Dr. Trina Clayeux: Therapists Aren’t The Only Answer (Pt 1)

Published Oct 29, 2024, 5:00 AM

For every single therapist, there are 350 people looking for that type of support. Dr. Trina and her team at Give An Hour realized that there will never be enough therapists to meet this need. And that the answer is us, their own Army of Normal Folks serving one another in peer support groups and as wellness ambassadors. 

Now if you you know, and I've had people, you know, if I say something, they're like, oh my gosh, do you have a good therapist? And I think, wow, that was such a missed opportunity. You kind have asked me a connection question, like wow, that seems really hard. What are you doing about that? Or what's what's your next step?

Or there's the training right there.

That's right, because as soon as you tell me, first of all, you don't know my history with therapy. You don't know if i've you know, you don't know my family history with therapy. You don't know how I feel about therapists. I gonna be terrible, you know, afraid of them. I could be. You think that it's all you know, it's a nonscience. But you also aren't taking into account that you just escalated our interaction. You just told me that my stuff's way too big for you.

Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a football coach in inner city Memphis. And that last part it's somehow led to an oscar for the film about our team. That movie's called Undefeated, y'all. I believe our country's problems can never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks, US, just you and me deciding, Hey, you know what I can help. That's what doctor Trina Clay, you the voice you just heard, has done. She's the CEO of Give an Hour, which started by encouraging therapists to donate an hour of therapy a week to military service members, veterans, and their families. But then they realize that for every single therapist that we have in the United States, there are three hundred and fifty people looking for that very type of support, and so therapists giving an hour or even recruiting more therapists into the field could never meet all of the country's mental health needs. And as you just heard, therapists aren't always the best solution for every person or need out there. So they came up with a solution that I cannot wait for you to hear about. Right after these brief messages from our general sponsors.

I had the mom and the dad, I had an older brother. I have an older brother, and you know, I think just like anybody, I mean, you have like an incredible I have incredible memories and feelings from that time. I think I also had a lot of you know, just like anyone, any adversities that you know that you're kind of troubling through that pop up at different time times in your life as you're on your journey. And so I had I think if any way it would ask you, I was like, quite kid. I did the school, I did the sports, I did kind of all the right things, and then you know, eventually I just kind of push pretty hard. And so I moved out while I was still in high school, and I was like ready to take on the world.

Did you really you left home in high school? Yeah?

Yeah, my mother is still a little devastated by it, but yes, and no, like I just once I decide something, the thing is happening, and I just and I do it without usually anyone knowing either. So it's not a lot of leaders too.

There's some independence over there.

There's something there I don't know, and uh, it still crops up every now and again in different ways. And so I think that I know when I've hit something that is a driver for me, and then there's no other thing that I can see.

Do you mind tell me why you moved out?

I think, you know, in retrospect, I could probably see a lot of the family dynamics that I probably had that you know, growing up in Northern Iahoe and in the seventies and eighties, I didn't have probably the skill sets for the coping skills for my family didn't have it. And so I think I felt and I you know, again, this has no relationship to my work now, but you know it's a relevant part is I had developed a lot of like childhood anxiety, which of course nobody knew what anxiety was in the seventies and eighties. But I think that that was kind of my first pop of like this is my coping skill, which is I'm going to kind of I'm going to go, I'm going to remove myself, I'm going to go into something else. And so I think that's something I've had a curb over my lifetime.

Actually, I think that really is interesting when we get to to give.

It was very difficult for me to just go through that. You can tell, yeah, I was like and done.

I can tell that's hard for you to talk about, but and I don't want to pray too much, but you also said it still kills my mom today, So there's something there. But the whole point is, again I'm not trying to dig deep into your psyche, but I do think that's interesting. Once we talked to give an hour and we'll get to that in a minute. Trina went on to serve as a leader and all kinds of social impact organizations, including workforce training, community college systems, and helping with military spouse employment.

So you know, and I know you know you're right because like the social impact, and I think it's always a little bit of a challenge when you do this type of work because everybody knows what business is. But when you talk about nonprofits or you talk about the education space, it comes already kind of prepackaged for folks when they engage with it, it's like, oh, nonprofit means not very good.

That's what I mean by gooey. Right, Right, it's sticky, But what is it? And it's not exactly something firm you understand when you hear it, right.

Or it comes with like so much connotation it's like, oh, it's not as good as business.

The Golden sounds on a corner free to this.

