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Institutional Health and Leadership In Difficult Times with Dr. Neal Schnoor

Episode 151

Dr Neal Schnoor Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Dr. Neal Schnoor is Chief of Staff to the President at California State University, Long Beach where he operates in various functions in support of meeting the mission of the University. Dr. Schnoor was also my professor when I attended the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and he taught me as a music education major and in a leadership class.

I still remember being in that class and being struck by his conviction about leadership and really calling us to be great leaders so when I started the Voice of Influence podcast, I really wanted to bring him on to share his voice. That was about three years ago and it was such a great conversation that when we decided to do this series on understanding power structures, I knew I wanted to talk to Dr. Schnoor again and have him share his perspective.

In this episode, Neal discusses how checks and balances help to maintain healthy power structures within an organization, how to lead in a healthy way, what you can do as a leader to create a culture that supports your team at every level, the most important aspect of a good leader, especially when faced with situations like the current pandemic, and so much more.

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Transcript

All right!  So, today I have with me Dr. Neal Schnoor.  Dr. Schnoor was actually my professor when I was in school at University of Nebraska at Kearney.  He was band teacher, and he taught me as a music education major.  He taught a leadership class.  And I just remember being so struck by his conviction about leadership and really calling us to being great leaders that when I got to start this podcast, I decided very soon that I wanted to talk to him.  I really wanted to bring his voice onto the podcast.

We did an interview about three years ago.  It’s called “Perhaps it’s Time to Stop Leading and Focus on Influencing.”  It’s Episode 14, and I really love that conversation.

When we decided to do the podcast series on “Understanding Power Structures,” I definitely wanted to talk to him again because his perspective comes from that of somebody who is the chief of staff to the president of a major university.  So, we wanted to look at what does this look like, understanding the power structures within an organization and how those checks and balances come into play.  How does that work exactly?  How do you have a healthy organization and maintain a healthy organization?  How do you lead in a healthy way, especially when we’re faced with things like COVID-19 and social injustice and unrest?

So, that’s the conversation that you’re about to listen to.  I am thrilled to bring you this conversation with Dr. Neal Schnoor.

Andrea:  All right, so Dr. Neil Schnoor, it is great to have you back on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  It is a pleasure to join you, Andrea.

Andrea:  So, can you tell us where you are now, what you’re doing?  What’s your position and role, your perspective?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Sure.  So, I started a new position a year ago at California State University at Long Beach, and I’m chief of staff to the president.  Too long to explain what that all means, and everywhere, chief of staff is a little different.  But in general, my job is to ensure that the office runs smoothly, that we work with the executive team and meet the mission of the university.  It’s the best way to say it, changes every day, and love the kind of pace and difference every day brings.

Andrea:  So, you have a very up-close perspective on what it looks like to really be at the home of an institution, and even make sure that things are running well, that sort of thing.  We are talking about this… you know, in this podcast series, we’ve been talking about “Understanding Power Structures.”  So, given your position and the institutional-level kind of perspective that you bring, could you share with us how much energy and effort do you think does or should a healthy organization put into making sure that it’s actually healthy?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, you know, defining the word healthy, I guess, would be an issue, but in terms of structures, you know… each leader that comes to an institution – and I’ve been in higher education, two institutions – the leader really does put a stamp on it, and they bring certain expectations.  And while you’ve clearly got in our structure a provost or some title there that oversees the academics, you need someone overseeing the business and finance and operations.  You need someone overseeing student affairs.  You’ll need someone with the foundation fundraising and alumni-relations technology.

Generally, those are the baskets you’re going to have and at most institutions, you’ll see that, but they also put their own flavors on that and have smaller or larger groups.  So that part of being healthy, you know… what you see on paper is just the description.  It’s really what happens behind the scenes that really matters.  It’s how we work together and how we collaborate and support one another.

I really would focus and draw people – you know, especially in the current climate – health and wellbeing are really challenged right now.  For folks that are very social, and they’re removed from those support networks and trying to support those through telehealth, telecommunications, those are big pushes for us right now.  So, I really am glad, I think, really only in the last five to ten years have we seen people get really serious about providing support for mental as well as physical wellbeing.

Andrea:  And why do you think that that shifted?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, you know, some people would say we live in a greater, stressful environment, and I think in some ways that’s true.  I just think there’s a realization that, you know, we bring people on board and the hiring process – which we may talk about moving forward; I think it’s so critical – and you get them on board and then what?  You know, more people than not just say, “Go, here’s the keys and have at it.”  Very little transition, very little onboarding, perhaps not enough oversight; sometimes too much oversight, not giving them the freedom.

But I think we want to take care of our people because it’s way easier to cultivate and grow someone you already have hired and has passed your review than to let them suffer, you know, and go through that process a lot.  But you will see in some organizations just a tremendous amount of turnover.  It’s not always bad, but better to support, develop, and train the wellbeing of our employees than to have this constant turnover.

Andrea:  So, do you mind if I ask what does that onboarding or that continued support look like where you’re at?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  You know, it’s really hard…  So it helps where I’m at.  It’s different.  I’ve been at different institutions and it takes on different… depending on whether it’s corporate or whatever.  But mainly what you want to do is once the person is on board, that process is there, start connecting them with the people that they’re going to work with and/or lead.  It sounds crazy, but people have to move their house, they have to move their family.  I mean, the sheer number of things that a new employee coming on board… you got to bring a set I-9 Form and it’s got to be in person, and “You got to fill out this.  We got to have you fill out this in order to get your email account.  You can’t have this until you have your email account.”  It is a laundry list.

So, there’s some of that that happens.  But it’s hopefully getting engaged with who they direct report to and start explaining and helping them understand a little about the culture and how things operate, connecting them with the people in their unit and starting to have those conversations.  And then again, it’s not about just running on day one.  It’s about being comfortable to assume the position and then you really start engaging one-on-one and in groups to learn.

Some people are more formal about that and then on the other end, it’s, “Well, I expect you should be able to do that.  I hired you, so go.”  And I think anywhere toward the first rather than the latter is a step in the right direction.  A lot of it… I had a lot of training in HR in safety and privacy and technology, security.  There are just a lot of trainings that have to take place.

Andrea:  So, from the perspective of the institution, how does an institution guard against the potential abuse of power?  And you and I had a really interesting conversation about power previously.  When we’re talking about the abuse of power – maybe it’s an abuse of authority – certainly, you have professors, you have I assume, a hierarchy of how people report, that sort of thing.  How does the institution handle and guard against that abuse of power?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  You know, one area, if you look at it from a larger organization that would be similar between public and private, is really to have two functions.  And I’ll jump to you really need to have a culture built around compliance.  And being transparent about and a tone set from the top that, “We will function in accordance with laws, statutes, and regulations, as well as ethical norms.”  Then there’s the other side of that, which is an audit function.  And you know, I think some people are surprised [when] they read in the paper that there’s this financial issue happened at an institution.  They think it’s the Wild West.  I can’t begin to explain to people who aren’t in this business the literally tens of thousands of statutes, regulations, policies that we operate in compliance with.

So, there can be abuses of power – I’m not ducking that, we’ll get back to it – but the good news is that there are audit functions.  So, for instance, every year, organizations have to have a fiscal audit, and those audits will catch things right away.  Most people will say, “Oh, you got caught!  Somebody did something wrong.”  Again, reflect back to what I said, literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of policies.

And so it’s possible that a trigger on a technology thing got tripped, and now all of the taxes were misapplied by thirty-two cents and that adds up to a hundred million dollars and the audit will catch that, and the audit will go back and require those things to be fixed.  So, there are built-in good things if we use them to avoid those power things.  We can dive into that.  I think another thing I’d mentioned at this point would simply be those two functions have to work hand-in-glove.  And in many places, they’re sort of against each other, and people in the organization have sort of sense that those are the bad guys.  So, that’s natural in a way, but I would also call our compliance and audit people to up their people skills.

Let me give you an example on the compliance front.  So, I had a dear colleague who is an expert in compliance, and I’m not joking with you.  Pick any area, and to be an expert in it takes a career.  And then the laws change and the regulations change and the system policies change – they have to make all those changes.  So, what compliance people need to do is they need to continue to do pertinent, continuous training on the big picture items.

But here’s how it plays out.  Now, you’ve got a faculty member whose job it is to prepare and deliver classes.  They’re also recruiting students.  They’re also doing their research, scholarly productivity.  They’re engaged in the community.  It is not possible…  Yes, they need to be trained on the big things, but dotting the I’s on even the most recent Title IX policy, which just changed and is being implemented, they’re going to come to you as the expert and say, “I need some help with this.  I think there could be an issue here.”

This colleague, who lives in this world and is an expert on it, one day said, “What’s wrong with faculty members?  I thought they were supposed to be smart, and they don’t know anything about fiscal policy.  They don’t know the steps you’re supposed to go to make sure that you pay people on time,” all these kinds of things.  And you know, I talked with them about it, about everything I just said.  They have a full-time job, they can’t also be an expert and all this.

And at one point, it became negative and said, “Well, I just don’t think they’re as smart as people think they are.”  And so I said, “Well, great.  Answer this question.  What was Wagner’s use of secondary dominant chords?  What primarily did he use them for, especially Neapolitan chords?”  And she looked at me like I was talking Greek.  I said, “No, I seriously want an answer.  If you’re so smart, what did romantic composers use secondary dominant chords primarily for what purpose?”  I said, “These are not stupid people.  These are some of the brightest people on the planet, but they’re not an expert in fiscal policy and all those things.”

So, I spent too much time on that, but I just hope there are some compliance people.  I’m on your side.  It’s a tough job.  Audit, even tougher.  They see you as, you know, the inspector general coming, and that makes them very nervous.  So, the more people skills you can have, the more you can say, “I’m here to do it.”  Because I’m telling you, 90%+ of the time, even the audit function, the person didn’t do it purposely wrong.

Andrea:  Right.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  They simply violated one of those little tweaks and in 90%+ of the cases, they’re mitigated very easily.  You have to follow through and make sure they get done because it’s not on everyone’s front burner.  And then, of course, you have those cases of wrongdoing which gets back a little to the abuses of power, where we may go next.

Andrea:  One of the things that came to mind when you were using that example is just the idea of strengths in general, gifts that we have to offer each other.  A compliance person has that to offer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody is going to always be able to do what they’re able to do.  It just means that the compliance person themselves has that to offer.  That’s their contribution to the university, to the organization.  I think sometimes we just expect people to understand us and give us what we want, like compliance.  Maybe it’s not always about… like you said, it’s not always intentional that, you know, somebody doesn’t do it.  Maybe this is something that you have to offer them.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Yes.  You really hit on something there.  One of the things that I’ve done multiple times in my role – having been a faculty member and then in administration and a dean and those kinds of things – is I have noticed this very rare phenomenon, and folks can reflect on it; we tend to think everybody else knows what we know.  I mean, it’s just second nature to you and your job now doing all you do.  But if I walked in to record a podcast, I would need training.  I don’t know how to do that.

