Why Don’t People Trust Experts?

Episode 157

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

With all of the global crises that have happened this year, people are stressed and we’re finding ourselves in the middle of a great divide when it comes to our perspectives on many important topics and it’s certainly having an impact on how we’re able to be a voice of influence.

In this episode, Rosanne and I discuss the growing lack of respect and trust for expertise and how you can get people to buy into your ideas in spite of that, the parallels between parenting and getting buy-in on your ideas from those around you, the importance of understanding that some people react based on logic while others react based on emotion, the value of taking actions to calm a situation rather than escalate it and the role self-awareness plays in that process, and more!

 

Transcript

Hey there!  Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  I’m Andrea Wenburg and Rosanne is with me again today.  We’re going to have a good conversation here in just a minute.  And we want to set it up a little bit by explaining, in case you haven’t been around much or if you didn’t realize what we’re really about.  Voice of Influence serves leaders and subject matter experts by helping them navigate personal and interpersonal human dynamics in order to effectively engage others and carry out their strategic mission.

 

So, if you are somebody who are in leadership, you have some expertise, and you really want to get that into the hands of the people that need it, we’re here to help you do that because there’s a lot going on that can get in the way of that happening.  And so, we’re going to talk about that a little bit today.

 

Now, just so you know, if you are interested in growing in your own social emotional intelligence, so that you can handle difficult conversations, feedback conversations, or things that need to happen between two people.  You’re wanting to convince somebody of something or you’re wanting to confront them about something, and you want to do this with more ease.  Well, we have a free mini course for you, and we’re so excited about it, and in under 30 minutes, you’re going to learn how to implement our proprietary model so that your conversations have a deep impact on others.

 

Go to voiceofinfluence.net and hit the podcast tab and there you’ll find more information about our free course the Deep Impact method.

 

 

Andrea:  Rosanne, welcome back to the show.

 

Rosanne Moore:  It’s good to be here.

 

Andrea:  And we’ve kind of been trying to talk through some of the things that we want to talk about today.  So, I’m just going to kind of let you set us up.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Well, we have talked a lot recently about how we see what you’ve referred to as the great divide, this divide in our nation with people. with different worldviews and how in this past year, in 2020, it’s become more problematic with all of the crises that are going on globally and nationally.  People are stressed, they’re tired, and it’s caused an even sharper division in perspective.  So, talk to me about that, Andrea, what do you see happening?

 

Andrea:  Well, I think the thing that kind of most concerns me for our audience in particular, has to do with the growing lack of respect for expertise in general.  And not just a lack of respect, but it’s also just general confusion about where should I get my information?  Who can I trust?  How do I know that I can trust somebody and what they’re telling me?

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  You know, my dad grew up, “You just trust the doctor.”  “The doctor tells you what to do, and you just trust them.”  And now there’s a lot more for good cause and good reason, people are advocating for themselves more in their own healthcare, which is good.  And yet, some of this finding your own voice and advocating for yourself, asking questions has turned into more cynicism and skepticism of what experts really provide.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked about how an expert is someone who really has devoted themselves to a subject so that they learned the nuances of it.  And so assuming that, because you have a piece of information, that’s equal in weight to somebody who’s looked at all of the nuances of something, that can be dangerous.  It’s got to be frustrating for our listeners who are experts in their field when they try to bring something and they’re not heard.

 

Andrea:  Right, right.  So, as a listener, maybe you have experienced this yourself where you have expertise to share but it’s not necessarily being taken with the same level of trust and “Okay, sure, I’ll do what you suggest.”  Or maybe you’ve got a change that needs to be made in your working environment, and you know that this is the right thing to do, you know, that this is the best thing to do, but you’re having a hard time getting people on board with it.  And I think that part of what we’re seeing in 2020 is this general like, confusion about like, “Why should I trust you?”  “Why should I do what you suggest to do?”

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, what should a leader do?  I mean, how do they get buy in on essential change?  That’s something that our organization specializes in.  So, share some of that, Andrea, what has led you in your thinking about this topic?

 

Andrea:  Hmm.  Well, you know, I sort of grew up watching my teachers and there are other students in my classes.  And it was just really observing when people actually understanding the teacher and taking in their information and obeying the rules of the classroom and when where they not and why.  Why was this happening?  I was constantly asking this question that was rolling around in my mind and kind of got to the point where I’d start to predict that when a teacher would say something, I’d be like, “They’re not gonna be able to understand that.”  And then I’d try to think of a new way to explain it to somebody, you know, not because I always knew.

 

I would oftentimes have to ask the questions myself and figure out what they’re trying to say or what they’re trying to accomplish.  And then perhaps every once in a while, you know, be a translator for another student in the class.  I needed a translator sometimes too but the point is that I just sort of have been studying this even as a kid.  And so, you know, I’ve continued to pursue that through my education, in my post secondary education.  And then I became a mom and, Roseanne, when you’re a mom, you have to really negotiate.  You have to be really good at getting people, little people to comply with what you have to say.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right, absolutely into to make sure you’re getting behind their eyes so that you understand where the breakdown is.  So, you’re not trying to fix something that’s not broken and missing what is.

 

Andrea:  Right.  And this story comes to mind about 10 years ago, my daughter, she was about three.  We had continually gotten into this situation where I would tell her to do something or tell her it was time to do something; she would start to be upset about being told what to do.  And then I would get stern like I grew up thinking I should do.  I should be stern and I should take control of the situation, “I’m the mom here.” and give her that mom look, you know.  And that would set her off even more and the situation would just escalate.

 

So, of course, I’m given a child that is not ideal for my way of interacting and moving in the world.  I mean, you know, I had a whole plan for parenting before I started parenting.  Don’t we all before we start?  And I think this is so applicable to all of life.  So, that’s the reason why I’m telling this story.

 

But anyway, so this has been happening quite a bit.  And one night, it was it was about time for bed and I said, “Amelia, why don’t you go brush your teeth?”  And she looked at me and she said, she didn’t want to brush her teeth and I don’t remember exactly how that came out or I had no idea why.  But it just felt like a, “I don’t want to do it because you just told me to do it, so therefore I don’t want to do it.”  And there was this pushback and I thought for a second, I was going to do the mom look and get really stern.  And then I thought about it for a second, I’m like, “There’s something else going on here.”

 

And I had been studying other things.  So, I have a background in psychology and theology and some other things, and I’d been studying this for myself and trying to understand myself and why I was so irritated sometimes.  I would get really angry, irrationally so, and I didn’t always know why.  And then I started to really think about it.  I’m like, “You know what, when I’m really angry…” sort of prickly like a porcupine, feeling attacked or whatever it might be, “I want to just punch people.”  You know, not actually physically but that’s what my presence is.  I want to punch back.

 

But what I realized that I needed was I needed somebody to come calm me down because I didn’t actually want to do that, I actually wanted to cry.  And I didn’t want to admit that I wanted to cry.  But there was something inside of me that was sad and I needed help, like I was reacting in anger.  And that’s a normal thing for people to do to react out of that anger instead of reacting out of sadness.

 

So, when I looked at my daughter and things were going in that direction of escalation, I have one way of thinking about this, she has another.  We’re both feeling disrespected right now.  And I feel like as a parent, I should be able to take control of the situation.  But instead I looked at her and I thought, “What if she is acting like a porcupine, but she really just needs somebody to help her calm down.  Maybe I could be compassionate and help her calm down instead of being angry and forcing her to do what I told her to do and ending up in a big power struggle, and everybody being frustrated.”

 

So, I just looked at my little girl with her fiery eyes and I knelt down on the floor, and I reached out my hands and I just kind of opened up my arms.  I had no idea what would happen.  And as soon as she saw me do that, she came in and kind of fell into my arms and started to cry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Ohh!

 

Andrea:  Why, because I asked her to brush her teeth?  No.  You know, like there was so much more going on in that moment underneath the surface.  And so, of course, I sort of teared up too, and I’m kind of tearing up right now thinking about it again.

 

Rosanne Moore:  I am too just listening.

 

Andrea:  Because this has played out many, many times since then in our relationship.  And I’ve realized that there’s something else going on inside of my daughter that is causing her to react with that kind of prickliness.  And the same thing happens with me.  She starts to be disrespectful of me, so then I feel disrespected and then I get prickly and only it furthers the process.  It only further escalates the whole thing.  So, I think that moment taught me something so huge, because after I gave her that hug and I just held her for a little bit, it was not hard to have her go brush her teeth.

 

That was not the issue.  It was just the simple like, maybe it was me asking her to change course in the middle of, you know, her playing and she didn’t want to stop.  It could have been that she felt like I didn’t care what she thought and I was already starting to look at her with a face that was the stern mom look and she doesn’t feel loved and that she feels disrespected and so that she was reacting to that.  It could have been a number of things.  But I think that the main thing that I learned from that was that sad is under angry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  Sad is under angry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think what I’m hearing from you too, correct me if I’m wrong, is that if a leader makes the mistake of engaging someone who has an emotional barrier to something and just tries to do it logically, like with a kind of a command thing, they’re not actually going to be heard.  And so, when you’re running into resistance, it’s important to look for what is taking the person you’re trying to talk to out of a logical place and into an emotional place.  And if the leader is getting triggered to be in an emotional place, that’s what it sounds like you were doing with Amelia.

 

Andrea:  Exactly.

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, being aware on both levels, what’s taking us out of a place of actual dialogue, and I know in my background with teaching special needs kids, the two sides of the brain, the emotional side and the intellectual processing side are different.  And if you have the emotional side flaring, you’re not going to get anything taught.  And so that’s what I hear you saying, am I right in that?

 

Andrea:  Right.  So, you know, it kind of goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  People need to feel like they’re taken care of.  Their physical needs, their emotional needs are taken care of before they can really start moving in a new direction before they can really start changing something.  And so, if there is a sense of “I’m not safe right now,” or “I’m not respected right now,” then it’s going to be really hard for that person to let down their guard, not fight back, and let down their guard and then be able to actually take in what you have to say at all, let alone make the decision to follow what you’ve said.

 

I mean that is what we talk about in the Deep Impact method.  And I seriously want as many people to watch this video series as possible.  It’s a short course and it’s for free.  And I want as many people to watch this as possible, because what I’m hearing back from people who have watched it is that it actually is kind of mind shift for the way that they’re talking to people.  And my hope is that, you know, when we look at our conversations, and we see the other person on the other side, and they are getting emotional, there is an escalation that’s about to take place, or we know that this is what typically happens.  That we as a voice of influence, that I as a voice of influence will stop and say, “Now wait a second what’s going on here?”  “What do I know that is true about me?”  “What do I know that is possible, like what could they possibly be going through and then how do we move forward from here?”

 

So, the main point of that particular story is both the fact that there’s something else going on underneath the surface, but then also that if we address the sadness first, we’re going to have a much easier time getting to change.  If we’re just reacting out of the anger, where I’m angry, you’re angry, we continue to be angry and we don’t address the actual grief of the moment.  There’s something going on inside of you.  There’s something going on inside of me that I’m sad, we are sad.  If we don’t address that, we’re skipping over something vitally important that could get us to a solution much, much quicker.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think to it as you’re talking, it’s not always your daughter’s reaction was to push back vocally but sometimes people shut down when they’re in grief.  And so either way, whether they push back or whether they shut down, having that awareness of what’s going on, that’s getting in the way of actually, like being able to dialogue is so important.  So, when you work with leaders to help them navigate through this undercurrent internal reactions and adoption of changes, obviously, you’re not going to have them go hug them like you did with your daughter.  So, what process do you recommend?

 

Andrea:  Well, first of all, self-awareness.  First of all, we all have to kind of look at ourselves and say, I mean, one of the best reasons I was able to actually be able to take this to a new level with my daughter was because I understood about this about that myself.  So, first of all, what’s going on inside of me right now and why am I so angry?  And if I am angry, what is sad about this situation?

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, you’re in motivation, being aware of what was motivating you was crucial.

 

Andrea:  Yes.  Look underneath the surface to say and to be able to ask about this particular situation that I’m in right now, “What is sad about this to me?”  Because if I can be honest about my own, what’s hard about this, what’s difficult about this?  Then I can share that with the other person and say, “Look, this is really hard for me.  I do not like having to go down this path.  But here we are, you know, it’s the beginning of empathy to be able to really understand yourself and be honest about that.  It helps you to be more empathetic toward the other person.  It helps the other person be more empathetic toward you.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think sometimes it can be fear underneath anger.  I see that a lot, you know, that the anger is a safeguard against feeling fear.

 

Andrea:  So, fear and sadness, I think are very similar.  There’s the fear, but then there’s the sadness about the fear.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  So, I would I would still get back down to that.  So, what is going to help calm the situation instead of what’s going to feed the fire?  So, what does this person need from me to empathize with me?  .  Fear is sad.  It’s sad that people are afraid.  So anyway, I would go back to what is sad about this situation.  Well, it’s sad because I’m absolutely terrified of, you know, whatever might be going on.  That is sad.  So, I need to know that about me.  I need to start to understand what might be going on with that.

 

So then, after that self-awareness, then there’s a sense of, “Okay, now I need to be curious and empathetic and respectful of why the other person might be resisting.”  So, the respect here may not be the kind of respect that is like, “I respect you because you have earned my respect the way that you’ve treated people and your expertise and all that kind of stuff.”  It might not be that kind of respect.  Instead, it could be the kind of respect that is about the other person actually being a human being.  I respect the fact that you’re a human being, that you have emotional needs, that you have an experience of all of your own.

 

So, if I can start there too, if I understand, “Okay, so I respect that you’re a human being, and that there’s a reason why you’re resisting.”  Then I start to can start to ask those questions inside of myself.  I can start to kind of dig a little and the other person.  So, what might be going on?  Why might they be resisting?  What might they be sad about?

 

Rosanne Moore:  And what if it’s not?  Part of it could be at times, not knowing something, right?  Not having certain skills or resources.  Sometimes the emotional thing has a very practical component to it.  Would that not be true?

 

Andrea:  Yes.  So, when we get to this point, the curiosity, the respect, all that kind of thing, then I think that we can look at it in three kinds of components, what might be causing this person to resist; the head, the hands, or the heart?  So, the head being what do they still need to know or understand so that they can move forward, so that they don’t feel resistant?  For the hands, what skills or resources do they need to pull it off?  And for the heart, what beliefs or feelings are going to need to change?

 

First, I think you have to address the fear or the sadness that we were talking about before, at least being able to understand that about the other person.  And then to ask that question of is there something that you need to be able to move forward?  Or is there something that’s getting in the way that you don’t understand?  Is there something else that you need in terms of resources or is there just like you totally are resistant because you don’t agree that this is the right direction to go?

 

Rosanne Moore:  You know, talking about this, Andrea, reminds me of a situation that I was in with the birth of my second child.  I have had a very traumatic delivery.  And there was some medical malpractice and mistakes had been made with my first child.  And so, with my preparing for the birth of my second child, I was very resistant to the idea of letting somebody else make decisions that I didn’t feel comfortable with.  I had gone into it very trusting the first time, didn’t know a lot, and the second time I was going to be prepared.

 

And I can remember interviewing doctors, pediatricians and they picked up immediately.  It was not hard kind of wearing it, my resistance to their expertise.  I think there were four different ones that I interviewed and the first three responded to that by doubling down on why they were the expert and I was not and I needed to do things, like they needed to call the shots.  Understandable, obviously, I had not been to medical school; I had not done all the things that they had done.  But the last one, when I started asking questions about how he handled things, instead of answering my questions, he asked me a question.  He said, “Did you have a bad experience?”

 

Andrea:  Oh, perfect!

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I told him what had happened and he said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.  I can understand why you really want to make sure that your baby is taking care of well this time.”  And so then he walked back through all those other questions that I had and he explained his expertise, and that’s who I chose.

 

Andrea:  Of course, yes.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Now, did he make any suggestions that were different than the others?  No, he didn’t.  He held the exact same position, but he was the one I chose because he did engage me on that level.

 

Andrea:  Yes.  It so, so good.  What a great example, Rosanne.  I mean, it goes back to that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  And the reason for that is that they don’t feel safe.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.

 

Andrea:  People are resisting you and you’re resisting what you have to share with them, your expertise, your knowledge or experience.  They’re resisting, they’re resisting, they’re resisting.  There’s something in them that is not feeling safe.  And so, it may be because of you, it may not.  But it’s _____ upon you as the person who is wanting to have, you know, the influence as somebody who cares about other people to ask that question, you know, “What might be going on?”  “Is there a bad experience?”  Or, you know, it could have been a different situation.  It might be a different question, but you stay curious and be respectful of that other person, even though they weren’t at medical school with you.  Man, that’s so important.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  And all of my birth experiences, quite honestly, that was the best birth experience because both my OB and the pediatrician were very aware of what I had been through the first time and they did everything in their power to make sure that I felt heard and a part of the decisions and respected throughout the process.  Yeah.

 

Andrea:  It’s so good.  So, it’s time for us to wrap up, Rosanne.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Sure.

 

Andrea:  I think that if I were to summarize anything here, or if I just say, please remember this, please remember that sad is under angry.  Please, remember that.  There is a reason why people are angry, and it’s not usually the top response.  It’s not usually the core response.  It doesn’t mean that it’s not important.  Anger is very important.  And it doesn’t mean that we should write off people’s anger, it means that we need to be curious about why they’re angry and what might be going on inside of them that could actually be sad.

 

One more thought on this.  I’ve got a question for you, the listener.  When do you feel most close to people, when you’re arguing with them or when they tear up?  And maybe you start to give them a hug or, you know, maybe you don’t touch them.  But, I mean, we feel closer to people when we can see that they’re actual human beings.  And we’re not just arguing on a on this other level, that is maybe just about things that are on the surface that we’re not really getting down underneath.

 

And so, if we can get down underneath, if we can feel that empathy for the other person’s human experience that is vitally important.  If you have expertise, it’s vitally important that you understand that you can’t just share your expertise.  You’re going to have to be an expert on people too.

 

So, the rest of this month, we’re going to be talking about this particular topic.  Next week we’re going to be airing an interview that I did with Dr. Espen Klausen, the psychologist on The Psychology Behind Personal Change.  Then we’ll take another look at that and we’re going to just dive a little bit deeper here the rest of the month on this particular topic.  We’re kind of excited about taking a little deeper dive.  It’s sort of like a theme we’ve got running right now, Rosanne,

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.  So, if you want to become more effective in conversations where you’re encouraging an individual to make change, whether it’s in a formal situation an annual review or responding to feedback on the job, or whether it’s just in a passing conversation.  We started out by talking about the deep divide in our nation, maybe you have family members that you want to be able to engage better or there’s someone close to you that needs to take more responsibility for something, a bad habit they’re stuck in.  We have a free mini course that’s available for you.

 

And Andrea already made reference to this at the top of the show, but go to voiceofinfluence.net/podcasts and you can find information on the Deep Impact method.  Also, if you want to work one on one with Andrea but you’re not sure what that would look like for your specific business situation, we recommend starting with the Clarify your Voice Call.  Again, you can go to voiceofinfluence.net and hit the contact button there and ask to learn more about clarifying your voice.

 

Andrea:  Thank you, Roseanne.  All right, so your voice matters, let’s make it matter more!

Greatest Hits: Episode 100 – The Elements of a Voice of Influence®

Episode 156

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

In this special episode, we’re taking a look back at episode 100 of the Voice of Influence® podcast! Our team is thrilled with where we’ve been and we’re excited for where we’re going with the show in the years to come!

In today’s show, I share the ways the podcast has shifted and what has remained the same since the beginning. Then I discuss one of our biggest ah-ha’s from interviewing guests, the six elements of a Voice of Influence, so you can utilize the framework for yourself.

To get you started, here are a few examples of episodes where we address each of the six elements:

Your Purpose (or Passion)

Your Style

Your Message

Your Offering

Your Strategy

Your Community

Other Resources

  • The Deep Impact Method Mini-Course

    Give great, effective feedback!

    This show is brought to you by the Deep Impact Method free course. Handle problems and present changes with care and influence. Register for the free 30 minute course here.

 

 

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and you are listening to Episode 100 of the Voice of Influence podcast.

Your voice matters, but you can make it matter more through our in-depth conversations with leaders and experts.  You’ll learn what it takes to move your audience with your message at home, work, and in the world.  It’s compelling communication strategy brought to you by your host, Author, Speaker, and Strategist, Andrea Joy Wenburg.  Welcome to Voice of Influence!

Welcome, welcome!  I am so glad that you’re here with us today.  It’s a kind of a day of celebration.  We’ve made it to Episode 100, and it’s been just over two years and about two or three months since we started the Voice of Influence podcast and we’ve made it to Episode 100, so fun.  So, thank you so much for being here, for listening, and for engaging.  We appreciate it.  We value you and your voice, and we really believe that your voice matters.

Over the course of the last couple of years, we have shifted, tried to figure out what exactly we’re doing with the podcast.  I’m typically not somebody who makes up her mind and just goes for it and sticks with the same exact thing the whole entire time.  Rather, we really believe in making iterations as we go.

And so as we started the podcast, we were really focused on the personal brand and personal brand strategy, which is still really important to the work that we do with people and the people that we’re hoping will listen to the podcast.  So, we’re talking about people who are really wanting to understand who they are and how they portray themselves to the world, how you are able to provide a presence that it will leave an impact, and that has remained the same.

What has shifted over the course of the last couple of years, especially in the last year and a half or so is that we’ve also added in this idea of service and leading teams and having a bigger impact on business in general.  But, really, it all comes back down to who you are as a person, what you believe about your voice, what you have been called to do, or feel a sense of purpose to do, finding meaning in your life and going after it.

And I tell you what, when it really comes down to it, it’s about putting yourself on the line for others, going that extra mile, being willing to sacrifice something of yourself in order to achieve something that is bigger, in order to put yourself in a position where you can have influence in a bigger way.  And when we’re talking about influence, we’re talking about influence that is ethical, influence that is not manipulative, but that helps other people to find their path that helps other people to make good decisions.

Sometimes that really looks like bringing clarity and helping people to see the big picture.  Sometimes that means giving advice, sometimes it could be providing an experience.  There are all kinds of ways that we can have influence and make a difference with who you are with your expertise, with what you have to provide.

But when it comes down to it, like I said before, it costs something.  It costs the person, you.  It costs you something to offer it because there are things at stake.  There are often things at stake.  There are things like relationships at stake.  There are things like your ego at stake.  I mean the idea of failing in front of other people, gosh, you know when you’re voice of influence when you’re putting yourself out there and you’re going for it and offering who you are to others.  Very often you’ll fail.  You will be rejected by others and it’s just part of life.  It’s part of what it means to lead and to be a leader, to be a voice of influence.

And so, I just want to say thank you first of all, for being a voice of influence.  Thank you for being willing to put yourself on the line for your cause for other people, to love other people really well.  I know that that comes at a cost to you personally and I just want to thank you for your courage and for taking risks.  And I hope that somehow along the way we have been able to provide for you a companion, perhaps a little bit of guidance on this journey of finding and owning and using your voice of influence.

Well, today we’re going to talk a little bit more in depth about what we consider to be a voice of influence here at our company.  We have a number of models, of frameworks, things like this.  This is one thing that I have found over the course of the last few years that I’m actually really good at.  And that is to help bring order to chaos, so, where there are lots of ideas or we’re trying to figure out how to solve a problem.  I love to help companies; individuals bring order to that process.

So, for example we the model of engagement, the A2 Model of Engagement and sometimes I call it A2, I don’t know.  I haven’t nailed that one down yet, but an A2 model of engagement, which is about how do you find context and understand where people are at in terms of engagement. And we do that in the context of agency and agreement, and I would love to explain that to you sometime if you want it, but it’s pretty darn hard to do that over a podcast episode.

So, send me an email if you’re interested in learning more about the A2 Model of Engagement and how I talk about that in keynotes and in breakout sessions or training sessions.  I’d love to visit with you about that.  You can send me an email at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net, and I’d be happy to schedule that with you.

But today, we’re going to talk about the Voice of Influence elements.  These are six things that over the course of the past few years as we’ve been putting together our thought leadership around voice of influence, these are the elements that we believe are absolutely necessary to dive into, understand, and get a grasp of for yourself when you’re wanting to be a voice of influence.

And as we are moving forward on the podcast, we want you to know that the way that we are structuring the podcast and the conversations that we’re having, the things, the insights that we share, the stories that we share are going to have to do with these six categories, these Six Elements of your Voice of Influence. And that’s how they fit together.  This is how it all fits together.  And it all also, as I mentioned previously, fits together under this idea of influence and service.

So, whether that’d be customer service or serving as a leader, we are serving other people and offering our voice of influence.  And so, in that process then these things all relate to all of those kinds of interactions.

Your Purpose

So let’s talk about these six elements.  We’re going to dive in.  The first one is your PURPOSE.  Your purpose could also be called your passion, but this is really about why you care.  It is so fundamental and important to have a sense of purpose, to give you meaning, to give you a reason to, you know, go that extra mile to get over that hump, to walk through the fire that you’re going to walk through in order to really offer what you have to offer well.  Having that sense of purpose and knowing why you care is incredibly important.

We’ve talked about this in a number of episodes.  I am going to a link in our show notes.  We will link to different episodes that have tackled some of these elements so that you can easily go back and see where we’ve already covered some of these things.  For now, just know that purpose is about why you care.  You need to know your purpose and have a purpose.  Whether it’d be something that you feel like is your own purpose and calling and that sort of thing, or if it’s something that you can align yourself to.

A lot of times when we’re working in a company, for a company, their purpose, the company’s purpose may not be exactly what our purpose is or what your passion, where your passion lies and that sort of thing.  But as long as it aligns with your purpose, as long as it fits together with what you care about, then you can still harness the power that comes with having a purpose and be able to utilize that.  So, the first category then is having a purpose.

Now, the Purpose at Voice of Influence is to help connect people’s gifts and expertise with the need in the world.  So, people and companies helping them connect what they have to offer with the need that is in the world.  That is something that drives us so that is incredibly important when it comes to what we do and why we care.  We see the need in the world.  We see your gifts, your talents, your expertise, and we’re saying, “Let’s figure out how to connect that.”  “I do not like dizzy thing go unconnected.”  So, we love to help make those connections with folks, so your purpose.

Your Style

And then your STYLE is the second element.  This is about how you show up.  What is the way that you do this?  How do you show up?  It’s kind of your personality.  Sometimes it has to do with your gifting, but certainly, the way that you show up in your personality.  The thing that we find that is so important about style is that folks often feel like they shouldn’t be the way that they are, or they don’t want to fully own who they are inside and then it doesn’t show up on the outside.  And it just really depends on the person, OK?

So, there’s a spectrum of different ways that we handle this, but let’s say on one side of the spectrum, there are people who want to be chameleons and sort of fit in with everybody else because we’re afraid of standing out.  We’re afraid of looking like we want to have attention, that sort of thing.  But maybe we do want attention or maybe we don’t want attention, but we need to receive attention in order to get a message out.

So, style and how we show up then for that person could mean owning who they are and showing up in a bigger way.  For somebody else, on maybe the other side of the spectrum, it could be that they are so out there and they beat everybody to the punch.  They are bigger than life and almost to the point where they’re covering up.  On the outside, they’re so big and flamboyant or extreme on the outside that they’re covering up something very, very intimately fragile on the inside.  And that fragileness on the inside then doesn’t have a chance to come out because it’s being covered up by a show.

Now, there are all kinds of people in between or perhaps on even further in different directions; who knows.  But how you show up authentically as yourself and knowing who you are being that person with others and then also at the same time being able to communicate and meet people where they are.  This is an interesting delicate kind of a balance.

It really comes down to being authentic.  It comes down to knowing who you are, being that person with others and caring about them enough that you don’t have to be you.  You know that you can make adjustments in order to meet somebody where they are.  So, the person who is naturally maybe loud, let’s say, like I’m naturally more of a sharer, there are times when I have to be quiet in order to meet somebody where they are, because they’re not going to share as much if I just start sharing.

So, there is this interesting balance that we have to kind of consider when it comes to being authentic, owning our voice, but at the same time doing it for the sake of others means being authentic to ourselves while at the same time meeting them where they’re at.  And that can be difficult but it is achievable.  You can do that.

And what I found with my own personal style is that I do tend to be dramatic.  I tend to be deep and intense.  I talk about all these things in my book UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You. I really went through a lot of struggle in my own life to figure out what was real about all of that and what wasn’t real or wasn’t me.

What I found is that when I’m feeling tension inside, when I’m feeling fear inside, when I’m feeling shame internally and that is unresolved inside of me, then I’m going to end up showing up as something that I’m not.  I’m going to show up in a way that is more self-protective.  That is more about me taking care of me and my ego than it is about loving others and serving them.

When it comes to our style, Voice of Influence, one of the ways that we know that we’re in-step with who we are in our style and how we’re showing up is if we’re not feeling that tension, if we are feeling free to be able to offer and love well.  So that’s something that you can consider for yourself, your style, if you’re feeling that tension.

If you’re feeling resentment and anger and sometimes righteous anger is legitimate and you should consider that as something that maybe is more of a passion or a purpose.  But when it’s indignation, when it’s, “Uh, I cannot believe they would do that,” that sort of thing.  Look, these are things that indicate that you are not totally resolved inside to be able to show up in a way that is true to who you really are and what you really want, which is to serve others well, to love them well, and to fulfill your purpose.

Your Message

And so this is Purpose, why you care; Style, how you show up.  And then MESSAGE, these are the words that you say.  Words that you say and how you show up are both part of your message truly.  But when it comes down to it, you actually need real words to be able to say, “You need to know what exactly you’re trying to communicate.”  “You need to know what your core message is.”  It’s one of the first things that we started doing at the Voice of Influence was to help people find their core message and get clear on the fact that you have to have a tiny message at the top, something that is specific and helpful to somebody else in order to be able to bring a bigger message behind it.

And so I call that the arrowhead alignment of a message, and we have talked about that some on the podcast.  So, I will make sure to link to an episode in the show notes on that one.  It’s about being really clear on what you’re going to say about your message, you know, what is it that you’re actually going to say?  One of the hardest things I think for people who tend to be more creative or passionate is that they might have a lot of different ideas, a lot of different things that they care about.  And it’s hard to narrow it down.  It’s hard to get more clear.  But if you’re wanting to come across as clear, you’re going to have to get clear for yourself.

And so, finding those words that you say are super important and the core message of Voice of Influence is when you align your voice or what you do and what you say with who you are, you will have more connected relationships and a bigger impact in the world.  That is the core of what we’re saying.  We are very clear on the fact that we want to help people get to that point where they can align what they do and what they say with who they are because that is where they’re going to find their voice of influence.

We also have other messages and you should have other messages that you’re really wanting to convey that you, you know, feel like are really important to you.  And we’re going to talk about having an anthem or a real clear set of values in Episode 102, so I’ll be working out for that one.  We’re going to be talking about what it means to have additional messages that are core to who you are and what you’re bringing as a team or what you’re bringing as an individual.  So we’ve talked about your Purpose, which is why you care; your Style, which is how you show up; your Message, which are the words that you say.  So we’re halfway done.

Your Offering

We’ve gotten down your OFFERING, what you can do to help.  All of these things, words are just words.  If you do not have something to offer, if you are not actually doing something for others, if you’re not putting out something that others can actually, you know, use or listen to or if you’re not serving them in some way, if there is no offering, then it makes it really hard to communicate a message.

A message in and of itself is nothing until you actually put it into some sort of creative contribution that you’re making to the world.  And so the question then becomes, what is your offering?  What can you do to actually help?  With Voice of Influence, our offerings have to do with training and coaching and strategy and these sorts of things.  And so we have a number of different offerings including the Voice of Influence Academy that allows us to draw from different teachings and different trainings that we have in order to create custom programs for our clients.

The Voice of Influence Academy is one of our offerings, but so is coaching and so as group coaching and the Fascinate Assessment and a number of different things that are aligned with our message and our style and our purpose.  And we want to encourage you to find an offering that aligns with who you are. And with offering, it may mean that you have to say no to other things in order to be able to do the thing that you really should be doing, that you really feel called to do.

