mindfulness and emotional intelligence to at-risk youth as well as other populations. He is certified in EFT and NLP. As a chaplain for the Department of Corrections, he has the privilege of mentoring and coaching both staff and inmates. Dr. Christie offers coaching and training to individuals, nonprofits, and corporations on a variety of topics: race relations, stress, resilience, conflict resolution, communication, mindfulness, nonviolent communication, compassion and communication, needs-based relating and so on. His most recent training workshops are “Retiring with Purpose,” “The Pursuit of Happiness,” and “The Transformative Power of Gratitude.” He is currently developing a training program for law enforcement to improve community relations. So you have quite an active career there in the public safety sector as well as in other sectors as well. So you are a full time chaplain with the Connecticut Department of Corrections as well as a Christian minister and a mindfulness teacher and nonviolent communication teacher. So can you tell us how you got involved in chaplaincy to begin with?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, so it was an interesting journey to become a chaplain. So for over 20 years, I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and back in 2011, right after the economy kind of crashed, I took a package, opened for a pause and to reintegrate myself back into the pharma industry. And in the meantime, I took a job with the DOC. And to be honest, initially, I was a little releuctant and I got at my desk and cleared the desk out for from the last chaplain and discovered something really interesting. So there was four pictures in the desk of the previous chaplain, one of which was of a lady, and the next three pictures was of me. And in my spiritual wrestling about whether this is where I belong or not belong, for me, that was kind of the “you're in the right place” And so I kind of settled there with some ease and some joy, and it's been an amazing journey. Prior to that, I spent about 15 or 18 years as a volunteer, going into the prison, teaching and doing Christian formation work. So that was my background on into the chaplaincy, per se, and also, as a clergy, very connected to reentry work before I got into the DOC.
Fleet Maull:
So that's how your pictures ended up there. You'd been a volunteer in the prison for quite a while.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, yes.
Fleet Maull:
And you also minister at a, I think it's a Baptist Church in Connecticut, Stamford. Connecticut?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yes, yes. I'm one of the Minister’s Pastors at Union Baptist Church in Stamford, Connecticut. I’ve been doing that for a number of years, so I've kind of have multiple careers going on at the same time. For me, they're all very similar. The calling is the same, it’s to serve others. So yeah, that's a big part of my life as well.
Fleet Maull:
And can you say something about how you got involved with mindfulness and becoming a mindfulness teacher?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, thank you. So, for years now, I've been interested in meditation, and to be honest, struggled with it earlier on as a clergy, because there was some tension between Christians accepting mindfulness or meditation as a viable practice. And so I got away from it until I met an interesting guy who had a program called Path of Freedom, and I was really interested in sharing ways for inmates to kind of have some resources to deal with their stress. And to me, it was a profound spiritual tool. And so I got invited to either train to become a Path of Freedom instructor or to go to the Engaged Mindfulness Institute and become a certified mindfulness instructor. So that's what I did. And what a “wow” that was, opened up my eyes on a number of levels, deepened my own faith and spirituality, it's really been powerful and transformative.
Fleet Maull:
Yeah, well, thank you, Michael. And I didn't know that it really all began there, but for full disclosure’s sake, I'm the Director of Training and Development for the Engaged Mindfulness Institute, and Michael is a valued member of our community, now as one of our Certified Mindfulness Teachers. And the Path of Freedom, that was actually developed by my colleague Vita Pires, which is a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum for at-risk, incarcerated returning youth and adults. And Michael and I have co-delivered some Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Resiliency training for the Connecticut Department of Corrections staff, and we're hoping to get future opportunities to bring that program there. So today's theme is “Spiritual Fitness and Resilience.” As both a minister and as a mindfulness teacher , what does that mean to you? Spiritual Fitness and Resilience?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Thank you. That is a great question. There's a relationship between fitness and resilience. If we look at physical fitness, you can't be physically fit without having resilience. And so I think this, the notion of fitness, grounded in fitness, is resilience, in large part. And so when we are emotionally or spiritually fit, we embody resilience, that becomes naturally. And so you know, fitness also has all kind of meaning connected to being resourced, having the capacity to be resilient, and mostly from a Christian perspective, and probably from many other faith perspectives, it has to do with connection to the divine. So I call it God, or some say Jesus, or some might say the universe, but it's this connection to something bigger than us that really resources us. And so in the New Testament, there’s a scripture that says, it's actually considered The Golden Rule, right, is to “love God, love your neighbor, and to love yourself.” And I think that embodies spiritual fitness to me. It means that whatever it is that you call God, certainly part of that is to be connected to God, to be connected to neighbor, and most importantly, to be connected to ourselves. I think in our culture, many of us are really disconnected from ourselves.