So, even in these big areas, we start from the understanding that the other person knows what I’m doing… and you just nailed it.  Part of it’s walking and saying, “I’m here.  I’m the audit officer.  The purpose of my job is to look into…”  Just give them a little background, that can even help.

Andrea:  “And I’m for you as long as we’re working together to make this right.”

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Sure.

Andrea:  Okay.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Yeah.  And if it goes the other direction – we start finding negative things – it can become adversarial, but it needs to be done.  And, again, as long as the culture of the organization is supporting that, it’ll be strong.  Moving more to your question about leadership, it can be a little bit vexing.  But I’d offer a few black and white things that I think… and you know me, I’m a gray guy.

Andrea:  Are you referring to the healthy leadership?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Yeah.

Andrea:  I don’t think I actually asked that question.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  No.  I’m looking more at that managerial level.

Andrea:  Okay.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  So, where I want to say a couple of things that we can do that I think are really important are to make sure that our policies are clear, that they are accessible.  So, I’m the employee; I can look it up, and I can find it, and I can read it.  You won’t believe how many institutions you go to – they don’t even know where those policies are.  They can’t find them.  So, they wonder what’s happening, and they need to be regularly updated.  We talked about training; really good training must be continuous and ongoing.  In short, we have to eliminate single points of failure.  And in a single point of failure – the easiest way you can think about that – if there is one person that signs off on the check, and there is nobody else that has to approve that you’ve just created a problem for yourself.  You’ve created an opportunity for an employee to do something wrong or even the appearance of doing something wrong.

So, there’s always got to be this sort of dual authentication, no matter what.  And if you think about they say, “Okay, well, you get all the way up to the president; who’s looking at them?”  Probably the system chancellor.  In a corporate world, the board is looking over the shoulder of the CEO.  So, it goes all the way to the top that there shouldn’t be single points of failure.  And the last thing, while lately in the country… I won’t get too political.  There have to be at least confidential if not anonymous reporting mechanisms.  That’s how you stop abuse of power.

If I, the employee down the chain, fear retribution because I’m going to report something even criminal – let’s go to all the way there – with someone in the organization, I won’t report that potentially if I fear I’m the one that’s going to get fired.  So, there must be 360 reviews and opportunities for confidential reporting to a compliance officer, to audit, and then they have to dispassionately look at those.  We know that there can be cases where someone falsely accused somebody, but that’s why the whole process, in total, does work and that fights those abuses of power you’re talking about.

Andrea:  How does someone know when they should report something and when they shouldn’t?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, here would be my initial take.  That’s why I like the confidential and/or anonymous, and if folks don’t know that – confidential means somebody knows it’s you.  Somebody who read it knows it’s you.  Anonymous means you can make the report, and there’s nobody on this planet can know.  So, there are options for both and there are pros and cons to both of those, but I’d say report it.

Andrea:  If in doubt.

Dr. Neal Schnool:  If in doubt, report, and then it’s up to our folks, and I’ve dealt with many of them.  We have had some very wrongful accusations, and it comes out.  If your person, you know, takes every complaint at face value and dispassionately and thoroughly reviews those, investigates those, the truth does come out.  It really does.  So, the truth can exonerate the other person and no one needs to really know about it even.  So, if in doubt, report.

Andrea:  Do you have any thoughts for somebody who might be in an institution that’s not so healthy, that they’re not so confident that there isn’t corruption up the chain of command perhaps?  Maybe they’re not really sure if their report will actually be taken seriously or if something will happen with it.  How does somebody approach this idea of reporting and following up with it when they’re in that kind of a situation?  Do you have thoughts on that?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Yeah, well, it’s just a tough situation.  I’m not going to joke with you.  If the culture is that bad that you don’t have a… you know, for instance, my first example would be to go to your manager and ask them, or at the very least, is there any trusted colleague?  You know, let’s say you’re feeling something about sexual harassment but you’re a little afraid to say anything to your boss because maybe they’ll think you’re a troublemaker.  Is there anyone in the organization, a colleague, that you work with that you might talk to them as a place to start?

But we’ve got reporting mechanisms through our equity and diversity office through our HR office, through any supervisor, manager, or dean.  So, it wouldn’t have to even be within, say, your unit.  Maybe you could report it through another because you fear that.  There should be a compliance and audit function and so on, and those ought to be confidential resources.

So, I’m only challenged because there is really no good answer for that person if the culture is so bad that complaints are ignored.  But I will tell you that some avenues you can pursue there is outside the organization.  Whether it’s a public institution or a private institution, they have to operate in compliance with federal state employment laws.  And so you can go to the state level, you can go to the federal level and issue complaints.

And that has happened before, that a person doesn’t feel comfortable, and they make a complaint with the Nebraska, you know, Office of… you name it, disabilities or so on or so forth.  And they will take up the complaint for you.  So, it makes me sad that there are institutions that employees feel like they do not or cannot report, but in those cases, you really can find external advocacy as well.

Andrea:  If you’re somebody coming into a situation where maybe you’ve been hired in a position like yours or an upper-level position to kind of make a change in health…  There needs to be a healthier environment here, healthier perspective on the way that we listen to people, the way that we work with people.  What are some of the initial things that somebody should think about when they are the one that’s coming in to help set the tone and make the changes?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, I mean, the best I can say… because every day there are people that genuinely feel like they’re not heard.  And I will say that’s the one thing, to go in and say, “I have five things that I’m going to do here.  They’re foolproof and they’re going to fix something that’s wrong…”  Listen, listen, listen, listen, what are people really saying?  I’ll give you an example so it’s not such a hot issue because people jump to, you know, criminal activity and sexual misconduct and so on.  But in every organization I have ever worked, you do a survey and everyone says, “We have to improve communication.”  I guarantee you; I’ve never seen that not come up in the top three in any culture.

You know what, I have not been successful yet at convincing anyone on a larger scale… and I’m not putting our groups down.  We got people on campus that do, but back when I was a dean, everybody, “Well, let’s send more memos out.”  Wait a minute, you didn’t ask them what that meant.  So, we have more meetings and we send out more bulletins, and I don’t think people are saying when communication’s bad that x,y,z is happening.  I think they say, “You aren’t listening.”  And so, it’s not a pretty answer.  I don’t have easy answers.  But the answer is to listen, to engage genuinely with people.  You better have a thick skin because they’re going to say some things, but that’s when you start hearing their issues when they do let loose and become a bit more emotional.

So, it’s all about listening and validating, honoring that they feel this way, not arguing with them right away.  You don’t know if it’s true or not.  It’s true in their world right now.  So, I’d like to go into a long thing, “Well, then you need a strategic plan.  You need to put together a blue route.”  There could be a thousand different answers, but I just leave it with people, “Are you genuinely listening or as soon as they say a word like ‘more communication’, you start pinging off answers that you think will communicate better?”

So, you know, when they say, “I’m uncomfortable in the workplace environment,” you’ve got to dig a little bit.  It could be that they’re feeling underappreciated.  It could be that they’re feeling underpaid.  It could be that they want to do more and feel like they have more skills and are asking you for professional development.  But you won’t know that if you just go, “Uncomfortable,” and don’t listen further.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I love that.  It’s hard.  It’s hard to not feel easily offended.  It’s hard to stay curious instead of making assumptions and that sort of thing, but it’s imperative in that kind of a situation.  Love that.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Yeah.

Andrea:  You know, we’re facing so much right now with COVID-19 and a lot of the spotlight on social injustice and in particular, racism.  When somebody is a leader of an institution, they have some sort of leadership capabilities or position, what does healthy leadership look like in such complicated times?  Especially when things are getting dicey and when there’s this kind of social unrest, perhaps even inside the company, inside the organization.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, I mean, it is truly a time for courageous leaders.  And really, sort of brave decisions have to be made that you’re going to be lucky if you get 60-40 approvals anymore on almost any decision you make.  And I don’t mean that, again, as an either/or proposition.  But if you take the COVID situation, are you delivering courses on campus or not?  And some people will look at it from a student perspective.  I’ve heard very intelligent people.  I could cite the articles.  We come from a system that our chancellor early looked at all of the information, his whole team thought it through and said, “You know, we’re gonna continue to offer instruction, but let’s minimize the people on campus for the safety of everyone.”

We have another institution across the country that said, “You know, we’re doing a real disservice by not having classes.  The students that are in class are 99% healthy.  It doesn’t affect them very much.  They’re gonna do great.”  But in each case, there’s not an either/or.  What about the faculty that are sixty-five?  What about the students who go home and care for a mother or father that has cancer, diabetes, so on?  It is just there are so many factors involved in that one alone, and neither of those people are right or wrong.  They’re using the best information in the region and locality they’re at with guidance from health.

So literally, what sticks out from that, you have to be brave, you have to listen.  There we are again; those leaders are listening.  They’re gathering experts who aren’t afraid to debate and differ and offer them different viewpoints.  And ultimately, the leader has to decide the direction.  Then they have to set the policies, the procedures, the plans, and of course, each decision creates fifteen more decisions, and on and on and on.  But you really have to have built into your culture the ability to disagree professionally, to allow voices to be heard and not let any one leader within that structure over-dominate.  And then just continue to look…

I will also say that there are just some plain restraining factors.  So, I’ll give you a silly example.  So, somebody says, “Oh, we’ll be able to clean the rooms better than we ever have before.”  And that’s great.  I’m not disagreeing with them.  And I’ll say, “Great, so do you have the staff to do it?”  “Well, I don’t think we have enough staff, plus with the budget reduction, we won’t have them.”  “Do you have enough product to clean?”  “So, we’re gonna have people use Lysol wipes and clean their office space”  “When can we get Lysol wipes?”  “Oh, maybe January.”  So, if you back up, “How does that help us in August?”  So, these are things that everybody’s working through.  But if their supply chain is good, and they’ve got a plan, and they’ve reduced this, then they may be able to start up.

So, I just tell people I know it’s a tough time, say, the COVID front.  I hope they just, at least, in the back of their mind… governors have the hardest job that I’ve seen in my lifetime.  There are no good answers.  And if we don’t start up the economy, people are not getting medical screenings and they’re losing their jobs.  So, these answers ended a long, long time ago.  With the social thing, you know, all I’ll say at this point is I think it’s always wonderful.  You know, I take it back to, you know, once we have to lay the axe to the root of the tree of liberty once in a while.  And when people feel like they’re not being heard – worse, that they’re being treated terribly unfairly – then absolutely – it’s what our country is founded on – should protest and have their voices be heard.

And while they’re the toughest situations, I’ve always found through life, the toughest situations lead to growth.  And I hope we grow and learn.