While many of us have many opportunities to say yes to this committee and that nonprofit and this one and that and, “Oh my goodness, there are so many opportunities to serve in the world.”  And if you haven’t found those, if you haven’t found opportunities to serve or places that you can offer your gifts, even aside from your work, then I would encourage you to open up your mind to the possibility that there are a lot of opportunities out there and that you have to just go out and start to explore those and see them for yourself.

But because you have a specific voice of influence, you’re not just doing everything.  Instead, you’re going to need to narrow it in a little bit and make some decisions on what is going to be most in line with who you are with your purpose, your style, and your message.  OK, so now let’s figure out what you want to offer.

Your Strategy

Then the fifth element is STRATEGY.  This is about how you share your offering.  Now, in some situations it just means getting a job.  It just means getting the right job.  But really it doesn’t just mean, “OK, now I’m on this committee,” or “Now, I have this job and now I’m just going to play this role, this is my strategy.”  But instead when you consider your purpose, your style, your message and your offering, what is the best way forward?  What are some things that you want to do that will help you to share your offering better?

So, one of our strategies at Voice of Influence is to have a podcast.  So we’re going to have a podcast, we are going to get our message out there.  It’s going to give us an opportunity to connect with guests, to connect with listeners, to potentially help them to see a lot of these things for themselves.  And maybe there are a few people in the mix who are going to eventually want to work with us as a company as well.  So this is part of our strategy.

Other pieces of our strategy have to do with going out and speaking.  I’m doing a lot of speaking and going to conferences and getting in front of audiences who could potentially use what we have to offer, not just anywhere but places and getting in front of the audiences that actually need what we have to offer.  This is not about feeding my ego and getting me in front of big audiences just to get me in front of big audiences.  This is even tackling or going for smaller audiences of people who actually do need what we have to offer.  Then we are kind of more quickly getting to the path that we’re trying to get down, you know, moving down our path.

So for you, what choices do you want to make about your strategy that don’t have to do with your ego, but do have to do with what is the best path forward?  What’s going to turn the needle the most?  My husband is the one that’s kind of always talked about this with me, “That doesn’t turn the needle for us, Andrea.  So, it’s not worth doing it.”

And as I started our business and we’ve kept going, I started to realize what exactly he’s talking about because there are times when I have great ideas, I have lots of ideas, but what is going to actually turn the needle on our purpose and getting us closer to the goals that we have, the vision that we have, what is actually going to turn the needle?  And that’s what you need to be thinking about when you’re thinking about your strategy.

Your Community

OK, and then your COMMUNITY.  This is the last piece.  This is about who you serve, not about who you’re leading, not about you being in charge of people.  This is about who you’re serving and you’re going to serve people in different ways.  There are different people in your life who need different things from you and who you want to serve in different ways.  Maybe this friend of yours, for example, maybe they are a great friend you love having fun with them, but you’re not going to talk to them about deep things inside of your heart because they’re not the kind of person that really likes to talk about that stuff.  And they’ve shown you that that’s not something they can handle, so OK, no problem.  I will reserve that sharing these really deeper things for another situation or just, you know, share minimally.

So, with your community, you’re not just saying, who am I targeting?  That is part of it.  You know, who is this?  Who is the person who needs what I have to offer?  This is an important question to ask, not just who needs it, because a lot of times you could say, the whole world needs what I have to offer, which of course I feel that way about Voice of Influence, everybody needs to know how to have a voice of influence, right?  But that’s not the only criteria.  Here, we’re also talking about who is it that not only needs what you have to offer but is open to it and wanting it, and looking for it.  Maybe they have a pain point inside that is driving them to look for an answer and you have that answer.

You need to know who those people are and what those pain points are.  How can you help them to see that you actually do have what they need?  And as I mentioned at the beginning, one of our great purposes at Voice of Influence is really about connecting people’s gifts and expertise with the need in the world.  Well, that is a lot of this community piece.  Who is it that we are here to serve and what is it that they need from us?  Why are they looking for what we have to offer?

For us, for Voice of Influence, we know that there are customer service teams, for example, who want to have influence or who might be feeling like they don’t have influence, that they are just there to answer questions.  They’re just there to clean up the mess.  But really, we’re missing out on such an opportunity to serve and to draw in our customers and build customer loyalty if we’re not helping our customer service teams to really have a voice of influence.

Because if they know what their purpose is, they show up with their style and their message and the offering of the company and they know the strategy and they understand the customer who they’re serving, then they can come to their job with a sense of purpose and they’re going to go the extra mile.  They’re going to do what they can to help.  And all of that is going to lead to building customer loyalty.  That human element that you really can’t control, it’s something you can only release.

And so, this is something that we know that customer service teams that are really looking forward to build customer loyalty, those are the ones that we can really serve.  We can serve them, and so those are the audiences we’re trying to get in front of and that sort of thing.  But at the same time, we also know that there are leaders and executives who want to lead well, who want to do a better job of getting buy-in from their teams.  These are also things that we do at Voice of Influence, and so those are also people that we recognize we serve.

So, my question for you is who do you serve?  Who is it that needs what you have to offer?  This is your community and then the people that aren’t open to what you have to offer, they need something else from you and that’s OK.  You don’t have to be all things to all people and you don’t have to try to knock down every door to make sure that everybody gets what you have to offer.  That’s OK, you don’t need that.  Instead, what you need is you need to go through the open doors.  You need to look for the open doors.

Sometimes you got to knock, but very rarely should you ever knock down a door just to get somebody to take what you have to offer.  These are the elements, the six elements of having a voice of influence.  These are the things that we build into, the things that we address, the things that we help other people to cultivate either individually or in their teams.  And what we want to provide for you here on the podcast, we want to give you the resources to be able to think through these elements for yourself.

When you get pretty clear on these things, then you’re going to show up in a way that has more purposeful that does have a clear message with, you know, more confidence for who you’re here to help and serve or work with or collaborate with or what you’re here to truly accomplish. And so that is what we have created for you moving forward.  We want to offer you podcast episodes that are going to address these elements.  And really most of the ones that we’ve already done in the past do address these elements in some way.

And so the question for you is what are you doing right now?  How is this helping you to grow as a voice of influence in your purpose, your style, your message, your offering, your strategy, or your community?  I just want to thank you for listening.  I want you to thank you for being here.  It is an honor, a deep honor that you would listen to what we have to say here, and I counted a privilege.  I counted a huge responsibility to be serving you in this way and I hope that it’s been helpful.

If you have listened to over let’s say five podcast episodes, would you consider going to your podcast player wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review, particularly on Apple podcast.  That would be so helpful for us as Voice of Influence, the podcast and for helping other people to find the podcast.  I’ve not asked for reviews very often and I know I probably should do that more, but I thought, “Well, you know what, it’s episode 100, let’s go ahead and ask you to leave a review.”

So if you have listened to over five episodes, would you go and find your podcast player and leave us a review.  We’d so appreciate it and we will read them.  We will take a look and see what you have to say and you can always email us also at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net. I would love to hear from you, especially if something that we’ve shared with you here on the podcast has made a difference, we’d love to hear about it.

It’s so fun to hear from you and to hear the things that you’re doing in your community, in your place of business, in your families because of what you’ve listened to here and what you’ve heard and, and how you’re applying it.  And so that’s what it’s all about.  It’s about making a difference.  And so we wish that for you.  Go and leave that review on the podcast player that you listened to.  Take these six elements and make your voice matter more.

I know that that comes at a cost to you personally, and I just want to thank you for your courage and for taking risks.

 

The Value of Bringing Your Diverse Experience and Talents to Work with Colin Crowley

Episode 155

Colin Crowley Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Earlier this year, I had a great conversation with Colin Crowley and I’m excited to have him back on the show today to talk about the value of bringing your diverse experience and talents into your work.

Colin is the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond. He specializes in building customer service departments from the ground up with a focus on scalability, infrastructure agility, technological innovation, and gold-standard quality and efficiency.

Something you wouldn’t know from Colin’s professional biography is that he’s also a playwright and he brings that experience into his work at Freshly and this aspect left me feeling like I just had to have him back on the show.

In this episode, Colin shares how customer experience really sits at the intersection of arts and operations, the importance of both strategy and empathy for customer experience, his personal experience becoming a playwright, how his self-driven learning and curiosity have played a role in his success, the parallels between producing a play and how the corporate environment should be in order to help people understand where they fit in the corporate vision, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, and they work to make it matter more.  I’m Andrea Wenburg, and this is the Voice of Influence podcast.

Earlier this spring, I had a really good conversation with Colin Crowley of Freshly.  Colin is the VP of customer experience where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond.  And when we were talking about how he helped build the customer service department from the ground up and focused on scalability, infrastructure agility, you know, technological innovation, efficiency, quality, and empathy; in that conversation, I asked him about hiring.  And he brought up a really, really interesting point about how helpful it is when people bring their diverse background to the table.  It’s possible that you have heard, maybe, before or all your life that you should stay in your lane and not divert out of your realm of expertise.

But Colin is a playwright, and he brings his experience as a playwright to his job at Freshly.  And in fact, they probably complement one another, and it’s very, very interesting.  I really wanted to have a conversation with Colin about this.  And so, I invited him back on the podcast to do an interview that is really focused more on how we do integrate our diverse experience and the arts even with our experience at work.

In this conversation, Colin talks about how customer experience really sits at the intersection of arts and operations, and how important both strategy and empathy are for customer experience.  We discuss his personal experience becoming a playwright, and how he really didn’t take the normal track that you most people would take through education and whatnot.  He didn’t take that normal track as a playwright or in the corporate world, but how his self-driven learning and his curiosity has really fueled his success.

And in our conversation, he also connects this idea of producing a play and all the players involved and creating that analogy to how it could and should be in a corporate environment with a team, with customer experience, or with a company who needs to have a real clear purpose and vision and be able to help others understand how they fit into that vision.

I am confident that you are going to really enjoy this conversation with Colin Crowley.

Andrea:  Colin Crowley, it is great to have you back on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Colin Crowley:  Thank you.  It’s great to be back.

Andrea:  So, the last time you were here, we were talking about your role with Freshly.  And in that conversation, [there was] the question of how do you hire people who are going to be able to really succeed in understanding the voice of the customer and understanding the team dynamics that are at play and all that.  And you brought up something about bringing in other experiences that you’ve had within your life…  That when people have a broad set of experiences, that they’re able to contribute quite a bit.

And so, after our conversation, I thought, “We’ve got to talk again,” because you have had a broad set of experiences, and you have an education and your experience as a playwright.  And I think that that could be really illuminating for our audience.  So, Colin, would you just tell us how does a guy who’s running the customer experience team at Freshly, how is he also a playwright?

Colin Crowley:  Yes, that’s a good question.  Although I think the more and more you think of it, the more and more it actually melds together and makes sense, I guess you could say.  I’ve been writing for about… probably going on fifteenish years now in a more serious capacity.  I was always kind of writing even prior to that, but not something that was necessarily, you know, fit for anyone’s eyes, shall we say.  So, it’s been about fifteen years in a serious capacity; definitely long before I entered the customer service world or really entered even the workforce in a specially enthusiastic manner where I was more career-driven and what have you.

I think, there’s a bit of a natural affinity between the arts and customer service because customer service itself – when it comes to relationships with people – really is an art as opposed to a science.  Obviously, you can use science to put behind it in terms of helping you be strategic in managing the relationships with customers and just being able to manage people on the phones or in email or in chat or what have you.  But at its core, the ability to be able to detect how someone else is feeling, and be able to respond to that, and help to give them what they need aside from what policies and procedures may be, really fits more in the area of the arts.

You could really say customer service sits at the intersection of the arts and operations in a kind of really interesting way.  Because in order to have a good customer support organization, you really have to have your eyes on both of those two things.  You have to make sure that your agents are empathizing and appropriately understanding customers, and really understanding them almost on an ethereal plane as opposed to a very, you know, a policy-based one.  And at the same time, you also have to be careful about certain operational realities in terms of how much money are you giving away and how much money are you spending on people versus technology, versus this, versus that.

So, there’s also a lot of just pure operational strategy that goes into play, and organizations tend to fail if they don’t get that balance right.  Or either they focus too much on the efficiency factor at the expense of empathy; or they focus more on empathy, but they don’t have enough strategy to make their operation successful.  So, it’s really at that intersection where you get good customer support.

I guess for me, I found the customer support space surprisingly natural when I entered into it, because I didn’t really have any direct experience in customer support management when I entered the space.  And I entered it with kind of cold turkey for all practical purposes, but it ended up being a natural affinity because there’s that balance that I understood from my experience writing plays.

I think plays are especially interesting in the world of theater generally because in the world of theater, you have that same sort of balance between art and operations, and for playwrights, especially.   So, an example of this would be, you know, in screenwriting, for instance, or novel writing.  You tend to have a different circumstance where, in screenwriting, there don’t tend to be realistic boundaries to the stories you can create because Hollywood makes so much money.

So, unless you’re specifically writing for a very small film, which most people aren’t doing – rather, they’re writing for the big game – then you can have as many locations or as many characters or as many what have you as you want because the idea is that if the film does well, it’s going to grow us a lot of money and no one really cares.  So, there’s not much operational restriction on what you write, and you can let your imagination go wild.

And in theater, it’s very different because theaters – unless they’re big commercial theaters – theaters don’t tend to have a lot of money, and they have to be very circumspect about how they spend money.  So, if you want to get your play produced by a local, regional, etc. theater, then you have to be mindful of how many characters you have, and how many scenes you have, and how many locations you have, and things of that nature because it all factors into how much money the theater is going to have to spend producing your show.  And the more money they have to spend producing it, the less likely any theater is going to take it up.  So, you have to write with that in mind, with that practicality in mind.

And with novel writing, it’s, of course, very different because there’s a larger audience for novel writing, and you’re writing more in isolation than you are in theater, which is a very collaborational process where you’re writing something which you know is going to be taken by a director or producer, etc., and then by actors and they’re going to interpret in their own way.  At the end of the day, it’s going to be a process where a bunch of different people work together to get something to happen.

And it’s not all on you, even though you may have had the initial idea, which is also very much how the world of customer support works.  And the world, in general, works where you have to work with different people who have defined boundaries and priorities, and you have to make sure to account for those as you’re going about your business.  For reasons like that, there’s actually a lot of interesting affinity between theater specifically and the customer support space.

Andrea:  Indeed, so much.  I think that describing it as the intersection between arts and operations and being able to apply that too… or at least help us to see how that is the same as theatre and writing for theater,  I think that’s a really interesting connection that you’ve made.  And I can see how being really good at one and being really good at the other and then how that sort of continues to probably sharpen you as you continue to move forward in both genres.

Colin Crowley:  Yeah, I would definitely say that’s true.   I mean, it really, really comes down to, I think you could say, priority because when you’re in a situation where you know you have to balance two concepts that are at least seemingly at variance…  Because most people when they think of, you know, operations, it’s usually at perhaps at the expense of empathy.  Although that’s not always the case, but usually that’s kind of how it stereotypes.

But when you really appreciate the balance and you know that in order to do your job well, you have to get the balance right… it really does make you go through the process of thinking what are the key things that you value when it comes to empathy that are like no-go areas, that are principles by which you will deal with your customers.  And you won’t give those up, even operationally if it may be convenient to do so under certain circumstances.

And similarly, what are those key things in operations that you just can’t let fall by the wayside, knowing that – either in the present or in the future – it’s going to end up crippling your ability to simply deliver the service to the customers or be able to respond quickly enough to their requests, even if the agents you have are really trained in empathy and understanding.

So, it definitely makes you – both in the theater world, yes, and also in customer support – think about what you value and what are the no-go areas in each pillar.  And that’s definitely an important step to getting that balance right, and not flip-flopping back and forth too much or sacrificing what you perhaps should not be sacrificing.

Andrea:  Okay, so one of the things that we do is we help teams and individuals on teams really find their own voice.  I’m curious about your experience in finding your own voice both as a playwright and then how that is also impacted your other work.

Colin Crowley:  Yeah, I think one interesting thing about my experience – both as a playwright and as a customer support leader – is that in both cases, I came into the fields not through traditional routes, I think it’s fair to say.  So, in terms of playwriting, that means, you know, I didn’t officially study theater in college or study drama or go through the process of getting a MFA or anything, but rather, I just loved theater.  And I more naturally gravitated towards playwriting, and I started to write myself, and I started to read other people’s plays.

And of course, in life, a lot of what you learn is what you absorb through reading, even just your understanding of the English language.  So, there’s a lot of reading, and a lot of absorbing, and a lot of trial and error because you try to write this or you try to write that and it doesn’t quite work.  But I didn’t have any avenues that you would typically associate with people who’d come up through more established channels, through the educational system, or what have you.  And because I’m outside of New York City, and I have a family – so, you know, running here and there – and the job and everything, I’m also not able to be very active participant in theatrical groups, which is a typical avenue that a lot of people use to get their works produced.

So, I came into the theater space from a back door.  And the same thing is really true for customer support as well because I didn’t study customer support or have a prior experience before really entering the space a little over ten years ago.  And ironically, or perhaps more coincidentally, I ended up being chosen to start at a company as a customer ombudsman – which was what the title was – which basically meant that I would examine the customer support operations and compare them to industry best practices and recommend changes.

And really, one of the main reasons I got that job was because the CEO of the company liked my playwriting background and the fact that I had been involved in helping to produce one of my first work is – a musical.  And he liked that experience in operations and also liked that balance with the arts, presuming that would mean I would understand empathy and so forth.  So, I kind of entered customer support partially because of the playwriting experience, and went through a similar experience of self-education from there going forward.

So, those two experiences of entering those spaces from backdoors, I think, had been very impactful.  It’s definitely helped me to establish my own voice because I developed it with a lot of self-education and observation as opposed to any sort of training, and that definitely helps you to identify things that matter to you or that you notice that may not be the part of someone else’s curriculum.  And I’m sure that manifests itself in all sorts of different ways.  I think in customer support, one of the ways that manifests itself is because of my playwriting experience, which inherently involves the arts and creativity.  So, that fuels a lot of ideas I have.

So, I find the customer support space to be a very creative one when it comes to understanding, like; how do you structure your organization to best meet the needs of the customers and what sort of teams do you have, what responsibilities do they have, areas of concentration, and how do you route customers appropriately so they get the best help.  And all that stuff to me is really like one gigantic, creative exercise, almost like in theater where you’re kind of arranging people on a stage and you’re trying to make sure that the audience gets a certain impression of people.  And you change that by what they say, and where they go, and how they act.  So that’s influenced my creativity in customer support operations, definitely.

Andrea:  You mentioned that your learning was self-driven versus really being imposed on you by a program, or what have you, somebody else creating the track for you.  You created your own learning track.  Have you always been self-driven in that way?  Do you learn better that way?  What kind of motivated you as you were getting going with both of these things to really learn everything that you needed to learn and make sure that you were getting what you needed?

Colin Crowley:  Yeah.  I mean, I am someone who does prefer self-learning, and it does work very well for me because I just inherently am curious about things.  And prior to the customer support world, I was involved in a think tank space because I actually studied, at first, history and political science, and then national security studies.  So, my initial vision was that I was going to enter, like, the think tank world and so forth.  And I did briefly before moving from Washington, D.C. up to the New England area.

So, I’ve always enjoyed researching, and understanding, and being able to pick out the salient points from a huge morass of information.  So that is something which I’ve always heavily enjoyed.  I think that’s one of the reasons why self-learning tends to work very well for me, and that, I would say, in combination with experience.  So, that’s how I learned playwriting, and that’s how I learned customer support operations essentially, from starting off from the point of self-research and then complementing that with experience when the time comes.

And also a great resource too, I have to say, is just people.  Not necessarily in a control curriculum setting, but just engaging with people and talking with people and understanding people and being able to hear their different challenges and their different triumphs.  And that also has been very, very significant, but mainly as something which has tempered the knowledge that I’ve gained from my self-learning and from my own experience.

Andrea:  How many plays have you written, plays and everything?

Colin Crowley:  Let me see.  I have written about twelve straight plays.  And straight plays means it’s not a musical – so it’s just a play, play, so to speak.  And I’ve written… let’s see, three musicals, and one point, I did, like, a one-act rock opera with someone.  I dabbled a little bit in screenwriting, but not as much.  So, I only have like one screenplay that’s fit for public company, but I have had some others resting someplace on my computer.  But yeah, the core of what I do is really in the straight play area.  So, I have twelve plays as it stands now, which I’ve composed over the course of the past really about ten years, I would say, for those.

Andrea:  So, where do you find time, do you feel like, to do this other work, to write plays?

Colin Crowley:  Honestly, for me, I’m able to write in smaller, short spurts, which I guess works well because that’s usually all I have.  So, I’m definitely not someone who could sit down at a desk and write all day long, like some people do.  I think it would bore me, and I think I would lack inspiration if I had to do that.  So, I write in short spurts, and my short spurts typically come from my commute into the office because Freshly, where I work, is headquartered in New York City, and I live in southwest Connecticut.  So, I have about seventy-five-minute train ride into and out of the city every day so that ends up being my time to be able to sit down and do some writing.  And then every now and then, I’ll grab some time at night after the kids are put to bed and things like that.

Andrea:  What a great way to use your commute.

Colin Crowley:  I know.  It ends up being very, very productive.  But yeah, it’s good for chill time, basically.

Andrea:  When you’re writing a play, do you already know the ending?  Do you sketch out the whole picture before you begin, or do you start at the beginning or in the middle someplace and just start writing and let it take shape from a more organic kind of like, “I think this would be fun,” or “This might be interesting.”  How does that work for you?

Colin Crowley:  Yeah, I definitely know the ending.  I think that’s probably true of most playwrights, mainly because plays are shorter than something like a novel as an example where I could understand that method working.  But in the course of a play, it’s a shorter work, and you really need to know where you’re going in order to get there because you don’t have a lot of time to meander.  And you have to be more strategic about getting to the point because there’s a very finite time limit on it.  So for that reason, I think it’s very difficult to write a play and not know the ending.

So, I’ve always written plays knowing what the ending is, although I’m not necessarily someone…  It can vary, but I’m not necessarily someone who sketches out scene by scene by scene ahead of time, which some people do.  And sometimes I do that, sometimes I don’t, depending on how I feel about the subject matter.  But one thing that is common is, yes, I pretty much have an idea how it begins, and I would always know how it ends.  And then I would have some ideas of how I’m going to get there just to keep the directional focus on it.

Andrea:  So with your political science and national security studies background, I was looking through your plays.  It looks like there’s a lot of political kind of subject matter.  What would you say your plays are about?

Colin Crowley:  They’re really about a lot of different things.  I would say that I don’t really have a lot of really any real political plays, but I do use history a lot.

Andrea:  Okay, history.  There you go.

Colin Crowley:  But I’m actually not the biggest fan of political plays.  But I use history as a prism for a lot of my plays, and I’ve always loved history.  So, that probably informs, I’d say, at least half of my work and even the other half will have in it…  Even if not in historical incident or event, it may take place in a different historical time period, so some history is brought in that way.  But I try to be eclectic in what I write so I’m not repeating the same story over and over again.  And I try very consciously not to repeat the same story.

So, typically, I’ve even kind of set myself some goals where, “Oh, I need to write this type of play,” or “I need to write that type of play,” just to make sure I’m not repeating things.  So, I’ve written tragedies.  I’ve written a pure farce.  I’ve written a comedy-drama/tragic comedy.  I’ve written musicals.  I’ve written a satirical play.  So, I always try to keep it different, and again very mindfully so, so I’m not writing the same sort of thing.

Andrea:  And why is that so important to you?

Colin Crowley:  Well, I think that it’s important to challenge myself because I don’t want to get into a rut where I am writing the same thing over and over again, where that just inherently has a certain lack of creativity.  Because it’s almost like you’re rehashing old ideas or it’s almost like you take a big puzzle, and you just rearrange the pieces, I guess is one way to describe it, as opposed to building a new puzzle.  And it’s just not as rewarding for me personally doing that.  So, I don’t feel as much of a sense of accomplishment or joy writing a play if I’m conscious that, “Mhmm, I’ve kind of written this before.”  Although, the single exception may be if I’m writing it again and the prior play, I’m very aware has a lot of faults, and I think I need to try it again.  So, in that context, I would say it’s acceptable.  But other than that, it just isn’t as rewarding or fulfilling to rehash the same types of stuff and have the same types of characters.

Andrea:  Well, between that and your desire for self-driven learning and your ability to excel in that, I can see how you really enjoy exploring things that are new and mastering something new.

Colin Crowley:  That’s true, yeah.  And I think that’s another connection with the customer support space too because we’re definitely living in a very fast-changing world, especially with technology.  And that’s been a key theme, like at Freshly that we focus on in customer support is trying to stay ahead of the technology curve, which can be kind of tricky to do because it curves so quickly.  But definitely, always being ahead and thinking what’s next and focusing on opening up new frontiers is a common theme in both – the playwriting aspect for me, but also in the customer support aspect.  And really, I trying to push boundaries where you can to keep things fresh.

Andrea:  On your website, you described theatre as being sort of democratic.  And I thought this was really interesting, and I want to just quote from what you said on your website; “Not everyone can be in a movie, even a small budget movie, but anyone can audition for a local play and be on the stage.”  What does this mean to you and to the world for a theater?

Colin Crowley:  Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitely an interesting truism and it’s interesting because big commercial theaters, unfortunately, have almost frozen out a lot of theatergoers, because it’s just so expensive to see a show now.  So that’s really unfortunate that a lot of people can’t have the experience of those big theaters.  But really, where a lot of the rising energy in theater is in our local theaters and community theaters, and there’s a lot that goes on in those local and regional theaters that’s really interesting and really gives a lot of opportunities for people to participate in it.

And that’s what I find sort of really uniquely attractive about theatre.  I guess it comes back to the collaboration aspect I mentioned before – about how like in the business world and theater, you have people who have to work together.  And it’s also different from screenwriting in that theater people have very defined roles.  So, the playwright controls the word and you can’t change a single comma, and the director controls this, and the actors control that.  And it’s much more defined than it is in screenwriting whereas a writer, you sell your script so you lose all your rights to it, and you really don’t have any say on anything.  But in theater roles are very defined and that’s more like what it is in the business world, so to speak.

So that’s kind of another interesting analogy there.  But theater is so collaborative where, you know, even though people stereotype it as “acting on the stage”, the fact is there’s so many talents that are needed in theater.  And you really appreciate that when you’re involved in theatrical experiences, when you think of all the people you need for set design – so, you’re bringing in carpentry, for instance – and then you have people with lighting design, and you have sound design, and you have the stage manager.  And you have so many different people with so many different skill sets working on one show that it really provides us so much opportunities for so many different people of different skills.

And I think sometimes people forget that when, again, they just focus on the actors on the stage or the person who’s writing the words.  But when you look at how collaborational it is, and the fact that it’s so much collaboration across people with those different skill sets, it’s almost an interesting microcosm of the universe.  But bottom line, it provides so many opportunities for people to get together and work on a project on a very local level.  And I find that really interesting about theatre, and hopefully, something that we’ll see more about in theater.  But it is a challenge, unfortunately, for theaters to get enough community participation.  And hopefully, that’s something that won’t wane over time.

Andrea:  What I love about that is in what I have seen in theater is that whoever’s working on the show, people from the lighting to stage crew to the person who is the lead of the play, they all seem to have the same amount of ownership that they take in the whole production.  Like, they feel so much a part of it and so proud of their production in the end, and that is inspiring to me.  And they all have to also respect one another.  You, as the playwright, have to respect the fact that the person who’s doing the lighting could ruin everything.  And you know, the way that everything plays together like that is fascinating to me, and then to think of a company and a team like this, that it doesn’t matter what role you play.  It’s going to be intricate and important, and we all have to respect each one, and we’ve all taken ownership in the end product.  I think that’s really inspiring.

Colin Crowley:  Yeah, I think that that’s a great point.  And certainly another great analogy to the business world, and it makes me think of how, like, even when I’m writing something,

I have to be conscious of how it works in the real world as opposed to how it looks on the page.  So, like, if you’re writing a speech for a character to recite, as an example, there’s a difference between what looks good on the page, and what reads well, and what sounds well.  Because when it comes to the speech being spoken, you have to pay attention to things like, you know, “Are the words easy for the actor to say,” and “When spoken, do the words have the right cadence that allows the actor to do something with it,” and things that don’t come across if you’re on a page.

And if you really want a successful experience in a show, you have to be willing to change things based on feedback from the actors.  So the actors say, “You know, it’s kind of hard for me to get this out or say this with this phrasing,” or “The phrasing seems awkward,” because again, whole different world from on the page and on the stage.  Then it’s part of the process working with the actor to say, “Okay, look, so let’s change that so it works for you.”  And it really speaks to how there’s collaboration even on very, very small things like that.

And definitely, also, to your point how it’s also a great analogy because everyone really does have to work together to have a common passion.  Because if you have, like, one actor who has sort of low energy and clearly isn’t engaged, then you see the ripple effects that that has on other people because they all depend on each other for that common energy, especially when you’re actually on the stage doing the show.

And that’s another great analogy to the business world with teams where you really need people not only respecting each other, but also all in and invested and obviously invested, I would say.  Otherwise, you can have an energy gap that impacts everyone.

Andrea:  So, it seems like it would be pretty important that people who are in leadership are able to kind of help define what the production really is.  “What is the product, not just the product of the company, but what is the overarching kind of thing that we are producing for the world?  What’s the difference that we make here,” and that sort of thing so that everybody can get a sense of how they play into the big picture and can be a part of it like that.

Colin Crowley:  Yeah.  And in that regard, I would say that when you look at the role of the director in a theatrical production, that’s really a great analogy in the business world to a good manager.  Because, you know, they have their eyes on everything.  So, they have their eyes on the actors and what the actors say, what the set looks like, and the lighting, and the sound.  And whereas, they’re not the individual master of anything.  They’re the ones who have to put everything together into some sort of coherent whole and work with everyone.

And when you look at how directors work with actors, at least the good directors…  The bad ones tell actors what to do, which is like how a bad manager just tells someone what they’re doing wrong or tells them how they should do something.  Whereas you notice good directors go through almost a process of extended self-discovery with actors.  So, when an actor is trying to understand a role, they tend to help them understand the role through questions as opposed to dictating to them.  So they’ll ask questions about a character’s motivation or how a character’s feeling at a certain time, or even give them questions outside of the purview of the play.  “So does this character have relatives someplace,” or what have you.

So, it’s just kind of an interesting process and very much like what it takes to be a good manager, where you have to be able to work with people, and that you get the best out of people through questioning them and encouraging them to understand their place in the team.  And through that, you bring out the best that they can be, all while having to keep your eyes in all these other areas to make sure that the lighting is fine, the sound is good, and the set looks great, knowing that if one of those pieces fails, that it can impact the entire picture.  And having to care about all those other things – the lighting, the sound, etc. – by working, again, with independent people who are the masters in their respective space and collaborating on what a common vision looks like.

Andrea:  And with acting, there’s so much of a release of one’s, like, just humanity that for a director to come on board and to tell someone how to be or what to do exactly and be exacting in that, it makes it very difficult for that actor to be able to really release the humanity and then truly connect with the audience.  And so, again, just the idea that anybody that’s working on a team is human.  And when we are able to release kind of the humanity of ourselves and be able to connect in a human way within the structure – like you were talking about – of operations, then it feels like a release.  It feels beautiful.  It feels like art like you were talking about at the beginning.

Colin Crowley:  Yes, definitely that’s very true.  And I would say definitely analogous to the kind of the high you get as a customer support person when you really fulfill, I guess you could say, the pinnacle of your calling, which is when you’re helping someone in need – especially someone who’s in a really tough spot – and how grateful they are for your assistance.  And you really feel some purpose in what you do, and it helps you to see what your place is and why you’re there to help people, and bringing out those moments and encouraging them are definitely key.

Andrea:  Is that kind of what drives you in your role with Freshly?

Colin Crowley:  Yeah.  I’d say what’s great about Freshly is… you know, you can work for other companies where you have a useful product that people find a degree of satisfaction in, like shoes or something.  But it’s really kind of a different plane when you have product – meals, readymade meals – that you know is so directly impactful to someone else’s life.  And when you hear stories from customers about how much they depend on our meals to fit their lifestyle, to help them eat more healthy, or you know, someone’s sending meals to their elderly parents because they can’t cook for themselves.  So, it just really brings it home when you’re dealing with a product that’s very, very personal to people’s very livelihood.