Fleet Maull:
No absolutely. In the clinical literature, in the psychosocial literature, and so forth, generally, the spiritual dimension, whether it's spiritual fitness or spiritual place has to do with whether we feel connected to ourselves, connected to others, as you said, and connected to something larger than ourselves, whether it's our the God of our understanding, or just something else it gives our life meaning and purpose, and it also seemed to be connected with all those things we do that do give our life meaning and purpose. And it seems like one of the dangers for first responders is that as a result of trauma exposure, they can lose that sense of meaning and purpose, and that can be, unfortunately, an on-ramp to suicidality. So I think that spiritual dimension and spiritual place in some ways, I mean, we can have our physical resourcefulness, right? Our mental and emotional resourcefulness, but in some ways that spiritual resourcefulness is kind of like the ultimate resource, right? When everything else fails, that's what we have to fall back on.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, and the data is actually now starting to bear that out. Many of the psychotherapies are now really starting to value spirituality as a part of the treatment protocol, which didn't happen in the past, because it's that powerful, that people pay attention to that. And I agree with you so much that so often, because of trauma, we become disassociated and disconnected from the spiritual thing, from the thing that brings meaning to our lives. And so, you know, we were fully living within our robot. Our robot is completely in control, just going on automatic, doing things kind of robotically and not connected to something bigger that really energizes us and gives us purpose and brings us a kind of joy, that also resources us to be resilient when we encounter challenges and difficulties.
Fleet Maull:
Absolutely. You know, I think a lot of people associate prison chaplaincy or think prison chaplains are mostly ministering to prisoners, to inmates, and may not realize that prison chaplains also minister to the staff and support staff around their spiritual needs and psychosocial needs and so forth. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that aspect of being a prison chaplain, how you work with staff and support staff?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Thank you. So I think probably what is common for many institutions in the DOC, Department of Correction, there is this division between the officers and the other departments. We had to work really hard as a department to disprove that said, said “No, we are here for all of the staff, for all of the staff, as well as the inmates: we're chaplain to everyone.” Everyone that needs a chaplain, that needs space to kind of feel safe and to talk, because oftentimes the staff will not go to mental health because they're nervous about that sending off some kind of radar to the leadership that they're not fit. And they're more willing to come to the chaplain to say, “Hey, this is what's happening at home. I'm stressed out. I'm stressed out at work.” They might not even say it in those words, but as a trained chaplain, you kind of pick those things up. So we really try to make it our duty to be in the space, to be intentional about letting staff know we're available to them; and also to be intentional- one of the beauties of being a chaplain is that we're not denominational. So even though I'm considered the Protestant chaplain, I am the chaplain without borders, so to speak; so I’m chaplain to everyone. Just to hold a safe space for someone, and not to indoctrinate someone with my own beliefs, but to hold the space for whatever they believe. Because there's lots of folks in the staff that really don't have a faith formation of any kind, at least, have anything expressed. And so to be able to hold that space for them and let them feel safe enough to do that, that I'm not going to challenge them or try to change them or convert them. And so that was an important journey as well, to be in this space. And there's practically every day a staff member comes into my office to talk; talk about personal issues, talk about the struggles with their children, with their relationships, and we just give them that space to be able to talk and talk freely: because they're not really having the space anywhere else to express themselves in that way, you know? And talking it out matters, right? Being heard is a powerful tool on the path of healing, and so we try to provide that for staff.