Andrea:  Hmm, so true.  And what you’ve said about culturally establishing this, “It’s okay to disagree…” you were talking about that in terms of COVID earlier and then you were also talking a lot about listening.  Those seem to also apply here in this idea of social unrest.  If we can have a conversation and disagree, how do we do that in a healthy way?  And how does a leader demonstrate that or kind of lead the way in having a healthy conversation?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, I think we’re seeing it all around the country.  I mean, we’ve got several leaders that are stepping up and doing that.  We’re seeing it right on the street with protesters and different mayors and so and so, meeting face to face and talking and doing it in a reasonable manner.  And reasonable is not the right word… Doing it in a respectful manner to one another, both directions.  I don’t think it’s that hard.  We’ve talked about the listening – to be open, to honor, and truly listen to that perspective – but then, Andrea, I think, you know, we’ve done this.  We’ve done this, not just on this issue; we’ve done it on others.  And I think what’s loud and clear this time is, “Not again!”  Have we learned nothing?  Have we gained nothing?

So, there are going to need to be some sort of actions that come out of this.  And so different mayors have already announced things like, “We’re gonna look at reinvesting to handle the income in unequal distribution.”  And it really has turned upside down.  And to provide better educational opportunities; you’ll see any number of initiatives already coming.  But there needs to be practical, visible, helpful, not just reactionary…

And again, I go back to my example.  Just think about that simple word “communication” that had so many permutations.  We have to involve the very people that are expressing this to us to be engaged in that conversation.  And the leader is going to have to be that very flexible but firm in-between making sure the voices are heard.

But, again, making sure the voices are heard.  We can’t just have the city hall just ring off five things they’re going to do.  Did you engage them in that discussion because that, again, is just sort of explaining to people again in another way, and it’s just not good.  It’s not good.

Andrea:  So, in kind of wrapping things up here, Dr. Schnoor, when you think of somebody being a “Voice of Influence”, do you have any advice, any suggestions for us in how we can better be a “Voice of Influence”?

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  Well, there’s just so many things.  We had a whole podcast we looked at that last time, and you’ve had so many guests having a different facet on it.

Andrea:  It’s always interesting to hear what people have to say, though.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  It is good.  Today, I’m sitting here looking at leaders, and I think you just have to have tremendous courage.  I would go with what you said; find your real skills, your real talents and chase those and offer your unique voice.  But don’t get too lost in why you’re not the voice for everybody.  Here’s something I will tell you that the greatest leaders, no matter how great they are, absolutely – and somebody out there can call me and tell me if they found somebody that’s different – they’re great because they have great people around them.  They are supported by great people.

I didn’t say everyone was a martyr or a saint or whatever, but they assemble a team with the unique talents.  They’re able to supervise effectively, to guide, to listen to that advice.  That team works well together, but none of these decisions… there’s this false idea that if we get “super CEO” in… that’s a new model we’re really stuck in; go hire a superstar.  I guarantee you that the company doesn’t go well if you don’t have great work programs, if you don’t have good supervisors all the way throughout the level, and that’s functional everywhere.

So, how do you become a “Voice of Influence”?  Hone your unique talents, your unique skills, and then I’ll just add the other part just so it’s not all sunshine – that’s not easy to do.  Sometimes we can’t see our unique skills, but I’d also say be quiet.  You’re not an expert on everything.  So, when you’re sitting around the table – and I’ve got an expert in counseling – listen more than you talk.

Well, I read a tweet and it said, “Good grief!  Keep the tweet to yourself and listen until you really have something thoughtful to add.”  But we often have people that assume they’re experts at everything, and they want to influence everything.  So, I think it’s a time if you think you want to step up and be a mayor or you want to be a president of a campus, you not only have to have skills in crisis.  You have to understand the academic mission.  You have to be able to engage with donors.  You have to engage with politicians.  You have to be able to eloquently give small, you know, addresses.  You’re asked to pin articles.  If you don’t have all of those skills, everything I just mentioned, there’s an expert helping you underneath that.

So, being part of that machine and bringing it together is the thing that I love, and having those pieces work together.  I think that’s a unique skill I have.  So, everybody has got to work to find it.  But the word I’ll leave with or if there’s a follow-up from you is we need to listen more.  And I mean, really listen, and then follow up with questions like you’re doing, rather than asking the first question and then deciding whether I like or dislike the bursar, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, or whether they agree with it.  Engage a little bit deeper and have a thoughtful dialogue.

Andrea:  And that’s why I keep asking this question.  I love the timely response.  Thank you.  Thank you for being a “Voice of Influence” here for our listeners today, Dr. Schnoor.

Dr. Neal Schnoor:  It’s an absolute pleasure, and thank you for the work you’re doing.  It’s so important.

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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:

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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 Church:  Healing 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!

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How to Support Someone in an Abusive Relationship with Rosanne Moore

Episode 149

Rosanne Moore Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Rosanne Moore, my Voice of Influence colleague, is back on this episode to offer guidance on how you can be of help if you suspect that someone in your life is in an abusive relationship.

In this episode, Rosanne shares why the place to begin is with yourself, how to create a safe space for the person you want to help to open up, what you need to keep in mind to empower a woman in this situation, how to support victims of abuse at different stages in their journey, and more.

Mentioned in this episode

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

Hey, there!  So, this is Andrea Wenburg with the Voice of Influence podcast, The Voice of Influence show on YouTube, and I’ve got with me Rosanne Moore.  We have been exploring on the Voice of Influence podcast.  We’ve been exploring, in particular, the difference between healthy and unhealthy influence.  It’s very important to us, and I think it’s highly relevant and important for us to cover.  And so, over the last few weeks and through the summer of 2020, we have been interviewing people for that on our podcast.  So, if you haven’t checked that out, we encourage you to go to voiceofinfluence.net and find our podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

There are a couple of episodes that Rosanne and I did previously that have to do with myths around abuse and coercive control.  We highly recommend that you see those videos.  And then this particular episode is going to be about helping others who are in a situation like this, in particular, where… you know, finding meaningful ways to help somebody who is actually in an abusive relationship and helping them out actually without hurting and making it worse.

Andrea:  Rosanne, let’s tell them a little bit about what we’ve just created, you’ve created with Lifeline.  Lifeline is a resource to help, in particular, women who are in an abusive relationship or coercive control and how to get out.  Rosanne, would you please give us a little description of Lifeline?

Rosanne Moore:  So, when I was going through my own process of getting out of an abusive marriage, there were a lot of resources that would deal with the psychological impact of an abusive relationship and unraveling that.  I had a pretty easy time finding things that would help me with that.  What I did not find, very readily, was something that would be a practical guide for the daily decisions, the legal process…  Something that would help me understand what to expect in the court system, how to navigate the court system, how to rebuild my life and my home for my children, safety for my children – coming out of a situation like that.

So, I was being asked… and anybody in this situation is being asked to make decisions that will affect long-term living at the same time that they’re trying to unravel major trauma that they’ve been through.  So, I wanted to provide a practical step-by-step guide that would help women tailor decision-making to their specific situation.  Something that would help them think through and not just have this overwhelming situation that they felt like they’d been dropped in, immersed, and were drowning in, at the same time that, emotionally, everything feels up for grabs.  So that’s how Lifeline was born.   It’s a practical guide for navigating coming out of coercive control, navigating the family court system, including divorce, for those who may be experiencing that.

Andrea:  All right.  So, Lifeline is a very robust resource.  And you can text VOILIFELINE to 44222 to get actually the first module for free that has to do with establishing safety and preparing yourself for the process.  You can also find it at voiceofinfluencence.net/lifeline.  So, right now we’re going to talk, specifically, to people who are in a situation where they see others who need help, somebody else.

So, Rosanne, let’s say I just learned that someone in my life is in an abusive relationship or I suspect it even, and I want to help.  I really do, but I’m not exactly sure where to start.  Where do you recommend that we start?

Rosanne Moore:  Okay, this is going to sound a little counterintuitive, but the place to begin is with yourself, doing kind of an evaluation with yourself.  You want to make sure you’ve got yourself out of the way first so that you can see the situation clearly and respond in a way that you’re not projecting your needs or your fears or anything else into what’s going on.  So, you want to do a little bit of self-evaluation.  You want to recognize, “What are the limits of my experience and knowledge?”  It’s okay to have limits.  Everybody, to some degree, has limits.  I’ve been through this myself.  I have walked through the situation with other women as an advocate, but I’m not a professional counselor and I’m not an attorney.

And so, even in Lifeline, the counsel that we give is how to choose those professionals.  It’s not to take the place of these professionals.  So, know the limits of your experience and your knowledge and don’t pretend to be what you’re not.  If you want to be a supportive friend, there are ways to do that very meaningfully, and it matters, and that’s a crucial role.  But you don’t want to pretend you’re law enforcement.  You don’t want to pretend that you are a counselor with years of experience in domestic violence if this is your first gig.  You don’t want to do that.  

So, recognize your own limits first.  Recognize that this situation is not about you.  You’re not the hero.  You don’t need to come in and save the day.  You’re not the judge, who if this person tells you something you need to determine whether or not it’s really accurate, whether what she’s saying is true or not.  You’re not her judge.

Andrea:  Oh, okay.  Hold on just a second.  I think that that might be one of the things that causes people probably to hesitate on helping somebody else because they’re not sure if they should believe or not.  So, can you expand on that a little bit?  Like, why shouldn’t I be the judge?  Shouldn’t I know or shouldn’t I try to figure that out before I help?

Rosanne Moore:   So, the first thing to realize… and we’re going to have a resource list that’s specific to helpers.  We’ve got a resource list for a woman in the situation – and a helper would benefit from the things on that list as well – but we’re going to have a resource list specific to helpers as well.  One of the things you need to know about abuse is the vast majority of the time – like 98% of the time – the person is telling the truth, and they’re not exaggerating.  They’re actually minimizing.  So, the little piece that they’re telling you or the thing that they’re searching for words to tell you – which is even more common – the situation is probably far worse.

And so, if you shut them down by responding, like, with investigative questions, that is not helpful.  They’re already struggling.  They’re living with somebody in a coercive control situation.  You’re living with somebody who’s constantly trying to reshape reality to gain control over you.  They’re constantly, basically, lying to you about your perception of what is real.  And so, if you have an outsider who’s like, “Well, are you really telling the truth?” the person just shuts down.  Like, they’re already overwhelmed.  They’re already traumatized.  So, you need to go into with the assumption, “This person is asking for help.  They are distressed.  I’m going to assume that they are telling the truth.”

Part of the reason you can assume to do this is… because people automatically go, “Oh, no, you’re supposed to presume innocence until proven guilty.”  All right, you’re not a court of law.  Nobody’s going to jail because of what you do, okay?  So, that’s not your role here.  Again, this is back to knowing your limits of what your role is.  You’re not the jury.  This is not a court of law.  You don’t have to presume that she’s lying.  You need to give her the presumption of innocence, that she’s telling the truth.  You need to begin there because if she is lying, that’s going to come out over time.  And the fallout from that is, at worst, you can go back and you can apologize to the person.  It’s not going to be a big cleanup because everything is against a victim of abuse coming forward.  Everything is in place to protect against false accusation, okay?