All the works for free, because they're just the hurts in it.

And it's like, but that's not what I get from you. You would be doing so.

Yes, it's not what folks sign into. And so what I think that you know, part of it is is that I was looking for that place for government and business couldn't solve for they can't solve independently for a social problem. But I think you're navigating this space between all of these things. You're having to almost translate what's meaningful to business and how that matters. If you know, if just for instance, I did a lot of work in workforce development, working with young adults eighteen to well sixteen to twenty four year old who were push out, fade out, drop out from school. So I ran a education and workforce center so on the by, you know, just generally nobody cared that much about our young people. They cared that they weren't breaking in their cars, they cared about they weren't down in the downtown area where all the customers were, but they didn't see it as a viable part of their workforce. And they had workforce problems, workforce shortages, and so you're really that person in the in between who is trying to you know, knit to the distance between. This is actually a problem that you have. This is a solution you have. It doesn't look like the solution that maybe you thought you needed. But if we work together, we could help solve four, not solve all, but solve for some of the workforce issues that you have and and benefit these individuals will not be down in the you know, down in the downtown area or still in your cars.

So you see that as social impact, well.

I do, because I think you have to have a business mind for what you do, I mean fundraising, trying to get in these places and spaces. This is not simple work. And you have to be able to understand and be alongside people who are the ones who are not benefiting from the systems the way that they are for whatever in a variety of reasons. And so I think spending time with people people in poverty, people who are low wealth, people are low educated, people who are don't maybe necessarily have all the same opportunities. When you get to know people, you have no other distance besides advocating for them, and so you really are bringing these things together. There go you had a look say it.

Just recently we released on Tuesdays, we release our normal episodes. On Friday, we release our episode ets and they're called shop Talk, and a recent one was on what I call living in a vacuum, and if you live in a vacuum, you can't grow. And what that means is when you surround yourself with people who look look like you, who love like you, who worship like you, who vote like you, and who believe just like you. That every conversation you have a circular and therefore all of your thought is in a vacuum. And what you just said is what I yeally challenge everybody in my word it to do, which is get outside of that vacuum and surround yourself with people who don't look, vote, worship, love, and act just like you, because that's where the real growth for not only the people you seek to serve, but also you happens. And that's what you just said.

Different way, it's so true. And you know, I think there's such simple things that we put to characters, so we think, oh, a person in poverty, Now I know everything I need to know about that person. But when you get to know people, then you find out all the other pieces to it and you have a more complete, you know, person. But I do find that the clipping of folks or this like tight narrative or you know. And that's what I think a lot of my work has been is taking on these narratives that institutions have also taken on. And so I won't call it the institutions, but I'm thinking like big governmental institutions. I'll use the Social Security Office just because that's an easy one, because I guess I can use a personal experience too. When I go into the Social Security Office and the way that I am engaged with from the moment I walked in. I can tell you that people with middle class who have some power, who have you know, who feel like they have a voice in things, don't appreciate the way that you're engaged with when you walk in the Social Security Office. Can you imagine people who don't have the ability to say because they need they need the service, they need the thing they need to get in there. And I think that part of what I've done, and then what I've surrounded myself is taking on those systems because we take on people harder than we take on the systems that we all know don't work. Aren't people friendly, aren't trying to solve real problems, and they're trying to solve general problems. But that doesn't help the person who's sitting in front of you to solve a general problem. So I think of things like that, like I am wanting to take I want to penetrate where those systems aren't working. It's not that the system is inherently bad, it's that the system is not necessarily working for people who have individual needs. And I think you can do I know you can do it. I don't even think you can do that.

What is military spouse employment? What is that? Yeah, it was you did that at one time. That one interests me.

Yeah, And I think again, you're you're working this conduit between people who don't necessarily value Like we all think we know what a military spouses. It's like, oh, that's that's adorable. You're a military spouse, like you're yeah, that's how you're very that's like.

A Southern Oh, bless your heart. It's it's it's almost it's almost condescending.

Yes, yes, I had actually have a picture of a place that used to go in North Carolina and it said the Dependent Center, and that was a spouse. So you were you're formed as a dependent. You're either you're either being sponsored, you're a dependent.

The language itself, the language.

