11-02-1021 – Joy interviews Irene Morgan, Founder of the Restorative CommUnity Coalition, and Ava Sakowski, a civicly involved businesswoman about the pressures people are feeling in the context of the 2020 Presidential elections, and the extreme social, economic, human displacement, grief and emotional upheaval felt as they are dealing with the covid crisis, impeachment, extreme political trauma and the impacts on family, friends and careers.
Mastering the art of intentional change leadership means first learning about nature and its natural change processes. Then learning about yourself as a living system, and how you are part of nature. This means you are intricately, intimately, and inevitably a part of the spiralic systems and cycles of life. Everything works in growth and decaying patterns.
The way of the new leader requires the rapid ability to adapt to change, under pressure, with increasingly compound emotional compression as our world changes. We are experiencing rapid shifts in our awareness, even as intense technology is speeding up our internal processing unit – our brain and its connection to our heart. Our nervous system can overload as we have to integrate more and more information. And we experience what I call “brownouts” as we cannot always keep us…and seek to slow down.
Joy has developed a proprietary self-leadership model that is based on Joy’s proprietary achievement science called Intentional BioEnergetics (IBE) (or harnessing the power of your life force energy and passion to change course, to achieve productive results faster).
This model is a living systems model of understanding the ebbs and flows of natural life (and of achievement) as things develop from an idea to a concept, to a product, to the disintegration, expansion, or revolution of the product to the next level. It is a kind of birth, growth, death, and rebirth process.
This natural systems understanding integrates with the human need to grow, achieve, and become fulfilled in our lives. The concepts of intentional visionary action with the mechanics of understanding how the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of life allow us to see that we all are inevitably expanding and contracting as we all move through time and space. Joy’s 9-step model shows how natural change is inevitable, and then how this relates to our personal lives, to our professional and even our non-physical world where we can only talk about the body/mind/spirit worlds. Joy’s concepts are fresh, new, and are all about tapping into personal passion, living systems, and achievement. Her talks apply to self-awareness type audiences and especially to free enterprise-focused or activist groups.
This chart is about the economic physics of reversing mass incarceration. It acknowledges that our community is operating with a depreciating economic model driven by jailing, and traumatizing people on the left column. On the right column it show how we can reverse the costs and outcomes to the taxpayers if we change what we do in our community at the point of an arrest. When we do an interception, we can completely change outcomes for many people, and build an “APPRECIATING” society business model for the community. This Appreciating Society Chart was produced by Joy Gilfilen after listening to over 24 speakers and 84 people discuss the problems we had in our County – people who attended the Community Visionaries Opportunities Conference in Bellingham, WA in 2010.
Joy Riders is the theme song that inspires people to team up with Joy to bring conscious change, civic leadership and personal activism together. Joy originally wrote it, then Shawn Gallaway and Joy collaborated on it to this version. It was used to inspire some of the thinking to create first the Joy Talks Radio interviews, and now to inspire the Cosmic Cowgirl and the Joy Riders to speak out about troubleshooting civic problems so we can turn them into opportunities to transform our future!
Joy recognizes that fueling energetic feelings is part of the process of manifesting change in our world – so she built a song that would inspire others to team up all around the world with joyful gusto, passion to put love in motion! So here it is! Enjoy it! Shawn is an internally recognized singer-songwriter who has written and performed many theme songs for others. Joy and Shawn teamed up to produce the film ChoicePoint – Uniting Creatives with Love and Vitality; to produce Shawn’s album Livin’ Love, and to produce the concert called Conscious Music, Conscious Nashville in 2011!
Since that time, Shawn has received two international peace song awards!
JoyTalk #2 BLINDSPOTS – PreConceptions Revealed by the Jail Trauma Study
Talking about a key unexpected finding – that people sustain extreme shock and trauma in the first 24-72 hours after an incident happens that leads to an arrest and jailing. This is way before they get a defense attorney. This is the key to reducing harm caused after a 911 call leads to an arrest. Why? People reported similar extreme symptoms that are listed in a Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder definition. And most did not have these kinds of extreme conditions prior to the arrest and jailing.
Announcing the release of Cracking the Rich Code – a new book co-authored by Jim Britt, Kevin Harrington that includes a chapter by Joy Gilfilen, “Quantum Leadership using the Natural Change Model”! I am honored to be included as one of the co-authors!