I know that’s an unpopular idea.  On the rare occasion somebody gets falsely accused, is that a horrific thing?  Yes, it is.  But there are ways to clean that up.  You get it wrong – you assume she’s lying – and you handle this badly, you could get somebody killed.  I mean, it’s that serious.  So you need to go into this, and you don’t rush into this.  And again, this is about knowing your role.  You don’t have to be the judge.  You listen, and you look for ways to support.  You don’t have to be the arbiter of what is true.  You start with, “How can I listen and be supportive?”  You don’t have to be the great savior and rescuer.  That’s not your role.

Again, what a woman in this situation needs is not somebody else to come in and take over, even with good intentions of rescuing.  What she needs is to have someone who helps her gain clarity so that she can use her own agency to make decisions.  That’s another reason why you don’t need to be the judge.  She needs to be able to have her own agency.  And if you come in and you tell her what you think is real and what[‘s] not, that’s pretty arrogant for one thing.  You don’t know what happened behind closed doors, you know.  You don’t need to be the expert for her.

If you have years and years of experience in working with domestic violence, you’re an expert and experts know not to try to take over.  They listen well.  They handle that well, okay?  But don’t come in as if you’re the expert.  And don’t come in – for those who are spiritual – don’t come in as the voice of God.  I’ve seen that happen a lot in religious circles.

Andrea:  Right, sure.

Rosanne Moore:  I want to give a quick example of a situation that I saw where this was handled very, very badly.  And it was not from wrong intentions.  The intention was to help.  The intention was good.  I knew the person who did this.  Their stated intention was to help with justice and protect the oppressed, but they didn’t know enough.  And so they went in and they had a need to be the hero.  They had a need to save the marriage for the sake of the church. 

Andrea:  Like a personal need, like a desire to be the hero.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, right.  And it wasn’t something they recognized in themselves, but everything they said and did revealed that that was the driving force in what was going on because they weren’t listening well.  They made assumptions when the abused woman tried to disclose what was going on, and there was evidence that what she was saying was true.  The response was, “I know that that’s your opinion that he’s abusive, but I don’t believe that’s real.”

Andrea:  Whoa!

Rosanne Moore:  How arrogant is that?  They hadn’t been there for the things that she had been there for, you know.  How arrogant to tell her that the situation she was in – that they were not present for – was just a figment of her imagination when there was a lot of corroborating evidence that what she was seeing was real and true.  But they didn’t ask good questions.  They needed the marriage to be fixed because they needed to feel like they were the ones who had saved the marriage.

Andrea:  Why does somebody feel like they need to be the one to save it?  What’s behind that?  I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot more than just a little bit, but can you just give us a snippet?

Rosanne Moore:  All right, so if it’s a family member, family members don’t want the disruption for the children or for the family.  They don’t want the embarrassment.  You know, there are a lot of reasons why a family member doesn’t want that kind of disruption in the family relationships.  It’s messy.  Same thing can happen with close friendships.  They don’t want to take sides.  It’s messy.  It’s disruptive.

In this case, it was religious leaders, and so as religious leaders, their focus was on, “Well, God has ordained marriage, and they made vows before God, and God hates divorce.”  And they had all of these things in their head so that they weren’t recognizing safety for the victim is the primary goal, not saving the marriage.  If it turns out that the marriage can be saved and it will happen only if the abuser deals with his stuff… which is not something you can control and is not something that necessarily is going to happen simply because he says he wants it to happen because he can say right words; actions have to be there.  But you can’t control that and so that cannot be your goal.  What you can make as a goal is doing everything possible to help the victim be safe.

And along with that, her safety and well-being is the point, not your comfort level.  That’s the other factor.  It feels messy, you know.  People are afraid of being wrong.  Well, what happens if you’re wrong?  You can always go back, and you can say, “Hey, I totally blew it and I’m sorry.”  And you know, is it disruptive?  Is it hard to recognize that you’ve made a mistake and come back and take ownership?  Well, guess what?  That’s maturity.  Sorry, you know.  None of us get it right all the time about everything.  But if you’re looking at percentages, you’re going to be far more likely to be wrong if you don’t listen to her than you are if you do.

So, if you just from sheer percentages standpoint, it makes sense that you assume she is telling you the truth and you support her accordingly.  And that doesn’t mean over time as things unfold if there’s evidence that she’s lying…  And evidence is not the same as things look disruptive because if she’s traumatized, it’s going to be messy.  Her timeline is not always going to be right.  She’s going to say contradictory statements.  She’s going to seem confused.  All the things that people look at and say, “Oh, well, she’s changing her story.  She must be lying.”  That’s actually an indication that she’s traumatized, and she is telling the truth.

Andrea:  Right.  And if she’s turning into drugs and alcohol or some other behavior that you would normally look down on…  Maybe you need to look at that, maybe I need to, we need to look at that as evidence of her need for help.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  I mean, if you think about the fact that a coercive control relationship is basically a hostage situation…  It’s a socially and legally mandated hostage situation where the person that you had entrusted your life to turns out to be your greatest danger.  That’s pretty freaky, you know, for anybody.  That’s the stuff of horror movies, quite frankly.  If you think about it, horror movies are usually based on finding out that the person you trusted is actually the one trying to kill you, right?  And so, for her to be in that situation, of course she’s going to be looking for ways to numb the pain or to numb the fear.  Not everybody turns to drugs or alcohol or whatever.  But if she does, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s the problem and she’s lying.  That may be a secondary issue that’s come because of what she’s been through.

Andrea:  Right.   Okay, obviously, safety then is a huge piece of what I should be worried about or should be concerned about when I want to help somebody.  One of the things that I think I and many others who want to be supportive might struggle with is how do we do that without actually making things worse?

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  So, begin by listening, okay?  If you’re suspecting that somebody is in a high control relationship, you’re getting a sense that something’s not right.  She’s being very isolated.  He may seem very charming and very nice, but she looks shut down.  The smile is always pasted on, but there’s something in her eyes that you see that is dying, okay?  Those are all indicators something’s not right.  You don’t want to automatically assume, “Oh, okay, she’s an abused wife.”  You want to do what you would do in any situation where you see somebody suffering.  You see indication that somebody is suffering.  You want to ask how they’re doing.  You want to ask good questions that show that you are concerned and you are available, and you don’t want to assume that you have information or understanding that you don’t have, okay?

So, when she gives you a little piece of information, you don’t want to automatically assume you know what that means.  You want to probe further.  “How did that make you feel?”  “Then what happened next?”  “Does that happen often?”  “What kind of thing makes that happen?”  I had a situation with a friend that I had not seen in several years, and I crossed paths with her in a public place.  And I was just chatting, asking how the family was, but I could see in her face that something was not right.  She had been a very vibrant person before.  She was very subdued, very shut down.  I didn’t know if she was just tired or whether something was going on.

And so, as I asked, you know, about her kids, how she was doing what was happening, the things she started sharing indicated, “Okay, things are not going well at home.”  And so, I began asking just gentle questions about, “How long has it been like that?”  “What kind of help have you been able to get so that you’re not alone in this?”  And the more she talked, the more I thought, “Oh, this sounds like an abuse situation.”  Now if I had said, “Are you being abused?” that would have freaked her out.  First of all, we’re in a public place.  It would have scared her.  If she hasn’t come to terms with that and she can’t put words to that yet, that would have been like, “Whoa, what are you talking about?”

And so, my question to her was just a gentle, quiet, “Are you safe at home?”  And her eyes filled with tears when I asked that, and that was the point when she opened up and she shared more.  That question, “Are you safe?” that’s not like a tool that you want to just automatically pull out of your belt and use for everything.  But know that that’s an underlying thing you want to find out.  If you’re concerned about somebody’s well-being, in some way you want to indicate a concern, “Do you feel safe at home?”  And that might not be just physical safety.  That might be emotional safety because in a lot of situations, there’s no physical violence, but there could be sexual violence – but they don’t think of it as that.  There can be financial control.  There can be soul violence, like the person is being attacked at an emotional and psychological level all the time.  And so, it’s like their spirit is being annihilated by the other person.

So, you want to ask that question about safety.  And that gives an opportunity for them to share in a gentle way what’s going on.  If they haven’t come to terms with the word abuse yet, if you ask about safety, it may help them connect emotionally with what they’re actually dealing with at home.  And if they have come to terms with, “All right, there is abuse, but I’m afraid.  I can’t talk about this freely.  I don’t know who understands, who’s gonna believe me.”  I mean, like, “Who’s gonna believe me?”  If you ask that question about safety, then that’s an indicator to them, “This is the person I can talk to about this.  They’ll get it.  They will get it if I talk to them about this.”

One of the things that’s really common with people who are abused is they’ll talk about the difficulty in their marriage.  They usually don’t want a divorce.  I mean, that comes much later.  But if they’re in the early stages of processing, they will bring it up as a marriage issue that they’re trying to figure out what they need to do differently.  And as you ask questions and as you listen, what a lot of people make mistake of doing is they give marriage advice before they’ve asked questions to find out, “Is this actually a marriage issue?”  If this is an abuse issue, it is not a marriage issue.

Andrea:  Right, right.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, and so you want to actually find out what is going on.  Chris Moles, he works a lot in domestic violence circles, and he works with abusers as well as with victims of abuse.  And the analogy he gave is, “If you don’t accurately assess what’s happening in the relationship, it’s like hearing the sound of clopping hooves on the road and assuming that a horse is coming towards you when you actually have a zebra.”  And so, what happens a lot of times is people… they project their own relationships into something that somebody says about the marriage, and they try to give marriage advice…

Andrea:  Or their experience with somebody else.

Rosanne Moore:  Exactly.

Andrea:  It’s all about their own experiences, though.

Rosanne Moore:  Exactly, which is why getting yourself out of the way first and asking good questions is going to be primary to being a good helper.

Another thing you want to do is often… because if she hasn’t figured it out yet, she’s going to be blaming herself a lot.  She’s going to be talking about the situation and looking for a resolution. And she’s going to be very focused on what she can do differently because she’s always trying to figure out what she did to make him so angry, why the relationship is not working.  He’s constantly telling her it’s her fault.

And so, telling her it’s not her fault directly is not going to be effective.  She’ll just tell you more reasons why she should have been able to make him happy somehow.  And she hasn’t figured out why yet, but somehow it’s supposed to be her job and make it okay.  So, what works far better is if you listen to that and you ask about how she felt in the situation.  And then you give her an analogy like, you know, “If your sister were in a situation where this kind of behavior was happening to her, how would you respond?  If your child came to you with this kind of a situation, how would you respond?”  And usually she’s very clear about, you know, she would be loving and supportive.

So, then the question is, “Okay, so if you weren’t treated that way, that’s not something you did wrong.  You deserve to be treated with love, just like you would treat your child or your sister or that other person you care about.  You treat them with love.  You treat your husband with love, so why would you not also be worthy of that?”  And that frees her to begin thinking differently so that she’s not blaming herself.  It also kind of gives her some language to be able to describe situations so that she’s not just carrying all of that load and doesn’t have any words.  That’s a big part of abuse.  You live with this constant sense of something’s not right, but you don’t really have words for why it’s not right.

Naghmeh [Panahi], when we had her on just a few weeks ago, that was something she talked about in her relationship.  It was like cancer; you know something’s bad that’s going on, but you don’t know what it is.  And that’s very common in abusive relationships.