Is what tries to shape the behavior and the way in which you get to show up in those spaces. And your spouse is you know, is the person right, and then you are all the other things. And there's a very silent not intentional and not even like anything that I could say is like negative, but there's a silent system that kind of shapes how as a spouse you get to show up in certain spaces. No one says it, and so you're you know, there's some expectations on you, which again I don't think I was incredibly I came in very late into that. I don't think it was incredibly amenable to it. But I also saw how much it affected people. So part of what we did though is to work with military spouses to help and again highly educated, you know, because many of them are not able. You know, you go to like I went to Clovis, New Mexico. There's not a lot of employment for me in Clobes, New Mexico not a lot, and so they tend to go back to school. They become highly educated, they got multiple degrees, lots of certificates, but a really hard time finding meaning for them, meaningful employment and certainly not meaningful employment when people are like, oh, and I've had them say this, you're a military spouse. You're only going to be here for a couple of years, so I'm not going to hire you. So I take off my wedding ring. I did all the things. I had everything as generic as possible so you couldn't see how much I was moving around. And you know, I think what I wanted to do was help smooth that for other military spouses, but also help educate employers about the benefit because again, these will be high functioning, high achieving professionals who will also be incredibly loyal and the expectation.

I'd say, what about the loyalty factor. Isn't it just embedded in that per particular community.

I think that absolutely. I think that and no one else do. You are forced to make some sort of three year or five year commitment to your organization. If you're just Joe Blow, you don't know that. Joe Blow didn't just come up take a job, and he's already looking at your job, or he's looking at using this as a stepping stone. So again I go back to like the narration out there, but it's very difficult to say military spouse and have people go like, wow, I really value that. That is incredible. I'd love to hire you. It's it's definitely you have to do a lot more upselling.

So as I hear all of these different things before give an hour, it's kind of clear to me, well, no, I'm assuming or I'm gathering better word gathering. It only took three chances, but I think I got to the word I wanted gathering. That you could have left Gonzaga with this Doctor of Leadership thing and probably to work some fortune five hundred companies. I'm sure there's people that do that because they're looking for leadership people and leadership roles. But you, on the other hand, wanted to use that preparedness and education to have some measure of change in communities, whether they are one community or another. That's kind of where you bumped along. It looks like until you started, you did what you do now. I mean, is that right? Is that where your.

Heart is absolutely and I think bumped along is a good way. You know, I came up as a first generation college student, so I bumped along a lot of these.

Really, nobody in your family had ever gone to college, and I had, and then you were a doctor went away.

Oh my gosh. Between a graduation high school, graduation in college, I mean it was like two years. And then I took quite a bit on my undergrad you know, my parents had gotten divorced, and you know, there was a lot of things that had gone down that you know that I kind of extended out. But even even my a master's program, I didn't know what public administration policy was. I heard someone say it and I was like, sounds great. I need to get a master's grace so that expize how I rolled into these things, So again would have been helpful. So any great advice out there is, you know, do some planning ahead of time. But I think the bump along was I never deviated and I always try to figure. I think I was always attracted to the most complex systems that seem impenetrable. They seem like they're just so set that this is it. I worked in prisons, and it's not like there's you know, people are going in and thinking like, how do we revolutionize this? I mean, you do have pockets of folks, but it kind of is what it is. And so for me, I wanted to go where it felt extreme and it felt intractable, and to see, like, what kind of change can you affect in a really thoughtful, genuine way where you are leveraging what you can learn from people to try to un really unwind and then reconstruct those systems.

Well, that makes a lot of sense when you get to give an hour and now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first I got something really cool to tell you about. We're hosting our second ever live interview. We're doing it Memphis on November seventh with Todd Comer Nicki. This guy is the director of one of the most thought provoking, inspiring deep movies ever made, one of my favorites Elf. But he's also the writer of Sully and now he is the director of Angels Studio's upcoming film. Bon Hoffer Pastor Spy assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who tried to rally the church to stop Hitler. He was involved in Operation, which was an operation to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland to ultimately save their life. And then he joined the famous Valkyrie plot, which was the plot to assassinate Hitler, and he was executed in a concentration camp for his involvement in that. He's one of the most epic examples of what we're looking for, an ordinary person who lived an extraordinary life of service all the way to the point of death. And I hope you can join us to get inspired and meet the incredible director that is now telling Pastor Dietrich Bonhofter story. You can RSVP for free tickets free tickets at Bonhaffer director dot event bright dot com. That's b O n h O E F F E R director dot event bright dot com in Memphis on November seventh. He should be a good night. We'll be right back.