Fleet Maull:
Absolutely. You know, that’s one of the beautiful things about chaplaincy, I think. I've been involved in chaplaincy training, been a trainer in several chaplaincy programs, and chaplains are really trained, whatever their personal faith is, they're really trained to meet people where they are, of whatever faith. Because if you're going to be a chaplain in a hospital or a prison or with the military or with the police or really anywhere, you're called on to minister to people of all different faith backgrounds, or those who are not religious and maybe very secular in orientation. And so chaplains get this really broad training, and I think it's really a beautiful vocation. Working in the corrections field, and I'm sure you deal with a lot of stress, and you also have, certainly secondary trauma exposure, because you hear about all the stuff that goes down in the prisons and the institutions, and that's one form of secondary trauma, or vicarious trauma, just hearing about all those things, and so you know, I’m sure you're exposed to that. And there’s actually been some research. There was a recent study just about a year or two ago in Ontario, in Canada, actually, that showed the levels of health risk, impact, and reports of some kind of psychological distress, you know, PTSD, anxiety, panic disorders, various things among the different kinds of correctional staff, from wardens and superintendents to correctional officers to clinical staff to chaplains to wellness people to administrative staff, and they were all over, I think all over 50%. In other words, 50% of the staff had, at least one time, reported having sort of diagnosable psychological distress, and had gone to someone to deal with that. And so there were a couple that were the higher, I think it’s actually interesting: the superintendents or warden had the highest, probation and parole was also very high. But even the chaplains are exposed. So everybody who works in the field is exposed to that ongoing stress, however they manage that or don't; and then also this exposure to sometimes both primary and secondary trauma. And so I’m just curious as to how you've dealt with that, and how you kind of felt the impact of that personally, and then how you keep yourself healthy and resilient in dealing with all that.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
So one of the things chaplains and clergy in general have to guard against is this innate sense that we have to always help, and oftentimes to sacrifice our own well-being and our own self-care. And there's this danger often that we're doing it for Go, right, we’re doing it for the church, and so we lose sight of really taking care of ourselves. And I think that's the danger that all of us have, and many have fallen into that trap. One of the beautiful things about having a mindfulness practice is you get to sort that out, or you at least, I have a traveling companion with me to help me to manage that. And just doing some deep healing work to know that that's not the case, and it's no longer my theology that I need to do that. If when you get on the airline, and if there's danger, they tell you first to put on the mask before you help anyone else. And I think we have to learn, really kind of retrain ourselves, that that's what needs to happen for chaplains, for those that are in the administration, that are caring for inmates and staff. And so the first question you raised about spiritual fitness really has a lot to do with this. I don't feel going to work is work. It's not burdensome to me. I relish in it. I find purpose in it. And for me, it's a calling and so that in itself is a resource to me. That resourced me to have that on. I'm also fortunate to have a mindfulness practice, and for many their own personal prayer or prayer practice that also helps to resource them, and it certainly helps me. And I'm trained in nonviolent communication, which helps me to kind of do the deep work when I kind of get stuck, to move me along. I build the capacity and resilience when I teach, when I teach mindfulness, and when I teach some of these other things, and when I have Bible study. It's a way for me to build healing and to be resourced. So all of those things kind of help me along. And then I also, one of the things I really promote is gratitude. I really think it's important to find the good, and so I have a gratitude practice where I'm writing down things that I’m grateful for and really paying attention to the good in the world, the good in life, to the good in the problem that I say, I look for it. I tried to at least. I'm not always successful, but all those things kind of helped me to be resilient and resourceful as I navigate; as you mentioned, the DOC is really a trauma center for both staff and inmates, and it is profoundly deep center of trauma for a lot of folks, physical trauma, spiritual trauma, emotional trauma, mental trauma. And it's imperative that we take care of ourselves, that we are able to be a resource to all of those people that we're trying to serve.