Another thing you want to do in terms of listening well and in maintaining confidentiality, make sure you don’t take anything she says back to the abuser.  You do not want to do that because she will pay for it later.  He will come back, and he will punish her later.  And she will not be able to tell you anything in the future.

Andrea:  So, don’t try to fight for her.  Don’t try to confront him or anything like that.

Rosanne Moore:  Or even go “get his side of the story.”

Andrea:  Oh, wow, yeah.

Rosanne Moore:  That’s not your job.

Andrea:  Right.

Rosanne Moore:  Because you got to understand abusive people don’t say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been abusing her.  Like, I feel really bad about that.”  They don’t do that.  They give you a very plausible-sounding story, and they’re very good at taking a lie and wrapping it in a veneer of truth that sounds plausible enough that you then want to level the playing field and you want to assume that, “Well, it was probably just a misunderstanding,” something like that.

Andrea:  Right.

Rosanne Moore:  If a person is afraid all the time in their own home, you do not have a level playing field.  It’s not just a marriage issue.  That is not what’s going on.  So that’s why asking questions, finding out, gauging what her level of fear is, and even if she’s not able to give you specific examples… because trauma does that.  Trauma makes it very difficult to communicate and to analyze situations like that.  And so you don’t want to breach her confidentiality with the abuser, in particular.  You want to help her make decisions.  “What do you need?”  “Okay, so you’re saying this is going on and you’re not feeling safe; what do you need?”  “Would it help to talk to somebody at a domestic violence hotline?”  “Have you thought about getting counseling by yourself?”  Don’t recommend marriage counseling.  Don’t do that.

Andrea:  It’s not a marriage issue.

Rosanne Moore:  It is not a marriage issue, and it will set her up to be punished in private at home and shut down and isolate her.  So, find out what she needs and you can start that process with her.  As she begins to come to terms with what’s going on, she’s going to feel grief and she’s going to feel anger and it’s going to feel messy.  And keep listening.  Don’t try to tamp that down for her.  That is a necessary part of her regaining her agency and her autonomy.

Andrea:  Be that safe space for her to explore that, probably, or express it.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  So, if you want to be a good helper, you need to be a good listener while she’s processing.  A big part of healing is having a safe space with somebody who’s a caring listener, who will let you voice the ugliness and the anger.  And she has reason to be angry.  And she’s had to keep all of that inside and all of that tamped down.  Does that mean she needs to be angry forever?  No, but if she can’t bring it out and process it, it’s going to make her sick physically.  It’s not going to go away.  She’s got to be able to process it safely.  And you want to process your own emotions elsewhere.

When friends start hearing that someone that they love… or a family member that they love is being treated horribly, they’re in a lot of horror, and it brings up a lot of emotion for them.  They’re angry.  They’re horrified.  They feel guilty that they didn’t recognize it sooner.  They feel, like, just off-balance, like, “How could I not have seen this sooner?  How did I get deceived in this?”  So, you want to continue getting yourself out of the way by processing your own stuff, but you want to do that separately from your friend or family member.  You don’t want to ask them to help you process it.  They have enough on their plate already.  Process your own emotions elsewhere, get help with that.  And you don’t want to try to jump in, take over and say, “Well, I’m going to tell him like it is!”  You will escalate things further, and you could create a potentially extremely dangerous situation.

When you’re dealing with a high-control person, it’s like a tug of war thing.  They’re always looking for a battleground, always looking for a game of tug of war.  They don’t have to win.  All they need is somebody to pick up the rope.  So, if she’s trying to de-escalate the situation and you go over and you try to pick up the rope on her behalf, he’s won and she’s going to pay for it.  She is going to pay for it.  You have just empowered him.

Andrea:  Can you say that again? 

Rosanne Moore:  So, your idea of confrontation and of saying what is true and bringing him to account, all of that kind of stuff rises up.  It’s understandable.  You want justice, right?  You want justice for the person that you love.  But all of that stuff in you that rises up and wants to come in, make sure truth happens and he has to face what he’s done, it’s going to come back and punish her.  It’s wrong to do that.  You don’t want to do that.  That puts her in a more dangerous situation.  And quite frankly, it’s not your place.  If the time for confrontation needs to happen, that’s for her to do.  It’s not for you to do.  She’s lived with the situation a lot longer than you have, and if there comes a time for her to do that, she’ll know when she can do it safely.  But you don’t know enough about this.  You don’t know enough about the dynamics, and you could create a much more dangerous situation for her out of your need to vent.  So that’s not helpful.  It’s very dangerous, actually.

Andrea:  Okay, all right.  So, what is the process of really helping somebody get out of this situation when it feels really dramatic?  It feels like, “Oh my gosh, this is such a big deal.”

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  So, if you watch it on TV, right, it’s always the drama.  In TV or movie or whatever domestic violence stuff, they always make that conflict really high and make it really dramatic, and big rescue, and all these big emotions.  The reality is the best way to help is to restore her agency.  It’s very practical.  Everyday things of taking her from a place of having no agency to her having restored agency.  Not you going in and rescuing, but her being able to pick up her agency to have a voice again.

So, transformation is actually going to look very practical.  She’s going to need housing.  She’s going to need food to eat to keep up her physical strength.  And in a high drama, high emotional situations, sometimes she might forget to eat.  She might need to be reminded of that.  She might need you to bring a meal so that when she’s working on paperwork for court, she doesn’t have to think about supper for her kids.  That’s covered, you know.  She’s going to need rest.

When you live with somebody who is not safe, you don’t sleep well.  You’re always on high alert.  You’re dealing with PTSD issues.  So, when you get out of that, your body is depleted.  You need physical rest.  You’re exhausted.  Plus, there’s all these emotions that you’re processing, and so that’s draining physically as well, so you need physical rest.  She’s going to need transportation.  I mean, does she have transportation?  If she doesn’t, she might need that.  That might be something she’ll need help with.

She’s going to need legal protection.  She may need childcare.  She would benefit from counseling.  If that’s something she wants to pursue… don’t push it.  When she’s ready for it, it can be offered as a safe place for her to unpack this, rather than “Oh my gosh, you are so messed up.  You need counseling.”  Instead, it’s, “You’ve been through a very traumatic event.  I think you needed a safe place to be able to talk through this with somebody who’s gonna care and be able to be there for you and understands what you’ve been through.”  If it can be presented like that.

I sometimes talk to people who’ve been through stuff and counseling has been pushed at them as if, “You’re broken and you need to go get fixed.”  And yeah, yucky, you know.  Nobody wants to feel like they’re the broken, messed up person that everybody looks at and thinks less of.  And I know with my own kids… my daughter at one point said she was sitting in the counselor’s office waiting to meet with her counselor and she said a man in his forties came into the waiting room while she was waiting for her turn.  And he was obviously very anxious about being there in the waiting room.  And he was chatty, and he finally said to her, “So, does this feel weird to you that you’re at a counselor’s office?”  And she said, “No, my mom says it’s kind of like going to the doctor for your primary care visit.  You know, your well-child checks and stuff like that.  It’s just you need to take care of your heart and your mind as well as your body.”  And she said he got this look on his face like that was a completely new thought.

Andrea:  That’s great.

Rosanne Moore:   But really, that’s how you want to present counseling.  Like, “You’ve been through a very traumatic event.  You are a strong person who has survived this, but I think it would be really valuable for you to have a safe place where somebody else could take care of you, rather than you having to always hold it together.”  And then giving her permission for self-care, because she’s been in a relationship where all resources have been poured into keeping him calm, like trying to keep him from blowing up or keep him from punishing her in some way.  It may not always be explosive anger.  It may be covert manipulation.  But all of her resources have been basically focused on trying to keep him from acting out.

And so, giving her space… like, she needs self-care.  She needs a chance to recover taking care of herself.  I know when I was at the point where I was filing for separation, my youngest son was three years old, and one of the self-care things that I did before I filed… because assets were going to be divided, you know, based on that.  And all of those years, I was still wearing maternity clothes.  He was three years old, and I was still wearing maternity clothes because we weren’t going to spend money on me having clothes.  It didn’t matter that they didn’t fit.  You know, it was just we weren’t going to spend money on me.  They weren’t worn out so I should just keep wearing them, right?  So, self-care for me was buying clothes that actually fit, that were non-maternity clothes, so things like that.

And then work – she’s going to need work at some point.  But that may need to come incrementally.  She’s been through a really traumatic thing.  And so having to take on, if she hasn’t been in a full-time job, to have to suddenly take all of that on at the same time she’s got all of this upheaval [going] on…  You know, sometimes people have unrealistic expectations of somebody who’s been highly traumatized and they expect them to just, you know, be responsible and all of that.

Well, you wouldn’t expect somebody who had been in a car wreck and needed months of rehab for a physical injury from a car wreck to just be able to walk into a new job and start something new and take care of themselves.  You would recognize that they needed help getting to that point of independence.  It’s the same thing here.  She’s going to need help getting to financial independence, and she needs permission to do that rather than pressure.

I had a friend… she was a mother of seven, she had five children still at home when she found out he was a serial adulterer.  And there were drugs and other issues involved.  

But she got pressure from other people because they knew she was under financial pressure.  He wasn’t paying child support and alimony the way it was supposed to.  And they said, “Well, you just need to go get a job at the grocery store.”  And she’s like, “For $8 an hour, so I’m not gonna make very much, and I homeschool my children.”  And she had children with some learning needs that homeschooling was the way that she needed to go with those, and they were all traumatized by what they had been through.

So, the expectation was for her to go get a low-income job to supplement this.  That was a church group that the person was in that said this to her.  A better response would have been for that church group to say, “Hey, how can we, for the next six months, help you get on your feet?  You know, give you some space to heal, and maybe give you some budgeting advice?”  “Maybe help you sit down and figure out what kind of work could you do that would actually meet your financial needs, so you’re not doing a minimum wage job and wearing yourself out with long hours of work, but still not having enough to really provide for your family’s needs.”

So, those are some very practical things.  And then of course, Lifeline – this brings us back to Lifeline.

Andrea:  Sure, yeah.

Rosanne Moore:  If you want to help, realize that Lifeline is going to have a lot of things that will help you understand better how to help her.  That resource list, having a basic understanding of how abuse works, what it does to its victims, how abusers manipulate; those things are going to be really important if you want to be an effective helper, and there are resources for that on the helpers list.  And then Lifeline itself… if she’s in a place where she’s wanting to get out, she may not have the $25.  We’ve tried to keep the program really inexpensive to make it affordable.  We’re talking twenty videos and worksheets that are essentially a workbook that will give her very practical help.  You could help cover that cost of that for her.  So that would be another really practical thing that could be very transformational.

Andrea:  Thank you, Rosanne.  I’ve got one more question for you.  And this might be repetitive in some ways, or you might decide that your answer is something you’ve already said or it might be something a little different.  But when somebody wants to be a “Voice of Influence” in the case of supporting somebody who is in a controlling relationship, what summary advice do you have for them?