My article in this book is all about understanding how to see the world in different layers, and how to see it in motion over time as we relate to it. I have used my life well – learning how to understand the multi-facetted layers of personal, social, civic and global impacts. Today it is time to help our many different niche markets understand that we are all still just humans, part of the natural cycles of life and learning to work together in a fast moving economy when society is under stress is a big deal.
My goal in being part of this book is to enroll the entrepreneurial industry in the process of civic change and evolutionary thinking. It is time to take back our economy from the domination of multi-national corporations who are undermining the integrity of free enterprise in America.
People talk like all business is the same – and it is not. There are huge difference between those of us who are solo-entrepreneurs, those who are small business networkers, or artisans and consultants, and those who are considered “small business owners” and “local community retailers” in a community. And then there is this gigantic leap to those who are government corporations, non-profit corporations, commercial corporations and then all the way up to huge institutional corporations and quasi-government corporations!
Watch for news about how to order the book online! Hurray, it is almost here – due out in April!
2020 – Invest in People 1st – this is the way we can do Social Change. Developing a restorative economics model for community business investment is a way to intercept and turn around the mass incarceration industry’s traumatizing and and tax addictive spiral of accelerating loss. The United States leads the world in incarceration. We are arresting and jailing over 12 million people annually. By comparison, only 630,000 people annually are entering prisons. That means that most people arrested are non-violent according to statistics compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice and validated by other studies.
Whether or not these people are guilty, they are treated like criminals at the point of an arrest. This causes a split brain kind of experience by the total disassociation from freedom and everything people believe about being safe and “innocence until proven guilty” in the US. This is so terrifying, disorienting and traumatizing it creates deep distress, and sparks mental illness symptoms in people.
It has become routine to arrest people from 911 calls, rather than striving to divert people to mental health facilities, housing alternatives, recovery and rehabilitation programs. When we stop the automotic arrest cycles and build the intervention systems, we can start investing in emotional trauma recovery at the point of 1st contact. We can stop the millions of people who end up homeless, in poverty, in mental health situations. Yes. With civic leadership and commitment, we can reverse the trends, and transform the results.
After doing deep research into the issue, I have found that “an arrest creates a traumatic experience for people – and it is traumatic enough to cause mental illness symptoms – even if people do walk away and say, “I’m o.k.” Most people do that because it is so shocking to realize what happens inside the arrest and jail process that people can’t even talk about it. It is like they have a split reality experience, and they cannot comprehend what just happened. So they avoid talking about it. It is like a psychic shock that is so mind-bending that people want to pretend it didn’t happen. But they can’t.”
I did 79 in-depth interviews with 79 people who have been impacted by an arrest in Whatcom County. Of the 79, fifty-three (53) were arrested and went through the jail, court and justice system process directly. Twenty-six (26) were family, friends or colleagues who were trying to help them through the situation. After listening to all their stories, and mapping them out, looking for common denominators, tracking the biggest issues…here is my summation. I did two different charts each showing different impacts, and each showing how the other side is impacted.
I talked with the person who got arrested and went through the jailing and justice system and all they way through arrest and the aftershocks on them and their families. I tracked it out and then diagrammed it into this early process, for it is here where I found the most shocking and hidden impacts – that are not typically talked about in the discussion about jail or justice system reform. It is at the beginning of a 911 call, through the incident, the arresting, the booking, then the jailing prior to 1st Appearance in Court where the shock causes seismic damage to the body, the mind, and the spirit of the person – from constant trauma. I have graphed it out in two phases to show the emotional impacts and symptoms that people experience.
As these intense interviews started building up, I started interviewing the family, friends, employers, police, emergency responders – even hospital staff and public defenders and justice system employees about what they observed, experienced and felt from helping the persons, or their families deal with the aftershocks. The interviews yielded a whole other level of awareness and insights that typically have not been talked about in most writings about reform. And the pre-assumption by those people who work in the system in court, in the administration, or in behavioral health or recovery is that they just assume that everyone who gets arrested is already emotionally messed up, mentally ill, or addicted – or “must have done something wrong, or you wouldn’t have been arrested in the first place.”
There is a automatic presumption of guilt and fault by the system against the person arrested that leaves no room for the possibility that the person is innocent, that the person may not have been mentally ill in the first place.