Fleet Maull:
Thank you. Dr. Christie, I wonder if you could kind of expand that into what you think maybe some of the priorities are that first responders of all kinds need to embrace. Because all first responders, it is a calling to be a first responder, an can also be that pull, to kind of get pulled into that rescuer role. You're familiar with the Drama Triangle that I teach a lot, right? And we get pulled into that, that “helping roles,” sometimes at the expense of our own self-care, right? And then sometimes our helping is not even that helpful, because we're taking too much responsibility for others, right? You know, instead of, you know, sort of being more of a support, ally, coach, you know, we're into, “I'm going to save people,” right? Sometimes first responders do literally have to rescue people. That's definitely part of what our first responders do. You know, but when they atart doing so, in the long term, at the expense of their own self-care, that can really be problematic. I mean, in the short term, they put their lives at risk, obviously, for all of us and for all of our safety. And that's the heroic nature of our first responders, and that is even a greater reason why they need to embrace self-care, right? So what do you think might be some of the priorities that you would point first responders to, to develop a better program of self-care and increasing their own resilience; and you know, healing, or at least mitigating the impacts of the exposure to trauma.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yes, thank you. I think that’s a really important question, and we've touched on many of the things that I think would be helpful, and one of them is really having a sense of finding the good in all of what we do. And really being connected to the value of our contribution wherever we work in the workspace. I think oftentimes we can get disconnected from that and disconnected from why we've done what we've done. And so to have some intention about our day, how we're going to be in our day, how we’re going to live in our day, matters, I believe; and then noticing, to listen to our bodies right, as our bodies cues us when we're getting stressed, when we're triggered, and to pay attention to that and to be able to respond to that in a way that can nourish us, that we might move forward. I also think it's really important to cultivate empathy. So empathy first for ourselves, because if our empathy tank is empty, there's no way we can be empathetic to others, and we listen differently when we are feeling resourced within our empathy. We respond differently. We're able to manage our stresses differently if our empathy tank is fuller. So I think really getting some training about how to do that, how to really build up our empathy tank, and to be able to offer empathy to others is a profound way to help us to navigate some of the stresses that we go through. And I mentioned gratitude already, and then somatic awareness, you know, simple things like, you know, dancing and moving and singing, just to help, help our bio infrastructure, to regulate and to feel some resource. There are those little, simple things that we could do that doesn't take much. It doesn’t take a class. You can do it in your car and do it in the bathroom. You can do it at your desk, and those little, simple things to help us to regulate ourselves. And if everyone could get some, some mindfulness or some meditation training, I think that would be: Wow! That would be really beautiful. Because for me, that is the foundation of all these other things that really, you can really grow with some depth. If you have that layer of foundation, regardless of the work that you do as a chaplain, as a law enforcer, as a police officer, as a judge, doesn't matter. Having some training and awareness and breath work will profoundly help your body, not just physically, your blood pressure, your sense of focus in your mind, but also helps your resilience and how you move forward in the work that you do.