But in two thousand and five we were founded by a child psychologist, doctor de Barbara Van Dalen, and I think that again, an incredible human being, just all you know in all respects. But what I think was so interesting is that she really took this to look around corners, and I think that's what wasn't happening in two thousand and five. So you think about, like how this conversation around mental health is now, which again I think is very big, and it's very muddy, and it's you know, it's a little messy, and there's a ton of interest there. But I also think if you've couch used in two thousand and five, what she was looking at was there are not enough people in her profession mental health therapists or mental health professionals. And it was in direct respec once to nine to eleven. So we were seeing like, really, now.

I didn't get that. I didn't know that that's interesting.

Which I think again just like really took a look out of population that is under resource underserved. Again, we're talking two thousand and five and the stigma for mental health care coming into a war. What were we going to do? Like, really, what are you going to do with this? And the other piece that she had in there was it was active duty veterans and their loved ones. And I think that was such an incredible again foresight to really set up the stage to say this is not a veteran challenge, this is not an active duty challenge. This is a family challenge, and the loved one has got to play an essential part. And I think you'll see over time that the loved one in many factors has not been held in the same just held as close to this as it should be. It hasn't been brought in every time.

So just parphries two thousand and one, we send a bunch of people to war. In two thousand and five, were looking at all of these folks, including loved ones, that are affected military service, and there's more need than there are therapists, yeah, I think for sure.

And there was a lot more stigma, and there was a lot more organizational barriers, so we were a barrier free, so it means free to them, confidential, and no one's going to tell anyone that you're there, because that was at that time, there is a narrative that you're probably going to lose your job in the military. People are going to think you're crazy, you're not going to be able to promote. And I'm not going to say that those things weren't true. It really didn't matter because that was the prevailing wisdom of the military.

Perception is reception, right.

So it didn't matter. Now, I will say the military has been phenomenal when when they got on board with mental health just like they do with any kind of social thing they take on. They take it fully on, but you know, we're just kind of encapsulating that time. So what she did was she rallied across the country. We've always been the national Mental Health organization mental health professionals to give an hour of clinical, free clinical care to that population, and it rallied people across the country. We have had and we continue to have therapists in every state across the country who's still give an hour of their time and there's no insurance, there's no payment. It is a connection between them and it's unlimited, which I think is another thing that again goes back to like a system that should be that I know for a lot of reason can't be. But military often and many populations have this takes many times to meet with someone before there's a level of comfortability to then like really start getting into the meat of why you're there. And if you have three sessions, six sessions, twelve sessions, you may have used half of them just trying to see is this person going to be But not every therapist is a good fit for the person. Not every person's good fit for the therapist. So what I loved is that we made that created that space for them to work that out, and so it became I mean that there was nothing like it, and I still think what we offer now there's nothing like. And so so that that's the genus genesis.

Which is get rid of the stigma, remove barriers, and therapists giving an hour of their time to these military personnel plus their family if needed, because I know the family dynamic when a guy comes back or lady comes back from war, that person waiting, the person that comes back to him four years later is more times than not the same.

Person that will and neither's that spouse or that child or yeah, well family.

And sometimes that child was six months old when somebody left, and now you got a five year old, and how do you reintroduce that. So there's a lot, but there's still one part. You told me at the top, there's not enough therapist for the people that need therapy. So even though you got therapists giving an hour, don't we have a whole lot more demand than we have supply.

Yeah? Yeah, if you look at like the national numbers, it's one one therapist for every three hundred and fifty people. I mean, I looked at at like Phoenix Metro, it's one for every like six hundred and eighty, Like that's a.

One for six. There's one therapist for ever six hundred eighty and phasis one.

Random spot that I looked at. And then forty seven percent of the country is in a workplace shortage for mental health support. So think of that, almost half the country does not have access to mental health. Rural America, you know, areas that that are small, small cities, so how and you know, again, therapy is a very personal thing. So if you live in one really rural community, I mean not only is there often stigma, there's you know this small town you don't want everybody knowing your business.

Go back to northern Ohio, Idaho. Yeah, how many people are going to go to the therapy? Yeah, especially in a smaller right that whereby nos of business every.

Absolutely, and it's very you know, like hunting, fishing, like pull up bootstraps, like there's so much kind of cultures like social culture around it too. And then you you know, you think you can't just I can't pull somebody from Boise, Idaho, which again there's a rivalry Boise is down here. Who leans up here those two. You know, they think Bois is the most like liberal like it's just you know, hippiach everywhere, right, you've probably been to Bois.