And that just naturally fuels a drive in customer support when you hear these cases of customers who really need help.  [It] really helps to kind of center you as to what your purpose is in the organization in the way that I find is more profound than other companies I’ve worked at, where it’s a little bit harder to define where that purpose is and to be able to frame it as impactfully as we can in our specific circumstances.

And of course, it’s never more true than in this current time now when we’re dealing with COVID-19, and so many people are hunkering down and need meals delivered to their door.  So that’s just going to double down for us even more.

Andrea:  When you are writing plays, do you have any kind of message?  Do you feel like that you’re trying to accomplish some sort of transformation that you desire for the audience?  Or what motivates you in actually writing aside from what we already know – which is just exploring the new and discovering and you know, you’re self-learning and all that?

Colin Crowley:  It kind of depends on the nature of the play.  So, there are some plays I’ve written that very consciously were written just to be fun.  So, like, I’ve written a farce that’s been pretty successful.  So, some plays, there’s no intended grave meaning behind them, which in of itself is a good thing because I think that there’s a lot of seriousness and a lot of problems in the world, so sometimes it’s fine to take a break.

But for other plays, most typically, I’m motivated to explore a certain theme that rings true to me.  And that’s typically what inspires me; either that or great characters.  So, it’s usually one of those two things where I like to use plays to explore a certain theme.  And not necessarily even reach a conclusion about it but just explore it.  Or I like to use plays as a way to do a character study, and I guess, through that kind of mine certain commonalities in the human experience.

One example is a play I recently had done out in the Los Angeles area late last year.  It uses a historical framing device, and it’s about Warren G. Harding, who ultimately became one of our presidents, of course, and his nomination process.  But the play, even though it has that historical backdrop, etc., it’s really about fate.  And it’s really about the open question as to whether there is such a thing as fate.  And if so, what is that?  Is that God?  Is that something else, and into what extent does fate control our lives?  Or is what we deem faithful just a result of our own human flaws when we kind of self-limit ourselves by our inadequacies?

So, that’s an example of a play that I’ve more consciously wrote because I was interested in that idea as channeled through this story, and the play is geared towards exploring that issue.

Another play I’ve had some success with about the author Dorothy Parker, and the noted wit.  I was inspired to write just because I was intrigued by this balance she had in her life between this public persona where she was associated with a very witty literary set of people in 1920s New York, where everything was fun and games, and there wasn’t much seriousness about it.  And then at home, she had issues in her first marriage with her husband who had come back from the First World War with what we now know as PTSD and was involved in drugs, and alcohol, and so forth.  And just that juxtaposition of this public persona which was artificially jovial when contrasted with what was going on in her home life and how she managed that.  So that was more of like a character study example that inspired me to write that particular play.

Andrea:  Okay, so I know that you’re a whole being.  You’re a whole person.  You have a family with children, and you work at a company, and then you’re a playwright.  And I’m curious, to kind of help us wrap this whole conversation up, if you were to get to the end of your life and look back and just be really pleased with how things worked out or what happened or what you accomplished, what do you think you will have accomplished by then?

Colin Crowley:  Oh, that’s a good question.  Well, I think, interestingly, I would look at it in regards to those pillars that you mentioned because I kind of compartmentalize my life into those pillars pretty neatly.  When it comes to work, so wanting to do well in my career, and be able to make a difference for people through that.  And then you have the artistic pillar with wanting to do well in my plays.  And then you have the family pillar about wanting to be a good father.

If I would look back on my life, I would say that my ideal situation would be first and foremost to have been a great father and raise great children who are able to contribute to their families and the world in the most productive way possible.  So, just knowing that I gave them all the tools that they needed.  And I would like to feel, in the playwriting world, that…  Success can be transitory in theater, but at least I’d like to be able to feel that I’d got out everything I wanted to say for all practical purposes and that there is at least some degree of exposure to that.  But just getting everything out would make me feel fulfilled.

And in the career space, I would say I would like to be able to know that I had created organizations that had still lasted, like the customer support organization at Freshly.  And importantly, on the people aspect, know that I provided a lot of opportunities to people who came up through that organization to go and do other great things with their lives.

Andrea:  Colin, thank you so much for this really fascinating conversation.  It’s been rich, and really fun.

Colin Crowley:  Oh, thank you.  Yes, it’s been a great pleasure!

Andrea:  And Colin if anybody’s interested in seeing your plays or using your play at their theater or connecting with you in some way, would you like to share anything about yourself for that?

Colin Crowley:  Yeah.  I’m afraid I don’t have anything coming up right now because, unfortunately, COVID-19 has kind of shut down a lot of the theater world for now.  But yeah, I have a website, which is colinspeercrowley.com. So, you can go there, and I have a list of my plays and contact information as well.  So yeah, if anyone would like to get in touch to ask questions about my plays or anything else, then they’re more than welcome to do so.

Andrea:  Awesome!  All right, thanks, Colin.  Thanks for being a “Voice of Influence” for our listeners.

Colin Crowley:  My pleasure. Thank you!

When Narcissism Comes to Your Organization with Dr. Chuck DeGroat

Episode 150

Dr Chuck DeGroat Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Dr. Chuck DeGroat is Professor of Counseling and Christian Spirituality at Western Theological Seminary Holland MI, and Co-Founder and a Senior Fellow at Newbigin House of Studies, San Francisco. He is a licensed therapist, author, retreat leader, and spiritual director. Chuck has been married to Sara for 25 years and has two daughters. Chuck is also the author of the new book, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.

Today we’re tackling the subject of narcissism, the systems that allow it, and how to deal with it. This conversation is applicable to organizations of all kinds but we take a deeper look at how it shows up in churches specifically, and in organizations that have a similar structure and culture. I think you’re going to find this to be an incredibly rich conversation.

In this episode, Chuck shares how it feels to be on the other side of a narcissist, how to recognize the narcissistic bite, vulnerability versus fauxnerability, what happens when we are complicit with a narcissistic leader, why we protect people in power, how to use our voice even though it may feel narcissistic, and so much more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, and they work to make it matter more.  This is Andrea Wenburg, and you’re listening to the Voice of Influence podcast.

All right, we’re tackling the subject of narcissism today.  What’s really interesting about this conversation is that we’re talking about not just narcissism itself, but also systems that allow narcissism, that are susceptible to narcissism, and how to deal with it.  There is much going on in this conversation.

The person who is with me here today is Dr. Chuck DeGroat.  He is a Professor of Counseling in Christian Spirituality at Western Theological Seminary, and co-founder and a Senior Fellow at Newbigin House of Studies, San Francisco.  He is a licensed therapist, an author, retreat leader, and spiritual director.  Chuck has been married to Sara for twenty-five years and has two daughters.  He has a new book out called When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.

This conversation is certainly applicable to organizations of all kinds.  But we do talk about some of what goes on in churches, specifically, and in organizations that have that kind of a structure.  I think that you’re going to find this an incredibly rich conversation because we tackled a lot.  We talked about what narcissism is, how you know if you’re sort of on the other side of narcissism.  He talks about the narcissistic bite and fauxnerability – which is a fake sort of vulnerability – different characteristics that people who have narcissism… those characteristics that they display, and what happens when we are complicit with somebody who is a narcissistic leader.

So, why do we do that?  Why do we like how we feel around that person?  And why do we protect other people in power?  There is so much here.  We discuss whether or not it’s possible for a narcissistic to change and how people can kind of determine whether or not their impulse to lead, to have influence, to be up on stage, to have their podcast… whether or not that is narcissistic, and whether or not we need to be concerned about that or how we handle that without completely refusing to use our voice.

So, how do we use our voice even though it may feel like, “Could it be narcissistic?”  These are really, really interesting things that we talk about in this conversation, and I think that you’re going to get a lot out of it.  I highly recommend that you check out Dr. DeGroat’s book, When Narcissism Comes to Church.

Here’s my interview with Dr. Chuck DeGroat:

Andrea:  Chuck DeGroat, it is great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Thank you so much.  It’s good to be with you.

Andrea:  You have just written a book that’s just been published When Narcissism Comes to ChurchHealing your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse.  This is such an important topic.  What led you to write this particular book?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s a good question.  The safer version of that story really goes back to the work that I’ve done over the last fifteen years or so.  I do a lot of psychological testing for people who are pastors and ministry leaders and church planters and organizational leaders.  And what we’ve seen, particularly, in the church – and I know your audience is broader than that – but what we’ve seen, sadly, in the church is that a significant majority of people going into ministry test in what we call the Cluster B, or the DSM-5 calls the Cluster B personality disorders, which feature narcissistic tendencies.

And so that’s a primary reason to sort of diagnose and explain why that is, particularly in church and ministry contexts.  The larger reason is actually more personal.  I mean, it goes back to my days in seminary in the mid-1990s, in my own arrogance, in my own certainty, in my own sense of being God’s gift to ministry, and recognizing that that was painful for people in my life and for my wife and doing my own work in counseling.  And so that’s been really important.

Andrea:  Let’s start with defining narcissism, though.  Our audience is somewhat familiar with the term, but would you do that for us?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yes.  So, when we think about narcissism, just to kind of click off a few characteristics, we often think of the classic grandiosity.  Alongside of that, there’s often a kind of interpersonal attention-seeking that goes along.  We, more often than not, see that those who are diagnosably narcissistic show very little empathy.  In other words, they’re really just not able to connect with the basic needs and emotions of another person.  And then often, because they relate in these ways, there are impairments in their relationships and in their work.  And so, there are ripple effects within organizations, churches, and so forth.

But one of the things I say is that might be kind of a classic caricature of narcissism, but it is more complicated than that.  But yeah, more often than not, we see this in attention-seeking, grandiosity, lack of empathy, and impairments in relationships.

Andrea:  And what does that look like when you’re on the other side of that coin when you’re the person who is experiencing the narcissism?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Mhm.  It’s crazymaking.  It can be really confusing because – and I’ve been under narcissistic leaders and I’ve experienced narcissism in organizations – oftentimes, you’re drawn to a narcissistic leader.  He or she may be inspirational, influential in your life, they may cast vision that is exciting and impactful.  And yet when you experience what I call narcissism’s bite, you will experience it as you’ll feel kind of crazy.  You’ll wonder, “Is it me or is it that person?”  “Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m missing something.”  “Maybe I did something wrong.  After all, he’s so powerful and everyone loves him.  It’s got to be me.”

Andrea:  Yes.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  So, you second-guess your own reality often.

Andrea:  Narcissism’s bite you said?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Mhm.

Andrea:  What does that tend to look like?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, it can be a little tiny bite sometimes and it can be a big bite.  Oftentimes with the smaller bites, it looks like what we call emotional abuse or spiritual abuse.  These are like tiny, little knife blows over the course of many years.  It might be a cutting kind of remark or critique.  It might be pulling the rug out from under you within a project.  It might be sort of whispering in the ear of a colleague about how you’re not doing your job.  It might be any of those kinds of things, but eventually, when it comes back to you, it’s kind of like, “Ouch, that hurt!  I thought I was doing well.  I thought that he liked me.”  And so the bite can be something of a confusing ouch, in which you say to yourself, “I’m just not sure it happened.  I thought I was playing by the rules.”

Andrea:  And then you just feel completely confused about what’s going on.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:  The term gaslighting comes to mind.  So is that how you would define gaslighting or what is that?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, I think so.  I think that phenomenon of gaslighting is, it’s a word that we’re using or a descriptor that we’re using more and more to put words around that experience of feeling crazy and confused.  I remember years ago when I was under the leadership of a narcissist.  This was someone who’s well respected and a number of important circles had raised lots of money, had influence.  And I remember that there were these ouch moments, you know, what I described as the narcissistic bite, right?  There are these moments like this where it was kind of like, “Ouch, that hurt,” or “Why did he say that to me?” or “Is he not confident in my abilities?”

But more often than not, I had this sense of, “It’s got to be me.  There’s got to be something wrong with me.”  And there would actually be times where he’d come to me and he’d say, “Chuck, I’m just not sure what’s going on with you.  You’re not as sharp as you used to be,” or “You’re not as engaged,” or “Last week, when you got up in church and you gave that announcement, you weren’t as charismatic as you usually are.”  And, so those of us on the other end of this gaslighting that you make mention of feel as if we’re going crazy.

Andrea:  Right.  As though you’re not sure what your reality really is anymore.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Mhm.  That’s a really good way of putting it.  And I think there are times where we find ourselves in that space, and I’ve seen people leave.  My primary context is more like ministry, Christian organizations, and things like that.  And I’ve seen people leave ministry, leave pastoring, leave organizations with their tail tucked between their legs, questioning their own reality until they get them in with a good therapist and begin to identify like, “Oh, it wasn’t me.  Actually, I was doing as well as I could have, but I experienced the bite of a narcissist.”

Andrea:  Okay.  That’s so important.  So, now, what does somebody do when they’re in that situation?  Maybe they have experienced the bite of the narcissist.  How do they heal from that? Are there any particular steps that people take or that you just find a good therapist?  What are some of the things that you suggest?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  Yeah, that’s a great question.  And really it does begin by defining reality.  As you mentioned, they begin to question reality, right?  And so, you’ve got to find a space, a place, a person in which you begin to define reality rightly, and, oftentimes, that’s a therapist.  I’ll often say to people who call me, write me say, “Hey, I think I’m in a narcissistic organization with a narcissistic pastor.  Do I confront him?”  And I’ll often say, “No, don’t do that at all.  Actually, step back, and take care of yourself first.  Define reality, get clear on what’s going on.  Begin to tend to your own wounds, and heal your own wounds, and then make that decision as to whether or not you want to engage, but only after doing some clarifying work in therapy.”

And, oftentimes, as a therapist, when I’m doing this work with someone, it’s just not one session, it’ll often be weeks and sometimes months before they can begin to get clear on, “Oh, this actually happened to me.  And, now, I’m beginning to connect the dots and I’m beginning to realize I’ve been in this…”  Like, I was talking to someone earlier today who was in an organization with a narcissistic leader for thirty years, and it took twenty-six years to wake up to it.  And so this can take a long while.

Andrea:  And I would imagine that tending to your own wounds… like, you have to first recognize what the wounds are, and I suppose that’s part of that defining reality and seeing what it is.  I’ve certainly seen it happen where people don’t even realize that they are hurt, that they’ve been hurt until they start to see it in their body, and in the way they react to other people.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s right.  And they don’t realize it even in their body.  And so I’ll ask them, “So, how do you feel?”  Or “How do you experience this in your body?”  And they’ll say, “I feel okay, fine.”  And I’ll say, “Well, you got to give me a little more than that.”  And it’ll take a while for them to actually get in tune.  So, I have to ask specific questions like, “What about your sleep? Has your sleep been disrupted?”  “I don’t sleep at all.  I don’t sleep well at all.  I’m constantly ruminating on stuff at work.”  Or “I’ve had this pain in my back for like the last five years, and it just doesn’t go away.”  Or “I’m dealing with heartburn and acid reflux all the time over the last three or four years since I’ve been working in this organization.”  “I’m constantly down,” or “I’m constantly anxious.”  And, yeah, what is amazing is that at the outset, people often can’t identify those feelings or those symptoms.  They’re so disconnected because they’ve been in survival mode for so long.

Andrea:  Right.  And they’re not even sure that… like we were talking about before, they’re not sure what their reality is.  So, I can see why it would be super helpful to have other people’s perspective if it’s a really good, you know, therapist or even friends, as well, to be able to say, “No, you’re not crazy.  You are normal.  They’re not normal.”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, just to reflect back and say, “That doesn’t sound healthy.  Let’s have a conversation.”  Yeah, definitely.

Andrea:  Okay.  So, it seems like we tend to exempt people who are in leadership who tend to be really talented and charismatic, attracting people to the cause, that sort of thing…  We tend to exempt those people from accountability when it comes to the narcissistic bite, if you will.  I mean, that’s what I see.  Is that what you see, and why do we do that?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  I think that that’s a great observation, and I think you’re right.  In large part, we protect those in power and people in power protect those in power.  When I tell stories, by the way, I always kind of conflate different stories as to kind of conceal the identities, right?

Andrea:  Sure.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  A few years ago, in a situation in which a prominent pastor was revealed to be abusive, and it stunned me because I knew the community and I knew some of the people involved.  But I knew that some of the people involved, who I had some love for and respect for, that they helped cover it up and protect this person.  And I knew them well enough to know that, like, that’s not…  At their core, I know that these are good human beings, and yet, when you get into those positions of power, and you become self-protective, and you develop relationships of loyalty, you call in favors, right?  And so, “We do exempt this person because, you know, he’s had so much of an impact.  He has born lots of fruit in his ministry, or you know, he’s been so successful in his organization.”

And so, we don’t want to go after those folks, you know, because it seems like they’ve done a good job.  This is where we have to, again, name reality.  We have to name the pain.  Where there is narcissism, there’s always a debris field of abuse: spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse at times.  So, this is where we need to name reality and tell the truth about what’s really going on and the impact.  And I remember, going back to that story a few years ago, as I talked to some of those people involved and said, “But do you realize the debris field?”  And as they recognized the debris field, there was this sense of profound shame, like, “Oh, I allowed this to happen.  I’m so sorry.”

Andrea:  That’s got to be really painful to see when you have allowed something to happen.  I would imagine, that with the self-protection that you were mentioning before, that part of what we’re protecting ourselves from is the idea that we’re wrong.  The idea that God might not be who I thought He was if this pastor isn’t who I thought he was.  Do you see that as well?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, I do.  I do, and I think there are lots of reasons why we find ourselves maybe covering up or complicit.  I remember a number of years ago being kind of in the middle of a situation where I found myself there.  And during that time, I liked proximity to the narcissistic leader.  And I didn’t know or think that this person was narcissistic, but I liked it because of how I felt around this person.  And then when others started to come forward and say, “I had this experience and this experience and this experience,” it was hard for me to begin to connect the dots and recognize that this person who I respect and who has high confidence in me and who has encouraged me is also a really flawed human being who has hurt others.

And so there are a lot of reasons why we’re not entirely clear right away, you know.  At the time, I had a license in counseling.  I had a Ph.D. in psychology, right?  I’m supposed to know these things.  And yet, what I want to say to your listeners is, let’s have some kindness for ourselves and offer ourselves some grace because sometimes we have blind spots too.  And then if we do find ourselves in a place or position where we’re complicit, then let’s own it, and recognize how our participation has hurt other people and really be honest about that.

Andrea:  Wow, your statement: “I like how I feel when I’m around this person.”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Gosh, I’ve seen that.  And of course, I’ve felt that, and I’m sure other people felt it around me when I’ve been, you know, unhealthily handling influence.  But that is really important because a lot of times we make our decisions based on how we’re feeling around somebody.  We think that that is a good thing to feel good, you know, “I love how I feel when I’m with this person.”  But what are the feelings that we should be attuned to, that would kind of trigger to say, “Wait a second, I need to take a step back because I’m actually feeling…” whatever it might be, whether it be indignant or…  What are some of those things that we should be watching for?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, you mean like when we kind of find ourselves in the middle or maybe even a little complicit?

Andrea:  Yeah.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Well, that’s tough because we’re not always aware of our feelings in that moment.  I think what I often tell people is be aware of the “high U” experience.  So, what I mean by that is it can be like a roller coaster, being around a narcissist, because you experience these high highs and then these low lows.  And so be aware of being on a kind of perpetual, year-long, five year-long, however long it takes adrenaline high where you’re riding this wave, you know.  So the narcissistic leader announces some big new program or initiative for the company and you’re going to be involved and you’re riding the wave up.  And there’s a party and the drinks are flowing.  And I’m feeling really great about myself and I belong.  And then he comes to me three weeks later and says, “You really dropped the ball on this,” and now I’m feeling really low.

And, oftentimes, you know, I look back to my own life ten, twelve years ago when I was in that place, but oftentimes, I’ll find that when people come to me, it’s sort of like, they’re somewhere, probably, riding close to the low part of the roller coaster.  Now, they’re recognizing that they’re on the outs.  But as they document their experience over the last two years, or five years or ten years, there was a sense of, if I ask, “Well, what was it like? What did you feel?”  “Well, it felt so good for such a long time and I was riding such a high that I really, you know, wasn’t as healthy as I could have been.  And I was eating too much and drinking too much and making a lot of money and doing a lot of great stuff, but now I realized that I was kind of lost.”  And lots of folks who I talked to will talk about feeling lost, feeling alone, feeling like there wasn’t any ever real connection.  It was more like trauma bonding with this person.  And there was never really a sense of, like, we knew each other or we were connected to one another.

Andrea:   Hmm.  Trauma bonding.  Can you explain that?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, trauma bonding.  Yeah, it’s a kind of false intimacy where you develop a relationship around your frustration with a scapegoat or someone else.  And, so, you know, for instance, just talking to someone recently who really did life and relationship like this for a long while, and she and a co-worker had a bad experience at another company and they both came from that company.  And they both reported to the same narcissistic boss.  And so they would often get together and they’d talk about how terrible it was in this other place.

And they thought that they had a relationship.  In fact, they’d get together at times for drinks after work and share life stories with one another until the narcissistic leader picked one over the other for a position.  And then there was a sense of, “Oh, we didn’t have a relationship.  All we were doing was we were just kind of raging with one another about our shared experience of anger at another person.”  And that’s not really intimacy.  That’s not healthy intimacy.  That’s a kind of false intimacy that’s born out of pain.

Andrea:  Okay, raging about another person because of something that they did that we don’t like.  Boy, does that happen a lot!

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yes. Yeah.  Right.

Andrea:  So that, in particular, sounds like a really important thing to be attuned to in ourselves when we’re doing that and then to ask those questions around, you know, “Is this healthy?”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  I love that phrase that you just used, “to be attuned to ourselves”, right?  And to recognize… and I have some shame about this, that I haven’t recognized this at different times over the years.  You know, you just said it.  We all find ourselves in conversations like this, and you know, it’s a half-hour in and I’m going off on someone who I’m frustrated with, and then I have this moment of clarity.  And this happens more often than you think, I have this moment of clarity where it’s like, “What am I doing?  What am I participating in?”  But it feels powerful if we’re honest.  It feels powerful.

Andrea:  And like you said, the adrenaline high.  There is an adrenaline high when you feel that kind of indignance.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  And the reality is, for many of us – and I’m one of these folks – if we look at our own stories, we realize that we experienced some kind of pain, trauma, and abuse in our past.  And so, the power of that moment of scapegoating another or raging about another, there’s a kind of power because you feel seen, you feel heard, and you feel empowered in your speech.  And I realized that in a way that for me is a really sad and troubling way of getting needs met.  It’s not ultimately how we healthily get our needs met, but it’s something that we commonly do. 

Andrea:  Let’s move toward the system.  So, your book talks about healing your community; not just the individual, but also the community.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Right.

Andrea:  How do we know when we’re in a situation… or how do we even recognize the difference between a leader who just has a lot of influence and a narcissistic leader?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Oh, that’s a good question.  Yeah, because they can look a lot alike, right?  And the thing about it is, oftentimes, when I get talking about these things, people will come back to me and they’ll say, “So, you’re saying that a leader can’t be charismatic or influential or inspiring.”  And I want to clear this up and say not at all.  I think they can be all of the above.  But those who are narcissistic manifest this cluster of attributes, and you know, we talked about it a little bit earlier.  There’s that grandiosity, that attention-seeking, that lack of empathy, and ultimately their influence is not in service of others.  It’s really in service of their own ego.

And, so, I’ve met some of the most gifted, charismatic, influential folks who are humble and self-aware and curious.  And in fact, I had someone come to me who said, “You’ve just written a book on narcissism. Am I a narcissist?”  And I said, “No, actually, just the fact that you’d ask that question tells me that you’re probably not narcissistic,” because those who are, are deathly scared of asking that question.  So, where there is curiosity, where there is wonder, where there is humility, self-understanding, we don’t see narcissism, although we may see some of the features that look like narcissism in some contexts.

Andrea:  I love that list that you just gave; the curiosity, the humility, and… self-understanding, is that what you said?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, right.

Andrea:  I can see how it would be really helpful to see that that is how you know that somebody is more healthy in terms of their influence.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.

Andrea:  So, when it comes to the system, what is a narcissistic system?  Is there a narcissistic system, and what creates the system around somebody to make that happen?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Oh, yeah.  Do you have a two-hour window to talk about this?

Andrea:  I sure do!

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  This is complicated because, you know, it’s one thing to deal with a powerful, influential, narcissistic leader.  It’s another thing to deal with a system.  That’s where it’s sort of… it’s invisible.  It’s like, you know, we’re recording this in the midst of COVID-19 right now, you know, and it’s a virus.  It’s in the air.  It’s invisible, you can’t see it.  And you know, my context – as I mentioned earlier – is often Christian circles context, organizations.

And I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine who got a job at a very large Christian organization and almost immediately recognized that there was a problem.  Like, this organization that was actually devoted to caring for others featured people higher up in the organization and middle management, who were all consumed with being the best, doing the best; “We’re better than that organization. We’re more unique. We’re more special. We’ve got more influence. We’ve got more power.”

And I mean, this was literally in the air, in the waters that they swam in.  And I remember my friend calling me, saying, “What do I do?”  And I came in, I did some consulting with them and there was a slow recognition over time that because of a history of leadership there and because of their quick rise to power and influence in their particular sphere, there was this sense that even though it was a Christian organization, you’d think it would feature humility, and deference to others, and self-surrender, and that those things were not evident at all.

And as the community began to realize this, it really took the higher-ups the leaders, the vice presidents – as they begin to realize this – there was this kind of collective humbling like, “What have we been doing?”  It was really powerful to see, but boy, it’s really difficult.  I mean, I mentioned already that we can take two hours.  I don’t think I fully answered your question, but I mean, it really takes some time and some real significant effort and intentionality to draw out the depths of systemic narcissism.

Andrea:  You mentioned a couple things there that sounded a little bit like a group of people who believe that they are the hero, that they’re going to come in and save the day.  Maybe that they are right and everybody else is wrong, that sort of thing.  And is that in line with what you were saying?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s right.  That’s right.  And I think that there’s a collective sense of… I’m thinking of, now, a megachurch where when they came to grips with this, the way they told this story was, “We really thought…”  Keep in mind, Christian context again, they really had this idea that like, “God has blessed us more than God has blessed anyone else in the area.”

Andrea:  Yeah.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  “And you can see it because our church has grown.”  And you don’t need God in the picture necessarily to think that, you know, “The market has blessed our organization more than any other organization.”  So, we can all sort of have this narcissism sort of implicit or explicit in our collective system.

Andrea:  Right, because we have had more success or we are blessed more or yeah, I get that.  Here we go, I’m making the assumption.  I don’t know that it’s true.  I mean, do you believe that churches are particularly susceptible to narcissistic leaders and becoming a narcissistic system, and why would that be?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  That’s the ten-million-dollar question.  Why would that be the church of all things?  And the reality is, is going back to the early centuries of the church – if we just kind of take a historical journey backwards – you see from the time of the kind of the Advent of Constantine and Christendom, there has been this conflation of Christianity and power represented in the Christian empire, right?  And so, narcissism is not a new phenomenon.  And I do think that there is this sense of manifest destiny at times.  Like, “God is on our side, and we’re at war with the powers and principalities and we’ve got to win the war.  And we’ve got to do everything that we can to win the war.  We’ve got to marshal our forces.”  And so we use militaristic language.  I can’t tell you how many churches and organizations I’ve learned about that have names, that have some sort of militaristic overtones or undertones, right?  And I remember when I was a little kid in vacation Bible school and church singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Andrea:  Yeah, “I’m in the Lord’s Army.  Yes, sir!”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  There’s this sense that we have to conquer, and look at the damage over the years that has been done in the name of the conquering army of Christ when Jesus himself was a suffering servant.  Peter picks up the sword and cuts off the ear of the centurion, and Jesus restores the ear, you know.  So, I have trouble answering your question because it’s so paradoxical.

But I remember a colleague, an older colleague of mine – who’s been doing assessment longer than I have – once said to me that, you know, “Look at all the men, in particular, who go into ministry who test on the narcissistic spectrum.”  And he said, “Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that you get up on stage and you say, ‘This is the word of the Lord’?”  And I wonder if there’s just something to that that we are representatives of God.  “I’ve got a master of divinity, right?  And somehow, I’m ordained, and I’ve got a Master of Divinity, and I’m special.  God has set me apart.”  It’s really dangerous.

Andrea:  Right.  Oh, man.  And anytime I hear, “God told me,” or “God’s way,” I feel very nervous about that dynamic because it really kind of strips away people’s desire or their thinking that they have the ability to think for themselves.  It’s like, “Okay, so you’ve told me, you’re sort of in a higher-up position than I am.  I assume that you’re closer to God.  You’ve told me that God’s way is this way.  So, I need to conform to that and I’m conforming to what you’re telling me because you’ve said it.”  But is it God’s way?  I mean, it takes away that sense of agency, I think, that people need to maintain in order to really buy-in, I guess, to what God is saying to them, you know…  I don’t know, to faith in general.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s really good.  And you know, what’s tricky about that now is that for a long, long time, we’ve given pastors power.  Power to absolve us of our sins, you know, power to speak to us when we come to them for marriage counseling and say holy things.  And now we’re seeing a decline in the church.  We’re seeing a decline in the power and the respect that ministers are given.  And I think it’s directly related to narcissism in the church and the abuse of power in the church.  We’re hearing more and more about ex-Evangelical – people have left evangelicalism – people have stepped away from church, people are deconstructing.  And I think this is directly related to really the absence of Jesus, you might say, in the church, you know, because I think Jesus stands in the middle of the church, and is kind of like, “This doesn’t look a whole lot like Me.”

Andrea:  And “laying down my life and giving up all of my rights as God.”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Right, right, neighborly love, love for the poor, and you know, suffering servanthood.  So, I do think that we’re at a moment – I’ve said this in the book, I say this in lots of different contexts – I think we’re at a moment of reckoning.  And we’ve got some choices to make about how we’ll show up.  And it’s interesting to me that we are recording this during COVID-19, where you’ve got this big, kind of, anxiety, right?  “How are we going to do church?

We’ve got to get video equipment.  We’ve got to put it online.  And we’ve got to make it look really good,” when some pastor friends who I really respect are saying, “Okay, we’ll figure that out, but what we need to do is we need to move to our neighborhood.  We need to move to people in our community who are struggling, kids in public schools who aren’t getting meals.”  The ones who I think are following Jesus really authentically are thinking about people in the community, people in need, and they’re moving toward the margins.

Andrea:  Thinking about others who… without the goal of… like, they’re not going to add to their power per se. 

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Right, right.  It’s not about power.

Andrea:  Yeah, it’s just about connecting and serving.  Would you say that there are characteristics of an organization that make it more susceptible to becoming a narcissistic system?  I think about things like a hierarchical structure.  What are your thoughts?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s good.   I do think there’s something to say about structures, for sure.  Sometimes hierarchical structures, I think sometimes theologies, and oftentimes it has much more to do with psychology.  In other words, how people show up, what they bring, and the baggage they bring.  People in pain connect to other people in pain, and they look for and idolize the narcissistic leader, right?  I mean, you can wrap whatever theology or structure you want around it.

And this is where it gets a little bit tricky at times because people often come to me and they’ll say, “Well, you probably see much more narcissism in non-denominational churches in your work.”  And I’ll say, “No, I see it in places where there’s lots of accountability.  I see it in places where there are level structures and hierarchical structures.  I see it in places where women can be pastors and women aren’t allowed to be pastors.”

I do think those things factor in at times, but I do think that oftentimes, it’s a group of people looking for… the psychological language is they’re“ideal hungry followers”.  They’re idealistically looking for someone to meet all of their heroic aspirations, you know.  Someone really to be God, in a sense, God in the flesh.  And this is easily transferable into all kinds of different organizations and startups.  I lived and pastored in the Bay Area for a while, and you know, the kinds of leaders that commanded the attention at the head of startups, you know, and larger companies in the Bay Area, oftentimes, there were a group of followers who are hungry for that kind of heroic leadership, you know.  And so, it’s a function of some kind of collective psychology as well, too.