Fleet Maull:
Thank you. We have a colleague, you talked about, you know, movement and singing and so forth. We have a colleague, who is also one of our summit co-hosts, who's a chaplain at the Los Angeles County Jail, both the Men's Central Jail and the Twin Towers, two very, very large jails with a lot of trauma and a lot of suffering. And he'll go spend the whole day there, both teaching classes and meeting with the inmates one on one. And when he comes out, on the way to his car, he has a route that he takes, kind of on a not so crowded street, to the place where he parks. And he just starts belting out some songs right, whether it’s show tunes or whatever. He just does that to shift his energy right, to shift his state. And interestingly, although we can do all kinds of mindful movement, vocalization and these kind of things in a completely secular way. Religious traditions have all been doing that forever. And the things that a lot of people do in various religious traditions of singing together, dancing, swaying, you know, all the contemplative practices, all heal trauma. So it's like human beings have intuitively known for 1000s of years what heals trauma, and of course, now we're validating that scientifically through current neuroscience, right? But it's interesting that it's been part of our many different human traditions all across the globe for a long time, doing the things that we know will heal trauma and help us be more resilient.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, the body, the body has the answer, right? It knows, it is intuitively aware of what is needed to get us on the path of healing. And I'm glad you brought up the movement in terms of the church. Part of the tradition of the black church is our clapping and our singing and for some that was, you know, a problem, but for many folks in the black community without knowing, this was a way to manage our trauma, right? And there's so much of that that we had to deal, in terms of racism and structural racism, all this other kind of stuff. But the black church kind of got that, the clapping of our hands and the movement and the running around the church, and not all black congregations are like that. But I think intuitively, our bodies knew that this was important to help kind of regulate the stress and the trauma that was occurring. So yeah, I appreciate you saying that. And the singing, though, singing is very big in the black church, the choirs and the humming. You know, if you go back into the history of the black life here in America, that the humming was a big part of it, and it was all, we're now knowing, neuroscience is now validating to your point that, wow, this was a really powerful way for the body to regulate.
Fleet Maull:
Absolutely. It reminds me, when I was very involved in hospice work. I had the opportunity to work with an amazing black woman who would have been involved deeply in hospice work, and she had inherited from her mother and her grandmother this kind of practice of humming and and she talked about, we actually made a video, and she talked about how powerful it was and how healing it was that, you know, just doing that humming, and it was just kind of a natural, organic, natural response to what the body needs and what our psyche and emotional part of our body needs to heal.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
And as you said, a lot of the contemplative practices, the humming, the “oms,” it creates the same kind of vibration in the back of the throat as humming does, it kind of regulates our nervous system. It’s really amazing how interconnected we all are, and how interconnected our mind, our body and our spirit is. So it's important for us to not separate them as we’ve so often done. To focus on our spirituality, which is often some of the cases with clergy or with the church or with other faith, that we’re so spiritually minded, that we are disconnected from our body and disconnected from our emotion. So we have to learn how to integrate all those things, to have spiritual fitness.
Fleet Maull:
Dr. Christie, I’d like to take a little different tact now, if you will. So, you know, as a public safety professional, as a black American, I’m sure you’ve had your own very direct experience of what it means to be black in America, and what’s been going on with the reckoning with race we’ve been going through, especially since the tragic police killing of George Floyd, which was eventually adjudicated as a murder, and the many other tragic killings of often unarmed black American citizens, as well as others, of other races. But it’s just the egregious nature of how black Americans seem to have suffered this in ways that are systemic and have a legacy going back to Jim Crow and slavery and so forth. And so, I’m sure you’ve been having your own experience with this, and I’m curious about your thoughts and feelings about that. And I also know you’ve been called to, over the last several years that we’ve been going through this, to begin working with communities and police agencies to try to develop some programs to improve those community relations between the police and the citizens.