Mad Rad Crisis Intervention Team Training: psych survivors train sheriff deputies – Faith Rhyne
Click on the title to go to the post on Beyond Meds.
Thank you, Monica Cassani, for this powerful piece from Faith Rhyne.
This is the kind of initiative that gets me excited and hopeful.
It aligns with the work we are seeking to do through our person-centred counselling service. It aligns with how we see the human condition, and (in the widest sense) therapeutic growth.
The whole piece is riveting, but these lines especially stay with me:-
‘Sometimes I have to remind myself that several years ago, I was being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, sitting silently in the back seat, trying to curl into myself as I watched the trees and houses of my neighborhood slide by from a different perspective, a different size window, a different sort of car, with men in the front who had locked me into the back.
I understood what was happening and I understood that it was an insult and an injustice.
I also understood that the officers were just doing their job. I thought that, for a moment, standing in my kitchen and listening to me explain calmly and clearly why I was being sent to the hospital, one of the officers looked a little like he did not like his job on that particular night. He looked sincerely sorry for being in my home.
For some reason, that was a comfort.’
Yes, I get that.
And our task as individuals and as cultures is to move beyond this broken model; to learn to relate to each other through the core conditions – with congruence, empathy, love – resonance with self and other in our full person-hood, as ‘Beloved’, not as ‘object’.
I support whatever supports us in these personal and societal journeys. I make a personal commitment to serve this purpose, in small ways and bigger ways, with all that I am, and however I can.
Thank you to Monica, Faith, the officers/others at this meeting, to those who volunteer their experience, skill, energies and time to work with us and with clients in our own service – indeed to everyone making their own version of this same commitment, in Exeter, Buncombe County and worldwide. There are a lot of us. I have a powerful sense this morning of the power in our shared humanity. We are all in this together. At a grass roots level, we can create the profound change we so desperately need – beginning with each one of us as an individual, and emanating outwards in a gentle, perpetual, irresistable, transformative wave. Now is the time for that.
Which leads me back to Paul Hawken (as this road tends to):-
Lindsey Talbott, Therapist
Palace Gate Counselling Service
Palace Gate Counselling Service Blog 
thank you Lindsey for all your support…this was a very encouraging meeting, indeed.
Yes, it sounds it. I have a sense of a lot that is helpful unfolding – along with a lot of embedded fear/resistance. And I guess those things characterize change, be it on an individual or cultural or planetary scale. I find what you offer extremely helpful, and part of the purpose of this blog is to make connections (so I like that we are in each other’s backgrounds).