Andrea:  Right.  That sense of needing a savior or needing a hero to come save the day and then, ah, phew, I feel relieved that somebody is gonna save this or save me or finally, somebody thinks what I think, and they’re going to take the message further.  And then that sense of relief, it just seems like people just let down their guard then and follow willy-nilly.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, I think that’s it.   And I think that this is not a contemporary phenomenon.  I think we’ve been doing it for a long time.  I mean, I’ve been doing this kind of work for over twenty years now, and it’s a shock to me that we’re really not much further along than we were even twenty years ago.  And that’s what?  The advent of lots of information, psychology and understanding spiritual and emotional abuse and trauma and gaslighting.  And we’re still missing it and following leaders who trick us into thinking that they’ve got it all, that they’re the hero.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Let’s move this conversation toward healing.  Let’s say a church then they’ve had a pastor that has displayed this narcissistic bite and has now left, and the church needs to heal somehow.  The temptation is to say that, “Oh good, the pastor’s gone, so we’re better now.”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yes.

Andrea:  But I know that you would not say that that’s necessarily the case.  So, can you tell us what kinds of steps a system or a church should go through to really heal and not allow that to happen again?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s a great question, and again, a complicated one.  Do you have two hours?

Andrea:  I know.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  So, one of the easier conversations I have with churches that are in crisis is around me coming in and helping them get out of a pretty significant jam with a narcissistic pastor.  Like when they’re really stuck, it’s not hard for a church to make the choice to say, “Come on in, and help us figure out what’s really going on here.”  The much harder conversation is once we get to a place where perhaps that narcissistic leader steps down, and I say to them, “Now, the real work happens, because now you’ve got to ask yourself a question, ‘How did we get into this in the first place? And what implications does this have for our team and for our structures and our organization and our people and our vision going forward?’”  And it’s kind of like what I hear then is, “Thank you so much for helping.  Don’t call us; we’ll call you,” and I’m being serious.

Andrea:  I believe you.  I absolutely believe you.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  And so that’s really… it’s sad to me.  It’s disturbing because what they end up doing… and we’ve seen this recently with quite a prominent example – I won’t name it – but a very large church that went through its own pain, and they develop a job description for the very same person that they just fired.  It’s kind of like, “Really, you couldn’t invest just a little bit more money for someone to come in and help you walk through this next season?”

Andrea:  Do you think that it’s money, though?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  I think it’s more than money.  I think it’s fear.  Like, all the attention is on narcissistic leader before then, but then I ask them to turn the attention to them and their own complicity in it.  I ask them to look at long-term patterns.  I ask them to look at structures, and I ask them to look at implicit beliefs.  All this comes from the Systems Thinking of Peter Senge, and when we do that kind of work, it’s kind of like, “Wow, now I have to actually ask hard questions of myself, and it was a lot easier to ask hard questions about the pastor.”

Andrea:  Well, if we’re already looking for somebody to save us and to be the hero, then if that hero then becomes… I don’t know, the bad guy, as soon as he’s gone, it’s like… the answer is gone, but also the problem’s gone.  You know, like you’re putting yourself in that position where you don’t matter in this scenario, and you do.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  You do.  And you’ve learned to live in a particular kind of way for a long time.  I think that there’s a sense of relief.  For instance, when that powerful narcissistic leader leaves, and there’s this sense of, “We’re okay now.  The problem is gone,” when the problem is still there.  It exists in the air, people’s ways of being, their styles of relating and communicating and assigning tasks and programming, all those things have been sort of formed around the habits of the system.  And so, you know, I’m watching as a number of churches that I’ve consulted over the years made the choice not to do this, and now there are different stages of dysfunction, whether or not they’ve hired another senior pastor that’s replaying, or there’s competition and drama amidst the remaining…whatever it is.  There’s a remaining toxicity that they haven’t dealt with.

Andrea:  And they need to read your book and then give you a call.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Okay, is there a way that we can have healthy influence with somebody who does seem to be a narcissist?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Well, I definitely think that relationship – let’s just say relationship, period – with a narcissist is really difficult.  I think someone who’s diagnosably narcissistic… and I talked about the narcissistic spectrum.  So, there can be people who have traits who are not diagnosably narcissistic, but if you are NPD – narcissistic personality disorder – it’s really hard to have influence.  It’s hard to have any kind of honest relationship because… the metaphor I like to use is just imagine you’re dealing with the actor on stage, not the real person behind the stage.  And so all you’re getting is the mask, and oftentimes they don’t know anything other than the mask.

So, the short answer to your question is it’s really hard to have influence.  Now, with someone with narcissistic traits, you’ll notice a curiosity.  And the question I like to ask – and this is a kind of litmus test for me – is, is someone willing to ask the question of his or her people, “How do I impact you or how do you experience me?”  And if a leader is willing to ask that question to his or her people and really receive honest answers without a threat of termination or whatever it might be, then I think we’re well on our way to the possibility of health.  But if they shut that down or if they don’t allow people to answer honestly, only answer a certain way, then I’m really suspicious of the possibility of any influence or progress.

Andrea:  Now, I’ve heard you use the word fauxnerability, like fake vulnerability.  It sounds like that would come into play here.  Like, how can you tell whether somebody is being genuinely vulnerable or just playing the game so that you think that they are?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  You ask good questions.  Wow, this one… so fauxnerability, that’s a term that I came up with – I hope no one else has used it before – but this fauxnerability looks a lot like honest self-disclosure.  It looks like transparency.  It may even look a little bit like empathy, but it really demonstrates none of those qualities and it’s really tricky. And you know, I’ve experienced this, and so that’s why I name it.  I’ve been sucked into it.  How do you notice it?  Because generally there are a number of different things, and the description is kind of laid out in more detail in the book.

But more often than not, when a person who’s fauxnerable, not vulnerable, talks about his or her life, they talk about their life in general terms.  They don’t talk about how they specifically have hurt people.  They may say, “Oh, I’ve made my share of mistakes over the years.”  But they won’t necessarily say, “Yeah, I just had to confess to someone that I’d been a real bully to them.”  You know, they won’t be that specific, right?  And they don’t manifest repentance or real genuine honesty over the course of time.  They may say something halfway honest at one point, but you don’t see that lasting over time.  And so, those are two common characteristics that you see with people who are generally more fauxnerable. 

Andrea:  All right.  Now, I have noticed that a lot of people, but I would say women in particular – this is what I’ve seen more – are pretty sensitive to the urges within them to want to be on stage, to want to perform, to want to lead or speak up with their voice, but they’re sensitive about it.  They’re nervous to share their voice.  They’re nervous to speak up or to lead because of their prior experience with what may or may not have been narcissism.  Or they’re worried about it being unhealthy power, a desire for glory.  I mean, this is certainly me.  So, I’m describing myself, certainly.  But would you help us bring some clarity to that difference between a healthy desire for influence and an unhealthy desire, whether that be on a stage, in a boardroom, or a conversation?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, yeah.  Well, I think what we always have to look at is one’s motivations.  And I think there can be and ought to be a healthy desire for influence that comes out of true humility and a desire to connect with others, to meet the needs of others.  And not in an unhealthy, self-sacrificial kind of way, but in a healthy self-surrendered kind of way.  Our motives are always mixed, you know.  And so, when someone comes to me and says, “Wow, I loved that attention that I got on stage tonight when I preached.”  That’s the second thing that’s actually encouraging to me.  Like, I’ll often say, “Thanks for saying that out loud,” because I think that sort of takes the power away from the narcissistic impulse.

I do think for women, in particular – and maybe I’m missing a piece of this – but I think at least a part of what I hear from some women who’ve been disempowered is, “Boy, it’s really tough to get up there and exert an influence when I’ve been so disempowered over time.”  And I know because I’m teaching a seminary where there are a number of women who’ve experienced this and now they’re preaching.  And I remember one woman saying to me, “There is a kind of like, ‘Screw you, I’m gonna get up there, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and I’m not gonna take no for an answer anymore.’”  And what I want to say is if that’s the case, that kind of feisty, edgy, maybe a little angry, just be honest about it.

And I think that there can be actually something beautifully repentant about that as well and honest about that, but just be honest about it.  I think that the more we disclose our lives to one another, our motivations, the more we realize that we’re all mixed.  None of us is, you know, perfect in terms of our own motivations, but I do think those who’ve been disempowered, sometimes it’s like, “I don’t have the benefit of choice or autonomy.  Like, I just get to show up and be humble.  Like, I actually have to fight my way to the stage, and that’s harder.”

Andrea:  Hmm.  Yeah, and I think that if you’re willing, if there’s something… at least what I found for myself, I should say, is that when I have found that I’m willing to be embarrassed in the moment – like, maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe I’ll get rejected – when I’m willing to put that on the line for the message, it doesn’t matter how I get the message out, whether it’s on stage or whatever.  There’s something about that, like you’d said, “You’re not just sacrificing yourself in an unhealthy way, but you’re willing to lay down the ego part of it even if it does end up feeling good.  There’s something about that initial, like, “I’m willing to put this on the line even if I screw up.  I’m gonna do this because I love people more than I’m worried about what they think of me.”

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.  And that’s where I’d hope and we’d hope, you know, that we’d all end up at some point.  And it’s obviously more complicated than that.  And I want all of your listeners to know that for those of us who have influence, you know, who record podcasts, who write books… I mean, someone actually presumed that I wasn’t narcissistic because I was writing on this.  And I said, “Oh, no, no, no.  You don’t actually get to a place where you publish books, and you speak a lot on these kinds of things without having a little bit of narcissism in you.”

But there is a… people get thrown off by this language, but a healthy narcissism.  I’d rather call it maybe a healthy confidence.  Psychologists tend to call it a healthy narcissism, at times, for young people like your five-year-old, who says, “Daddy, daddy, look at me! I’m doing a handstand,” you know.  But that healthy sense of… for instance, watching some of my students preach for the first time, and that healthy sense of like, “I did really good job. I’m really grateful;  I’m proud of myself.”  There’s something beautiful about that that I think we can celebrate.

Andrea:  Hmm, without going to the top of the roller coaster every time.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah.

Andrea:  It’s not the roller coaster.

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Yeah, that’s great.

Andrea:  So good.  Thank you so much, Chuck, for your work in this area and for sharing your work with us and being a “Voice of Influence” for our listeners.  Where can they find you and your book?

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:   Sure.  So, I blog.  I’ve got resources and other information over at chuckdegroat.net.  And then the book is called When Narcissism Comes to Church, and it’s at all the major booksellers.  So, you can find it at just about everywhere you look.

Andrea:  Perfect.  Thank you so much, Chuck!

Dr. Chuck DeGroat:  Thank you so much for hosting!  Great questions!  I appreciate it!

Why We Need to Understand Trauma and Coercive Control with Dr. Debra Wingfield

Episode 147

Dr. Debra Wingfield Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Dr. Debra Wingfield is an Author, Speaker, and Trainer for family abuse prevention and intervention treatment.  She practiced counseling for 25 years with domestic abuse victims, offenders, adults, and children from all types of dysfunctional family systems. She’s also provided family court advocacy since 1993 and would love to be able to train those within the court system about trauma.

In this episode, Debra shares what the courts miss in cases of domestic abuse due to not being sufficiently trauma-informed, the societal impact that misconceptions about abuse can have, what it means for the rest of society if we don’t actually address these misconceptions and have the correct understanding about trauma, the difference between parenting with coercive control and parenting in a healthy way, and so much more.

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

All right, so today I have with me Debra Wingfield.  She is an author, speaker, and trainer for family abuse prevention and intervention treatment.  She practiced counseling for twenty-five years with domestic abuse victims, offenders, adults, and children from all types of dysfunctional family systems, and she’s provided family court advocacy since 1993.  She would love to be able to train those within the court system about trauma.

So, in our conversation, one of the things that we talk about is what the courts miss in cases of domestic abuse because they are not sufficiently trauma-informed.  She also talks about the societal impact that misconceptions about abuse can have; so what it means for the rest of society if we don’t actually address these and have the correct understanding about trauma.  And then we also talk about the difference between parenting with coercive control and parenting in a healthy way.

There’s a lot to be gained from this episode, and I really look forward to you hearing.  Enjoy!

Andrea:  All right!  Debra Wingfield, it is great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Thank you, Andrea.  I’m honored to be here.

Andrea:  Would you tell us a little bit about what you do and why you do it?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Okay.  Well, I have been working in the field of abuse and working with trauma survivors for over forty-five years now in my career.  And I’ve worked with children.  I’ve worked with adults.  I’ve worked with teenagers.  And in all of that work what I found is that the dynamics that are connected with domestic abuse and coercive control have lifelong impacts on the individuals involved in that.  So, I have, over the years, gone from actually being a therapist and doing the groundwork there to now being more of an educator.  I have an online training center where I actually train people to understand the dynamics of domestic abuse and coercive control as well as how to actually help people – whether it’s survivors or it’s the abusers, how to work with them and help them go through a change process that will help them heal.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Who tends to be the people that you help with that?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Right now, I’m partnered with a program called Called Peace Ministries.  I’m training advocates for their program to work within the church system as well as in the community to actually be there and available for survivors who are coming out of relationships where they’ve been abused or they’ve been coercively controlled.  And to help them get through the court system as well as they can based on a very broken court system that we’re working with right now, to protect their children, to keep their children as safe as they can.

And I know you have some questions about the court system.  So one of the other things that I do is I actually serve as an advocate for survivors that are going through the family court.  And as I’m doing my work with them, I’m also teaching others to do that same work because that’s a legacy that I want to be leaving behind is that we’re creating an army.  And that army is to go out there into the communities around the world and we are international at this point and educating so that people understand more about, not only the dynamics, but the impacts and how that impacts us in society and how it can have lifetime impacts on those who are abused.

Andrea:  Do you do some of this training with professionals within the court system somehow?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  That’s my dream.  I would like to be working with some of the professionals that work in the court system.  At this point and time, they consider their training that they get through their degree programs as sufficient for the work that they’re doing.  And we know that through the research, we’ve been able to show that their lack of training in their degree programs actually contributes to more harm to children on down the line.

Andrea:  There are a few different questions that come to mind.  Well, first of all, you’ve been in this, it sounds like you said for forty-five years; you’ve been working with children, adults, teens in various ways.  How have you sort of sustained that work, that mission and the energy that it takes to continue that mission?  I’m sure it has to be somewhat discouraging a lot of times.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  You’re right, Andrea.  There are times when it is discouraging.  However, when I see someone who is able to come through their healing and get on the other side and really make a solid life for themselves, that keeps me moving forward.  We had a tragedy the first of this year.  My granddaughter overdosed, and I had gotten into working in the family court system because she had lost her son to her abuser, and that’s what took her down that downward spiral into using drugs because she just never felt like she had an opportunity to be a part of her son’s life.  So, I have dedicated the remainder of my years that I can do this work to her and her legacy and for my great-grandchildren.  She left two children behind.

Andrea:   I’m really, really sorry to hear about your granddaughter, Debra.  Yeah, that is tragic, and I’m so sorry to hear about the disservice, the harm that the court system ended up causing for her life and the lives of the people in your family.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Well, thank you.  It’s not been easy.  We’re making adjustments as we go along.

Andrea:  Yeah.  So, when it comes to the court system then, what are some things that you feel like need to change?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  I really think the courts need to be trained in trauma-informed processes because they miss what’s going on with the survivor in courts.  Survivors tend to have a lot of anxiety in court and over an abundance of anxiety to what the courts are normally used to when someone comes in before a judge.  First of all, they know nothing about the court system.  They’ve never been, for the most part, involved in anything like this.  So, it’s very unfamiliar, and not only the courts but the attorneys really need to have a strong understanding of the kind of clients that they’re working with, who don’t know how to express what’s gone on in a marriage where they have been coercively controlled by their partner.

And as a result of that, very often what we see is judges will discount what mothers say.  They won’t believe them.  And mothers tell the truth 98% of the time in court, and judges tend to just gloss over that and buy into the charm of the abuser.  And the abuser convinces the judge that, “Oh, I was involved with the children’s lives and I did all these things with the children,” when in fact it’s the opposite.  The mother has been left to do all of that.  And then the father comes in and says, “Well, I should have at least 50% custody of my children or 50% parenting time.”  And we are changing; the language is changing across the country from custody to parenting time.

Custody actually implies a sense of ownership, and abusers capitalize on that.  That’s what they’re looking for is to own the victim, to own the children.  They’re property to them.  And when children are with their abusive parent, they may be being covertly abused, which means it’s just kind of under the surface or they don’t understand how they’re being manipulated.  But then they go back to their mother who is trying to continue to maintain the discipline, to maintain the family rules that have been set up for how their family works.  And the children balk at that because they’re basically with the other parent 50% of the time who’s playing the Disneyland parent.

So, let’s put in a couple of statistics here, so I don’t have to try to keep this gender-neutral because it’s not gender-neutral.  We know that one out of every four women has been abused by their partner at some point in their relationship and that abuse is very off and ongoing.  So, children are also experiencing that.  The research now that talks about how children experience the coercive control that’s being exerted on their mother actually has long term impacts on them as well.

Andrea:  Like what?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Like, we see health impacts in middle age.  And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study.

Andrea:  No, I’m not.  Please, tell us.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Okay, the ACE Study was developed by Dr. Vincent Felitti in San Diego.  He was a physician in Kaiser Permanente out there, and he had set up a program for his patients who had problems with obesity.  And what he wanted to do was he wanted to make sure that they were losing weight, and keeping that weight off, and getting healthier because he comes from a prevention standpoint.  And over time, those patients who had enrolled in that program started dropping out or started regaining their weight, and he was concerned about what is causing this. And with that, he brought in their social scientists to interview the patients.  And what he found was there were ten factors that happened during their childhood, and of those ten factors, one was witnessing mother being treated violently.  Seven of those factors have to do with physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect.

Andrea:  That they personally experienced?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  That they personally experienced.  And we’re talking about a population of people that are middle-income people; they’re not low-income, they’re not higher income.  They tend to be more middle income.  And he repeated the study in other states and then around the world and kept getting the same results, that history of one to four or more of those ten factors actually resulted in midlife onset of chronic physical illnesses.  So, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, having had a teen pregnancy, substance abuse, and the list goes on.  And you can actually look at the ACE study on the Centers for Disease Control website.  And on that website, there are multiple research studies that have come about.

And it was such a phenomenal study and opened up the eyes of the Centers for Disease Control so much that they changed their whole focus on how they address child abuse.  So, instead of addressing child abuse as, “We’ve got to stop the abusers,” what they saw is you’ve got to start when children are in the womb, actually, and moving forward and create safe, stable, nurturing families.  And the effort of the CDC in their violence prevention unit now is completely the opposite of what it was prior to this study in 1998.

We’re still having people catch up with the fact that this study is out there.  We’re having people still needing to catch up with all the research that has come as a result of that study that helps us understand that we have to stop children from witnessing a parent being abused.  We have to stop children from being abused.  We have to teach empathy skills when children are young enough that it carries over into adulthood so that for them hurting someone else is no longer an option.  And whether that hurt is an emotional hurt or a physical hurt, we have to stop that.  And the way that we do that is we have to do education.  And part of what I do as an educator is I talk about the prevention side as much as I talk about what is the problem and how do you identify the problem.  So, I know that was a long answer.

Andrea:  That’s okay.  This is really interesting.  I’ll be back in just a second.

Okay, so we have to catch up with this.  So it makes sense.  We’ve got to catch up with the research that’s already been done on this.  So, there’s health impacts, long-term health impacts.  What other kinds of societal impacts are there that kind of stem from the fact that the court system isn’t taken care of, as it isn’t trauma-informed that children are seeing and experiencing abuse?  How does that really impact not just those people and the people around them but then also society at large?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  So, from the standpoint of society, what we’re looking at is some of these children who do not get the help that they need from the courts – the courts do not operate very quickly and very timely – and I have seen children who have basically thrown away their education.  They coast through school, and the schools get upset and schools suspend them, schools exclude them permanently from a school district and they have to be moved into another school district because they have never learned emotional control.  So, we actually have literature that talks about children who are emotionally dis-controlled or dysregulated, and what we need to do to help them with that.

And children who come out of situations where they’ve witnessed their mother being abused or coercively controlled, where they’ve also been abused themselves, they get into trying to address their own trauma and trying to heal from it, and instead they act it out.  So, they end up in our juvenile court system.  They end up never going to college, working at jobs way beneath their intellectual capabilities.  They become abusers.

And one of the things that we do know is that boys who are exposed to witnessing coercive control, witnessing domestic abuse, actually have a greater chance of becoming abusers in their own relationships and continuing this intergenerational cycle of abuse in their families.  What we see between the ages of six to ten is they’re learning from the abuser how to treat women and beyond that.  Then they turn that around and they start treating their mothers that way until we run into situations where the guardians ad litem in the court system say, “Well, maybe this child needs to just go live with dad.  Maybe that’s the problem.  The problem is that they just aren’t getting along with Mother.”

Andrea:  And Mom can’t control them at this point, probably.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Right.

Andrea:  Because they’re trying to control the mom.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Mhm.  And then they go and live with Dad.  Well, Dad just teaches them to be better at their abuse.  And then these children start blowing off their lives because Dad doesn’t hold them to the same level of accountability that Mother does for getting their schoolwork done, for staying involved in activities, for doing the things that build good, strong, healthy adults.  What they do is Dad says, “Oh, I got a buddy.  Let’s go play video games together.  Let’s go hang out together.  Let’s go do…” whatever Dad believes is going to keep that child locked into him and be the fun person, the fun parent, and then portray the mother as the rigid, structured parent when all she’s doing is carrying out what they had agreed to do during their marriage as far as how to raise their children.

And at that point in time, he’s undermining everything that Mother is doing to where, finally, Mother goes to the court and says, “I can’t keep this child in my home, and he’s gonna have to go live with his dad.”  And the court says, “Okay, we’re gonna let him live with his dad and he needs to go to counseling so that he can learn to be a better person because that is supporting whatever he’s doing.”  When they’re with Dad, Dad undermines the counseling or never gets them to counseling.

I have a case like that where the court has ordered the father to put the son in counseling.  He had a psychological evaluation that the dad put off and put off and put off for well over a year that the court had ordered.  And now he’s about to age out of the high school system and probably will drop out on his 17th birthday and never complete high school.  And his therapy that he’s been in has only been happening for maybe three to four months now.  Dad is facing contempt of court with the judge to the point where he’s facing jail time and fines.  And the dad says, “I don’t think it’s gonna happen.  I don’t think the judge will do this to me.”

And so, what is the message to this child?  What is the message to multiple children in these situations when Dad doesn’t hold them accountable because Dad wants a buddy?  Dad is going to do whatever he can to take the children away from Mother because he’s mad because she had the audacity to leave him and to stop being abused.  That’s the bottom line.

Andrea:  Debra, what can we do or what do you feel like it would take to really…  If we were to move forward in an idealistic way, what would it take to disrupt the way that things are in the court system so that we actually see the impacts lessen – the impacts of trauma lessen – and people in more healthy environments?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  It’s going to take a huge revamp of the court system.  And I know that the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is slowly chipping away at this.  It’s going to take a much more massive movement to have something happen dramatically.  I know of a judge in California who actually was following the dictates of what the judges taught her to do in these cases and sent the child to live with the abuser.  And when the child was murdered by the abusive father, she felt so harmed as a judge by what she had been taught that she actually resigned her judgeship because she could no longer carry out what her fellow judges were teaching her and saying she had to do.

So, there’s movements across the country to make these kinds of changes in the court system.  The Center for Judicial Excellence out in California, Kathleen Russell has led them a very strong movement in California where they’ve done audits on the courts out there to show where the courts have not done a good job.  But we need millions of dollars to do audits across the country on the court system.  Joan Meier with DV LEAP out of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has just completed a study of cases that were available where Mother claimed domestic violence or child abuse and Father gained at least 50% custody or more.

So, you know, we have little pockets.  This issue gets pushed underneath the surface because many people think domestic violence is physical abuse, is a physical injury – and that’s incorrect.  Domestic abuse is coercive control.  And if you look at the Power and Control Wheel that was developed by the Duluth Project out of Duluth, Minnesota, what you will find is there’s a wheel – it’s called the Power and Control Wheel – and there are eight spokes inside that wheel.  And every one of those spokes inside that wheel are coercive control – whether it’s financial abuse, using the children, using male privilege, threats, intimidation, emotional abuse – and on the outside of that wheel is physical and sexual violence.

So, what everyone goes through is, “Oh, well, there was no physical abuse.  You didn’t file a police report.  There’s no medical reports.”  And, so, therefore, the judge determines that there’s no domestic violence and does not use that part of the statute to make their ruling about parenting time.  When in actuality, what the judges need to be looking at is all of those spokes inside that wheel and addressing how all of those spokes inside that wheel were used as a way to coercively control.  I’m going to use the women because we know more women are abused in relationships than men.  The women are cut off from expressing that.

So, one of the things that I teach is stay away from saying the word “abuse” in court.  Instead, describe the behaviors of the abuser.  Describe how you were pulled out of your educational program when you became involved with a relationship with this abuser and that he convinced you that you wouldn’t need that because he was going to take care of you.  Describe how you were the parent who had to stay home with the children and homeschool the children instead of pursuing your career because someone had to do it.  And so he said you were to do that, so he isolated you from your home, sometimes even isolating from the homeschool community.

And as we go around that wheel, we can find examples of that happening on a very frequent basis in that relationship.  And then because I’m working with Called to Peace Ministries now, I’m getting more and more people coming to me who have been spiritually abused by the way that the abuser uses the church against her.  And I’m not going to do the quotes here.  I’ll just stay away from that because I come from a secular perspective.  But we do know that the churches are creating great harm to women in these relationships by saying, “Oh, you have to reconcile.”  “You have to forgive.”  “You can’t divorce.”  And that in itself is coercive control.  So, how do we change all of this?  We have to change our whole mentality around domestic abuse and coercive control.

They’ve done it in the United Kingdom and are working on it, I know, in Australia.  But in the United Kingdom in December of 2015, a law went into effect that actually criminalized coercive control.  So, all these dynamics inside that Power and Control Wheel have been criminalized.  And they have made arrests.  Yeah, they have made arrests and convicted people, and there’s a five-year prison sentence that goes with that.  So, we have to look at coercive control as a captivity crime in this country.

Andrea:  That’s a huge shift.  That is a huge shift.  That would be disrupting to not just the court system and churches but even schools.  I mean, I looked it up while you were talking about it because I’ve not seen this before, but using coercion and threats to get somebody to comply…  I mean, that can happen in a school pretty easily.  It’s using intimidation, you know, things like that.  It makes a lot of sense that we would be careful around these things and not use them and that we would criminalize them.  It is such a huge, huge shift.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  It is, and that’s why it takes so long to create that kind of shift.  Evan Stark put this together so well in his book on coercive control.  And he explains exactly what it is – it’s a condition of unfreedom.  The abuser has taken away the freedom of choice, the freedom of being their own person from the victim.  So, in our program, we teach empowerment.  We teach our advocates how to use empowerment with trauma-informed processes with the survivors and that’s so important because survivors need to finally take back their personhood, to take back their identity that has been stolen from them by the abuser.

Andrea:  How do you help people to see the difference between empowerment and helping people to take back their identity, that sort of thing… or maybe not even a difference.  I’m going back to the idea of schooling or parenting, when of course there is a certain amount of needing to kind of guide a child to make the right decisions and things like this.  So, what’s a healthy expression of parenting and schooling and that sort of thing versus the unhealthy way of approaching it with coercive control?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Okay, so a healthy way of parenting – and this is how I parented my daughter – is using logical and natural consequences.  This comes out of some of the early research in parenting, and one of the things that is the hallmark of that is giving children autonomy to make choices.  So, I’ll give you an example, and this is a true story with my daughter.  I had called her in, she was out riding her bike, and I called her in to set the table for dinner.  And she comes to the door and she, you know, in that whiny voice that kids use, “Oh, Mom, I just want to be outside riding my bike with my friends.”  And I said, “Well, you can do that.  However, if you choose to do that before you set the table, then the bike is mine for a week.  Now what do you want to do?”  And she said, “I’ll set the table.”

Now, I have been doing that with her from the time that she was very young.  She was about three or four years old, and I stumbled across this whole piece about logical and natural consequences.  And as a result of that, she learned that she had to make good choices.  That’s an empowerment piece.  When we work with survivors, we help them look at different options so they make the choice.  We don’t tell them what to do.  That’s what abusers do.  We say, you know, “You can look at it from this standpoint or this standpoint or even a third standpoint, if it’s there.  What do you want to do?”  And that helps them make their own choices.

The other thing is that we believe the survivor.  We don’t question her story about what happened to her.  That’s her experience, and we want to be there for her.  So, if it’s okay with you, I want to give a little plug here for our training program.

Andrea:  Oh, yeah, absolutely.  So, tell us about where people can find information about you and your trainings.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Okay.  I have a website.  It’s called houseofpeacepubs.com, and there are links there to the advocacy training program where someone can find out information about the program.  We start a class about once a month.  We do a class over four weeks.  So, it kind of comes out over every month.  Sometimes, it rolls over into the next month.  But we end about mid-December with our twelve courses so that everyone has the holiday season off, and then we start usually the first full week in January again.

Andrea:  And this is a series of twelve courses, is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Yes, there’s twelve courses.  People can join the course at any time and go through the sequence of twelve courses.  So, we are in our second year now.  And we are close to having 200 people who have taken one or more of our courses.

Andrea:  That’s great!

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  So, another thing to look at on my website if people want to know more about coercive control and the impacts of coercive control and how to work with that in the family court system, I have a book that I’ve written that can be found on the products link on that website.  It’s called Eyes Wide Open: Help! with Control Freak Co-Parents.  And it explains all the different types of coercive control that I’ve identified through the research, through talking with survivors and through working with survivors.  So, you know, people are welcome to go and check that out and see if they have questions.  They can contact me through info@houseofpeacepubs.com if they have any questions, they want to know more.

Andrea:  That sounds great.  Debra, we’ll make sure to include links to everything you mentioned in our show notes on our website, too, so that would make it easy for people to come and find at voiceofinfluence.net.

Debra, thank you so much for sharing your experience and expertise with us here and your passion to see things change.  I hope that in the midst of all the unrest that we’re all experiencing kind of right now that perhaps some good will come of this for race relations but also for just this issue of coercive control in general, and specifically also for people who are experiencing it in the court systems and in their families.  So, thank you for all the work that you’re doing and for being a Voice of Influence our audience today.

Dr. Debra Wingfield:  Oh, you’re welcome, Andrea, and thank you for having me on your show!

Finding Her True Voice After Domestic Violence with Naghmeh Panahi

Episode 146

Naghmeh Panahi Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Naghmeh Panahi is a speaker, a Bible teacher, and an executive director for the TAF Foundation; an organization that helps abused women escape and recover religiously motivated violence, both in the form of domestic violence and in the form of religious persecution.

Naghmeh made national news when she publicly advocated for the release of her then-husband and pastor at the time, Saeed Abedini, who was imprisoned in Iran for his Christian faith. Unfortunately, her story is not an easy one to hear because it turns out that she was in an abusive marriage, and eventually they got divorced.

In this episode, Naghmeh shares her story, the complexities that go with what it’s like to be in a situation of oppression, the complex reasons why it’s so hard to get out, the importance of siding with the oppressed instead of staying silent, and her advice on being a voice of influence in a diverse setting.

Mentioned in this episode:

 

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

Well, I am really honored to share with you the story of Naghmeh Panahi.  She is a speaker, a Bible teacher, and executive director for the TAF Foundation – she’s going to pronounce it for you in a little bit.  It is an organization which helps abused women escape and recover religiously motivated violence, both in the form of domestic violence and in the form of religious persecution.

Naghmeh made national news when she publicly advocated for the release of her then husband and pastor at the time, Saeed Abedini, who was imprisoned in Iran for his Christian faith.  She’s going to tell us all about the story.

But, unfortunately, it’s not a story that is easy to hear because it turns out that she was in an abusive marriage, and eventually they got divorced.  I’m really looking forward to hearing her story and understanding the complexities that go with what it’s like to be in a situation of oppression and the complex reasons why it’s so hard to get out.  So, she’s going to share with us her story.  She’s going to talk about the importance of siding with the oppressed instead of staying silent and then her advice on being a voice of influence in a diverse setting.