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Yeah, thank you. I'm really on one hand, celebrating that as a country, we're really taking this seriously at this point, and trying to make sense of it, and trying to create some healing. It's not going to be an easy process, because you don't do something for 400 years and then have it go away in two years. So I'm really valuing the awareness, the conscious awareness, that is unfolded, not that there's a complete, fully conscious awareness, but celebrating that part of it. And so I've had my own share of being black in America, right? All of the common stuff about being pulled over, being followed in the store, I got ID three times in my own house. I had to prove that I lived there in my own house. So those kind of things have to happen. And I'm grateful, because of my background and training, I was triggered, but I was resourced enough to be able to handle that trigger without it turning into something big, and being able to let that go. Regarding what I've been doing, so right after George Floyd occurred, there was lots of churches, particularly white churches, that wanted to make sense of this, wanted to kind of learn and to grow and to move forward and to be a community of one, to be one citizen, opposed to being multiple citizenships. So much of the work that I’ve done was integrated mindfulness and nonviolent communication, really teaching both sides how to listen to each other without seeing or having an enemy image of each other, and how to do that with delicacy and knowing that we're going to stumble and fall. It's not going to be perfect. And so John Kenyon is a fellow that is out of California that I've done some work with, doing across the aisle and bridging the gap, type of work, which is to really listen to even very different political viewpoints. You know, the Democrats versus the Republican and the red versus the blue, and creating the space that you can actually hear each side without wanting to burn the other side and to cultivate that level of listening and empathetic listening and empathetic reflection. And in regards to the police, something similar that we've done working with Tom Bond and some others that create a program to have dialog and de-escalation with the police department. So really teaching skills, non-violent communication skills to law enforcement officers, so you're able to talk it through, and you're able to to look beyond the behavior and the action and the words or the tone of someone you're talking to, and to begin to ask, become curious about what the needs might be for that person, what's important to that person. And it's a way for you to have compliance. It's a way for you to have collaboration. It's a way for you to cultivate mutual respect for each other. So now when community feels respected by the officers, they're more likely to comply, when I don't even like that word necessarily, but they're more likely to collaborate. So you can move forward, so everyone can be safe, the officer can be safe, the community can be safe. And what needs to get done, done, opposed to what happens often now is that we get triggered. We go to our reflex, which is, you know, often violence, either in our language or violence with our weapons. So those are some of the work that we've been trying to do, to get out to law enforcement, to do this kind of work. And this training is not a one, it's not a one day, two hour training, because we don't feel those are very helpful. You know, it feels good that you've gone through training, but you can't train your behavior. You can't rethink what you've been thinking for years after going to a one day training. I mean, we wouldn't go to a surgeon that showed a certificate that he went to a one day training, just you know, to operate. “Yeah, I went to a one day sermon. Let me cut out your heart.” That wouldn't happen. And so it's the same the work that we do is stressed over a longer period of time, because we really want to give folks the space to integrate this into their lives, into their work, and to come back and tell us where it's working, where it's not working, so we can can help make this a transformative experience and not just a one and done type of deal.
Fleet Maull:
It's really important work that you're doing. I completely agree with you around the need for ongoing training and what it really takes for us to develop, embrace and learn and really make use of new skills. And one of the really, the good news is that really a lot of the skills and practices that our presenters are going to be talking about at this summit, you know, mindfulness skills, mindfulness-based emotional intelligence skills, you have a mindfulness-based approach to non-violent communication, all the self regulation skills, the breath work and so forth, that all of these tools that help us deepen our own well being and resilience and help us self regulate, so even on the job, we can work and respond to crises but not do so much internal damage to ourselves. So all these skills that are good for us also translate into helping us communicate better with each other. So there's that win-win there. That all the work that first responders can do to become healthier and more resilient themselves will also help them communicate with others in more skillful ways that are going to lead to better results. So it's really a sweet spot and a win-win here, by focusing on on all this kind of training we can do in wellness and resilience and self-regulation and self-care.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
And it's not just about the work. It's not just about what you do as law enforcement engaging police, but we all have families, right? And so this kind of training affects how you talk to your children, how you relate to your kids. I mean, and we know for law enforcement, it's a horrible problem in terms of divorce and family issues, and struggles with the relationship with children, because of the work, the nature of the work. And so, so you get some tools to be able to do that. So say, you’re not a statistic, you know, and and also to apply this in amongst your colleagues, on the force or in the department that you're working with, that you have the tools to be able to be heard by others, and to hear others you know, in a way that you cultivate a win-win so you can move forward and not create kind of the conflict and tensions that often happens in workplaces in law enforcement.
