Strength in Crisis: Navigating Trauma with Motivational Interviewing

About this Episode

Welcome to today’s episode of The Communication Solution podcast with Casey Jackson, John Gilbert and Danielle Cantin. We love talking about Motivational Interviewing, and about improving outcomes for individuals, organizations, and the communities that they serve. In this episode, we discuss the critical role of communication in handling traumatic situations, especially in the school system amidst threats and violence. The episode delves into how motivational interviewing can offer guidance and support during crises, focusing on Casey’s personal experience with his children in a school lockdown. It emphasizes the importance of managing reactions, choosing between fear and rational thinking, and the impact of these choices on others, particularly children.

In this podcast, we discuss:

• Casey’s Personal Experience: A recounting of a school lockdown involving Casey’s children, offering a real-world context for the discussion.
• Managing Parental Fear: Insights into how parents can handle their trauma responses while supporting their children during crises.
• The Duality of Reaction: Exploring the struggle between emotional reactions and the need for rational action in emergencies.
• Applying MI in Trauma: Discussing how motivational interviewing principles can be adapted in traumatic situations, particularly in school environments.
• Advocacy vs. Change: Balancing the desire to advocate for change with the need to create constructive outcomes.
• Empathy and Understanding: The importance of entering others’ worlds empathetically, even in traumatic contexts.
• Consequences and Compliance: How motivational interviewing can help in framing consequences and compliance in a more constructive manner.
• Feeding Fear or Faith: The concept of choosing which emotions to feed during a crisis – fear or faith.
• Role of Educators and Staff: Guidance for teachers and school staff in stabilizing situations and providing support to students.
• Empowering Through Communication: Strategies for empowering individuals and communities to deal effectively with trauma through effective communication.

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Thank you for listening to the communication solution. This podcast is all about you. If you have questions, thoughts, topic suggestions, or ideas, please send them our way at casey@ifioc.com. For more resources, feel free to check out ifioc.com. 

Transcribe

 Hello and welcome to the communication solution podcast with Casey Jackson and John Gilbert. I’m your host, Danielle Cantin. Here at the Institute for Individual and Organizational Change, otherwise known as IFIOC, we love to talk about communication, we love to talk about solutions, and we love to talk about providing measurable results for individuals, organizations, and the communities they serve.

Welcome. To the communication solution that will change your world. Hi everyone. I’m Danielle Cantin. I’m here on the Communication Solution podcast, and I am joined by Casey Jackson, your host and expert in motivational interviewing. How are you, Casey? I’m doing pretty well. Awesome. Well, I’m excited about this episode.

We’re looking at,  Basically, what’s happening in school systems. I had a question for you around motivational interviewing and the communication solution when, you know, in the news, you hear about all of the challenges in school systems,  and how they’re trying to keep kids safe and how they’re exposed to obviously guns and violence and threats.

And what I really enjoy,  about the way that you train and the way your brain works is that, you know, how to take an idea from kind of the ivory tower discussions and make it very tangible and real. And I don’t know if that’s the visual part of myself that you just tell stories in a way that I get.

And then I also. Retain and it helps me relate to things. So I was hoping we could dive into an experience that I know you just went through recently with your kids in the school system as it relates to how motivational interviewing might be able to help be a guide in situations where. Kids are,  in school systems and parents, everybody’s affected by the potential threat and the actual threats that are happening in the school system.

Yeah, it’s, I mean, at least I’ve had a day to process it now.  Yeah. So, so what had happened was yesterday morning, you know, I get,  first I get the texts from my daughters that they’re, they’re in lockdown and freaking out.  They were separated, they’re twins and they were separated.  So one is with her boyfriend and they’re in one room.

And then my, the other daughter is with two of her friends and they’re both texting me scared because they’re in lockdown and they know that there’s a potential,  threat. Either in the building or outside of the building, you know, and then, then I get the emergency alert on my phone,  from the school district saying that they’re in lockdown, you know, and then about, I’m just so blessed that I have friends that work in that school.

So I immediately text them,  and. Hoping that they’ll respond in the middle of the crisis. And they did. I mean, immediately, which is amazing that, you know, and gave me kind of the scenario. And then some other teachers had texted separately and let us know what was going on that we knew. And, and

it’s hard because when the. The girls are freaking out as would make sense.  And trying to stay calm and, you know, I’m just so in dad brain in that moment,  it is hard to, to, you know, what’s the right thing to do? You know, how can I be supportive? And, you know, they, they say, you know, parents don’t come to the school.

You know, law enforcement’s involved, stay, please stay away from the area. And, and then it’s just the, as I get more information from people who know what’s going on,  there was,   a man with a rifle outside of their school,  and it just caused all sorts of reactions in me and. You know, just anger and frustration and, you know, that gets into politics and all these other things that, that,  that my brain just wants to go to just, you know, angry and emotional.

And, and then I think about some of the things that I literally, I mean, because I, I talk about this stuff every single day, I get to train every day and then my brain goes through kind of the, the practical side of how I look at motivational interviewing, which is, you know, there’s nothing wrong with being angry and advocating.

Doesn’t necessarily change behavior, not that advocacy doesn’t change behavior, but in most situations we look at when we go into a hard advocacy position, you tend to generate hard opposition pretty quickly. And that’s where my brain just continues to go through, you know, where’s the source of discord?

Where’s the source of writing reflex? Then there’s the dad part of me. It’s like, I don’t care. I don’t give a f k. I don’t care.  You know, these are my babies and, and this is insanity. And when is the insanity going to stop? Like, I can’t handle this anymore. Like this is just, you know, and, and knowing just kind of where people’s brains are at in the communities that I live in, that it just triggered a whole lot of things for me.

 And I remember, you know, when I was kind of driving towards the school and, and kind of in that hovering moment of, you know, staying back. But if I need to go there and pick up a girl, so I’m going to be right there to get them, the thing that went through my brain is, do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?

 And, and if I want to be happy, that means I need to create change in a way that’s productive and not react from my emotions, which is really hard not to do when you’re, you know, every parenting instinct gets triggered and, you know, you’re ready to fly over there and, and. Take that gunman out yourself.

Like, it’s just like, I can’t, you know, you’re not going to hurt my kids. You’re not going to hurt these kids. So it’s just fascinating that my brain that’s in this reactive mode and emotional mode and, and its own trauma response in the moment has this whole other lecturer part in my brain just going, okay, now let’s deconstruct this as I’m sitting in the car next to the sidewalk, just going, okay, you know, it’s wild.

So that was, that was, you know, part of the experience from yesterday. That’s a really good point.  That you mentioned about advocacy. Casey is,  advocacy is great. And the truth of it is, is that it can create opposition. And so you went directly to,  what is that behavior? What, what is, what’s the end result you want to achieve?

Is it be happy or be right? And you had to make a decision. And then from there, you could align your behavior. To, okay, what can I do to achieve that end? Is that an accurate,  assessment? Yeah, and it’s the things that I think of where I want to react or, you know, maybe from an outside perspective, overreact.

And even when I was thinking about just. How angry I was and how emotional I was, I know what happens when you take that to a school board meeting or, you know, you get people whipped up in a frenzy and there’ll be on your side and just, and then you see the counterbalance to the opposite side of that, that whips up in a frenzy.

And it just, it comes again, you know, I love what Miller talks about with the writing reflex. It comes from a heart of wanting to help, but when you have those writing reflexes. It’s nea