I think that you are going to really appreciate this conversation with Naghmeh Panahi.

Andrea:  All right, Naghmeh, it is such an honor to have you here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Naghmeh Panahi:  Well, thanks for having me.  I appreciate it.

Andrea:  So, you stepped into the international spotlight when your husband was imprisoned in Iran.  Would you mind sharing with our listeners how that unfolded and kind of how it led to what you’re doing today?

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yeah.  My husband had traveled to Iran, and I got a call that he had been arrested because of his faith and my whole world crumbled.  My husband was literally my world.  I’d come from a very hard marriage, but I guess my marriage had become my everything where my husband actually controlled everything from the way I thought, the way I dressed, who I saw, who I didn’t see.  He became the center of my world.  And so at that time, it just felt like I couldn’t even function without him.

And, so, I did everything I could do to get him out and started with being on the news a few times a week – Fox News, CNN – and then people start seeing me on TV, and Congress started contacting me.  I spoke in front of our Congress three times.  I traveled the world.  I spoke at the United Nation.  I spoke at human rights groups.  President Obama actually flew to Boise, Idaho where I lived, and I met with him.  I met the heads of states.  I mean, just three and a half years I did everything to get him out of prison.  And, you know, I had two small kids at that time.  They were toddlers – they were four and five – and I really believed they needed their father and tried to do everything to get him out of prison.

And interesting enough, his imprisonment is what set me free from my abusive marriage, and that’s a story in itself.  But it was through him being separated from me for so long that I started gaining confidence.  Because before he went to prison, I really believed that I was worthless, that I couldn’t think properly, and that I was crazy, “the crazy-making” as he would call it in domestic abuse.  I believed all of that, which is interesting because, when I met him, I was a very independent businesswoman.  I had no self-image issues.  The marriage had really brought me down to a place of complete destruction where I had no self-worth.  I believed all the lies.

And, so, when he went to prison, it gave me space and time and a lot of prayers and reflections, self-reflection, and I know as a Christian, my time with God that really set me free to say, “Wait a minute, that’s not what God says I am.  That’s not who God says I am.”  And it really set me free and it was an interesting journey.

Towards the end of his imprisonment, my husband got a phone – a Smartphone – inside of the Iranian prison.  Before he went to prison, there was beating; me getting beat up, my dad, my dog destruction of property, possible infidelity, even though I didn’t want to face it.  Very clear… I closed my eyes to a lot of things.  I didn’t want to believe that.

But I believed that if I fought and I proved to my husband that I loved him so much, he would love me back.  And towards the end of his imprisonment, he got a phone and I noticed he had not only changed, he was different.  He was even an angrier person.  He definitely had PTSD.  He had paranoia.  But he was angry that I was traveling the world and he was calling me the same names, “Worthless,” – I’m sorry to say, but – “ whore, Jezebel, don’t think you’re valued. Don’t think just because you’re traveling the world and people are clapping, they’re clapping for you.”  He would say, “They’re clapping for me.  I’m the hero.  I’m the one in prison.”

And, so, I was shocked because I had literally laid down my life to get him out of prison, including putting my kids’ wellbeing after him.  I was a single mom of two kids.  I got death threats because I traveled, because I spoke out against Iranian government and their abuse of human rights issues, and I continued to do that to get him out.  I had serious anxiety getting on airplanes.  I grew up in Iran where there was war, and airplanes meant bombs and war.  And, so, I had always struggled getting on an airplane, but I would get on airplanes every single time with anxiety and I would say, “I’m doing it for my husband.”

So, I knew I was laying down my life and loving him to the best of my ability, and to have him still call me those names from prison just was a wake-up call that this marriage is not going to get any better, no matter how much I try.  It’s just not, and that’s when, really, I was set free.  I didn’t know it was abuse.  I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I knew I had a hard marriage, but I couldn’t figure out…  I felt dark.  It felt foggy, but I couldn’t figure it out until on a last trip, I was speaking at a church and I finally, for the first time, shared everything with this pastor and his wife.

Now, as someone who comes out of domestic abuse, you’re groomed to hide your spouse’s flaws.  You wouldn’t dare tell anyone about your issues or that he had any flaws.  So, I had learned to do that to kind of cover-up for him.  For the first time, I shared it with someone and this pastor looked at me, and he said, “Do you know I’m a doctor?”  And I said, “No.”  He said, “Yeah, I got my doctorate in psychology.”  And he looked at me and he said, “You’re an abused wife.  And it’s like getting a cancer.  You know there’s something wrong with your body and you don’t know what it is, and a doctor says, ‘Oh, it’s cancer and it’s deadly.’”

And for the first time it had a name and it made sense, because then I googled about abuse and all the signs of how a person tries to control another person, he pretty much met every single checklist.  And I was shocked because I thought I was the only one experiencing the isolation the being put down, the… just everything, the deflection and the gaslighting, all of that.  And I thought I was the only one experiencing it.  And then when there was a name put to what I was going through, it just all came together and I realized, “This is not an incident after incident.  This is actually a diagnosis of bigger issue called abuse, called cancer, and this is deadly if I don’t do something about it.”

I was already a dead person before he went to prison.  I was a robot.  I did everything he said.  I couldn’t show any emotion.  If I cried, he would say, “You’re trying to manipulate me.”  If I showed anger, he would say, “You’re the abusive person.”  So, I had learned to become a robot with no emotion and just do everything he told me.  I was a slave, a servant.  And, so, when it got a name, when the name abuse came, I was like… It just all made sense.  And I knew that I couldn’t just close my eyes to it anymore.  And that it was not only deadly for me, it was deadly for my kids.  I would not want my son to know that this is okay to treat a woman like this, to treat another human being like this.  And I didn’t want my daughter to know that it was ever okay to be treated that way.

Andrea:  Hmm, so, at what point… I mean, this is so poignant, and I think a lot of people are going to be able to relate to this, and the feeling of, “Oh gosh, I didn’t even realize this is what it was.”  But what point did that really hit you, in what point in your story and in the arc of your husband coming back and all of that?

Naghmeh Panahi:   Well, actually, before he came back, I drew my first boundary.  And even before the pastor told me it was abuse, I was traveling the world three or four times a month, trying to get him out, and he would call me all sorts of names.  He was controlling everything from where I went, what I said, and money that was coming in.  He was controlling everything from prison towards the end.  It was pretty amazing that he had a Smartphone in an Iranian prison.  Like, he could actually FaceTime me.  It was shocking to me, but I think that was a good thing for me.  At first I was like, “If he didn’t have access to me, I would fight hard for him.”  But every time he would poison me, I had to be like, “I’m gonna be a bigger person.  I’m gonna still fight for him even though he’s, like, kicking me from prison, verbal abuse and emotional abuse and control.”

But I’m glad I got to see who he was from prison because it was my wake-up call to say, “Oh my goodness, he’s not getting any better.”  So, before he came out, I actually drew boundaries.  I said, “If you can’t be nice to me then I can’t talk to you.  Because I want to be able to fight to get you out of prison, and every time you spew out these hateful things to me, I get bitter.  And I have to work through that bitterness and I have to work through forgiving you, and then I have to put on a front and try to do an interview to try to get you out.”  I said, “I can’t talk to you if you can’t be nice to me.”  And he never called again, never.  All it would have taken was him to call back and say, “I’m sorry, I want to be nice to you,” and he didn’t.

So, he didn’t actually call me at all, even when he got released from prison.  State Department contacted me, and I’d heard on the news he was released January 16th, 2016.  And State Department told me… I called them and I said, “I heard he’s released from media.”  It was all over media, BBC, CNN, Fox, everything.  And they said, “Yeah, but they’re still in the country,” these Americans that were taken hostage, including my husband, “So, we don’t want to really say anything until they’re out because last minute the Iranian government could pull back and not let them leave.”

Long story short, they got out, took about a day and they flew into Germany where he was evaluated, you know, mentally and physically, which I never found out what that evaluation was because he wouldn’t allow me to have access.  He didn’t call me then.  And here I was seeing all over the news, he was talking to all these big names like Franklin Graham, and everyone was sharing how they talk to Saeed, to my husband, and he hadn’t called me.  And because that had been my boundary was like, “If you can’t be nice to me, don’t call me,” and he didn’t.

So, I told him that in October of 2015.  November is when I went to that church and the pastor told me I was an abused wife.  And in my, I guess, mental breakdown, I wrote an email in November of 2015 saying, “I’m an abused wife.  I’ve had access to Saeed in prison.  He’s still abusing me.”  And then this went viral, and then there was news that covered it… Washington Post covered, Fox…  I mean, there was a lot of media covered it.  And so he heard about it, of course, he had access to the Smartphone.  So, he was mad at me, and that was another reason, you know, when he got out, he didn’t call me.

Finally, his sister messaged me and said, “This is his phone number in Germany.  He doesn’t want to talk to you.  He just wants to talk to the kids.”  I was like, “Okay.”  So, I called him, he was very angry at me.  And it was an interesting phone call, to say the least, but that was our first phone conversation.  And you know what, the first thing I was accused of when I drew boundaries with my husband was that I was cheating on him.  I was throwing him under the bus, because I was with another man, which was ridiculous, because to this day my husband was the first man I ever kissed, I ever held hands with.  And we’ve been divorced for three years now, I still haven’t dated.  So, to be accused of that was just really painful.

And, so, he asked me, he said, “Have you cheated on me?”  And I said, “No.”  And I asked him, because now things have come to light that I was sure he had cheated on me in our marriage, and he said, “Well, I’m not gonna answer that because you’re gonna use it against me.”  And long story short, he got out.  He still ignored me.  He ignored me for months.  It took a court order in order to have him communicate with me because when he got out, I was so scared.  He had serious paranoia, serious PTSD.

He was an abusive person who had already almost beat me to death early on in our marriage and I was scared of him, of what he was going to do.  And he had threatened me when I called them in Germany that he was going to come and take the kids from me.  I called a lawyer and they said, “Oh, yeah, they can do that.  He’s still their father.  Unless you have a protective order and legal separation…”  I didn’t want a divorce.  I was hoping that our marriage was going to heal.  But the lawyer said, “Unless you do this, he can come and take the kids.”  And, so, I did that.

About a week, I was told I should go to a marriage counseling – which again, for abuse, you do not encourage women who come out of abuse to go to marriage counseling because their abuser is so manipulative, so deceptive.  It’s dangerous for them to be in the same room with them and going through marriage counseling, but I was kind of being forced to do that.  It was all over the media that I was going to go to the Billy Graham Center and do marriage counseling and make it up with Saeed, and I just didn’t.  I ended up talking to abuse counselors, and it was not a good idea.  So, I didn’t go.  I ended up staying in Boise.

One morning, I got a call from Reuters, saying, “Oh, how do you feel?  Your husband’s flying to Boise.”  And I was like, “What?”  So, it was about a week after his release, it was late January.  He’d been released January 16th.  He’d kind of stayed in Germany a few days, and then he’d gone to the North Carolina at the Billy Graham Center for about a few days, about three or four days.  And then he surprise-flew into Boise, with Franklin Graham’s private jet.  And I was like, beside myself, I was so scared.  I didn’t know when he was going to land.  I didn’t know what was going to happen.

And I called my lawyer, she said, “He can come now.  He’s on a private jet.  He could just put the kids on the private jet and leave, and you would have to fly to wherever he’s at and then try to figure out how you’re gonna get your kids back.”  So, that day, I filed for a protective order for me, not the kids – but supervised visits for the kids – and legal separation, hoping that it was going to prevent him from taking the kids and that I was going to be safe until we could talk through it for our marriage and make it work.  And that was the best thing I did because that’s exactly what he had planned.

But unfortunately, the media just went with it, and they made it sound like this poor persecuted Christian comes home and his wife files for divorce, which I didn’t.  I filed for a legal separation.  And no one really understood what I was going through.  This man was after me.  He had suffered a great deal in prison as well.  He had severe PTSD.  He saw me as his enemy, and I became the bad guy who had to file for legal separation and protection order for a hero that was coming back home.

It was heartbreaking because people were making judgments without knowing what had happened throughout our marriage.  So that’s how it unfolded.  Basically, I asked that he would get help on the abuse.  And the moment he realized that I wasn’t going to submit to any of that behavior anymore, he filed for divorce and he divorced me April of 2017, which was heartbreaking.  I had people around me say, “Well, you’re free!  You’re free!”  You know, because of my religious views, I thought God hated divorce so bad that I was willing to stay in that marriage and be separated for as long as possible – even if I grew old – until he repented, until he changed his behavior.

But he divorced me, and at that time I saw it like, it was very painful because I felt like, “I fought for you for three and a half years, day and night to get you out of prison, and you come out and you divorce me when all I’m asking you is let’s talk and you can’t beat me anymore and you can’t cheat on me anymore.  And you’re not even willing to go see abuse counselors, try to work on our marriage a little bit after your wife literally laid down her life.”  It was painful that he didn’t even want to fight for our marriage.  He’d lost his slave.  He’d lost someone who had been completely obedient to him, and he could walk all over me.  He could cheat on me.  I wouldn’t believe anyone but him.  If he said, “I didn’t cheat on you,” I’d say, “Oh, I believe you.”

He had complete control over me, and he had lost that and he was done with me.  It was painful to feel that.  There was no love.  He didn’t even want to fight for our marriage.  You know, that was a shattered dream.  I turned 40 and then a month and a half later, my divorce became final and I’m like, “Here I am at 40, two kids, broken home.” I was devastated.  I was still trying to get my mind around what was happening with the abuse, and then all the travels I’d done.  It just felt like I was sitting down in the middle of this destroyed building with rubble around me, and I didn’t know how I was going to get back up.  But I did.

And today, I am a much stronger, happier person than I was even in my twenties, you know.  Sometimes you think back, “What if I could go back in my twenties and I made a different choice and I had a better marriage?”  And I look back, I’m like, “No, I love this journey I was on because it helps me understand what abused women or actually, anyone who’s gone through abuse or oppression goes through, and it has given me a heart for those who are abused.”  The people who are supposed to serve them are abusing their power and oppressing them.  And it has given me a heart of compassion instead of heart of judgment, and it has made me a better person.

I would say, it’s transformed me from a caterpillar to a butterfly, and I couldn’t be happier.  So, I wouldn’t go back and I’m actually at a much better place, but I couldn’t see that three years ago.  I couldn’t see how I was going to get out of this rubble.  It just seemed like destruction, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.  That’s how I felt three years ago.

Andrea:  Hmm, devastating.  It’s so devastating, and to think that he would betray you like that.  And not only him, but then everybody who had been applauding you and cheering for you.  And as you are going on this campaign to get him released from prison, I can’t imagine the devastation you must have felt to realize that people weren’t believing you.

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yeah, and you know, women who’ve gone through sexual assault or abuse or anyone that kind of we saw with #MeToo movement, usually when you’re at the forefront of that and you’re calling out someone with a big name or someone who’s in the place of power, people question you, question your character, and don’t believe you.  And so at first, it was hard that people did that.  But then I was like, “You know what, I’m so glad because that’s how every woman who has come out feels.”  And I’m glad I felt that.  Now, I know how painful it is for people to judge you and to question you and say you’re a liar and question your character.  And also, it actually helped me get free of people-pleasing.  I needed to have the whole world turn against me to go, “Okay, it does it matter?  Does it really matter that much, or does it matter that I do the right thing?”

It was really hard because I am a people-pleaser.  And I think, you know, a lot of women who are people-pleasers stay in these abusive marriages because you want to please.  And so God just got rid of all that for me and said, “What matters to you?  Do you care what people say or you’re going to live your life the way that’s truth, that’s right even if the whole world thinks you’re a bad person?  Does that matter?”  And I had to come to the decision of, “Nope, you know, it doesn’t matter.”  And, you know, I would have probably cried and told you that three years ago we’ve talked.  It was hard.  People abandoned me.  People judged me.  Not only did they abandon me, they kicked me.

It’s like the Good Samaritan story where there was a bleeding person.  People passed by; not only did they pass by, they kicked me and threw all sorts of stones and hurled all sorts of accusations against me.  But again, I’m thankful because now I understand how other people feel when they come out, and people just throw stones at them instead of being compassionate and loving.  And also, it really helped me get over the people-pleasing that was destructive in my life.

Andrea:  And really, that people-pleasing, you know, to lay that down, to have that leave or for you to leave it seems to have really empowered your voice for you to be able to speak up now and do what you’re doing with the TAF Foundation.  Can you tell us some about that?

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yeah, it did.  It’s interesting because I was silenced in my marriage.  And to have been given a microphone because he was in prison, and then for God to really give me a microphone for women who are oppressed and abused has been pretty amazing.  So, I do want to say, just to clarify, I had to learn – it was through my relationship with God – that God hates what’s happening to the person in abuse more than he hates the divorce.  So, when I realized that God hated what was happening to me, He was not happy about me submitting to abuse and oppression and all of that, it really changed my view of God.  And it was so eye-opening that a high view of marriage includes divorce.  It’s okay.  God is actually more concerned about the person.

You know, as a Christian, I believe Jesus came to save us, but He didn’t come to save the marriage, He came to save a person.  One person matters to Him.  So, the wellbeing, the mental health, physical health, wellbeing of a woman or whoever is being abused, oppressed, is more important to Him than the institution of marriage.  And it was so eye-opening for me to learn that.  But when I came out of it, women started contacting me about what they were going through.

And my co-founder, Mariam Ibraheem, contacted me – and I’ve shared her story – and she had come out of prison in Sudan.  She was on death row because of her faith, and she had come out to only end up in a very dark, abusive marriage.  Well, I had met her in 2014.  She had just come out of prison in 2014.  I was traveling to get my husband out, and then in 2018, she contacted me.  So, we’ve been talking back and forth over the years for four years.  Well, 2018 she contacted me and she said, “I need help.”  She said, “What I’m going through in my marriage right now is worse than being on death row and tortured by radicals in the Sudanese prison,” where she actually gave birth to her daughter under very hard conditions in Sudan.

She said, “The domestic abuse I’m going through right now is worse, because it’s from within.  The attack is from within, and it’s so hard to see.”  And, so, I ended up helping bring her out of that, and then our foundation was formed.  We didn’t want to share our story.  I mean, people knew about mine, but Mariam didn’t really come out about her domestic stuff until recently.  So that’s how me and Mariam got together, and then we have another colleague that kind of joined us.  But around the time I was talking to my colleagues, you know, we hadn’t formed TAF yet, which stands for Tahrir Alnisa Foundation; which tahrir means freedom, liberation, and then alnisa in Arabic means woman – so liberating woman.

And before we started it, I had a group of women contact me from Iran.  One of them had been thrown in prison, few had fled to the country of Turkey because of their Christian faith, and so, I really wanted to help them.  And I reached out to my friend, Mariam and I said, “What can we do?”  And she said, “Well, come to DC and let’s see if we can get some politicians involved, see what we can do for them.”  I went to DC and pretty much everyone told us, “Why don’t you guys start an organization?  You can have a more powerful voice having an organization.”

Reluctantly, we started it, and it’s been about almost a year now.  And, you know, the focus is woman – alnisa means woman – but to help woman who have dealt with abuse of power, whether it’s in a home or in a government that has abused its power.  So, we address any abuse of power that a woman has gone through, whether it’s religious freedom or domestic abuse.  Actually, a lot of these women who come out of religious persecution have also gone through domestic abuse.  Unfortunately, a lot of these women that we work with in the Middle East, they have similar stories as me.

So, we help many, many women who are broken, who’ve come out of, you know, again, places of abuse of power, whether in a home or country.  And we help them get back on their feet, find their true identity, their true value and become productive and help others to come to a place of healing.  So, we have counselors.  We work with different counselors, and we help them figure out how to get back on their feet with their kids and really be productive members of society.

Andrea:  Hmm, that’s fantastic.  So, can I ask you, would you mind sharing what are some of the systemic issues, the big issues that kind of keep a woman in an abusive situation within a religious culture?  You mentioned one, which is this idea that divorce is the worst thing.  If people believe that, then they’re going to stay in it.  But other than that, what other kinds of things are involved in religious culture that keeps people in those abusive situations?

Naghmeh Panahi:  I think, at large when there’s oppression and abuse, there’s something called reactive abuse where the person reacts and misbehaves also, and so that brings a lot of confusion.  I have a lot of churches… and I think in society, they’re like, “Well, this person behaved badly, too.”  You know, where they’re confused, they’re like, “We don’t know who to believe.”  So, they don’t know who to believe.  “Well, the wife was yelling too, and who’s the abuser here?”  And, you know, we see in society, there’s oppression and then people behave in a bad way.  So, they’re like, “Both parties are at fault.”  No, there’s usually an oppressor and an oppressed.

Now, I did a video recently with Leslie Berg Vernick, who talks about abuse.  And there’s something called reactive abuse where the person is being abused.  That means there’s one person in place of power trying to control…  Abuse is not just about physical abuse; it’s an imbalance of power.  One person trying to control another person or, you know, there’s oppression and the person that’s being abused, oppressed, acts out.  And, so, there’s confusion.  Who do we believe?  Who’s the abuser?  So, because of lack of education of how abusers work and because they’re seeing both parties get angry, both parties throw things, people take their hands off.  They’re like, “We don’t know whose fault, that person…” you know.

So, education of what does abuse really look like, what does it mean, and how do abusive people operate because they operate in such a way that you get confused, that you don’t even step in to defend the oppressed.  But when you don’t step in, silence is actually you siding with the oppressor, you siding with the abuser.  So, it’s kept a lot of churches silent because they’re like, “Well, God hates divorce.”  So, as soon as a woman divorces, they walk away from that person.  They don’t say, “Okay, why did you divorce?”  “Okay, we can give you grace for that,” and try to understand what she’s going through.  But also they don’t know who to believe because I don’t think we – as a society – we’ve really fully understood what an abusive person is and how they operate, whether at a larger in society or smaller in a home.  So, we get confused because we see bad behavior on both sides.

So, education is key and then accountability because there’s always going to be abusers in society, whether in a home or outside of a home.  So, you can’t really stop that.  You can’t really stop… not have abusive people around.  They’re always going to be there.  But in a society or at home, where there’s accountability, where they’re like, “This is not allowed and there will be consequences,” then that’s when you can actually protect the oppressed.  So, there has to be consequences where the police, our court systems understand abuse. They protect the woman and children.  And because a lot of times abusers, really, they go to the churches and they say, “Well, my wife’s being abusive.”  A lot of times they call the abused the abuser so that causes confusion, and then they call them crazy.  Like, “My wife is crazy,” and people believe that.

So, I think a lot of why there’s inaction is because there’s confusion of, “Which side do I choose.?”  You always choose the side of the oppressed.  That’s the heart of God.  You choose the side of the one who’s being oppressed, you know, and you call their oppressor to accountability and repentance.  That’s the most loving thing you can do to them.  You are accountable for your action.  And that was my goal when I did that for my husband that when I drew boundaries and I called him to accountability, I was out of love.  I still loved my husband.  I still wanted healing.  But that was the most loving thing I could do.  I stopped being an enabler, and we need to first have clarity of who’s the oppressed, who’s the oppressor and what’s the right thing to do.

There’s no “two sides to every story” in a marriage where there’s abuse.  There’s no “two sides of the story” when someone’s being oppressed in the society.  There’s the oppressed that needs to be defended.  That’s what Jesus did.  The woman that was being accused of adultery, He didn’t say, “Oh, well, she did… yeah, she’s sinned too.”  He protected the oppressed and then after everyone left, after everything was quiet, after she was protected, He said, “Go and sin no more.”  So, you protect the one that’s being oppressed first.  You don’t go, “Well, you’re a sinner too, so I don’t know who I’m gonna side with.”  You protect the woman and children.  You know, at times there’s men who are oppressed.  You protect them and then you say, “Well, this area, don’t do this anymore.”

For me, the reason I stayed for so long and the area that I had to change and repent of was idolatry.  I put something above God, and I was bowing down to it in fear and in my marriage, and I had to say, “You know what, I’m not gonna bow down to people-pleasing anymore.  I’m not gonna bow down to this anymore.  I need to change in that area.”  But I had to be protected first.  So, anyways, I think it’s really education of what does oppression mean, what does it look like, what does abuse look like, how does an oppressor or an abuser behave.

There are so much similarities of how they behave, and a lot of what they try to do is bring confusion, gaslighting, and deflection.  Because they want confusion so people take their hands off and go, “Well, I don’t know who to trust.  I don’t know who to protect.”  That’s exactly what they want because when you take your hands off and you’re not protecting the oppressed, then they get their way.  So, confusion is the biggest thing of why churches don’t get involved with domestic abuse.  And one of the things we do is try to educate them that, “Here’s how you can see clearly and you are called to act.”

You know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.”  Like, just because you’re silent, it doesn’t mean you’re blank.  You’re actually siding with the evil when you’re silent, when you’re not acting and so that’s a big issue.  And why people are silenced is because they’re confused.  They don’t know who to believe and once that confusion’s removed and they see that actually they have to act, not acting is siding with the oppressed, is siding with the evil then they get educated on that.  Then they can act in a positive way of helping a system… create a system within a marriage, within a church, within the court systems where woman and children go for, you know, legal actions or divorce or whatever, where they can educate those systems and say, “Here’s how you see and this is how you keep the abuser accountable and protect the people that are being abused.”

Andrea:  So, this is all so powerful and good, and you’re articulating it so well for us.  Your ex-husband came back, and he was paraded around as a kind of a champion for the faith.  I know that when somebody is kind of in that hero positioning, or they’re in a position where they’ve done so much good for your cause and yet they’re accused of abuse or you find out that… the people push back on that because he’s a hero, right?  He’s a hero.  What do you want to say to people who say, “But he did so much good?”

Naghmeh Panahi:  You know, that’s the trap.  I think over the years in history of humanity, we’ve submitted to dictators and abusive leaders and people because they’ve done so much.  You know, you look at Hitler who’s doing so much for Germany and it’s the same way, you know.  As a Christian, what really woke me up was God didn’t care.  He doesn’t care about people doing so much.  God cares about the character, you know.  We read in the Bible that says in the last days many will say to Jesus, “But I prophesied in your name.  I did miracles in your name.  I did this.”  And Jesus says, “Get away from me.  I never knew you.”

And we get deceived by big actions and big things that are being done, and that was my trap.  That’s how I was trapped in this marriage.  My husband was very charismatic.  And he was doing great stuff for God, but he lacked the character.  And I turned off all the alarms that was saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not a good character.  That’s off.”   All the alarms that were like coming inside of me was saying, “Careful, careful, back away,” I was shutting them down, saying, “But look at all the stuff he’s doing.”  And that was the trap.

If I have to warn anyone about anything is really, over history of humanity, we’ve fallen into this trap over and over again as people, as in marriages, and people end up in abusive marriages.  It’s not because they’re dumb and not educated.  There are a lot of educated people that fall into it is because we look at someone who does great things and we don’t look at their character, their humility.  That’s a really dangerous when you do that.  And abusive people are drawn to a place of power.  They’re usually charismatic and in a place of power, and they usually do a lot of great stuff.

But as a Christian, I realized as my husband was in prison that God was like, “I don’t care about that.  I can change a nation within a moment.  I don’t look for people that can do great things for me.  I’m looking for a humble, kind, loving person.  If you don’t have love, nothing matters.  It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.  If you can have love and compassion for your fellow human being, who cares [about] all the great things you’re doing.”  All the dictators of the world have done amazing things for their people in their country, but they also killed millions, you know.  Look at Russia; they killed the most voiceless, the most weak people of their country.  Look at Germany, the Jews.  I mean, they do great things, but they also do much evil.

Again, as a Christian, I look at the Bible and God doesn’t care about people that do great things.  He cares more about the character of the person at home – are you loving your wife and children well?  Are you humble?  Are you reaching out to your neighbor?  Are you being a person of peace instead of someone who causes rift and hatred and anger?  What are you doing as a person?  You might never do great things in your life, your name may never be known in society, but that doesn’t matter in God’s eye.  If you’ve been faithful to where you’ve been, if you’ve been in Boise, Idaho, loving your neighbor, that’s what matters, even if you haven’t done “great things” for the world.

And I think that’s a deception we really need to be careful of.  That’s what had me end up in an abusive marriage is the great things.  I focused on the great things versus the character, versus is this person a loving, humble person?  And I turned off all the alarms that said, “Nope, he’s not showing compassion here.  He’s being cruel here.”  And I closed my eyes because he was doing great things for God, you know?

Andrea:  Do you think the people that were applauding him have had their eyes opened to any degree in the last few years?

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yeah, I’ve had some people come back because at first, I tried to defend myself.  I tried to explain, and then I really felt God telling me, “Just be quiet, let me defend you.”  And as years went by, he showed his true colors and people were shocked that he was not the hero that he made out to be, and they came back and said, “We apologize, we judged you.”  But there are people that are still following him and supporting him.  And over time, it didn’t matter anymore.  I didn’t really have to prove anything anymore.

But yeah, it was hard at the beginning because he was on the news, and he was a hero that had come out of prison, I was the bad person.  I didn’t do a good job of shutting my mouth.  I tried to explain to people that I was telling the truth, but then after a few months, I said, “You know what, Okay, I’m done.  I don’t need to explain to people.  People-pleasing needs to be out of my life.”  You know, it’s a struggle all the time, but I got rid of that.  God got rid of that in me a lot.  We all still struggle with people-pleasing and how people view us, but I just had to let it go and say, “Okay, people are gonna worship him no matter what.  There are some people that are gonna do that.”  But I’ve had a lot of people turn around and say, “We see what you’re saying now.”

Andrea:  Now, you and Mariam, you guys seem to have some diverse background in terms of cultural context, and the people that you work with.  Is that true?

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yes, it’s just beautiful.  I love it.  She grew up in Africa.  I grew up in the Middle East, and totally different cultures, different worlds.  Her mom is Ethiopian, they went to Sudan, I think as refugees.  She grew up as a refugee and her life experience is just so powerful, you know, and then she came to America in 2014.  But most of her life was spent in Africa.  And for me, a third of my life, you know, a fourth of my life now was spent in Iran.  And we come from two different cultures, but she’s a sister.  And our other co-founder, she’s American with a European background.  We just get along.  We love each other.  We support each other, and that’s been the most beautiful thing I’ve found through this journey.

When I was in my marriage, I couldn’t have any friends.  I was isolated.  And when I came out of it, God has given me so many good girlfriends, and to think we were all raised…  Like, our other colleague who co-founded this with us, she was raised in America, I was raised in the Middle East, and Mariam was born and raised in Africa.  And for us to get together and really enjoy our differences… I mean, we’ve had to learn to communicate because we just communicate differently because I was born in Iran and raised, you know, in a different culture.

But as we learned, we’ve really enjoyed our differences.  They’ve really enriched my life to talk to women that are different.  We have another colleague working with us, she’s Hispanic.  And that diversity has been so beautiful.  I’ve enjoyed it so much and to just be friends with other women that are not like me and we can learn from each other and we can grow with each other, and we can just love each other.  And we all come from different political backgrounds, political ideas, but it doesn’t bother us.

I mean, we have super conservative, we have liberal, we all stand on different issues in a different way, but we can just talk in a very, you know, peaceful way and we get along.  We love each other.  There’s no resentment because one person believes, you know… I guess, leans towards a certain party and the other leans towards another party.  It’s just beautiful, because we’re so different, but we really enjoy that difference and I think that’s what America is about.  That’s what I love about America.  When I came to America, it’s like, there’s so many people of different backgrounds and you just can go, “Oh!”  I love learning the Chinese culture and going to Chinatown, eating there.  I didn’t have that in Iran.  I just had Iranian, Iranian, Iranian.

Here, I came here, there was, like, Hispanic and Chinese and this.  I love that.  In Iran, it was just Iranian.  There were some Afghanis that would come here and there, but the culture… and then, again, this organization, we’re all different women with different backgrounds, different political thoughts and ideas, and we just get along and we’re really good friends and I just love that.  It’s so beautiful.  It really enriches my life.

Andrea:  So, when you think about those who’d like to be a Voice of Influence, to want to have a Voice of Influence – and perhaps with people who are being oppressed – but they’re from a different background, they’re from a different perspective, or they’re from a different culture, do you have anything that you would like to share with us about how we can best be a Voice of Influence in that kind of a situation?