It was unexpected to realize that no-one, including me, the researcher that the stress of the arrest distresses the mental health and stability of everyone who goes through the system…and it was likely that the impacts of the loss of freedom, the acute shock of being arrested, were the cause of the mental distress symptoms seen in people even at 1st arraignment and certainly post court. Our rise in mental illness issues can most likely be traced back to a traumatizing situation that happened with a crisis, an arrest and the impacts on the psyche.
I was taken aback to truly realize that most people arrested had no criminal intent that sparked the arrest. It was the circumstances areound a crisis that led to an incident, that sparked an arrest and accusation that the person broke a law, and that starts the sequence of distress that compounds. Many of those arrested did not seem to have had mental illness symptoms pre-incident. This was shocking and it led me to do another level of questioning for both those arrested and for all their support team members. Here is another chart summarizing what I found.
After doing all this research and comparing information gleaned, I went online to find out if there were any diagnoses of mental health symptoms that matched my findings. I found the Complex Post Traumatic Distress symptoms listed in the World Health Organizations list the most comparable. I found symptoms from severe head trauma caused by split brians or broken brains to be similar as well. Nothing else fit the broad range of symptoms described and the depth of impact. The only ones that seemed to fit the plethora of symptoms were those that were exhibited by people who had experienced deep and sudden shock and betrayal by a protector or who been held hostage or captive by a “friendly”. People who were taken prisoner in a friendly land, or were held hostage by a cult, or a person taken captive and held as prey to their protector.
My bottomline conclusion: Just a call to 911 can trigger an arrest and jailing because of the way that the system of technology, protectionism and fear of liability works today. The presumption of innocence is lost and superceded by the likelihood that a law was broken, and inevitably this leads to an arrest – whether or not anyone intended to commit any crime of violate any law. The pre-assumption of guilt is made at the 911 call – and once that call is made, it triggers the system to step in and protect the government and all the people who run the legal system.
What is not shown on this chart, is the high costs that any family incurs from the point of the arrest ($10,000 to $30,000 is fairly standard) or it can escalate rapidly, throwing the family into immediate poverty as well as into RADD-RAT escalating conditions.
This podcast is the 1st in a series about what really happens to people who get arrested. I did the research as President of the Restorative Community Coalition. I had been striving to figure out why the top three law enforcement officials in our County kept pushing the taxpayers to pass a massive tax to build an even more massive jail when crime rates had been dropping dramatically. It made no logical sense. More on this in another post.
Regarding the ethnographic research study: I decided to interview people (53) who who had been arrested and went through the Whatcom County Jail and Justice System from beginning to end. Some were still dealing with it. These were people I had helped through court navigation, or had worked with in our educational sessions, or had coached about their situation. I wanted to know in deeper depth what really happened to them from the beginning to the end – so that we could learn what was the matter with the system from the bottoms up.
Everybody else was seeing “system reform” from the top down – and it wasn’t working. How does it look from the bottom of the barrel?
So this podcast talks about the people I interviewed and how I did the study. These first interviews gave me pause, and caused me to interview another 26 who were friends, family, employers, criminal defense attorneys. There were employees of the system – police, defenders, prosecutors, clerks and other staff, jailers, emergency responders, hospital and mental health providers, and investigative writers. There were people of diverse demographics, education and financial class.
Of the 79 people, all were deeply concerned about the system. Nobody really wanted to go into the emotional heavy lifting – but each was willing to do it for the purpose of hoping they could help fix it. These were not easy conversations – for the subject is emotionally traumatizing to talk about for all of us.
In future podcasts, I will explain more…
Invited by Joy Gilfilen to share his musical career from start to 2010 – Shawn Gallaway presents an extraordinary and highly personal concert. In it he opens up to the process of becoming a male artisan in a family where business leadership was the expectation! He shares, through both song and story his evolution from a young boy growing up in a family that expected him to excel in sports and business into a man who discovered he was an artist instead. So it is a singing story of his life, as he moved from one transition of life to another as he evolved into a nationally recognized and internationally known troubadour! He is a singer, songwriter and artist who pioneered conscious music, and transformational music helping to bring peace to the world!
Joy Gilfilen as the host and executive producer of this concert invited Shawn to share his process as a leadership artisan growing up, for it is a story of perseverance, manhood, and emotional maturation in a time where many feel that artisans are “less than” – when in fact, artisans are the true emotional leaders of change.
Shawn performs several of the songs he has written and performed for some of the other master teachers of our time. One of his signature songs is I Choose Love – which has earned many awards!
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