Rosanne Moore:  Two things.  One is learn as much as you can.  So, listen well, like I said.  We talked about this already.  Not just listen to her, but also try to look at that resource list.  And it’s kind of like the race thing, right?  I know our family is looking at the ways that we can be more sensitive to those who are minorities and who experience life differently than our family does because we’re white.  And so, listening to them rather than telling them what we think is a really important part of that.  So, I would say listen well and try to learn, go to that resource list.

The other thing that you can do is understand that she has constantly, in her head, a litany of accusation that he has poured out on her for all this time.  He has undermined her perception of reality.  And so, you don’t want to come in and try to be the voice of reality to her.  But when she says things that you realize are from his influence – like, that he is giving her a negative view of herself – you can challenge those gently.  Not directly, but by asking questions.  “Why do you think that about yourself?  Do you want to know what I think, what I see in you?”  You want to reaffirm the good things that you see about her.  Your best way of being a “Voice of Influence” on her behalf is to help her find her voice again.  See in her what she can’t see in herself right now.  And so, you don’t want to come in and be a voice for her as much as you want to call out of her the voice that has gotten lost in all of the other noise.

Andrea:  Mhmm, absolutely.  Thank you so much, Rosanne.  That gets to the heart of what we do at Voice of Influence is helping other people.  When you want to be a “Voice of Influence”, the thing that you do is you help others express their voice and do it in a respectful way and all that. Anyway, I really appreciate you and your “Voice of Influence” on behalf of those whose voices have been oppressed, those who are struggling to figure out what to do next.  Thank you, Rosanne, and thank you for helping us to know better how we can help without hurting and have that meaningful impact in that way.

Rosanne Moore:  Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this again.

Andrea:  Of course.  Again, you can find the resources that Rosanne talked about and get access to Module 1 of our course Lifeline by texting VOILIFELINE – all one word – to the number 44222 or go to voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.  All right, we’ll see you soon.

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How to Spot a Child Abuser Hiding in Plain Sight with Jimmy Hinton

Episode 148

Jimmy Hinton is a full-time minister and safeguarding specialist with Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), who researches deception techniques of child molesters and specializes in abuse in plain sight.

In 2011, Jimmy’s sister confided in him that she had been sexually abused when she was a young child by their father, a former Minister of 27 years. Jimmy and his mother reported his father to authorities, which resulted in his confession of 23 victims, and a conviction of 30-60 years for sex crimes against children.

In this episode, Jimmy shares the story of how his sister confided in him that she was sexually abused their father, why he immediately went to the authorities, the fallout from that experience, three things that that can help you identify concerning behavior and potential abusers, how parents and organizations can be more proactive about protecting their kids, and so much more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

Transcript

Hey, there!  So, today’s episode is incredibly important for people who have kids, who work with kids, or who just care about kids.  Today, I am interviewing Jimmy Hinton.  And in 2011, Jimmy’s sister confided in him that she had been sexually abused when she was a young child by their father, a former minister of twenty-seven years.  So, Jimmy reported his father to authorities, which resulted in his confession of twenty-three victims and a conviction of 30 to 60 years in Pennsylvania State Corrections Facility.

Jimmy researches deception techniques of child molesters and specializes in abuse in plain sight.  Jimmy is a full-time minister and safeguarding specialist with GRACE – that’s Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment.  We talk about and I invite him to share more about that story of how his sister confided in him and he went to the authorities.  And kind of the fallout from that; the emotional fallout, his personal experience with that with people who were helpful to him in that process as well.

He also shares three things that he believes would help anyone to be able to better spot concerning behavior and potential abusers.  So, he looks at everything through the eyes of the abuser.  He has spent a lot of time talking to his dad who has shared with him a lot of information about what it’s like through his eyes as an abuser himself, and so he is looking at all of this through [a] very savvy, kind of well-informed perspective.

And then he also talks about three things that organizations and kind of even parents really can do to be more proactive in protecting kids beyond just background checks, which can be helpful but don’t catch everything.  So, please take in this information and consider what it would look like for you to be a “Voice of Influence” for the vulnerable, for kids.

Here’s my interview with Jimmy Hinton:

Andrea:  All right, so Jimmy Hinton, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Jimmy Hinton:  Thank you.  Thank you for having me.

Andrea:  Let’s start with your story because we know it’s a big reason for why you’re doing what you’re doing now.  So, can you tell us a little bit about what you do now and how you got to where you are right now?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  So, I am a full-time pastor.  I’ve been since 2009, and I also do trainings across the country, mostly with churches.  But I’ve trained police departments, the military, and schools so I’m kind of all over the place.  That all started in 2011 whenever my youngest sister disclosed to me at the age of twenty-one that when she was very young, she was sexually abused by my father.  That was the first time ever that we have heard any kind of an allegation of abuse.

We grew up in, by all means of the definition, a normal home, you know, a normal Christian home.  We loved and adored my father.  He preached at the church that I’m preaching at now for twenty-seven years, and I went in a ministry because of his example.  So, you know, needless to say, we were incredibly shocked whenever my sister disclosed.  My mom and I reported that to the police immediately, not having any idea how many victims there might be out there.  And he subsequently confessed to twenty-three victims – all prepubescent – over the course of about 40 years of his life.

Andrea:  Wow!

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  So, then the following year in 2012, he was given, essentially, what amounts to a life sentence.  So, he was given 30 to 60 years in Pennsylvania State Prison.  So, you know, what started my path on this journey is just being haunted by the fact that he had abused so many victims, hundreds of times each, and we didn’t have a clue.  We had no idea that this abuse was going on right under our noses by the very man who we looked up to and loved and respected.

So, you know, I started really digging into every book that I could find on child sexual abuse and just trying to understand how abusers operate, you know, what’s going on in their mind, what are they thinking of, and more specifically, how do they view us.  How do they get away?  Because all the research that’s out there – 90% of the research at least – it’s all about how we find the abusers or how do we spot the abusers.  And it’s really ineffective.  And even people who write this stuff will tell you it’s very ineffective when push comes to shove for actually identifying abusers who are among us.  And I wasn’t okay with that.  That really bothered me that that’s the acceptable standard for training people how to detect abusers.

Andrea:  So, you’re saying like detecting them after they’ve already abused?

Jimmy Hinton:  Or just spotting them in general – when they’re sitting in our pews, when they’re teaching in our schools.  You know, it’s incredibly difficult.  This is one of the most sophisticated crimes that exists, and the training just isn’t adequate.  So, you know, I really wanted to flip that perspective and say, “Instead of looking for the abusers, why don’t I train people to look for us, you know?  To look through the eyes of an abuser and what is it about us that makes them know that they can not only do this but get away with it right in front of us?”

So, I started really focusing on deception techniques and you know, very specific techniques that abusers use.  So, I focused less on behavior and more on actual techniques.  So, basically, you know, I liken this to what magicians do.  And it’s basically pulling people up on stage with the magician and standing beside them and showing them “the tricks of the trade.”  You know, how do they actually rehearse these techniques, because abusers are very rehearsed.  They’re methodical in the way that they carry out their techniques in order to abuse their victims.  It’s not accidental that they get caught very rarely.  I mean, very rarely do they get caught.  So that’s a little bit about my background and how I got to where I’m at.

Andrea:  Wow!  So, now you’re doing these trainings, and you also have a connection with another nonprofit, right?

Jimmy Hinton:  I am a trainer for GRACE – Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment).  And then I also serve on the board for Porch Swing Ministries – it was a nonprofit started by one of my friends and she focuses on really providing support for people who’ve experienced church abuse.

Andrea:  Okay.  All right.  So, I’ve got a number of questions for you.

Jimmy Hinton:  Sure.

Andrea:  First of all, with your story and how your sister came to you and told you that this had happened to her, you said that you and your mom reported your dad immediately, even though he was somebody that you had always looked up to and all of this.  And I know that abuse victims or survivors often feel like they’re not believed right away, and yet it sounds like you believed your sister right away in the face of somebody that, you know, was so well regarded in your life and in your family.  How did that happen?  I mean, how did you actually believe your sister instead of your dad or whatever?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  I didn’t realize until I started doing this how rare it is for people – especially, in the religious communities – to believe survivors of abuse.

For me, it wasn’t this big aha moment.  I just have always respected facts.  Even though I’m kind of an emotional person, I try not to let emotions sway logic, okay?  So, when my sister was sitting before me, clearly she was in distress, clearly something had happened.  She didn’t give me a lot of details.  You know, it’s not like I had a whole lot to go on.  The details that she gave were very sketchy, very generic.  I knew that some form of sexual abuse had taken place, but that was it.  But the fact was she had zero, absolutely zero reason to make that up.

You know, like me, she had loved and respected my dad; like the rest of my siblings, she loved and respected him.  She had absolutely zero to gain by making that up, absolutely nothing.  So, I did, I believed her immediately.  And I didn’t want to, you know.  That’s not something that you’re like, “Oh, okay, this happened and now I’m gonna march into the police station.”  You know, it was a grueling discovery to find out that she had been abused by him and that potentially there were many more victims out there.  It was an awful, awful process.

And I’ll say this, you know… I’m a mandated reporter in Pennsylvania and believe it or not, I didn’t know that whenever I reported.  This was all pre-Jerry Sandusky, pre-Bill Cosby, you know, where we’ve shined a lot of attention on this notion that we’re mandated reporters, all clergy are mandated reporters.  I didn’t know that at the time.  So, I think it’s important for people to realize I didn’t report because I knew that I had to by law.  I reported because I didn’t see any other option for getting a fair investigation into these kinds of allegations.  It was the only option that I saw on the table.

Andrea:  What was it like?  Did you confront your dad, or did your sister talk to your dad, or did you guys have conversation with him before he was arrested?

 

Jimmy Hinton:  None of us confronted him and that was really strategic because in my mind, I didn’t want to tip him off and give him all kinds of wiggle room to, you know, back out or to know which one of his victims had rolled on him.  You know, I didn’t want to give him any room to be able to back out of any confession that he would potentially give.  So, in the meantime, you know, when the police actually questioned him, they brought him in for questioning, he had no idea that it was I who reported him.  And so as soon as he left the police station, I was the first person that he called to confide in.

And so, you know, I had to sit there and listen to him pouring his guts out about how he was in big trouble, and he had messed up, and he was probably going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and he doesn’t know which one of his victims told.  And you know, he was really distraught when I talked to him, and I just had to sit there and listen to it and pretend like I didn’t know anything about it.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Do you mind if I… I am asking you all these personal questions before we get to the kind of the strategic things that you teach about.

Jimmy Hinton:  Oh, it’s okay.

Andrea:  But what was it like to realize that somebody that you loved and respected… because I’ve heard you talk about it on your podcast about how much you thought he was like a hero.  And what was it like for you to go from feeling like somebody is a hero in your world to realizing what he really was?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, it’s instantaneous identity crisis.  So, within seconds, I mean, your entire world changes.  And I knew that the second my mom and I stepped over the threshold at the police station, our lives, our family’s lives would never be the same again.  Regardless of the outcome, nothing in our lives would ever be the same again.  And we had to be willing to do that, which we were, but all the unknowns just come flooding in.