Naghmeh Panahi:  Yeah.  I’m not an expert, but the way that has worked in my life, I’ve gotten my hands dirty.  I’ve gone into communities.  I remember, I’ve mentored people of low income, whether they were refugees from Middle East or African from Africa.  I have always been in those communities.  And the more I have been in them, the more it has changed me to see the world in a different perspective and not be afraid.  I’ve actually brought people reluctantly into these refugee groups where there’s a lot of Muslims, and they’ve been afraid.  But it’s been beautiful to bring them and say, “Okay, see, they’re not scary.”  And it’s actually so beautiful there.  You sit with them, the culture, they bring all sorts of food and Syrian…

Here in Boise, there are so many cultures.  You wouldn’t believe that.  It’s one of the refugee cities.  But when you go into these neighborhoods and you see them for who they are, and they’re all sorts from all over Africa – from Sudan, from Ethiopia, from Eritrea, and you have Middle East – you have all over the world and you see how they interact, how they’re in each other’s houses.  They eat together.  So, I think it starts with to be able to influence you really need to understand and it’s just hanging out with them.  It’s okay if you mess up culturally.  I’ve messed up.  I come from the Middle East, and I’ve made some really crazy mistakes with someone of a different culture, even Syrian culture.  And I’m like, “Oops, sorry, I didn’t know that.”  Just laugh it off, and they understand.

So, don’t be afraid of messing up or offending.  They understand you weren’t born in their…  I mean, I was born and raised for the first nine years of my life in Iran.  I make cultural mistakes with Iraqis and Syrians all the time, and we’re with same region.  So, you really need to get your hands dirty.  You really need to be in communities.

When I was in college, I helped mentor some black kids and I would bring them to my college.  I just went into the black communities.  And at that time, you know, Tacoma, there was some racial tension.  So, as someone from Middle East, I really put myself out there and really went into those black communities and made some really, really good friends, and it changed me as a person.

So, I think for me, being a Voice of Influence is you really have to be willing to get your hands dirty.  You have to be willing to kind of mess up your schedule a little bit, you know.  I think coming from a European background sometimes, as Americans, we can be like, “I have an opening right here.”  Like, set up your time where it’s everything’s like lined up, but it’s like, what if you spend half a day in a refugee neighborhood?  It might mess up your schedule, but if you want to be a Voice of Influence, just let your schedule be ruined for one day and just go hang out with these people and get to know them.  It’s going to change you, and it’s going to change the way you interact, and it’s going to change the people around you.  That’s what I think.

Andrea:  I love that.  Okay, so, Naghmeh, would you share with us how can people connect with you and TAF, and how would you point them to your resources?

Naghmeh Panahi:  I have social media under Naghmeh Panahi – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.  And I think it’s harder to find our organization, but if you find me, you can kind of link into what our organization does.  It’s Tahrir Alnisa Foundation, but if you type in Naghmeh Panahi, it’s going to all come up.  I share stuff on social media quite a bit.  I think we talked about a while ago about Leah, a girl who was abducted in Nigeria.  We’ve done a prayer vigil for her.

So, we kind of focus on different things whether it’s religious freedom, women who’ve been oppressed in that way, or domestic abuse.  And being a voice for them and not just through social media; we take actions, we have an advocacy.  Part of what we do where we actually reach out to government officials and ask for change, and that’s one of our passions and goals is to see change in the way our government addresses domestic abuse and oppression.

So, over the year that we’ve started, we’ve met with many government officials and had very good talks.  And we’ve had talks with our government, with the Vice President’s office, with the White House and a dialogue of how can we have a system that protects the oppressed and abused, and women can be believed and they can be protected and so can the children.  So, you can look me up and hopefully you’ll learn more about what we do.

Andrea:  Great, thank you so much!  And we’ll link to that in the show notes too so that people can find you easily.

All right, thank you so much for being with us today, Naghmeh.  You have a beautiful story.  It’s tragically beautiful, but it’s so beautiful with such a redemptive ending…` and not that there’s an end to it yet, but a redemptive story that you have, that you’re telling.  And I’m grateful that you could be a Voice of Influence for our listeners today.

Naghmeh Panahi:  Thank you, Andrea.  It’s just wonderful talking with you, and I appreciate you giving me this opportunity.  Thank you!

Deceptive Myths About the Abuse of Power (Part 2)

Episode 145

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

My Voice of Influence colleague, Rosanne Moore, is back on the show for part two of our series on breaking down destructive myths surrounding coercive control and abuse of power.

In part one, we went over the first seven myths and, in this episode, we’ll be going over the next seven.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me again, Rosanne Moore who is on the Voice of Influence team.  This is episode 2, part two of a two-part series around abuse of power and how coercive control, people who are trying to take coercive control, what the kind of myths are that people believe about that.

And so, we’re debunking some myths today and last week about this abuse of power and understanding situations like this is so important.  I’m so glad that we are doing it, Rosanne.  It is such an important thing for people to understand, not just people that are going through it, but even leaders, people who want to have a voice of influence.  Why does it matter to that person?  Why should they understand these myths?

Rosanne Moore:  Because you really can’t leave an abusive situation without help.  You need help on some level, something outside of yourself.  One of the dynamics of coercive control is to eliminate outside support systems.  And so, if we can get society to understand the myths and we challenge those so that people respond differently, we have a better chance of providing an outside support system for people who are trying to leave abusive situations.  Truth matters and wrong belief systems have terrible consequences.

Andrea:  Not only for that one person, but for the people that are around them for their work environment, for their church environment, or for their family. 

Rosanne Moore:  Yes, absolutely. 

Andrea:  All right.  And we want you to know on the outset, first of all, you need to go back.  If you haven’t listened to the last episode, please go back and listen to it.  You can listen to this one first.  That’s fine, but you do want to hear both episodes if you’re interested on this topic and if you really do want to be as somebody who is informed about this as a voice of influence, somebody who is informed about abusive relationships, coercive control, and how to really empower and bolden others that need it.

And we want you to know that there is a list of resources, a free download available for those who are seeking to get out of in particular an abusive marriage or intimate relationship.  And you can find that list of resources by texting to the number 44222 and text the letters VOI for Voice of Influence, VOILifeline all one word.  So, VOILifeline, text it to the number 44222.  You can also find information about that and a course that we are going to be offering and perhaps are already out depending on when you listen to this episode.  And you can find all that information at voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.

OK, Rosanne, we’re going to tackle some more myths.  We’re going to debunk some more myths.  So number eight, this is something that the people say.  They hold it deeply.  They hold it deeply inside their heart, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard it or even like I remember thinking it and it’s almost embarrassing to say that but you think to yourself, “That can’t be true of so and so. They are such a good person.”

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  Why is this a myth?

Rosanne Moore:  OK.  Abusive people work very hard to present a persona that is trustworthy so that they can gain access and so they can be very generous.  They usually put on a very convincing, very charming, or very generous.  They are nice.  Niceness is not a character trait.  I think it was Boz Tchividjian who said it, “It’s not a character trait, it’s a personality presentation that you can choose.”  Niceness is a choice.  It’s not a character quality.

A person can choose nice behavior.  They can choose to do something that looks generous, all for the goal of gaining trust in order to betray.  People who work as spies in other countries do it all the time, you know.  We talk a lot about sleeper cells or whatever.  The whole idea of many horror movies is that the person that seems the most trustworthy is the one that turns out to be a serial killer or whatever, right?

And so the idea that we know, we just absolutely know that this person couldn’t be capable of what’s being accused, that that is a reason in and of itself not to investigate, not to seek further information, not to look at something as a possibility.  That’s what abusers count on.  That is what people count on.  I don’t know how many times that I have heard people say, “Well, you know, a person is innocent until proven guilty.”  No, that’s not true.  Legally, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.  But if they did it, they did it whether they ever get proved or not.

People frequently say that “Well, a person is innocent until proven guilty.”  And the actual legal term is a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  In other words, you’re not supposed to face, like legal charges unless there’s evidence that you are guilty.  But the reality is if a person is guilty, they are guilty whether anybody else recognizes it or not.

And so the unintended effect of that, I will say this too, one of the hardest things for people who are in an abusive relationship is, although I’m not negating the need for there to be a presumption of innocence, the same presumption of innocence needs to be offered to the person who is coming forward with an allegation of abuse.

Andrea:  Wow.

Rosanne Moore:  Because what happens to them typically is they are treated as if they were a liar and a manipulator, and that they have ulterior motives.  The same presumption of good motives needs to be given to the person who’s coming forth with an allegation because statistically, it’s far more likely that they’re telling the truth and they’re paying a heavy price to do it.  And so that’s just something, I’m not saying that there’s not the need for investigation.  What I’m saying is there needs to be a willingness to be open-minded and to not assume we already know the facts because this person looks good on the surface.  Because we haven’t personally run into any treachery with this person does not automatically mean that somebody else hasn’t.

Andrea:  You know, Rosanne, as I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking in an abroad kind of way, people who have done really amazing things.  You look at the Harvey Weinstein’s case.  You look at a number of people.  We’ll just leave it at that, you know Bill Cosby. 

Rosanne Moore:  Bill Cosby.

Andrea:  Yes, exactly.  You look at these gentlemen and you think to yourself, “gentlemen,” you think to yourself “funny.”  You’re thinking to yourself “brilliant,” you know, because of the amazing work that they’ve done in the world, whatever they’ve produced or whatever.  And so it’s a great loss to actually say that they could actually be wrong.  Maybe they’re not such a good person.  Maybe they’ve done some amazing things, but people are complicated.  They’re not just evil or good.  They’re very often have done good things in the world but have done very bad things.  And unfortunately, those bad things have consequences that have to be dealt with; otherwise, they’re going to just keep going and going.

Rosanne Moore:  One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read is the account of a young German woman who talked about, she worked as a waitress at a hotel that Hitler frequented during the war.  And she talked about how kind he was and how he would ask after her mother and sisters and the things that he did that went out of his way to, you know, do nice things for her family.  It was just unbelievable the account that she gave of him and of his top generals said that the same people who are systematically torturing and murdering thousands of people, if you hear her account, were also capable of doing generous things, you know, for her and her family.  And it was chilling to read.

I mean, there was a level of denial even with all of the evidence to the contrary because she had had a good experience with them that she felt like they’re being made out to be worse than they are.  And as she said, “People are complicated and we are made in the image of God,” which means we are capable of great good, but we are capable of making terrible choices.  That image has been impacted by our separation from God and we’re capable of doing terrible things and justifying those to ourselves.  That’s something we have to grapple with deeply.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And then I know that another myth that we’d talked about has to do with when a victim comes forward you think to yourself, “The victims of abuse should be able to accurately account details.  They’re confusedWhy are they confused?  Well, they must be lying.”  Tell us why that’s not right.

Rosanne Moore:  Or yeah, they changed their timeline.  Their details changed or whatever.  Trauma impacts memory, memory is malleable to begin with but trauma impacts the brain.  And it doesn’t mean that you’re coming up, like you’re just creating things in your mind, but you can be piecing together things from different incidents and putting them together so that they’re not really accurate.  They happened, but maybe not at the time that you’re thinking they both happened, things like that.

So often, abuse victims are expected to behave in ways that they would only be capable of behaving if they had not actually been honest.  If you think simply about anybody who’s involved in law enforcement who’s been trained in taking witness statements.  If you have four witnesses to something and their story is exactly alike, that’s a sign that they’re lying.

They’ve planned a story because in reality, if you have four witnesses to the same crime or the same incident, they’re all going to be noticing different things.  Their perceptions are going to be different.  The core truth of what’s there may overlap, but they’re all going to be seeing something somewhat differently.  And so, often there’s this great burden of expectation that somebody who has been deeply traumatized should be able to give a very clear, cohesive, you know, organized account of what happened.  And in fact, that’s not true.  That would be an indication that they were making it up, not that they were telling the truth.

Andrea:  Very important to know.  All right, number 10, this is 10 of 14.  We did the first seven in the first episode.  Don’t forget to go back and listen to that.  All right, number 10; “She’s the one who is harming everyone.”

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Now, wait a second.  In what context are we hearing this, Rosanne?

Rosanne Moore:  OK, so all right.  There’s a woman that I have walked closely with who she discovered her husband was having an affair and she made known that she was going to be taking legal steps to protect herself and her children and he didn’t pay child support and alimony when he was supposed to.  And so she followed through with court system and he ended up going to jail for not paying what he was supposed to be paying.  He withheld funds for the provision of children and he went to jail.

And her mother-in-law said, “You put him in jail.”  

No, he made all of those choices.  He chose to be unfaithful.  He chose to shack up with somebody else and to spend money on drugs and other things.  He chose not to provide for his children.  He put himself in jail.  She didn’t do that, she just asked the court to address the behavior that he chose.  And yet you see that happen constantly, you know that kind of thing.

The abused one who comes forward in a church setting and is told, “Well, you are harming not only him but his family and you’re harming the name of Christ.”  

No, he chose all of that by choosing to behave in unhealthy ways, in wrongful ways.  

In a situation where there’s a whistleblower in a corporation, “You’re harming our bottom line.  Our stock has dropped because of you, because you made this known.”  

No, whoever did the deceitful or unethical thing; they’re the ones who created that situation.  It’s not the whistle blower, it’s the one who did the wrong that created the situation and yet has fallout for other people.  Be mad at the right person, not at the one who calls the abuser on it but for the one who makes the bad choice.

Andrea:  Hmm, so important.  OK, number 11; this really shouldn’t impact you that bad “Why do you have to make such a big deal of this sort of thing?

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  I can tell you that when you live with somebody who is seeking to destroy you and who’s constantly playing mind games with you, who is constantly attempting to distort your perception of reality, one of the impacts of that is that it makes you distrust your own judgment.  Another reason, just to kind of go back a little bit, why is it difficult to the whole thing of accounting details in a timeline or whatever.  This plays into that as well.

Often an awareness of what’s happening dawns over time.  You see things that don’t add up, but then there’s a plausible explanation that gets given and so you accept that because you don’t want to be hard-nosed and so an awareness of what’s happening unfolds over time.  But then in retrospect, when you look back and you realize, “I saw signs of this, I should have figured it out sooner.  I should have known.  I should have somehow like recognized what was going on and protected myself and then I could have escaped being through all this pain or having my children go through this pain,” whatever.  All of that happens in your head.  It takes time to uncover that.

The reality is we’re built for trusting healthy relationships and when those are violated and violated at a deep level the way that they are in a domestic abuse situation; it’s not just your trust in other people, it’s trusting your own judgment that gets violated.  And that’s what keeps women in that or keeps going back for so long.

So this kind of goes back as well to the whole issue of that there should be a sequential account that can be given and a cohesive narrative and all of that.  The reality is a person who’s in an abusive situation, they see things, but then they’re given a plausible explanation for them and so they go on.  And the awareness of what’s actually happening takes place over time.  And so when the clarity about what has happened finally comes enough so that they start to take steps to get out of the abusive situation, they’re looking back and they’re thinking, “Oh, I should have seen this sooner.”  I mean, when and such and such happened, like, “Why didn’t I get out?”  Or “What didn’t I do something differently then?”  So they’re actually their own sense of being able to trust their perceptions have been undermined over time.

So, not only do they have to learn to trust other people after having their trust deeply violated, and that’s a big part of health is the ability to trust again, trust other people again.  But first they have to learn to trust their own perceptions again.  And when you have your own sense of your ability to know who is safe and who’s not and what’s right and what’s not right and all of that, when that gets taken from you, when that gets violated that takes time to recover that.  It’s like having the floor fall out from under you and just be in free fall for a long time.

And there are also physiological changes that take place.  A lot of times, women who are in abusive relationships get accused of being codependent and what they actually are is trauma bonded.  Codependency has to do with behavior patterns that try to manage somebody else’s addiction, unhealthy caretaking patterns that try to manage somebody else’s addiction.

A trauma bonding is actual changes in the brain of someone who’s being abused where they’re trying to figure out in the relationship what’s causing the person to behave badly sometimes and be kind other times.  It’s not necessarily a cycle, but there’s usually some reward delivery system that’s intermittent that takes place in an abusive relationship and the person is being told something that you did caused the punishment. 

And then the person will be nice, and so they’re trying to figure out,  “What was it that made the relationship work?” at that point where they’re regaining your trust.  And not only does it draw you back in emotionally, but there are actual physiological changes that take place in trauma bonding in the brain where it’s almost like an addictive chemical release in the brain, and it’s one of the most difficult things to overcome.  And so it takes time and it takes proper understanding with a therapist, working with therapist who understands trauma to be able to get through that.  You can’t just flip a switch.  Just because you’re out of the relationship doesn’t mean all of that goes away.  It takes time.  It takes safety.  It takes safe people to be able to recover from that.

Andrea:  Hmm.  OK, so, here we are at number 12.  This myth that “The victim must be exaggerating.” 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  Usually, actually, in a domestic abuse situation and coercive control situation, the person is not exaggerating.  They’re minimizing.  They’re actually minimizing, and that’s because denial while it has its negatives, it also serves the function of only giving us as much information as we can deal with in a highly traumatic situation.

Andrea:  And you said that’s denial that does that.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.

Andrea:  So denial serves both purposes.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  Denial for the person who is being abused is what you’re talking about right now. 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  For the person who’s being abused, denial is both friend and foe.  When you’re living in that kind of intense trauma, there’s only so much reality that you can handle at a time without being completely destroyed by it.  And so when you take that little part that you can bear to talk about and you take it to another person and their response is to say, you’re exaggerating, that person’s actually being gaslighted by society in general.  Gaslighting comes from a movie, an old movie where there was a deliberate attempt by an abuser to drive his wife insane in order to get her money.

Andrea:  And to make her think that she was wrong all the time and that she wasn’t thinking correctly.

Rosanne Moore:  That she was losing her mind, where he would adjust the gaslights in the house to make the lights flicker and then tell her that that wasn’t happening.  So she would think she was losing her mind.  So when someone takes that piece of information that they’re able finally to address and they go to someone else and they’re being told, “You’re just exaggerating, it’s not that bad.  You should be able to cope.”  It’s incredibly damaging, incredibly damaging.  The reality is most of the time that’s the tip of the iceberg, and what’s happening underneath in the dynamics of the relationship is far, far worse.

And when someone in that situation takes that little piece of information and is finally heard and is brought to a safe place where they can start to unpack it, usually you’re looking at a huge process of having to look at what the depths of the reality that they were living with actually is.  And so it’s adding insult to injury to say, “Oh, you’re just exaggerating.”

Andrea:  Hmm.  So number 13, “I couldn’t possibly be deceived by this person.  Surely I know that this isn’t true.”

Rosanne Moore:  Well, the reality is all of us are vulnerable to deception if we’re given the right circumstances.  All you have to do, again, go back to Nazi Germany, you had an entire nation, there were a few people who stood out as being people who didn’t buy into the lie, who saw what was happening and spoke out against it.  But the vast majority of the country was not Nazi.  They didn’t agree with the ideology, but they were impacted by it.  They were party to it.  They helped make it happen because they didn’t see the dynamics of what was happening for what they were and they minimized, and all it took was being afraid to speak up or looking the other way or collaborating in various ways.  So, you didn’t have to be the spearhead that was doing the actual abuse, all you had to do is collaborate by not speaking out.

Andrea:  OK.  And just this idea of not speaking out, I think, it’s tough for people to know, Rosanne, when they should speak out and when they shouldn’t, especially on behalf of somebody else. 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  It’s hard to know and yet when you see somebody being targeted for abuse or you see these negative behaviors to not stand up and say something…

Rosanne Moore:  Empowers the abuser.

Andrea:  It certainly does, it certainly empowers the abuser and so silence, unfortunately, is consent.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  Yes, yes.  You know, part of this is when I say that everybody is vulnerable to deception given the right circumstances, part of the protection against this is being really honest about what motivates you. 

Andrea:  Oh, that’s so good.

Rosanne Moore:  You know, you’re going to be less likely to be open to hearing from someone about an abuse situation if the person that they’re accusing is someone that does something for you or you’re somehow a member of the tribe that they help lead. That can be political.  I mean, we see it all the time in both political parties where they’ll point to something in the other side that they are giving a blind eye too in their own camp.  That’s true in churches where they’ll criticize something that’s outside, but they won’t deal with it when it’s in their own myths.

So, there has to be an awareness of what am I getting out of choosing not to listen, not to see, and not to be willing to investigate.  That’s a big part of it is we’re most vulnerable to deception when we have our own motives that are being served, our own agenda that is being served.

Andrea:  And that’s a toughie because people want to believe that their tribe, that their people are good people and that anybody that would come and attack their people are bad people.  And so we do this dualistic kind of idea in our minds about good and evil and assume that we’re on the side of good and that those who are with us are on the side of good when we’re all very much more complicated than that.  And if we can’t recognize that, if we don’t humble ourselves to recognize that we could also be deceived – it’s humility.  It’s the honest humility that’s saying I might not be right.

Rosanne Moore: Right, right.

Andrea:  And if we can’t say that we’re going to end up inadvertently possibly, very sadly helping abusers.

Rosanne Moore:  I would say that’s the early stages of it, is that the humility to recognize that I could be deceived and be willing to humble myself and investigate.  But then the backside of that or the deeper implication is when we lack that and we’re challenged with evidence, then there’s a hardening that I’ve seen take place where that unwillingness because now I have something to defend.  Not only do I not want to admit that I’m not capable of being deceived, but I have decided that I have to be on the right side already.  Therefore, anything further challenges not just my perception, but my rightness.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm, my identity.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes, my identity, exactly.  And so then not only am I willing to look at the possibility of being deceived, but now once I’ve chosen not to go there and I’ve taken steps that have proven to be wrong then I have to face that I actually was the bad guy.  I was not the hero.  I empowered evil, and a lot of people are not willing to recognize that, I mean, all of us.  I will say this myself, I have journeyed with abuse survivors for over 30 years, and I did not do it well early on because I had a lot of these myths that I believed, and I was not good at listening appropriately early on.

And so part of my own journey has been having to humble myself and recognize I was at times part of the problem, not part of the solution.  The only way I can be a good guide now is to be willing to acknowledge when I’m wrong.

Andrea:  Yeah, absolutely.  And that’s really hard.  It’s really hard to do when you feel so strongly about a topic, and the person that you’re defending cares about that topic too.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, right.

Andrea:  But I think that’s just the idea of keeping in mind that everybody is complicated and that we’re not all just good or evil and that we could also be wrong about things.  This is being a mature person, and if you’re wanting to have a voice of influence in the world, you have to cultivate these things in yourself.  You have to be able to confront some of the really hard things in life and kind of take a really hard look at yourself in order to be able to move forward so that you can actually be an advocate, be a support, be a positive impact on the culture to minimize the power dynamics that are at play and be a part of good.  And I say good – it kind of sounds like we’re the good ones and they’re the bad ones – I guess, and I don’t really mean that, but you know, to be furthering good in the world.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, there is good and evil that is absolute.  And at times we join it and at times we don’t.  And so instead of trying to see ourselves in terms of us being good or evil, we need to acknowledge that we’re a mixture and that we need to be constantly looking at where we’re giving place to evil in our lives so that we can move away from that. 

Andrea:  So good.  OK, and this last one is a toughie.  It’s a hard one to swallow Rosanne, and so I hope that you can leave us on a positive note in some way.  But the last myth that we’re talking about is “If I tell the truth, the system will bring me justice.”

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.

Andrea:  And why is that not necessarily true?

Rosanne Moore:  And the social myth being that if what the woman is sharing is true, then the system will protect her.  It’s not true because the laws are written by fallible people, and they’re executed by fallible evil, and the same things that can be social myths in the greater society also play out in the court system.  I have frequently heard it said that the courts favor women.  If they accuse abuse, the courts automatically assume that that’s true.

A study was recently done that shows absolutely, that is not true.  Actually, if a woman comes forward with allegations of abuse, it doesn’t really matter how much evidence she has that her children are being abused; the court will actually punish her for trying to protect her kids.  And so you just have to understand that the court is flawed.  And while I do not advocate doing anything illegal – you definitely want to utilize the court system to the degree that you can.

One of the things I had to come to terms with, I went into a very naive thinking that I will just tell the truth, and I’ll present evidence of the truth, and the legal system will protect me.  And that was not the case, at least not to the degree that I expected that it would happen.  And so that was a bitter pill. That almost as bad as the whole situation I was facing, was the sense of betrayal that I felt by the legal system.  The courts tend to assume that women exaggerate the abuse to use it as a weapon to get back at somebody that they’re just fed up with for lesser reasons.

This isn’t true, but that’s the mindset.  That’s the myth that the court is operating under.  Often the boxes that the lawyers are ticking off basically in terms of building a case,  lawyers build a case looking at the laws and these are the parameters for how we build a case.  Those boxes often don’t fit the reality of what an abuse situation looks like. 

And so you may have a good attorney who’s able to take enough of your situation and put it in a box that they can protect you.  But if your situation is kind of outside those boxes, then your solution lies outside of those boxes.  That’s not suggesting that you should thumb your nose at the law, but one of the things that we’re going to address in the Lifeline system is what do you do, for instance, when you have a partner who is an abusive parent without engaging in criminal behavior.  So your children are having to deal with abuse, but it’s not the kind of abuse that the law views as criminal and therefore will take action on.

There are things you can do but your help is going to have to come outside the legal system.  It’s not going to be from the system itself.  Like I said, I had a very naive view of the justice system, but what I’ve come to realize is the legal system can restrain evil, but it cannot provide justice.  God has to do that.  And it doesn’t come on our timetable, unfortunately.  I mean, no, ultimately, fortunately, because He knows more about what we need than we do.  But the legal system can only restrain evil.  It can’t provide us ultimate justice, and that’s an awareness we have to come to the system with so that we’re not asking it to do something it’s not capable of doing.

Andrea:  Or expecting it to save us in a way, like, there’s a lot of responsibility that you still have to sort of understand how to make it work, how to navigate it.  And in hearing, Rosanne, the content of the Lifeline course and working with you on that, it has helped me to have a way better idea of the importance of so many different kinds of support that women need and how they can get that support and then how they can navigate all of the changes that they’re going through navigate the legal system.  Not that you’re a lawyer, we’re certainly not lawyers, though there some counseling background and spiritual direction background in Voice of Influence, we’re not claiming counseling or, you know, legal advice in this course; however it is a guide for someone to help gain clarity that they know how to proceed with the right people.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes, and how to choose the professionals that can help them in those areas.

Andrea:  So if you don’t have a friend that has been down this road before and can help you make those decisions then this course would certainly be a benefit to a woman that is going through that process. 

Rosanne Moore:  You asked about, how do we look at that last one with hope?

Andrea:  Yeah.

Rosanne Moore:  The system can’t bring me justice, but God is a God of justice.  God is a God of justice. He is always on the side of the oppressed.  He’s always against oppression.  And so when we feel trapped, I mean that was the point that I had to keep coming back to.  I’ve worked this past week with a woman who is in an extremely dangerous situation, and we are trying to get her all of the people on her team that can help her get out of that safely and preserve her life.  This is probably the most escalated violent situation that I’ve worked with to date, and we got some bad news earlier in the week.   That night, my prayer was, “God, evil cannot be stronger than you.  It just can’t be stronger than you, so we need you to step into this because evil cannot be stronger than you.”

And the next day, the resources that she needed came into place.  And so that I would say is while the system is flawed, like every other man-made thing, God is on the side of the oppressed.  And so there is hope.  There is hope, and if anybody hearing this feels absolutely trapped in your situation, there is a way of escape, and you want to proceed carefully, we want to help you get resources.  You don’t want to act precipitously, we want to help you put things in place to keep things as safe as possible for you.  That’s our goal.

But just know that there is hope.  You do not have to believe what you’re being told by your oppressor, which is that there is no way out.  That’s not true.  There are things that can be done to help rescue you.

Andrea:  Yeah, I mean it’s so complicated.  I just want to say too that there’s no promises, there’s no guarantees in life.  Even with prayer, there’s no guarantee that something will just come.

Rosanne Moore:  But I will say, I have seen again and again and again and again with the women that I’ve worked with – I’ve seen again and again and again because one of the lies that women believe that there is nothing that they can do, that they are completely helpless.  And they stay in that situation for a long time believing that there is no way out, but when they art to come to terms with the possibility of escape, I have seen things lined up that were not readily visible.

So are there bad things that happen?  Yes, there are.  But I would tell you that there are options that may not be immediately visible for you and we want to try to get you the resources that you need, get you plugged in locally or wherever, to things that can help make that path of escape for you.

Andrea:  Thank you so much for sharing this.  I don’t know your passion for this Rosanne, your wisdom that you have gained through walking very difficult path.  And I want to remind everyone that you can download the list of resources by texting, VOILifeline, Voice of Influence Lifeline, VOILifeline, all one word, no spaces to the number 44222.  And you can also find that information there as well as information about the course at voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.  We hope that this is helpful for a lot of people.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.

Andrea:  All right.  Thank you so much for spending your time with us today.  Rosanne and I are glad that you have stuck it out and listened and are so grateful that you’re open to learning and growing and, you know, finding even more humility within yourself to be able to recognize that some of these myths might even be things that you have thought in yourself.  So let’s go out and know that…

Rosanne Moore:  I was going to say just a word of challenge.  Next time you watch a crime drama, pay attention to how many of these myths are voiced in it because they’re very common in television.

Andrea:   Hmm.  Perfect.  OK, so just know that your voice matters and you can make it matter more.  Thanks, Rosanne!

How to Talk About Racism Online and with Kids with Lucretia Berry

Episode 144

Lucretia Berry Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Last week, we brought you part one of a two-part series about the myths around abuse and coercive control.

We had originally planned to release the second part of that series this week, however, we decided that given the events of the past few weeks, in particular, how things really escalated this week around the issues of racial injustice, we decided instead to release this interview with Lucretia Berry.

Lucretia is the creator of Brownicity, an anti-race/ism curriculum specialist, a writer for in(Courage).me, the author of What LIES Between Us Journal & Guide: Fostering First Steps Toward Racial Healing, a TED Talker, and a Senior Consultant for The American Dream Game. She received her Ph.D. in Education (Curriculum & Instruction) from Iowa State University.

In this episode, Lucretia shares why she created Brownicity and how it helps those at the beginning of their anti-racism journey, how the protests are about more than the recent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, how racism and racial injustice extends beyond police brutality, her response to those feeling overwhelmed and unsure of what to say or how to show up for others right now, why you can just jump on the bandwagon and follow along with things you see happening on social media, how she is discussing racism and anti-racism in her own multi-ethnic family, and more.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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Transcript

Hey there!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Last week, we were set to kick off a series on understanding power structures.  And we began that series with a conversation that is actually a two-part conversation about the myths around abuse and coercive control.  So, we offered seven myths, and then we have seven more to share.  But we decided that given the events of the past few weeks – in particular, how things really escalated this week around the issues of racial injustice, social injustice, and the rioting and everything – we decided that we were going to go ahead.  

We had this interview with Lucretia planned, and rather than pushing it to where we were going to put it in the series, we decided to pull it right up to the front.  So, the rest of those myths will be posted next week as our next episode.

And today, I have with me Lucretia Berry from Brownicity.  Lucretia, well, she’s going to tell you a little bit more about herself and how she started this organization and what she does with it, but I love their tagline and I want to share it with you; “Many Hues, One Humanity.”  In researching for this interview with Lucretia, one of the things that I ran across was her example of just how everybody is just a different shade of brown.  It’s not like we’re, you know, white and brown and black, but we’re really all a different shade of brown and we are one humanity.

So, how can we, as voices of influence, have some sort of impact in this conversation?  What should we be doing?  What should I be doing with myself?  What should I be saying online or with others?  How do we have this conversation in a way that it’s really productive and not hurtful?  I know a lot of times we get frustrated because we’re wanting to contribute to a conversation like this, and we try but then we find out, “Oh, shoot, I said the wrong thing.”  And then we feel stupid, and we go hide back under our shell.

