Key Takeaways: Megan and Karen introduce the returning Crisis Groups, run by Karen again this year! Karen describes the impact that running Crisis Groups has had on previous clients. Megan explains how Crisis Groups work as well as telling of the respectful and warm environment the Groups provide. Notable Quotes: "If we don't expand and invite other people into our healing, our healing is kind of like one-dimensional, and by having a crisis group...it's a way to engage, and there's something powerful in saying something out loud in a safe place that is so healing." — Karen DeArmond Gardner "It's true that there are so many perspectives that we all offer. So, if you kind of think about God being in each one of us, right, and we all have sort of a different flavor of that relationship, when we come together, like you and these three women, so all four of you, you're bringing in sort of a different aspect of God working in you." — Megan Owen "...when we step into healing, we are stepping out of our time and we're stepping into God's time, which means there's no time that a day is a thousand years and thousand years is a day." — Karen DeArmond Gardner "I will go to my grave...saying that people are uncomfortable with their own emotions and so they will be uncomfortable with your emotions. And so, when people are trying to shut you down or tell you you're wrong for feeling a certain way, it's because they don't even know how to be with their own emotions." — Megan Owen Resources: Mountain City Christian Counseling: mountaincitychristiancounseling.com Crisis Groups: Services (0:00) MEGAN: This is Pretty Psych, the podcast where we discuss and deconstruct the impact of evangelical Christianity and cultural phenomena on the psyche, the deep and sometimes uncharted territory of the mind. We venture into raw, rough, and sometimes triggering moments, but we know that through this what we will find will be pretty fascinating, amazing, and pretty intelligent. My name is Megan Owen. I'm a pastoral trauma counselor, and I have spent decades studying the science of human behavior. I draw parallels between therapy and connection to God, self, and others. I love what I do, and I will walk hand in hand with you through the fire to help you find healing and rest. Most importantly, I want to bring you home to yourself. (1:12) MEGAN: Hi, Karen, and everybody, welcome to Pretty Psych. (1:17) KAREN: Hey, welcome, Megan. (1:20) MEGAN: Karen was just telling me why she's so excited about this podcast on groups. Take it away, Karen. (1:27) KAREN: You can read about it. We can tell you about it, but to actually talk about how the engagement in a crisis groups, and crisis sounds like bad, that everything's always hard, but it's a way, a place, a safe place to verbalize what you're going through and then have other people in the group reflect back to you, and each one will see something or hear something that the other didn't. Yes, perspectives. Yes, different perspectives, and when we're traumatized, when we're harmed, it happens in relationship. It's from other people. It's not something we do to ourselves normally, so healing also comes in relationship, and so we need more than it's just being God or me and Jesus. If we don't expand and invite other people into our healing, our healing is kind of like one-dimensional, and by having a crisis group, which we usually have three participants and one facilitator, and it's a way to engage, and to sometimes there's something powerful in saying something out loud in a safe place that is so healing. (3:00) MEGAN: Yes, yes, so Karen loves groups, and we are getting ready to open up our crisis groups in the fall, and the reason crisis groups came into existence, I'm not sure, Karen, if you know this, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but Heather Elizabeth of Held and Healed, the nonprofit that helps women coming out of abuse, we were trying to think of a way to provide emotional first aid to women in crisis who could not afford therapy, and so what I ended up doing was I created a set of 12 videos, and Karen loves those videos too, and they each cover a topic, but they're only, I don't know, they're from 7 to 11 minutes long, something like that, because we, Karen and I understand, because we've been there, so when you work with us, you're not working with counselors and coaches who haven't been there. We know what this is like. We know what it's like to be in crisis and not have the bandwidth to watch an hour-long video or read a whole book to help you. This is first aid, and so we've created these short videos, and then like Karen said, in comes three women who are in crisis, and then Karen moderates, and we have this very specific format that we use, but everyone is able to reflect, so people are not just receiving guidance, counsel, and reflection. They're also receiving compassion and empathy, which as you just said, is healing, right? (4:47) KAREN: Yes, absolutely, and that, there's so much power in it. We keep the, with three people, we keep it to an hour, and because there's a time limit, you have 10 minutes to talk and share and uninterrupted, and that, what it allows for is the talkers, and being a fellow talker, it keeps you on track, and because when your 10 minutes is up, it's up, and if you're not a talker, if you struggle to share, it allows, it kind of creates a safe place to be able to share, and I don't want to use the word force, because that's really not the right word, but it stretches your capacity to talk when maybe you would like, that you would prefer not to, you would like, you would rather sit in the background, and it gives you that safe place to be able to share, and then we have one minute of pause, where we're just praying into it, the other ones that are just listening, and then we have, each one can reflect, we try to keep it to two to three minutes, sometimes it's really short, sometimes it can get a little long, so we have to be careful of that time, because we are on time limit, this is a 60 minute session, and we want to make sure everybody has time to share. (6:24) MEGAN: Yes. (6:25) KAREN: And we will help you in that first session on learning how to reflect back, I will start that process, so that you kind of understand what we're doing, if you've never been in a crisis group. (6:38) MEGAN: Well, what I love that you've said twice now is safe space, and that's what we need, and what do we mean by that, what we mean is that we will never judge you, right, nobody will judge you, nobody has really come in and started judging somebody else in one of these groups, but if they did, there's no doubt in my mind that Karen and I would say, okay, we're going to stop right there, we also, we may give us advice as moderators, you and I might, but we don't have everybody just giving advice. (7:14) KAREN: No. (7:15) MEGAN: And that's what we mean by safe, right? (7:18) KAREN: Yeah, yeah, we don't want to give advice, now there are times last fall where someone wanted advice, they needed like a specific, maybe it was related to a court date that was coming up, and they needed advice, and so that's okay, that's when someone, if they have a similar experience, can speak into that, but we don't, and we also don't want to over spiritualize, or throw out scriptures, we want to be very careful with that, it's not that it's wrong, but sometimes we can throw out band-aids, (8:02) MEGAN: Yeah, yeah. (8:03) KAREN: And that don't really help at that moment, and so we do want to be careful of that, so being a word girl, it occurred to me that we talk about crisis, and of course, then I thought, maybe I should just look this word up, and see what it says, so what do we mean by crisis, and it says it's a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, for better or worse, are determined, that it's a turning point, so crisis is a turning point, whoa, I didn't think of that, we think that that's where we just sometimes live, it's a condition of instability, or there's danger, but it's leading to a decisive change. (8:57) MEGAN: I love that, I kind of thought of like a hinge, or a threshold, when you said that, like it's not necessarily, oh, this is horrible, everything's going to be bad, even though it may feel that way in the moment, right? (9:11) KAREN: Yes, we're leading towards a turning point, a decisive change, and even though it causes upheaval, sometimes there needs to be an upheaval, like Jesus turning over the tables, there needs to be a table that in our life that may need to be overturned, because we may be believing something that isn't true about ourselves, because it's really not our voice, it's a critical voice, that's usually tied to people who have said things about us, and to us, that we have taken on, and we really believe it's us, and so what if it's not you, what if it's another voice? (9:54) MEGAN: Yeah, I really like this, because it ties into something I talk about often, which is cruciformity, that cruciform way of life, which is our lot, you know, when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just showing us his love, this is his love for us, right, but he's also showing us our path, and he talks about that when he talks about the seed going into the ground and breaking open, he's talking about the bread being broken, and the cycle of that cruciform cycle is that we're crucified, died, buried, and then we rise again, and we have all these cycles of that throughout our whole lives, right, so what you and I are doing, and what you're doing specifically with the crisis groups, is we're going to get into that dark place with you before you get to rise again, so that's the piece of the cycle where we will enter in with you, which is just like what Jesus did, right, he entered into the tomb of where Lazarus was, he went to the place where the man was cutting himself, to th