And you know, for me personally, there was an instant identity crisis where everything that I thought I knew about my dad was now in question.  Every memory that I had growing up with my dad was a positive memory.  I literally didn’t have bad memories because I didn’t have a bad upbringing.  I mean, my dad, he was always kind.  He was compassionate.  He was giving.  He was supportive.  I have letters that he wrote me when I went off to college, just encouraging me and saying how proud he is of me.  You know, that was my experience with my dad.  And now there was this other side where the person who I admired, who was a hero of mine was an abuser of the worst kind and he did it to my own family members, to his own flesh and blood, his own children.

So, it just really messed with me on so many levels.  And then there was a spiritual crisis as well, because, you know, I was two years into my ministry, and I went into ministry because of him.  And now everything that I thought that I knew about God, everything that my dad taught me about God was now in question.  And it just really messed with me on so many different levels.

Andrea:  Sure.  How long do you think… or maybe you’re still struggling in some ways for some of these things, but how long was it before you kind of regained some sort of sense of equilibrium, if you can call it that?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, it probably was at least three or four years.  And it’s just, you know, so many ripple effects because in the process of this, we’re still dealing with so many family crises, you know, and he left so much carnage behind.  He had victims in my church that he was abusing up to the time of his arrest.  So, it’s not just within my family, it was within my church.  And I mean, just so many layers and components to this.  You know, he would write me letters from prison and be like, you know, just kind of matter of fact, “Just so you know what you’re dealing with whenever I go away for good, here are the names of some of the victims.”  And he would just rattle them off like it was just, you know, “Here are their names, good luck.”

You know, so there are no words to express the vast amount of carnage that he left behind.  And so trying to wade through that while you’re still trying to figure out your own identity, you’re trying to figure out who God is, where God was…  You know, I was trying to figure all that stuff out while I’m leading a church and while we have victims in the church.  I mean, there’s so many layers to this that it’s so hard to put into words.

Andrea:  Through that process, were there people around you that… I’m sure that there were plenty of such situations – I would imagine, I have never heard you say this – so, I would imagine that there are times that there were difficult conversations that were not very helpful for you.  But were there ways that people supported you that was actually really helpful and nourishing for you through that time?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, there were.  And I had a core group of probably three friends from my church.  And these guys are guys who never ever… they never judged, they never probed and asked me inappropriate questions.  They never told me… even though I could tell some of the things that I was telling them, you know, because my heart was bleeding out, and you know, there was stuff that I heard that there was no way to process it and the only way to process is just to talk about it.  And I didn’t want to go into therapy.  That just wasn’t an option that I really wanted to explore at the time and so my therapy was just to talk about it.

And I could tell there were times where things that I told them really were too heavy for them.  I could just see it on their faces.  And they never told me to stop and they never said, “That was just too much,” or “We’d rather you not talk about this,” never once.  And so those three guys really became an anchor for me and just helped me to process that grief and that trauma.  And I probably traumatized them a little bit in the process, but you know, we remain very good friends.  I mean, these guys, I can lean on them for anything, and that’s been a godsend for sure.

Andrea:  That just makes me think of how important it is for us to share in one another’s burdens.  I mean, it’s going to be a burden for somebody who’s going to hear the things that you had to say.  Of course, it’s going to be a burden, but it’s almost like you were able to spread it out a little bit.

Jimmy Hinton:  Oh, yeah.  And I think that’s because, you know, the ripple effects come in waves.  So, the thing that kept going through my mind is just when you think things can’t get any worse, things will calm down for about a week or so then the next big surprise comes, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, of course, they can get worse, you know, and this shouldn’t be a surprise anymore.”  So, those ripple effects kept coming.  But it was in those moments where the waters had kind of calmed a little bit, where you can kind of come up for air and just take a breath and you just prepare and you brace for the next wave that’s going to come and hit you.  And you know, that’s been a process for years.

And I’m at the point now where I’m so conditioned and calloused that nothing shocks me anymore, nothing surprises me.  And I don’t think that’s a bad thing because I’m able to really think through and process and use my brain and use logic.  And you know, it’s really what doctors who deal with the crises do, you know.  Like, trauma doctors, they don’t panic when they’re in the operating room.  They might panic after, but they’re trained to be really calloused to what they’re seeing because the human brain can’t comprehend that level of trauma.  But they have to because it’s their job.

Andrea:  Okay, thank you for sharing all of that.  I want to get into some of your expertise on this now.   So, you’re talking about basically abusers hiding in plain sight, you know, the deception techniques that they use.  Could you share with us at least a few of those deception techniques that are really common that could help us to better understand?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  So, I always try to think what’s the most practical thing that I can tell churches or police departments or the military or whoever it is that I’m training; you know, what’s the most important takeaway that I can give people that they can put into practice right now today?  So, I’ve basically boiled it down to these three things.  And this is a way oversimplification, but it sticks with the people, they really get it.

You know, I tell people when you walk into a room – and people can see this with me – like I just go into this hypervigilance mode.  I’m not paranoid whatsoever, but I observe.  And I think observation is really important because that’s what abusers do.  The minute they walk into a room, they go into a hypervigilance mode because they’re hunters, and they’re looking for their prey, and they’re looking for vulnerabilities, which all of us have.  So, I go into that mode as well.  So, when I walk into a room, I’m looking for people in the same way that they’re looking, which helps me identify the abusers a lot faster.

So, I tell people, you know, watch the eyes, watch the hands, and listen to the words.  So, for all people who are in the room, watch the eyes.  Well, why watch the eyes?  Because abusers are scanning and they’re looking and they’re gawking, and if they’re a sexual predator, they’re eyeing up their victims and they’re having sexual fantasies about those victims.  And the reason we don’t see sexual predators – child sexual predators – when we walk into a room is because we’re not expecting it and the abusers know that.  And my dad has talked a lot about this to me since he’s been in prison.

And I always say every female that I ever present to when I ask this question, “Do you know what it feels like to be sexually undressed by a pervert?”  Every single woman can identify with that.  They know what it’s like to go to the shopping mall, or to go wherever and have somebody sexually undress them with their eyes.  There’s no misinterpreting that look.  They know what it looks like.  They know what it feels like.  They can tell when somebody’s stalking them at the shopping mall and walking behind them, and they know what that feels like.  And most people can identify a pervert in a shopping mall who’s checking out teenage girls or, you know, into adulthood or whatever.

But once we get to prepubescent children, we lose the ability to be able to spot those perverts, even though the look that they give to those little children is the same exact look that the pervert at the shopping mall is giving as he’s gawking at women and teenage kids walking by, you know.  So that was a big eye opener for me when my dad really unpacked that and he was like, “You know, I’m able to spot other perverts because I am one.  That’s how I think.”  He was like, “The problem is you people don’t think that way so you’re not able to see it, or you’re not willing to see it.”

So, watch the eyes.  If there’s somebody who’s on my radar because of how they’re looking at people, the next logical thing is you watch their hands because abusers always are testing their victims by touching.  That’s one of the most important techniques.  And they’re benign touches at first, you know, a touch on the shoulder, a hug, a sideways hug or whatever.  They’re constantly touching their victims to see how they physically respond to that touch.

And you know, most of us have these automated responses where we don’t realize when we shrug off a hug, but the abuser does.  They can feel it, they can sense it, and they can feel your shoulder tenses up, or they can feel if you kind of lean into it a little bit.  Those are automated responses that our body has – those physiological responses.  So, I’m watching the people. Where do their hands and fingers, where do they go?  Do they glide across somebody’s shoulder?  Do they massage them as they’re hugging them?  You know, are they touching all over?  Do they touch around the waist?  Did they let their finger slide across the butt whenever they hug adults and kids?  You know, where are their hands?

And then next one, listen to the words.  Abusers are always information mining.  They’re constantly asking questions or better yet, framing in a way where they’re telling us to tell them something about ourselves.  So, a question like that would be this, “Tell me about yourself?”  That’s seems really benign, but it’s such a manipulative statement and it’s very tactical.  That’s not a question.  That’s a statement.  They’re telling you, “Tell me something about yourself.”  And usually we feel flattered by that.

So, we’ll start to talk about what?  What’s the very first thing that we start to talk about when we’re making a small talk with people besides for the weather?  Our kids, right?  How proud we are of them that, you know, “I have a ten-year-old daughter and she’s at the top of her class,” and on and on and on.  We talk about our kids, and what are they getting?  All kinds of information about your belief system, about what information you’re willing to divulge, about what your kids interests are, what their ages are, what they wear, you know, on and on and on.  And we got so wrapped up in talking about ourselves that we forgot to ask that person anything about themselves.

And I look for people who don’t reciprocate because normal conversations – if we’re genuinely interested in meeting somebody and getting to know visitors or whatever – would reciprocate.  You know, we’ll ask them about where they’re from or what they do or whatever.  You know, we’ll ask them, not demand that they tell us, but then we’ll reciprocate.  We’ll talk about ourselves.  That’s a normal conversation.

So, I just look for some of these indicators that shows people are being manipulated.  And if they meet all three of those criteria – you know, if their eyes are wandering and they’re undressing people with their eyes, if they’re touching all over people and can’t keep their fingers and hands to themselves, and if they’re manipulative in the way that they converse with people – they are so high on my radar.  It doesn’t mean that I’m saying they’re an abuser, but they’re very high on my radar.  And I’ll let other people know about it and why they’re on my radar.

Andrea:  Okay.  I have some more questions about how do you let people know about it?  What does that look like without, you know… I don’t know.  Is it possible to go too far in warning others?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  Yeah, I think it’s definitely possible to go too far.  And an example of that is, you know, first of all, saying that somebody is an abuser when you have absolutely no evidence that shows that.  You know, I think we need to be very careful.  We also need to be careful not to become paranoid and start pointing at people and saying, “Oh, they could be an abuser.”  You know, I think that’s why it’s really important to have very specific pieces of evidence that substantiate somebody who crosses boundaries.

And if somebody’s crossing boundaries, I think it’s more than fair to tell other people, “Hey, I’ve noticed that this person is just touching all over this person and you know, when they give hugs, they’re rubbing their shoulders.”  And maybe there’s nothing there, but you know, it’s my duty to tell people that, “Just be cautious, be aware.”

Andrea:  Who do you tell?

Jimmy Hinton:  When I do trainings at churches, I tell the leadership.  One of the things that I do is a facility walkthrough.  And I observe both facility and find vulnerable places within the facility that abusers would migrate to.  But I also observe people, and you know, 100% of the time, this has never failed.  If there’s somebody who sticks out or shows up on my radar, I will tell the leadership, I’ll say who it is and why they’re on my radar.  And 100% of the time, they said, “Oh, we’ve had a lot of problems with that person.”  You know, and then they’ll just list all these boundaries that this person has crossed.  But the problem is they’ve never been trained to know specifically what to look for and so it just feels gossipy to them.  And so nobody ever says anything, you know.  All these people have all these issues where this person has crossed so many boundaries, but nobody’s ever spoke up about it.