Well, I want to encourage you that Lucretia is going to have some words for you today that will be very helpful.  And the main thrust of this conversation is that it’s not just about jumping on a bandwagon right now.  It’s not just about declaring that we’re not racist.  It’s about going on a journey of deprogramming the inherent racism that we grew up with, the way that the world works, and understanding how we got to where we are now.  Instead of writing it off, taking it in, listening, admitting that maybe, I don’t know everything.  Maybe my perspective is limited and it’s important for me to listen.

So, I’m really, really honored to provide you with this conversation with Lucretia Berry.

Andrea:  All right.  So, Lucretia Berry is the creator of brownicity.com, a contributor for incourage.me, and a TED and Q Ideas speaker at TED Charlotte.  As a wife, mom of three and former college professor, her passion for racial healing led her to author What LIES Between Us:  Fostering First Steps Toward Racial Healing.

Lucretia, I’m really, really grateful that we had this conversation scheduled and that we’re here today.  I’m honored to have you, and would you tell us a little bit more about what you do with your organization, Brownicity?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Well, thank you for having me in.  Oh, my goodness, what timing this is because we scheduled this a while ago, a long time ago.

Brownicity – our tagline is “Many Hues, One Humanity”And as you said, I think because I am a former college professor – my doctorate is in education, curriculum, and instruction – I think I was literally designed to be a teacher, even though I didn’t want to become a teacher because of… we don’t really pay teachers or appreciate teachers.  I think after COVID, we do now.  But we didn’t before so I didn’t have aspirations to be a teacher, but just naturally, you know, I do love to teach.

So, Brownicity is more heavily focused on equipping and liberating people through making quality education around anti-racism literacy accessible.  So, for example, currently, you know, you can probably take a college course if you’re a college student.  If there are organizations in your community where you can do a workshop or something like that, those are available.  But what I was finding with lots of my friends, especially parents, moms, and regular everyday people are not policymakers or working at a corporation where they would get some type of diversity training… they didn’t have a touch point or access to some structured education.

And for the most part, it’s left up to people to educate themselves.  So, the good thing about that right now is that there are a lot of books now.  I would say like five years ago or so, not really.  Not a lot of like, you know, read it yourself and you can maybe figure this out yourself.  So, I put in… you know, like scaffolded education in place, and I started teaching… or I should say we, because it’s a group of us – so we just started teaching like in our communities.  Our first official “we’re doing this” type of… it was a woman who lived in a neighborhood who said, “I have a big house, I have lots of neighbors, and I’m going to invite them into my house.  Can you please come and teach my neighborhood?”  “Yes!”

Andrea:  Right.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  So, we go into churches.  Ultimately, I was asked to come into a school.  So, I packaged this curriculum or this kind of foundational course; it’s called What LIES Between Us, Journal & Guide: Fostering First Step Toward Racial Healing.  Because in my experience of doing this work, and attending workshops and meetings and kind of community-organized efforts is that people who are new to the conversation and even the idea of, you know, anti-racism… there weren’t a lot of resources for people who are new.  And so much of the good content, I believe, is for people who are already kind of on the journey.

So, there’s already this understanding that what race and racism actually are, like, they’re constructs, they’re not biological.  Well, the beginner, you know, doesn’t really know that and hasn’t been immersed in that understanding.  So, I wanted to create something, or I did create something that kind of takes the beginner and gives them a foundational understanding – here are definitions, here are terms, here’s how race was created as a construct and it’s not biological.  And then this is how the narratives been shaped and formed and fit into policies or policies shaped narratives.  This is how we’ve cultivated this over the years, and then this is the lens you have to have to be able to analyze these structures and institutions, and then here’s the lens you have to have to analyze yourself.

So, when people start there, then they’re able to move forward with more clarity and more urgency and wherever they decide to take their, you know, fundamental anti-racism education.  So, I am African-American.  My husband is white American.  We actually met doing this type of work together in a church, and we became great friends and then ultimately got married.  So, we’ve always been kind of immersed in awareness and consciousness, and have been active and intentional and hungry to learn more, to be a part of disrupting and dismantling kind of the systems, policies, behaviors, and beliefs that are in place that continue to move us…  They continue to keep us in the flow collectively, in the flow of racism.

So, we’ve been intentional and active about how to disrupt that flow or how to create an anti-racism flow, and therefore we’ve just been very vocal with our children.  And even before we had children, we talked about, “What is our framework for talking about racial dynamics in this country with our multi-ethnic children,” because it’s going to be a different education or different conversation than what my husband had growing up in Iowa in a white family.  And it’s going to be different than what I had growing up in the south in North Carolina in a black family.  So, again, we’ve had to do the work and figure some things out.  And yeah, I just told you all those things.

Andrea:  Thank you!

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  And here we are.

Andrea:  That’s perfect!  I think that lays a really solid foundation for the rest of our conversation because everybody has a better idea of where you’re coming from.  And I really appreciate the fact that Brownicity focuses, at least, gives the beginner the opportunity to understand this perspective and to understand the dynamics that are at play right now – not just right now, but all the time.  And because I think that, you know, we are having this conversation… usually, you know, it takes us a couple of weeks, at least or sometimes a couple of months after we have an interview before we release it.  And we’re having this conversation a couple of days before we release it because of everything that’s been going on lately.

I mean, the response to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, have certainly spotlighted injustice and triggered a national or international conversation about systemic injustice that people of color experience.  So, I want to ask you, from your point of view, what is the message that we all should be hearing right now?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Okay, so what we should be hearing is we have a deficit and we have been complicit with our deficit in loving, caring about, and offering opportunity to all of our citizens equally or in a way that treats everyone with the humanity in which they deserve to be treated.  So, you know, it’s unfortunate that it takes these types of tragedies to see the kind of the perpetual, ongoing, rampant systems that have been set in place, right, and secured and sustained for a long time because these are just like some outcomes and it’s just a few outcomes.  But, you know, we have people dying every day.

And I don’t mean dying, like, at the hands of police brutality.  I’m saying like, you know, African-Americans get less significant healthcare, or ghettoized – pushed into ghetto housing or displaced.  And, so, I think what we should be hearing now is there is a problem and it’s not going to go away until we actually address it, until we actually fix it and correct it.  And I hope people are hearing that it’s time to really understand the problem because it’s real.  So, it’s not made up.  This isn’t like an anecdotal, you know, every now and then this happens.  We have just been flowing in this stream and so fish have been dying.  And, so, I hope people are understanding, “Okay, now it’s time to look at the water and not simply look at the fish.  Let’s take a look at this water, let’s sample this water, and then let’s begin to detox this water.”

And many of us have been taught that the water is fine, you know, and our frameworks for even perceiving the water… it’s like you have a framework that allows you to perceive that the water is fine.  So, again, we need to look at the water and we also need to look at our lenses, through which we are offered this reality because our lenses have been skewed and our water is toxic, so as a result, you know, we see…

And now, in this day and age, we can film all of these things versus a few years ago, when something would happen that was overt like this… because again, racism unfolds and it impacts every single day in institutional ways, and in representation and exclusion, and all those things.  These are just cases that we are seeing that are so overt and flagrant that it grabs you and makes you see what has been happening for hundreds of years, or the seeds we’ve sown for hundreds of years.

Andrea:  And the protests have certainly grabbed.  I mean, it makes sense to me that it has taken even these voices rising up, even though, you know, nobody wants to see destruction.  At the same time, there’s been this awakening too, “Oh my gosh they’re really serious.  What’s going on?”  I think that there are people that are saying, “Okay, so what are we supposed to do here?”  And there’s this post kind of being copied and pasted and going around Facebook about, you know, “What am I supposed to do?  Like, if I’m silent, this happens; if I speak up, this happens; if I am trying to spread positivity, this happens,” and so on.

And I know the other day, the Blackout Tuesday, you know, there was a lot of concern about the hashtag.  If we use the #BlackLivesMatter with that particular picture then all of the other things that are being talked about with BlackLivesMatter gets pushed down in the newsfeeds and whatnot.  And I think that people are confused and frustrated thinking, “Wait a second, I’m trying to help.  Oh no, I screwed it up again.”

So, when people are wanting to help, they want to be good fellow humans, but they’re feeling caught off-guard and not really sure what to say or do.  What do you want to say to us?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:   I think, of course, people feel the pain or they are feeling the pain.  Like maybe they haven’t before to this degree, but I am realizing that people are feeling the pain of this time right now to a greater degree and saying you know, “What can I do?”  So, what happens is we want to react and, of course, social media is created for that, right?  It’s inherent in, you know, its design to say, “This is what I’m doing right now, and this is what we should be doing right now.”  So, what I would suggest – and have been suggesting for like five years – is that we don’t have these reactions that haven’t been thought-out, but instead that we become or we start or we maintain a journey that is anti-racism or anti-racist.  So, we make it a way of life and you begin by learning.

So, if I could have my way, I would say, “Okay, the rest of 2020 is canceled,” right?  And can everybody just make some time, take some time – maybe it’s not all day every day, but maybe it’s an hour a day, or thirty minutes a day, or fifteen minutes a day, an hour a week – to build your anti-racism literacy, to build your muscles and get immersed in anti-racism and anti-racism literacy.  Like, become a part of the movement because things are going to happen.  But that way, you already have things in your toolkit, you know, you already know how to flow.

So, here’s an example.  I woke up on Tuesday, and I kept seeing all these black squares, and I’m like, “Uh, what is happening?”  So, I go and figure this out, research this out, like, “What is this?”  And sure enough, of course, I have teachers, so I went to a person that I follow and then she explained why we shouldn’t be doing that because, yes, it was the hashtag interfering with the actual information that the BlackLivesMatter hashtag needed to be communicated.  So, I’m like, “Okay.”  So, immediately then I go and tell people that I knew, and I’m like, “Okay, you can do the blackout, but don’t use the hashtag.”

But you see that’s because I’m more, you know, immersed and on this flow, so I’m like, “Okay, careful, you know, carefully tread.”  Especially if it’s something that’s new like that.

Andrea:  Instead of jumping on with the bandwagon, whatever it might be, do a little research make sure you’re doing it right.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Right, you want to do that, but yeah, when you say jump on the bandwagon, so again, that’s not really anti-racist work, right?  That’s just, you know, reacting.  And yes, we can react, but I would like people to put more time into like the deeper work.  I saw that as well with the safety pin, and someone said, “Oh, should I wear this safety pin to show, you know, my allyship?”  And I’m like, “No, that’s performative.”  To me, it feels like you wanting to put on that safety pin is more about you being, like, seen as safe, but it really doesn’t do anything for black and brown bodies.  It really doesn’t do anything to then counter the flow – I’m going to keep going back to that analogy – it doesn’t do anything to counter the flow that we’re in.

And I want to do things or put my time and effort into what will actually disrupt this flow.  And that’s how I’ve led or that’s how I’ve moved in what I do, like, “Well, I don’t want to, you know, just do this.  Yes, I can do some things that show my support.”  So, as an educator, I’m like, “Okay, wherever I can possibly go to educate and to get people to turn their brains on and to be activated.”  That’s my activism is to activate these brains.  

So, we’re not just mindlessly participating and going in the flow.

Andrea:  So, what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not so much about this very moment… it is about this moment in that, you know, if we can be more sensitive to what’s going on and try to join the conversation in a very thoughtful and you know, somewhat researched way.  That’s a good thing, to share your heart and that sort of thing, maybe.  But the bigger issue here is that we should all be really going on this journey in committing to going on a journey of anti-racism in our own kind of reflecting, I would assume.

I mean, it seems to me like a lot of the work is on our own awareness and self-reflection on how this all has really been integrated into our own lives without us even realizing it.  Because I think part of what’s going on and what I’m hearing and certainly what I felt at times is, “Well, I’m not racist.  I don’t want anybody to think that I’m racist.”  And so we put up our black square, which I think that’s good and I did too.

But I can see, though, that it is so important…  This is how I’ve been in imagining it, and I want you to tell me if I’m right or wrong here.  But it seems that if I’m going to post something, I should also or if I’m going to say, “Wow, that was really thoughtful.”  I mean, I posted something from a friend, reposted her reflections on white privilege, and she’s also an interracial marriage but she’s white.  And it was just so powerful, and it really helped me to understand a new level of white privilege.

So, instead of just reposting and saying, “Wow, this is really powerful,” the real things I should be sharing or the thing that’s more powerful is if I share why it was so powerful to me.  What is changing in me when I read this?  Because if I’m vulnerably saying, “I didn’t understand this part,” then that’s allowing other people to be able to say, “Oh, wait a second, maybe I don’t understand it either.”

Okay, talk to me.  Tell me, Lucretia, am I anywhere close on this?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  That is so good, because when white people are showing vulnerability in terms of this transformation, like if something moved you, transformed you, you didn’t know or it’s like, “I thought I knew, and then I learned.  I thought I knew and then I learned, please come learn with me.”  Being, “I’m not racist,” isn’t good enough.  I’m not racist either, you see, what I’m saying?  I’m not racist either, but there are still racist systems in place.

So, we have to do this work of dismantling these systems, the outward systems and the systems inside.  We still have racist wiring in our brains.  And the whole, “I’m not racist,” it needs to be thrown out, like throw that out.  And what people need to say, “I’m becoming anti-racist,” or “I am on a journey,” or “I am on an anti racism journey,” because that means there’s a constant, like, peeling back the layers and questioning everything.

So, I’m just going to view it just simple.  You know, so when you really understand that there are systems and forces and influences in place and it’s not just, “Well, I’m a product of my heart or whatever, you know, or my morals.”  I know there are things that that are in place – forces and narratives and stories – that have shaped how we see ourselves in relation to how we see people who are not, maybe, in our same racial category and social economic class, all of that.

But when you understand that, then you can be an active part of changing the narrative or speaking up.  Like, for example, I know right now the focus is on the violence committed by police officers.  But I, as an educator, would dare to say that, you know, of course, the violence starts early on.  How much violence do we teach in American history that is approved violence against native peoples, you know?  Even violence against the British because, you know, Americans or the United States or the colonies wanted to be free.  Now, that is kind of an approved violence; they wanted liberation.

So, you know, we have to look at what we’ve been taught and what the stories are depositing, you know, in us and how these stories are shaping us.  We needed racial categories so that we can be okay with the violence against enslaved Africans.  Oh, but again, you know, we have holes in history.  So a part of that, you know, doing this work is committing to this journey so you begin to, like on a daily basis, you are challenging what you thought, what you know, you know, this whole neutrality of everything and you know, racial inequality is just normal.  And, you know, that’s not the case.  It’s all been very intentional.

Andrea:  So, Lucretia, you’re really an expert, especially with talking about race and anti-racism, this journey with children, and I’m looking forward to looking at your materials on that.  But how are you talking about the current issues in your own family right now?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Right.  So, again, the beauty of already being on the journey… and I just want to encourage everyone like, you know, racism is going to spew things at you.  You can pretend that that’s not the case, but I need people to see anti-racism literacy or anti-racism education is like parenting preparation.  Just like something else you would put in your toolkit, just like a parent would prepare themselves to be able to talk to their children about sex and things like that.

And anti-racism education and literacy is not an accusation that you’re racist or something like that.  It means that you understand where we are and the opportunities that we have to equip our children and ourselves to do better.  So, I say all that to say, in our family that is a multi-ethnic family, we went about addressing… first giving our children, of course, permission and normalizing conversations about skin tone because children see color, right?  I know people say children see race, but really because they don’t know the racial categories when they’re babies or when they’re little, they see that people are different colors or skin tones.

So, that’s how we talked about it in our family because talking about people specifically, or only I should say, only in racial categories would feel like our family was two parts or three parts of a whole and that’s not the case.  We are one whole; you know, our children have mom and a dad like everybody else, and so that’s how we chose to frame our conversation.  And actually, it was my daughter at four years old who said it.  She was like, “Mommy, you’re dark brown.  I’m medium brown. Daddy is light brown.”  And she is correct and we talked to her about melanin, and why Daddy’s ancestors had less melanin, why Mommy’s ancestors had more melanin.  Yeah, so we give them language, and we give them permission.

And so talking about what people look like is already normal.  So, there’s no discomfort there.  And then maybe about five or six, as they’re about to, you know, head out to kindergarten and to be out in the world more than they’re with me.  Then we explained race, how racial categories were constructed, and you know, people will put in this hierarchy and why historically.  And I know some people, you know, especially white people, think that that’s going to destroy their child or it’s taking away their innocence.  It is actually equipping your child, and you shouldn’t deprive them of the reality that we live in.  That’s what my TED Talk is about, actually.  So, if people want to listen to the TED Talk, you just google Lucretia Berry TED Talk, and I talk about that, how our Children Will Light Up the World If We Don’t Keep in the Dark.

Andrea:  Love that.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Thank you.  So, once they already understood race and the history of race, and yes, like they got upset, but that just means that they’re healthy because they should.  It means that they’re hardwired for love, so injustice pained them and it should.  I would be concerned if I told them that and they go, “Oh, okay,” and walk away.  Like, “Oh my gosh, we need to call somebody,” right?  But that’s okay, that is totally healthy.  And then as things come up on the news… and we don’t turn off our television, you know.  They know everything that is happening, and they watch me and my husband, you know, me and their dad talk about it.  Like we literally talk about it at the dinner table, we show our sorrow, they see that.  Like, it’s okay to be upset.

When they’re upset about certain things that happen at school, you know… they go to a school that is predominantly white and yeah, they know that their peers, their white peers, their parents aren’t having these conversations with them.  And they are not obligated to parent their peers, but they at least are way ahead in terms of understanding racial dynamics and in our world.

So, when they say something like… like one of my children, she was upset that there was only one brown boy in her class.  And she said, “That’s not fair.  There should be more brown boys in the class.”  And she’s our little outspoken one, and so I think she would probably go to school and stage a revolt.  But because it’s a normal conversation, I just explained to her about redlining and housing historically, and how people, schools, where they’re situated and depending on your neighborhood, and that’s who attends your school.  I said, “We can move someplace else in our city where the neighborhood or the community have more African-Americans or people of color or brown people,” I said, “then there’ll be lots have brown boys in the class.:  But she just said, “Oh, okay.”

She just needed that understanding, and then she was fine and went on about her day.  You see, children are not simply sponges, they are negotiating and meaning-making on a daily basis about everything.  And by seven years old, they have already observed how racial hierarchies work in the United States.  You might not hear them talking about it at your home, but that’s because you haven’t been talking about it at your home, and you haven’t given them language.  Oh, but when they go to school, they do.

Andrea:  Then they’ll get the language.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Well, they talk about it, and they don’t talk about it in healthy ways.

Andrea:  Right.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  So I have loved the school where my kids go to.  They have hired me as a consultant for the teachers.  And I get to go in and give the kids language, and then it’s amazing how the kids who have the language and understanding have healthier conversations.  And then I also teach a high school course on anti-racism literacy, it’s an elective.  And again, people have conversations with my students and they are blown away how they can articulate what has happened, what is happening, and how to create something better.

Andrea:  Lucretia, how can people connect with you in your work and actually, you know, have that be a part of their own journey in this process for themselves and their own families?

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  So, I have created… well, first of all, I would love to come everywhere and teach and talk to people.  But I’m a mom, I have smaller kids and so I’m staying put for now.  So until then, I created a… Brownicity has an online learning community.  And we just launched it in the fall, so it currently now has, I want to say, six or so courses in there.  We do the courses live so if you can attend live, you do.  If you can’t, it’s recorded, and then it’s just in there for when you can get to it.  It’s a membership, so currently, it’s $10 a month or you can pay $110 for the whole year.  But it’s for people who need ongoing support and who need the education.  We have… like, I teach there, we have guest teachers and authors.  It’s a great space for people who want to be on the journey.

And, so again, you enroll and it’s there for you.  Currently, we have a class – one of our starter classes – called What LIES Between Us.  So, we’re going to do that virtually live on Tuesday, June 16th through July 14th.  So, they can go on the website and all that information is there.  But you know, when people want resources from me, I put everything there.  The resource library is free; you don’t have to be a member to access the resource library.  If you want to do What LIES Between US study on your own, you can buy the guide book from Amazon.  And that resource library is free, but other than that, everything is in the online membership.  We have schools use it for professional development.  I just have created a space because I care about people’s learning journey, because I know it can be traumatizing.

Andrea:  It can be tough, for sure.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  Yeah, it’s traumatizing.

Andrea:  Anytime you look at what’s underneath of whatever we are and whoever we are and the way that we interact in the world… I mean, anytime you look underneath that it can be a little difficult.  So, thank you for providing that space, Lucretia for your voice of influence in the world, and for being here and helping us know as Voice of Influence listeners how to really respond in this moment of the world.  And we appreciate your voice of influence here today.

Dr. Lucretia Berry:  I am so honored to be here.  Thank you so much for inviting me.  Thank you for making this space available, and thank you for amplifying my voice and Brownicity’s voice

Andrea:   Hmm, absolutely.  And just so everybody knows, everything will be in the show notes.  So, any links or things that Lucretia mentioned, we’ll definitely have those there all in one spot if you would like to be checking that out.

So, thank you so much, Lucretia!

Dr. Lucretia Berry: Thank you!

Deceptive Myths About the Abuse of Power (Part 1)

Episode 143

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

My Voice of Influence colleague, Rosanne Moore, is back on the show to break down destructive myths surrounding coercive control and abuse of power.

We’ve broken fourteen myths into two groups that will be split between this episode and the next.

In this episode, Rosanne shares what the dynamics of abuse of power and coercive control, the importance of understanding the myths around abuse of power and coercive control, the truth behind the seven myths below.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Rosanne Moore.  She is in the business with Voice of Influence.  She does a lot of incredible things, and we’ve had her on before where we’ve visited about your expertise, Rosanne.  We’re going to go a little bit deeper into that today.

And the reason why this particular topic is important is that the idea of having a voice is the foundation of what we do with Voice of Influence.  And when somebody comes across an abuse of power – in particular in their own lives – it takes their voice away.  It makes it very difficult for them to be able to have agency in their lives to make a difference and do the things that they want to do.

And so today, we’re going to start a two-episode series on the myths that are related to this abuse of power.

Andrea: So, Rosanne, thank you so much for being here again today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Rosanne Moore:  That is my pleasure.  I’ve been looking forward to this.

Andrea:  So when we’re talking about this abuse of power, first of all, can you just sort of give us a summary overview of what the dynamics of abusive power would look like in a relationship or in any particular setting?

Rosanne Moore:  Well, my background is a domestic abuse situation.  I came into that with a lot of the common misconceptions about what was involved in domestic violence, domestic abuse.  And what I’ve learned is the dynamics of abuse and abusive power are not necessarily about violence, physical violence.  They’re about coercive control.  And that can take place in a church.  It can take place in a business.  It can take place in a marriage.  It can take place between parents and children, and it can happen in a totalitarian regime if you look at what happened in Nazi Germany, for instance, or other totalitarian governments, North Korea.

And so when you learn about the dynamics of coercive control, there are a lot of different applications for them. 

So I guess, when we’re talking about abuse in a home, there are broad applications for what coercive control can look like in relationships.

Andrea:  So, today, we’re going to be tackling it.  You and I worked really hard on… you kind of sharing with me a lot of information, and then we distilled this into a bunch of myths that people believe.  And why is it important that we understand the difference between myth and reality?

Rosanne Moore:  Because a big part of coercive control is able to take place because of people who are decent, good people who believe wrong things.   And so they reinforce the power of the abusive person without even realizing it just by believing things that are not true that make it very difficult for a person who is being abused to escape the power of the abuser.

Andrea:  So a voice of influence is somebody who cares about this.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.

Andrea:  If you are listening to this podcast, you’re somebody who cares, and you want the people that you lead, you want the people that you work with, you want the people that have any kind of influence on to have a voice.  You want them to feel empowered and be able to make a difference in their own lives and in the realms of their influence.

And so the reason why we’re tackling this today is because we believe that it is fundamental.  It is absolutely imperative that voices of influence have a very clear understanding of what is myth and what is reality when it comes to these dynamics of coercive control as Rosanne was saying.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.  And in any business or any group, it’s just important to know that a large percentage of the people that you’re dealing with, people in society have experienced some level of abuse at some point in their lives.  They may be currently in it.  It may have happened to them earlier, and it has long-term impact for them.

So, being aware of that and understanding the dynamics and the things that you can do to help a person recover their voice and bring all of who they are, and all of their gifts, and all the things that they learned; because people who come out of abusive situations are survivors, and they have a lot of gifts to offer.  And so understanding that and being able to help utilize their gifts and help them in the process of recovery is really valuable.

Andrea:  All right.  Now, we also want you to know that Rosanne has compiled a list of resources that, in particular, would be beneficial to a woman who is leaving an abusive relationship.  Is that right, Rosanne?

 

Rosanne Moore:  It is.  And because my experience, and the domestic abuse situation, in general, tends to be disproportionately applicable to women, that’s what we’re going focus on.  I do want to acknowledge from the outset that there are relationships where the woman is the abuser, and the man is the one who’s being victimized.  The dynamics of that are slightly different, and so I want to acknowledge that and the reality of that and the pain of that.

But I do want to say that today, the pronouns that we’re going to use are, you know, female pronouns for the victim and male pronouns for the perpetrator simply because that’s the most common in a domestic violence situation between intimate partners.  That can be different when there are parents and children involved.

But that’s what we’re going to be looking at today.  And the list of resources that we have, while it is primarily targeted toward women in abusive situations, there are going to be really good resources that will be applicable to anybody who’s coming out of some form of abuse.

Andrea:  So if you would like to download that list of resources, please, we encourage you to do so.  If you know somebody that needs them or if you need them… and if you know somebody that needs to hear this podcast episode, we want this to be a resource that is available to you and this list of resources to be available for further help.  And so, you can get that list of resources by texting to the number 44222, text the letters VOI – that’s for Voice of Influence – VOILIFELINE.  So you’re texting VOILIFELINE to the number 44222, and you can download that list of resources.  And we will also have it available at voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.

All right, and then I want to also mention too that Rosanne is working on a very helpful course that would be not just a list of resources, but it is something that we will talk about a little bit more here at the end.  But I wanna just let you know that there is a very affordable course that is coming that could really help women who are just coming out of an abusive relationship.

Okay, Rosanne, let’s start sharing these myths that have to do with coercive control and the way that people kind of look at it.  So, today, we’ll share seven of them and then we will share seven more in the next episode.  Okay, so, first of all, the first myth that we identified was that, “People get targeted for abuse because they are weak or gullible.”

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  Rosanne, why is this not true?

Rosanne Moore:  You have to understand that an abuser is looking to make themselves large by breaking down someone else.  There’s no great thrill in destroying someone who is already destroyed.  Actually, what researchers have found is that abusers target people who have strength that they admire.  They are looking to dominate and to break down someone who is strong, who is independent.  For women in particular, the qualities that they look for is somebody who is kind, empathetic, and interesting.

So, essentially, it’s the very strength that a person has that makes them a target.  It’s not weakness; it’s strength.  And that’s true for cults.  I’ve done some research around cults because while there are people who just take pleasure in doing evil, period, you know – so they don’t really care who the target is, they just enjoy doing evil – most abusers get something out of the fight, out of destroying someone who is resistant to their domination, which means they have to have the strength to resist.

Andrea:  All right, so don’t believe the myth that people get targeted for abuse just because they’re weak or gullible.  So whether you’re the person that is in the situation where you’re being taken advantage of or abused, or if you are just society at large thinking about people, hearing stories, just don’t believe that myth.

Okay, so, number two; “If you are impacted by trauma, you are weak.”  First of all, what do you mean by that, Rosanne, and then explain why that’s not true.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  So when people are impacted by trauma, often those who are seeing them afterward are thinking, “Well, why did they respond that way?  Why didn’t they just do x, y, z?”  They should have just been able to see that the person was lying.”  They should have just been able to fight back in this particular way that the healthy person sees as a rational response.  What people fail to understand is trauma changes the brain.

A domestic abuse victim responds very much the way a POW does.  And now you stop and think about that.  A military prisoner of war has been trained for battle.  They’ve been trained to prepare for the possibility of being captured.  And yet the impact of trauma on the brain, on the body means that they typically respond in some very predictable ways.  The trauma is designed to break down the brain of the other person, the rational thought processes of another person.

We are made for healthy relationships.  We are not made to live closely with people who are trying to do us constant harm.  And so women who are in abusive relationships are basically in a hostage situation.  Whereas in a prisoner of war situation, you went into it knowing who the enemy was; in an intimate abuse situation, you went into it believing this was a person who loved you most and was going to be most for you in your life, and yet they’re actually out to destroy you.

And so it’s very common for people to misunderstand the response of somebody who has been injured by trauma and say, “Why don’t they just…” and you can fill in that blank many, many ways, when in fact the person is behaving in ways that are typical of someone who has been deeply traumatized.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Okay, and we talk about trauma again, I think, later and maybe even in the next episode, Rosanne.  But I think just the understanding that trauma changes you and it makes it difficult for you to think and rationally is so important, especially around anything that’s triggering.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.  And you can’t just muscle your way out of it, and you can’t just rise above it in the midst of it.  There’s a level at which healing can’t really come until you’re outside of the thing that is harming you.  You can survive it.  There are many, many people who survive horrifically traumatic situations and they managed to, you know, pull out the strength that they need to survive that situation.  But for them to really be restored to health, they need to get outside of the traumatic situation – not still be under assault – to begin the healing process.

Andrea:  All right, number three; “If it’s really that bad then you could just leave, right?”  Rosanne, why is that not necessarily true?  And we’re not just talking about, you know, intimate partner relationships right now.  This definitely applies in many different situations.  So why is it not so easy to leave?

Rosanne Moore:  Well, in a marriage, you have legal things holding you into the marriage, for one thing.  It doesn’t usually become apparent what’s happening.  One of the things about abuse that people misunderstand is when you’re in a coercive control relationship, the abused person frequently doesn’t know they’re being abused.  They just know that something’s not right.  And so their go-to usually is, “What is it about me that I need to change for this situation to change?”  Which in general, if you think about it, is a healthy thing, you know.  The thing that you have the most control over usually is yourself.

And so it’s a healthy reality for a person to want to look at their own part and their own ability to change.  The problem in a coercive control situation, the victim is not the problem, and so no amount of change on their part is going to change the dynamic of the situation.  In general, though, there are many things; there are financial concerns, there are legal things that bind a person into a relationship, there are practical things like housing if you’re in a marriage. And a person who is abusing through coercive control systematically undermines the support system of their target.  And so they are removing options at every turn, so just leaving isn’t simple.

In an employment situation, a person can’t just leave.  I mean, they have to live, they have to have a job.  When we look at what happened with Larry Nassar in targeting elite athletes, in order for them to compete for the Olympics or for these top things for which they were training, they were in the midst of a system that was in itself abusive.  And it wasn’t just Nassar; it was the whole way that the Olympic committee was set up the way that they protected abusive coaches, et cetera.  And so just leaving is not simple.

For women who have children, just leaving doesn’t get their children out.   When you have a person who is physically violent, just leaving can escalate the violence and can end up getting you killed.  And so there has to be a recognition that leaving is a complicated process, and there are a lot of pieces to it.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t, but it means that instead of just assuming, “If it’s really bad, you could just leave…”  That’s not reality.

Again, back to the POW thing, “Why don’t POWs just leave?”  There are a lot of answers to that question and none of them are simply within the power of the person being victimized.  There’s need for outside help.

Andrea:  All right, so myth number four; “You really need to stick with it.  Be loyal.  You need to stick with it because for the greater good.”

Rosanne Moore:  For the greater good, yeah.  In the context of marriage, people are told, you know, “Our society is breaking down because of divorce and you made a promise,” and in some cases it’s, you know, “You made a promise before God, and you need to stick with it.”  If you are dealing with a coercive control situation, you are dealing with someone who is systematically seeking to do harm.  There is no greater good that is being served by protecting an abusive person.

People say that… you know, they try to silence a victim because they don’t want to have to deal with the discomfort.  They don’t know what to do with it.  And they don’t want to have to deal with the discomfort of finding out the truth and finding out that the world isn’t as neat and tidy as they’d like to believe it is, and it’s wrong.  What they’re essentially saying when they say that for the greater good is they’re saying, “My comfort in avoiding this is more important than the fact that you are at risk and you are being sacrificed.”