Fleet Maull:
Absolutely, those are both really important points, because, you know, first responder culture, public safety culture, are known for being kind of negative, and that's, you know, it's just a human condition when you have a lot of people who are very stressed out working in a high stress profession, are not using good self regulation skills: they're going to create conflict with each other. That just a given, right? So there's all that, and that creates more stress. So it's kind of a vicious cycle, right? But as you said, the same self-care skills can help us communicate better and shift the nature of the culture so it becomes a healthier place to work and a more enjoyable place to work and so forth. And also we hear again and again from the first responders going to our Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Resiliency training programs that the same skills they're using to take care of themselves are really shifting their relationship with their spouses, with their children, and getting dramatically different results in terms of their family life. And as you said, there are really high risks around that. Because, you know, when we work in a high stress profession with a lot of trauma exposure, we bring that home, and then you get a lot of problems at home, right? So now the win-wins here, just so you know, again, the basic work that we can all do to become more resilient then kind of ripples out to impact every dimension of our life in such good ways. Yeah, so, you know, we're about at the end of our time here, Dr Christie, I think the last question. So this is day four of the summit. We're focused on “Spiritual Fitness and Resilience.” Day six of the summit, the theme is titled, “Leading Healthy Change in Public Safety.” So what might you say, if you had the opportunity to get up and speak to a conference, you know, in a hotel conference room or something full of public safety leaders, what might be some of the key things you'd say? What would be your message that you would invite public safety leaders to focus on in order to shift our first responder and public safety cultures in a healthier direction?
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
I would definitely invite leaders to be more trauma-informed, that your institution has to be more trauma-informed; for your staff, for your leadership, and to have the resources close by to deal with that trauma, to know that it's inherent in the job, and so to have the tools to help with that. So having, what I'm calling, you know, meditation room, or relaxing room, or some space where, where your staff is feeling overwhelmed for whatever reasons, triggered because of something, even at home, that there's a space they can go and just WOOSA, you know, listen to some soft music, watch nature and just to again, affect their bio infrastructure and deregulate themselves and their nervous system. I think that would be a profound shift. I think developing the culture that makes it safe for staff to ask for help. I see right now, a lot of staff won't ask for help, because if they have PTSD, if they having some other issue, they’re nervous that if they’re going to talk about that, it's going to affect their promotion, they're going to maybe even be demoted or maybe even lose their jobs. So they don't, so they hold on to it. They're having problems at home, they don't speak to anyone. And so to create a space where folks feel safe, that they can really talk this, since it’s the nature of the work that we're doing. To put in some mindfulness and resilience training, into the academy, into the work that you do, not a one time thing, but on the regular, at least training trainers, so that their resource can be there in the department to help support the staff, I think is, is profound. To do the work, like advanced communication skills that we're talking about, advanced, you know, dialog and de escalation skills with non-violent communication, or any other kind of tools to really resource officers, to be able to talk in a way that they're more empathetic to themselves and empathetic to others. And empathy is not about agreeing with someone that has done wrong. It's really, for me, it's trying to get to a win-win solution, but doing it without having judgment and without having an enemy image of the other person. And then the space to process. So much, so much of law enforcement is riddled with PTSD and trauma and all this depression and anxiety that we have to do a better job of recognizing that that is a part of our institution, and put in place the resources for those things to be dealt with. And if I had one final thing to say, Dr. Richard Shwartz, who is the founder and the developer of IFS, Internal Family Systems, has 9 Cs in terms of, I think it's 8 actually, that I think helps with resilience and it's: Cultivating Calm, Curiosity, Compassion, Courage, Clarity, Confidence, Connection, and I added two more that is Centeredness, Confession, or rather Communication and Community. And any one of those aspects or cultivating those aspects throughout the course of their tenure, will certainly create some pretty resilient human beings and officers and citizens, and will make the place and our working space a better place to be.
Fleet Maull:
Thank you very much. Dr. Christie, and that is a fabulous list of principles and values and qualities all beginning with C. That's a very, very helpful list. And just thank you so much. It's been incredibly valuable, and really appreciate the work that you do and your contribution to this summit. So thank you so much.
Reverend Dr. Michael Christie:
Honored to be here. Thank you for having me.
Comments