Andrea:  Yeah.  Yeah, because none of them are really huge that you can really point to.

Jimmy Hinton:  Right.  And abusers keep it that way, you know.  They keep things very ambiguous because, you know…  I could share with you so many letters that I got from prison where my dad talks about this.  He unpacks it and he’s like, “The more ambiguous you can be in your behavior, the more it works to your benefit because people don’t have anything specific to hang their hat on to actually accuse you of anything.”  That’s by design.

Andrea:  When you’re mentioning the testing, abusers testing by touching or whatever and they noticed the response, the physiological pull back, what is an abuser’s technique from there?  Like, do they continue to push that boundary or do they realize that, “This is a person who’s not going to want to, you know, like submit to whatever I am trying to accomplish”?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  Yeah, typically, you know, my understanding, my experience is that if somebody has a negative physiological response – you know, if they tense up, if they pull back – they’re usually not going to take it any farther than that.  You know, they’re looking for a path of least resistance when it comes to victimization.  And so, you know, we think of vulnerabilities as the kid who grew up in a foster home or who has negligent parents.  You know, when I read the research, I’m like, “That’s not really who they’re targeting.”  Like, all of us have vulnerabilities.  Every single one of us has vulnerabilities and an abuser can find those vulnerabilities really quickly.  And you know, what they’re doing, what it comes to is a matching game.

So, they could find a vulnerable child, but have a parent like me who’s incredibly observant and who’s going to let people know, “Hey, you’re violating boundaries. Get away.”  Not that my kids could never be abused because I think that’s really dangerous territory to say, “Well, you know, I’m trained and an abuser would never target my kids.”  They might, but the point is what abusers are doing is they’re playing this matching game.  So, they’ll find a vulnerable child, somebody who’s – in their mind – pretty easy to offend, to abuse and then they’ll match that kid to the proper parents.  And so they begin all these testing techniques on the adults too.

And that’s why watching the hands, watching the eyes, listening to the words, that’s all very important because they start touching all over the kids right in front of the parents and that’s very intentional.  They’re seeing not only how the kid responds, but they’re seeing whether the parent notices or not.  You know, do the parents eyes… can they maintain eye contact with the parent, or do the parents eyes keep going to where the abusers hands are?  And it’s anything from a touch on the shoulder to rubbing hair to patting them on the head and letting their finger slide down the victim’s hair, you know, on and on and on.  These are all fairly benign things, but they’re all 100% intentional.

Andrea:  So, it sounds like, as parents, we should be more defensive of our children in situations like this.

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, and have conversations with our kids about what their boundaries are and what they can do if somebody is violating those boundaries.  Because, you know, abuse doesn’t feel like abuse to a kid.  For one, they don’t have a sexual context to really understand that what’s happening to them is abuse.  You know, and I just think it’s really important to talk to our kids and say, “Okay, what are your boundaries?  What’s your no zone?  What makes you uncomfortable?  And what do you do if somebody gets into that no zone and starts making you feel uncomfortable, starts doing things that just make you feel uneasy?”  You know, what’s the process?  What’s the procedure and have those conversations with our kids.

But also, as parents, we need to be incredibly vigilant.  And we need to watch if somebody walking up and touching my kid on the shoulder, maybe they just wanted to tap my kid on the shoulder.  I’m not going to tackle somebody to the ground because they tapped my kid on the shoulder, you know.  But I also know what techniques abusers use.  And so if I see this pattern of somebody gawking at one of my kids, and then they walk up and they try to force a hug on my kid, at that point, I’m going to physically intervene.  I’m going to physically break them away from my kid and reprimand them and say, “You don’t touch my kid like that.  You know, I don’t want you hugging my kid.  I don’t want you stroking my kid’s face.  I don’t want you stroking their hair.  I don’t want you rubbing their shoulders.  That’s not okay.”

And I’ll probably say it loud enough so that other people hear it, which kind of embarrasses the person and it catches them off guard.  And again, maybe they’re an abuser, maybe they’re not, but they’re going to know good and well when they’re done with me that they violated physical boundaries and they’re not going to do it again to my kid.

Andrea:  So tiger mama or tiger daddy needs to come out.

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah.  I mean, again, we don’t need to belittle people and be rude and demeaning.  But yeah, absolutely and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah.  Oh, man.  Okay, so background checks are something that organizations, companies use to figure out who’s going to work with their kids and who’s okay to work with their kids or not.  Do you feel like those are sufficient then?

Jimmy Hinton:  Not alone.  They might catch people who have spent time in prison, who actually got caught which is the vast minority of abusers have ever been caught.  And even the ones who have been caught, rarely do they get charges that, you know… a lot of times they’ll find loopholes or they’ll find sweet plea deals, and so there’s no criminal record that follows that person.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, they need to also do what?  I mean, is that when an organization needs to have this additional training that you give and have an idea of what it looks like; the hands, the eyes, the words, that sort of thing?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, training.  And good training is a very good component that’s married well to background checks.  You’ve got to be properly trained.  And you know, I kind of harp on this whenever I go places, and some people don’t like it and I’m okay with that.  But I say teaching people to report people after they’ve spotted this red flag behavior stuff is not prevention, so stop packaging that as prevention.  Making a report… by the time you pick up the phone and you’re making a report, that means that somebody has crossed the threshold of reasonable suspicion and that means that most likely if that person is an abuser, you’re way too late.  That is not prevention.

You know, I relate it to airplanes, right?  Picking up the phone and calling 911 after you see a big mushroom cloud coming up from behind the trees is not preventing that plane from going down.  Look at all the measures that we do through the FAA to screen people, to do to do background checks, to ask questions of people as they go through the TSA checkpoints.  We have a rigorous system.  There’s a reason why it’s safe to fly.  It’s not by accident that it’s safe to fly, and we don’t do any of those things.

When we hire people, we allow the person to tell us which people we’re going to call if we even call their references at all.  We never call anybody else.  We’re like, “Oh, okay, they have two glowing recommendations by these people they hand-selected – they chose them.  They have two glowing recommendations; come on through!  Come on in!  In fact, we’re going to hire you and pay you money to be here.”  We have terrible screening processes. So, I think we need to start there, but we also have to have a really good ability to fire people.

Andrea:  Oh, tell me more about that.

Jimmy Hinton:  You know, we talked about screening, and I’ve seen abuse training where they talk about screening.  Screening, screening, screening, we’re going to screen people.  Okay, that’s great. That’s necessary.  I’m all for it.  I’m 100% behind that, but let’s talk about the ability to fire people too.  We should have clear written policies that spell out what the boundaries are; physical boundaries, emotional boundaries, communication boundaries, all these things.  We need to spell those out in written policy, and then spell out the consequences for people who violate those boundaries.

And if somebody’s violating those boundaries and doing it over and over and over again, we shouldn’t say, “Well, maybe we just misinterpreted what they were doing.”  That’s not acceptable.  Can you imagine TSA operating that way?  “Maybe we just misinterpreted, you know. Come on board,” right?  TSA is very serious about stopping people who they think are even potential threats, and we don’t do it.  We don’t do it in the workplace.  We don’t do it in our schools, especially.  We get these strong unions that back our teachers and make it nearly impossible.  I could point to teachers in my own school district, the school that my kids go to that have violated so many boundaries with students, and they’re still on staff.  That’s not acceptable.

Andrea:  Hmm.  No, absolutely not; or volunteers too, I’m sure.

Jimmy:  Sure, right.  So, yeah, we need to be willing to fire people, to get rid of them, and to have substantiated reasons.  You know, it’s not just like, “I have a bad feeling so we’re gonna fire this person.”  That’s not fair.  All of us would probably be fired at different points.  But we have to have very clear boundaries that are spelled out, and we have to understand deception techniques on how abusers operate and how they violate those boundaries and why they violate those boundaries and how they get away with it.

Andrea:  Jimmy, I’m going to ask you how people can get in touch with you, and then I’m going to ask you one more question about what it looks like to be a “Voice of Influence” in a situation like this.  So I’m giving you a little fair warning here.

Jimmy Hinton:  Sure, okay.

Andrea:  So first, can you tell us if somebody is wanting to have you come to a training with their group or they want to learn more about what you do or your podcast, can you tell us more about how people can get in touch with you?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yes, so the easiest way… and this is not because I’m a narcissist.  It’s because I am not a marketer, so my website is about as simple as it gets.  It’s my name, jimmyhinton.org.  That’s the easiest way.  All of my resources are tied to the website.  So, the podcast is on the homepage.  It’s a very simple layout.  That’s by design.  It’s easy.  I have a tab on the services that I offer.  There’s a page for speaking, and there’s a contact form directly on there if people want to contact me and inquire about speaking.

Andrea:  And you have patrons for your podcast.  Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jimmy Hinton:  Yeah, so we wanted to find a way to fund our podcast and to improve it.  And you know, we looked at sponsors and we didn’t really like that route.  And so we decided to go to the route of Patreon, so it’s patreon.com/SpeakingOut.  And we love it because we got people who already listened to the podcast, and they sign up at different tiers.  And then we offer different rewards for each of those tiers.  So, they’re actually getting something.  It’s not like a nonprofit where you give money, you know, you make a donation, and then who knows where that money winds up.  We tell people exactly how that money is being used.

They’ve gotten to see our studio be built, you know.  Our patrons have seen this process and they’ve been part of that process.  And then they give us all kinds of feedback.  They’re part of our community, and so a lot of our episodes are really shaped by our patrons.  They really help us with the content.  And at the top tier, we even bring patrons on as guests.  So, we’ve had multiple patrons beyond as guests to the podcast, and it’s just fun.  It’s really neat and we’ve gotten to know people and we feel like they’re part of the family, so it’s really cool.

Andrea:  Hmm, that’s the Speaking Out on Sex Abuse podcast and it’s with your mom, right?

Jimmy Hinton:  Correct.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  Okay, so in conclusion then, when somebody wants to be a “Voice of Influence” for those who might be survivors or for the vulnerable, really, what is your advice for somebody who wants to be a “Voice of Influence” in this sphere?

Jimmy Hinton:  Three words; start where you are.  Four words, I miscounted – start where you are.  I never dreamed that I would be doing what I’m doing nine years ago.  You know, nine years ago, I was in a little small town.  I reported to the police.  I just went on this quest to really understand how we all missed it, and I just started blogging about it.  I started speaking immediately about it and it kept progressing and you know, there is no silver bullet.  There’s no magic to it.  It’s just doing what’s right, starting where you are right in your own community, right within your own family, right within your own school district.  And you know, just following your heart and doing what’s right.  We know right from wrong; all of us do.  Whether you’re Christian or not, whether you’re male, female, young, or old, it doesn’t matter.  We know right from wrong, so just start where you’re at.

Andrea:  Great!  Thank you so much for being a “Voice of Influence” for our listeners today.

Jimmy Hinton:  Absolutely.  Thank you.  It’s an honor to be on the show.