Andrea:  And how do you see that playing out?  I know that sometimes it has to do with maybe parents who feel shame about the fact that maybe their child is now getting a divorce, or people in a church or a religious environment where they don’t like the fact that somebody is actually thinking that they need to leave. “No, you need to stay.”  And why is that so important to people?  I mean, it’s comfort on one hand, but what else?  What else is that?

Rosanne Moore:  Well, I think we have to go back to what is true.  Does truth matter?  If the truth of the relationship is you’ve got somebody who is seeking to do harm, then to try to silence the person who is asking for help is enabling evil.  And I think part of the time, what happens is people don’t understand the dynamics of what’s taking place.  There are things, in a church setting that are said like, “You know, you’re harming the name or the reputation of Christ,” for instance, if a victim of sexual abuse comes forward and names a leader in the church or even just somebody who’s prominent in the church.  People don’t want to hear that, and they’ll frequently say, “You’re hurting the church.  You’re hurting the name of Christ.”

So there’s this idea that if the victim is silent, it’s going to serve the greater good of the community.  But the whistleblower is actually serving the greater good because they’re exposing what will be detrimental to the health of the whole.  And that’s true whether it’s domestic violence or whether it’s in a corporate setting, somebody who discloses wrongful practices, whatever.  We need to honor the whistleblowers instead of being so invested in our own desire for the boat not to be rocked that we’re willing to go along with things that are ultimately going to be damaging to the whole of the group, the wellbeing of the group in the long term.

Andrea:  And I think too, it’s easy to think that this could be about one person.  If you do have a situation where maybe it is a leader of a group of people, that leader might be abusive and there might be people in the group that see all the good that that person does and they say, “But look at all the good that they’re doing.  Yes, there’s maybe a few things that aren’t great, but we need, you know, to move past that and whatever, and stay loyal, and look at all the good,” and that sort of thing.  And I think that also is a part of what this means to be loyal, what people think that they need to be loyal to the leader.

Rosanne Moore:  And so my question for that person was, “If it were your child that had been harmed by that leader, would you feel the same way?  If you were the one who had been assaulted by that leader, would that still be your position?”  No, probably not; very likely not.  Now that does happen sometimes where a parent will silence a child because they don’t want to upset things.  But you’re essentially saying that one person is the sacrificial lamb because this other person has done good things.

What people need to realize is abusive people often do good things in order to allow them the credibility to continue to harm others.  That’s very common.  That’s part of the lie that is being presented.  And so, that’s not an anomaly.  That’s part of the dynamic that takes place.

Andrea:  All right.  So I’m going to move to the next thing then.

Rosanne Moore:  Okay.

Andrea:   All right.  So for five, six, and seven here we’re going to talk about some of the myths that are around forgiveness in particular.  As we’re looking at forgiveness, it became really evident that we needed to separate these three because there’s a lot of confusion around forgiveness.  So, Rosanne, we’re going to start with number five that, “Forgiveness equals reconciliation.”  So, forgiveness means that I need to bring this person back into my life.  Why is this not right?

Rosanne Moore:  There’s no basis for that.  Reconciliation requires that the person be safe, be healthy, that there be change.  You can forgive someone.  You can release them to God.  You can determine you are no longer going to carry the weight of their offense and the bitterness toward them anymore.  But that is not the same, and often people who push forgiveness do so in the name of God.  There is no biblical basis for forgiveness without repentance and even if there’s repentance…

Andrea:  And repentance is essentially change, right?  It’s an actual change.

Rosanne Moore:  Exactly.  It’s actual change.  And so what often happens is there’s a demand for immediate forgiveness and immediate reconciliation.  Abusers use this in a big way.  You will often see abusive people who make a quick confession.  When they’re actually caught and they can’t deny it anymore, they make a quick confession and then they immediately push for reinstatement of relationship.  And what they’re really after is number one, no consequences and number two, the opportunity to re-offend.

And so, it’s very important not to push reconciliation that is premature.  When a person has had their trust deeply violated, they need to be the one who determines if and when reconciliation is ever possible or appropriate.  That’s not to say that they can’t forgive.  They can, but that doesn’t mean that reconciliation is necessarily a good thing.  It could actually be a harmful thing.

Andrea:  So, essentially even if they forgive, they still don’t have to be in a relationship with somebody who’s not safe.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, and to pressure that… especially since the person who has been wronged has more intimate knowledge than outsiders do of exactly how that wrong took place.  If a person is resistant to being reconciled, other people should not press for that because instead of just assuming that they’re just hard and bitter and unforgiving, there needs to be a recognition, “No, this person intimately knows what went into drawing in their trust in the past, and so they’re going to be the first to know whether or not that dynamic is still at play.”

Andrea:  Hmm exactly.  Okay, number six; “Forgiveness can happen instantly.”

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, that’s not real.  In order to genuinely forgive, you have to grapple deeply with what was lost.  You know, if the offense is small, then you can forgive relatively quickly.  But when you’re talking about coercive control, you’re talking about systematic breaking down of another person and there’s an ongoing assault; it’s not a onetime offense.  And so for forgiveness to be real, a person has to grieve what has been taken from them, and they have to look at the implications for their life of what was lost and the long-term impact of what was lost.  You can make an immediate choice to commit to the process of forgiveness, but forgiveness is a process.

I know there were times when people would ask how we were doing, and I would talk about things that my children were going through on an ongoing basis, in terms of the impact of the abuse that we suffered.  And it didn’t take very long; people would get start to get uncomfortable, particularly if I showed any heat at all over what was happening to my kids.

Andrea:  You mean your personal anger, or what do you mean by “heat”?

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.  That if there was any kind of emotional reaction or anger expressed over what was happening to my children, people would shift into, “Well, you know, you gotta forgive.”  And my response to that was, “I am committed to the process of forgiving.  I am also committed to justice for my children.”  And anger is part of that.  There are things that people do that we should be angered by.  They’re just wrong.  They’re harmful.  They do tremendous damage, and if you’re not outraged when you hear about somebody’s voice being taken away in injustice, somebody being harmed, an innocent person being harmed, there’s something wrong.  Anger should be a part of our response.

Now, it should not be the controlling response that we have.  Committing to the process of forgiveness recognizes that this is an ongoing thing.  And if you’re in a relationship with an abusive person, there’s ongoing assault.  So even after I left, because my children still had contact, there was ongoing injury that was happening.  And so, there in particular, forgiveness had to be a process that I committed to, but it was not a switch that I could flip.

Andrea:  Mhmm, I think that that is super important, super important for people to understand that it’s not instantaneous and it’s not simple.  Okay, and finally for today, Rosanne, number seven; “Forgiveness negates any need for consequences.”  “Hey, I’ve forgiven them.”  “So you need to just move on.  You’ve forgiven them, so just move on.”  Why is this not true?

Rosanne Moore:  Because if the person is dangerous, the rest of society needs to be protected from them, honestly.  I mean, that’s the bottom line.  And there are consequences to our choices.   Forgiveness says, “I am not going to carry the bitterness of your action with me any longer.”  It does not mean that there aren’t consequences for your choices.

Rachel Denhollander gave a beautiful victim impact statement speech in which she addressed both the need for forgiveness – she offered forgiveness to her abuser at the same time she was calling for justice and that she had made great personal sacrifice to seek legal justice and to make sure that he couldn’t harm other people and that he faced the consequences for what he had done.

Andrea:  He being Larry Nassar?

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  And so the idea that if someone physically assaults me that pressing charges is unforgiving is wrong.  If somebody crosses that line, they need to face the consequences for that.  If someone embezzles from a company, they need to face the consequences for that.  There needs to be accountability that’s given because it’s not just a wrong against the individual.  There’s also a social wrong that has to be addressed as well and protection for the innocent in the future.

Andrea:  I think that another way to look at that too is that when we don’t have consequences for behavior like this, this behavior becomes normalized.

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.

Andrea:  We’re saying in effect, “This is okay, this is normal.  We should just move on.”  And then it just escalates.  It continues to become part of the culture, and it escalates.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  A good picture of that is the fact that most sexual assault crimes are not ever prosecuted.  Very few sexual offenders ever face any kind of consequence for the behavior.  And if you look at our culture, it’s rampant.  I mean, there are all kinds of sexual abuse that’s just rampant.  Sex trafficking in our country, there’s so many ways in which it’s just exploded.  And part of the reason for that is there are no consequences.  The consequences are for the victim who seeks justice rather than for the perpetrator.

Andrea:  And why do you say that?

Rosanne Moore:  I’ve walked closely with several friends who have sought justice through the legal system.  And what they were put through in order to bring it to light where they had to be retraumatized again and again in the process of telling their story, and proving it, and being treated as if they were lying… and they were just revictimized on so many levels, only to have the person come to a hearing where they simply got a slap on the wrist, where they had no significant sentencing.  It was just unbelievable to watch.

So, they paid the price of the original wrong.  I mean, they carried the wrong.  They still carry the impact of the wrong that was done against them.  They courageously tried to stop evil at the sacrifice of themselves only to have the system do nothing in response, which emboldens, of course, the abuser.  Yeah, it’s a terrible thing when you watch something like that happen.

Andrea:  It certainly is.  And I think that that is why it is so important that more and more voices rise up to help embolden the ones that need to be heard.  And Rosanne, I know that that is your heart here today.  It is our heart, collectively, at Voice of Influence as we have been working on this Lifeline course.  Can you tell the listener just a little bit about that so that they have an idea of what is coming… or perhaps by the time they listen to this, it may already be out.  But tell us a little bit about that Lifeline course that you’ve been working on.

Rosanne Moore:  In order for a woman to leave an abusive relationship, she has to leave in her mind first and there has to be a pathway for her to leave.  Again, you know, it’s not as simple as, “If it’s really that bad, you’d just leave.”  There have to be things in place; otherwise, she can actually escalate the danger.  I’ve walked closely with a number of women who have been through this process.  I’ve been through it myself, and so one of the hardest parts is trying to do something like that while you’re unraveling the impact of trauma yourself.

And so I wanted to provide a resource that would help women to make decisions step by step.  Not tell them what to do, but help give them parameters to think through their specific situation, understand some of the situation they’re stepping into as they go into the court system.  There are some really good resources, and they will be on the resource list about how to deal with the psychological impact of things.  Our course is going to focus more on the very practical things.  How do you get out?  On a practical level, what steps do you have to take?  What pieces need to be in place to get out and to minimize the risk as much as possible?  And that’s what our course is going to be.

Andrea:  Okay, so, again, if you are interested in either/or, the download… it’s just a free download.  It’s a list of resources that you can use right away, or you can offer to somebody else right away.  You can get that by texting the letters VOILIFELINE to the number 4422 and at voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.  That is where you can find that as well, and it’s also where you can find out some more information about the Lifeline course.

For the price of a book, you can purchase this course and be able to have what you need at least to get going, and to have a friend, a guide who has been there before and has guided others along this path.  We don’t claim to have all the answers.  We don’t claim to have all of the information.  What we do claim to do is to provide some guidance and help you come to some clarity for yourself so that you know how to move forward and how to proceed.

Rosanne, thank you so much for today, and I look forward to sharing more of these myths and debunking these myths again here in the next episode.

Rosanne Moore:  Thank you so much, Andrea.

Characteristics of a Business that Endures with Bill Flynn

Episode 141

Bill Flynn Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Bill Flynn is the author of Further, Faster: The Vital Few Steps that take the Guesswork out of Growth and we had a really interesting conversation about building a business and what the characteristics are of somebody who builds a business that endures.

Obviously, there’s a lot going on that we need to endure through right now. Even if you don’t have a business yourself and you’re listening as a leader who wants to have influence, there’s a lot in this episode for you.

In this conversation, Bill and I discussed his book, how to go from being sucked into those moments where you’re constantly putting out fires to being able to relax and plan for the future, how leading as a human being creates trust, how your response as a leader right now can impact your future success, and more!

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

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Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, and that they can make it matter more.  I’m Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

 

Today, I have with me Bill Flynn, who is the author of Further, Faster: The Vital Few Steps That Take the Guesswork Out of Growth.  We have a really, really interesting conversation for you, in particular about building a business and what the characteristics are of somebody who builds a business that endures.

And obviously, there’s a lot going on that we need to endure through right now.  So, we’re going to talk not only about the business aspect of it, but the leadership aspects.  So, if you don’t have a business yourself but you’re listening as a leader who wants to have influence, there’s a lot here for you.  We have a very, very introspective and interesting conversation.

In this conversation, we talk about his book, particularly about building a healthy, thriving business.  We talked about how to go from being sucked into the tyranny of the moment – those moments where you’re sort of putting out fires that feel like crisis all the time inside the business – to being able to relax, step outside of the business, to be able to think about it, and really plan for the future.

He also talks about leading as a human being to create trust and what that really looks like, and then how leaders respond to pain – particularly right now – really can impact their future success.  I think that you’re going to get a lot out of this conversation with Bill Flynn.

Andrea:  Bill Flynn, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Bill Flynn:  Thank you for having me on, Andrea.

Andrea:  So, Bill, tell us a little bit about your business and what you do.

Bill Flynn:  Yeah.  So, I’ll start back a little before my business because I think it’s relevant.  So, for about twenty-five years, I was an entrepreneur.  I did ten startups over that time frame.  At one point there, I was five for six, but I’ve always been a student of business.  I’ve always learned… you know, or tried to learn about how to get better and how to improve.

And what I found out along the way, actually after the fact, was that my style is really a coach style and that’s now what I do.  I am a leadership or a business coach.  So, I work with leadership teams, and I help them think about how to run their businesses well as they can.  I ask a lot of questions.  I teach them a framework that is mostly based on some certifications that I have, but I also add some of my own stuff in there.

So, I do that until recently.  I did that full-time and now I’m helping my clients.  Most of them, actually, can’t afford to pay me right now, but I’m doing it for free because this is a calling for me, so I want to help people as much as I can.  So that’s what I do at a high level.  I’m certainly happy to go into more details if you wish.

Andrea:  Well, it probably would be wise to go ahead and explain why free, why now?

Bill Flynn:  Well, so we’re recording this just at the beginning of April and COVID or the coronavirus situation is really coming to a head, if you will.  So, many of my clients are struggling.  One of them just laid off 60% of their workforce on Wednesday.  So, it’s been sort of really difficult for them.  Others are doing okay.  Actually, some of them are doing well, but there’s concern for the future and they want to make sure they preserve as much cash as possible.

So, I’m, you know, an expense they would rather not have to have.  So, I’m forgiving them that for now because, you know, their employees are more important.  So that’s sort of why things are going the way they are, unfortunately.  It’s too bad because my business was doubling every year and had been for about three or four years in a row.  But what are you going to do?

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  It’s very strange.  It’s a strange time when things just aren’t the way that that they’re supposed to be, it seems.

Bill Flynn:  Yeah, right.  Exactly, and who knows if they’ll ever get back that way.

Andrea:  Right.  You know, since we’re here already at this point, one of the things that we’re here to talk about is your book Further, Faster.  So, obviously, that is something that’s going to be really important for people, for businesses in particular.  But it also might change a little bit depending on how things shake out.  And maybe could you start by telling us just a little bit about your book and what people can really get out of it?

Bill Flynn:  Sure, yeah.  So, I never intended to ever write a book.  I actually don’t like writing.  I don’t consider myself a very good one, but I’ve been doing this for about four or five years.  I speak all over the country, and I help whoever I can, and I’ve got a lot of feedback from people saying the way I look at things is really different than they’ve heard from others.  So they said, “Hey, you should write some of this stuff down.”  And so I did.

I actually hired a company called Scribe Media to help me with it because of my lack of interest in writing.  And I went through a really great process where, basically, they interview you like you would be doing, but they do it over about ten or twelve hours.  And then someone who is a much better writer than I am tries to find my voice, and then writes it all down, and we sort of work through that.  So that was a process.

But, basically, the book was just released.  And the reason we decided to release it was because it’s a book that applies to this situation.  What I teach my clients is to build a really healthy and thriving business – one of those things is to make sure that you have enough cash to weather inevitable situations like this.  You know, we’re twenty years into the century, and we’ve already had three.  You know, we’ve had 9/11 we’ve had 2008, and we’ve had now that this thing, which are really impactful crises.

And one of the things I tell folks is you should have a set of capital that’s set aside for this happening, and you can decide how long you need it for.  You know, I usually recommend six months – there are some people who want to do it for a year.  There are some people who are smaller and struggling, and they’re happy to just get three months.  You know, whatever it is to just sort of get started.  But the bulk of the book is actually thinking about how do I actually build a business that endures, which we typically don’t have a lot of time to do because we’re too busy running the business.

And one of the first things I teach the leader – or the head of company, as I like to call them – is you need to figure out how to fire yourself from the day-to-day as quickly as possible, because your job isn’t to run the company anymore – it’s to predict the future.  And predicting the future takes brain cells and insight and innovation and creativity, which is stunted or really stopped if you’re thinking about the day-to-day crisis.  I like to call it the tyranny of the moment.  We’re sucked into that tyranny of the moment too often, which doesn’t allow our brain to think.

I ask a question which I love, which is, you know, “When do you get your best ideas,” and it’s usually when I’m running or in the shower or whatever, when you’re not actually thinking.  When you’re trying to think or trying to solve a problem, you let your brain relax.  And that’s the kind of thing you need to do to grow.  That’s what the book is about.

So, we released it because… I don’t think it can help anyone right this moment.  But if you start reading it and think for the future, once you get out of this crisis and the hunkering down part is sort of… you’ve done as much as you can, you’ve survived at least for a period of time, and you can start thinking about the future.  This book is great for that.

I’m an 80/20 guy; it’s written into the title of which is Further, Faster.  It’s the vital few steps, and the law of the vital few is really the 80/20 rule, and that’s what the book is.  It’s really the few things that you should do first and focus on those and get a hold on those which will move you furthest fastest; then you can work on the other stuff.  I like to sort of think of it as this is the book for the big knobs that you can turn, and then there are other great books for the smaller knobs that you can turn to truly tweak and improve.

Andrea:  So, getting everybody together and onboard is part of what is crucial to moving forward and to moving quickly.  That’s something that we have particular interest in here at Voice of Influence is, you know, how do you have that influence and make sure that you’re actually influencing others in a very ethical way.  And one of the things that you bring up in your book is trust.

Bill Flynn:  Yeah.

Andrea:  On page 75, you say, “Game-changing ideas can come from anywhere in your organization.  The odds of them filtering up to you increase considerably when you hire the right people, and let them know that they can talk freely about their ideas without fear of judgment or ridicule.”  Would you tell us a little bit more about how to create that kind of environment where people are able to share their ideas freely?

Bill Flynn:  Yeah, sure.  So important, really great question, and thank you for referencing a page in the book.  That’s great.  So, I’m a bit of a neuroscience geek, which you may have noticed from some of the stuff in the book and creating this sort of psychological safety – which Amy Edmondson has really coined the term – is really important.  So, that starts with you as the leader.

The best way to create that environment is to show that you’re a human being.  You’re flawed.  You’re irrational.  You make mistakes.  You’re okay saying, “I’m sorry and I screwed up.”  That goes a long way, you know.  We are tribal in nature, and we’re also very forgiving in nature.  And if you are seen as that and you let yourself be vulnerable in that kind of way, then people will start to say, “Oh, well, if the boss can be screwing up left and right and whatever, and admit it then, boy, it might probably be okay for me to do that as well.”

And, you know, that people will be a lot more comfortable with being themselves and speaking up, questioning things.  You know, Amy Edmondson has this great quote that she talks about in one of her TED Talks, which says, “It turns out that no one wakes up in the morning and jumps out of bed and says, ‘I can’t wait to go to work today to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative.’  We prefer to look smart, helpful, and positive.”

But what happens in the workplace is, unfortunately – we don’t always do it deliberately, sometimes we do it inadvertently – we create this environment where people don’t feel comfortable doing that.   So, they don’t want to look ignorant, so they don’t ask any questions.  They don’t want to look incompetent, so they don’t admit a weakness or mistake.  And they don’t want to look intrusive, so they don’t offer ideas; and they don’t want to look negative, so they don’t criticize the status quo or certainly don’t criticize the leader.

You have to be open as a leader to be criticized and to be challenged, and be okay with that and be curious and say, “Wow, we have completely different way of looking at this thing. I’d be really great to understand your perspective.  I hired you.  You know, I hired you because you’re smart, and you’re a good fit, and you have skills and all these things.  So, it’s in my best interest to at least hear what you have to say, and then figure out if maybe that’ll modify my way of thinking or change my way of thinking.  

“Or have you understand, ‘I’ve thought that through and here’s why I didn’t do it that way.’”  And they understand that, right?  So, they’ve been acknowledged, and they’ve understood, and you’ve explained to them why maybe that isn’t the way to go.  That’s what you have to do.  It really all starts with you and you with your team.

Andrea:  Totally agree.  Have you noticed any particular characteristics of leaders who kind of allow themselves to be open to criticism and change their way of thinking?  Or any particular characteristics of leaders who kind of just don’t know how to go there and refuse to go there?

Bill Flynn:  Yeah.  So, definitely the first part; the second part is a lot longer answer, unfortunately.  So, I actually pick my clients, and I look for three things.  I look for someone who’s humble, I look for someone who’s a lifelong learner, and someone who is comfortable challenging the status quo.  And I have a process I work through; I talk to them a few times, I ask them a bunch of questions, I ask them about their team.

I actually offer ninety minutes of my time for free in front of their team and walk them through an exercise so I can see how they interact with their team, because behavior really tells everything.  We can say we are a certain way, but you really don’t prove it until you behave that way and you’re put in that situation.  So, I try to create that environment so I can see them.

And I’ve turned down some clients where I didn’t really like the way they interacted – they thought they were the answer man.  It’s usually the man, by the way, too often.  They felt like they had all the answers, and they would look weak if they didn’t.  I can’t really help them, because I’m going to come in and ask a lot of really basic questions that they probably don’t know the answers too.  And if they’re not comfortable saying, “You know, wow, that’s really good.  I’m glad you made me think that way,” then I can’t help them.  So, those are the three characteristics that I look for.

There are too many other explanations of the other person, right?  I sort of make a half joke and I say 95 to 99% of all leaders should hire someone like me and 95 to 99% of those people never will.  They don’t want to be seen as not being the answer man, right?  Jim Collins calls it the “Genius with a Thousand Helpers.”  I can’t help that person.  And at some point, they’re going to run out of time and energy, and that’s usually what happens.

It’s usually when growth stalls is when that dynamic, you know… an intelligent and really dedicated founder just runs out of time and energy, and hasn’t built that culture – they almost always hit a wall.  It might take a year.  It may take five years.  It might take ten years, but you will hit the wall.  And it’s unfortunate because you probably built something really great, but just haven’t created that environment to take it to the next step.

Andrea:  You know, as I think about the situation that we’re in currently and what you just said, something else that comes to mind for me is people’s experience with pain.  I’ve noticed that people who have experienced pain and have almost a brokenness… not necessarily in the idea that they were completely broken as a person, but to the point where they felt like they needed help, to the point where they accepted that they were not able to be everything for everybody, that sort of thing.

There is something really powerful with the person who has gone there and their ability to do the things that you just mentioned – those characteristics that you talked about when you’re picking your clients – being humble, and learner, and wanting more than the status quo.  When you add to that also just this experience of pain and how one responds to that, there’s something incredibly powerful with that.  Would you want to comment on that?

Bill Flynn:  Yeah, sure.  I’ll take it from two perspectives.  One is what I found is, especially, working with all the founders… because I was never a founder of a company.  I was usually brought in to help scale it, you know, sales, marketing service, that kind of thing, kind of a CEO kind of level.  And what I’ve found was the founders that had the most trouble with in working with, and getting them to the next level or helping them get to the next level were those who are really successful.  Either in some other part of their life, or maybe they had a previous success or two in founding companies.  They just assumed, it seemed, that the next one would be right so everything that they thought was perfect.

And it was only, I think, those that I worked with that had had difficulty before, or struggled in some way, or were in a position where they didn’t know something and they had to figure it out and didn’t just do it themselves… you know, lean on other people and ask lots of questions were the ones that were much more likely to succeed.  And those are the kind of folks that I kind of work with, you know.  They’ve… either through one way or another, they had some level of pain as you described it, or lack of success, or some something that humbled them in some way.  I think that’s really important.

My daughter is a college-level swimmer, and I’m an athlete as well and I played college hockey and tennis.  I played soccer in high school.  So, I’ve been on lots of teams and my daughter has been on teams since she was five – swim team, which really isn’t a team.  It’s a bunch of individuals that happen to get together and do their own thing, but they’re the best kind of team I’ve ever met.  They’re so supportive of each other.  And, you know, even though it’s really an individual sport, they act like a team that I’ve never seen before.  And I sort of asked myself, “Why is that?”  And the only thing I come up with was similar to your question on pain, which is shared misery because swimming is really, really hard.

You know, I’m a college-level hockey player.  I played against guys who played in the NHL, but I got to tell you, I don’t like swimming.  It’s super hard.  It’s difficult.  So, I think that’s the shared misery of, you know, swimming six, seven miles a day and burning seven to eight thousand calories in a few hours, and having to work through that.  I think that’s what makes a good leader and also makes a good team.  I think that’s an indicator; when you can share those burdens and you know that you’re all in this together and it’s going to be difficult, I think that helps you.

Andrea:  So, when we’re looking at the time frame that we’re in right now, we’re looking at the situation that we’re in right now, those people who are listening who are leading teams and going through hardship, what would you say to them about how their response to this all matters in terms of their future success?

Bill Flynn:  Oh, as a leader, it matters tremendously because people are going to judge you by how you act right now.  You’ll see the best and the worst in people when you’re in situations like this.  The leaders that take it on as a way to really take charge and help people and support them and sacrifice on their own versus those who sort of, you know, go into protective mode and safe mode and think more about themselves… you’re going to sort of see how that transpires over the next several months. 

And I think, you know, one of the things that you can do first is to understand that – when you said people are in pain right now – there’s a lot of stress.  The brain does not like uncertainty, and it forces itself into this protective mode – you know, this sort of fight-flight-freeze kind of thing we talk about in the popular culture.  And your first job is to help them get some control over their lives as much as you possibly can.  And what I tell folks all the time is just give them meaningful work, right?  Have them focus on the work.  They can control the work.

There’s other things you can do, of course.  You have to be concerned about health and safety of your employees.  We’re seeing that a lot with Amazon and some other strikes that are happening right now where people are saying, “Look, they’re making me go to work, and you’re not giving me any protective clothing.”  “You’re making me stand next to people.”  “You’re not telling me who’s sick.”  You know, I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to come out of this very well unless he starts to make some changes because he says, “I’m hiring 100,000 workers,” which is great, but these people that work for him are saying, “Look, I’m uncomfortable being here because I could get sick at any moment.”  So, it’s going to be a huge thing.

So, health and safety, first, of your employees and customers, and then get them… the ones that you’re able to keep and keep going forward with, get them to focus on the work.  Keep them with things they can control, and then keep them in touch with each other.  You know, I recommend four things that you can do in virtual ways; have a daily huddle.  Every day, quick daily huddle; you know, what’s most important, what’s some good news going on?  Where are you stuck?  You can have a weekly meeting with your team to do more difficult things.  And then, you know what, have a virtual happy hour once in a while.  Just let people hang out with each other in a social setting, even though it’s sort of weird because you’re just kind of hanging out on your laptop and whatever, but it feels good.

And then lastly is just set up an hour or so a day where you and your team just hang out.  Meaning you all get on Zoom; you don’t have a meeting, but you’re just on Zoom together.  And, you know, if something pops up, just, you know, raise your hand or ping somebody.  It helps us, you know, at least have some semblance of connectivity.  I think those are some great things that leaders can do, and people will remember that.  They’ll remember that you carried them and their families.  They’ll remember that you tried to keep them connected and tried to give them some sense of control.

Andrea:  I like those.  I like those a lot.  Okay, so for yourself and your own sense of… you know, leading yourself through this kind of situation or anytime when you have really experienced hardship, is there any book or person or principle that you cling to, to help you get through it that really influences your ability to get through and keep going?

Bill Flynn:  So, I’m a big fan of David Rock, who is the head of the NeuroLeadership Institute.  He’s written a bunch of books, Your Brain at Work and a couple others.  So, I’ve taken those principles and applied them to myself.  And also my dad was an alcoholic, so there’s sort of A Principles – you know, first things first, that kind of stuff – and I think they really apply… which is what I just mentioned, I try to figure out what are the things that I have direct control over and indirect control over and what are the things I have no control over.

And the stuff I have no control over, I just don’t worry about them.  There’s nothing I can do, right?  I practice stoicism, you know, from Cato and Epictetus and all those guys.  You know, you focus on the stuff that you can control and realize that what you have is a gift.  The likelihood of us being here is next to zero, so remember that, you know, which is hard to do.  So, I sort of fall back on those things, which is the stuff I can control, I will try to put my heart and soul into it; the stuff I have indirect control on, I’ll try to influence.  You know, as you say, I can have some influence to my clients and to others.  So that’s what I do.

You know, my job is to protect my family as a parent and myself, but you know, I also can’t do that and ignore other people.  We’re tribal in nature and our inclination is to help others and so I’m trying also do that, which gives me some control right?  I lost 93% of my revenue because of this.  So, what I did first was I extended my home equity line of credit.  I applied for an EIDL.

I’m going to apply for the PPP from the CARES Act just so I have buffer because I don’t know how long this is going to last.  I do have some money in the bank to hold me for a little while, but now that I’ve done that, I can spend more time on, “Okay, how can I help people?”  And so I offer one hour a day to any leader that wants to chat, you know, whether they work with me or not.  I’m giving free, you know… any of my clients can set up any meetings with me that they want, and I’ll help them any way I can because that’s stuff I can control.

Andrea:  Hmm.  All right, so in closing this out, I’m going to ask you also to give us information about yourself and how people can get a hold of you or access to you.  But first, what advice would you give to somebody who really would like to have a Voice of Influence?

Bill Flynn:  So, if you want to influence others, the way that you influence someone is to have some level of trust first, because people are only influenced really… they allow themselves to be influenced.  It’s not something you can make them do.  And that trust is the first thing that they want.  So, the way to trust you is to feel like that you’re sincerely on their side, and you’re not doing it with an agenda in mind.  You’re doing it to sincerely help them.

So, I was a thirty-year sales guy.  I’m not a built-in sales guy.  I don’t have great technique.  I’m not an extrovert – I actually skew introvert – but I do have a sense of service and I always brought that to my sales job.  And the first question I would always ask when I was meeting with a potential prospect or their team was, “Hey, we’re gonna meet for like an hour or so.  If each of you could describe for me what would be a really good meeting, like when you talk to each other afterwards, how would you describe this meeting to each other as a success?”  And then I would write them down.

I wrote everything down they said, and I made sure that everyone had a chance to share.  And then before the meeting was over, I made sure I went over the list and said, “You know, this is what you asked for, and did I give this?”  And in an hour, I had great influence over these people.  And I had a very good close rate, you know, because also, if I said at the end of the hour a half, “Look, I can’t help you.  What you’re asking for is not what my product does.  It partly does what you want, but I wouldn’t want you to be unhappy, so here’s the name or two that I recommend people who would do what you want.”

And I’ve had people refer people to me.  They turned out not to be my clients, but they referred others who they said, “Oh, you know, Bill’s a great guy, and I think what you want is what he does.”  So, to me, that’s influence.  I definitely influenced them in some way, but they allowed me to do that.  They gave me permission because they saw that I was sincere in service.

Andrea:  Hmm, I love that.  All right, Bill, where can people find your book Further, Faster, and any other resources that you’d like to highlight?

Bill Flynn:  Yeah, sure.  So, I have a website, it’s a catalystgrowthadvisors.com.  All my contact information is on there, my email and phone number are on there.  But if you want to reach me without having to go there, it’s just bill@catalystgrowthadvisors.com.  And then of course, I have the book out.  It’s on Amazon and other places; there’s a Kindle version, a paperback.  There will be an audible version, but it actually got interrupted because the narrator is in New York, and he was told he couldn’t come to the studio anymore.  So, that’s been put on hold for a little while until they’re able to finish it.  So, I’m looking forward to that because that’ll be kind of fun.  So that’s it.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for being a Voice of Influence for our listeners today too, Bill.

Bill Flynn:  Thank you for having me on, Andrea.  I really appreciate it.