People nor they're not. They get people boys here liberal right liberal absolutely, and so where people in LA people think people are boiser conservatives sticks.

That band, right, Yeah, perspective.

There are industries and professions that we just don't have enough. There's not enough people going into education, I mean, to meet the need. There's certainly the way things are. There's not enough people going to law enforcement to meet the needs of the law enforcement across the country. There's these kind of things, and I'm just thinking about one in three hundred and fifty. There's there's there cannot be enough people in therapy currently and being trained in therapy, whether psychiatry, psychology, social work, whatever, that's meeting the need. So there is need going unsatisfied.

Of course, and I would even put an argument that it can't be solved by just adding therapists because not you know, just like any profession, not all teachers are created alike, not all therapists are created like, and not all therapists are the therapists that we need for some of the conditions that we have. So I think that generating more therapists I mean is part of a strategy. It just can't be part of a solution. And we put so much on the backs of therapists to solve mental health. I'll say crisis, but do you think we have a human connection crisis? But the mental health crisis is that we can't just necessarily say more therapists because that doesn't mean better therapists, quality therapists, or therapists that people can even access. And so they are part of a solution and they play an essential role. And I think that part of what we have worked on is like what else do people actually want need that we can provise, Which.

Is really the incredible part of this, which is give an hour from the beginning, unto itself is awesome, convincing therapists to give an hour their time and expertise to help people who needed so they can avoid the stigma and get the help they need along with their family. That in and of itself is awesome, But that's not really the story. That's not only the story is the creativity that you guys took from your experience there and parlayed into.

What you're doing now, which is we were coming up against, like therapy isn't for everyone. You don't take into account people's culture. You don't take account their neighborhood and the socialization of going to therapy. You don't take an account that my young gang member probably isn't going to go sit in a therapist's office and feel like this is his space, and so what else is there? And so when we really started looking and we're like, you know what, peer support has been around centuries. It's not like it's a new concept and really came from communities of color. And I always want to give, you know, the recognition there is that this is how communities who have been disinvested have always helped each other and always showed up for each other. Now what we're doing is really trying to make it feel like they can even have more feel more equipped.

But see there's where my first blush, I got a little lost. Oh sorry, but then I came back to it. But I think it's important. That's a great segue to this. My concern was peer support's great, but what if the peer support is not good support? And I don't mean like putting an alcoholic in a room for guys who are alcoholics who are still doing alcohol. I don't mean that. I mean the advice and the mentorship being given is or advice you can actually make things worse for somebody, sure, for sure. But then I read about your five indicators and what you do with the peers, and to me, that's part of the secret sauce. Can you talk about that?

Yeah? Yeah, I think I think you're right. I mean, we people don't generally want our advice, right, they want a connection. I think what we're trying to really do.

No, that's that's also really true. People generally don't really want your advice. They just what's the old adage, nobody cares how let you know until they know how much you care.

And that is and I think part of what we're trying to do is re equip people with that. Like some of it, I feel like, you know, you have we care about people, and we care about people we care about, right, I don't care about people we don't care about I mean it is you know, so you're really trying to find, like though, is trying to understand people's stories, which to me is more of the population based context.

Right.

A veteran is a context. It doesn't mean that's every veteran story, but I want to learn about that so I can bring that into another veteran to compare it, not compare, but to integrate that context into the way that they see the world and how they can use their experience to help someone else. So it's really more about connecting and looking for connection points rather than saying the right thing, because I can tell you nobody's going to know what that is, Like I don't know what the right thing to say, but I can help you show up in a way that that person feels connected to you, feels heard, feels listened, and we could teach you some things like some impulse controls that you want to do, which is I want to give you great advice, I want to tell you about my story. I want you know, to tell you what you should go do, rather than trying to teach people to stay in this conversation. And we've created a tool and we were testing out with the military last week just to see like how does this tool work in your life, And it was how to keep in a seven minute conversation. And it's more of a framework. It's just like a way of containing things for people to say, could you stay in a conversation that isn't advice, that isn't jumping ahead, that isn't disclosing all of your things, to one up them for seven minutes and to see if it can kind of reduce the need to be thinking ahead and jumping ahead, but rather like you're just on the journey next to them and part of it. So you mentioned the five signs, so one of it is gives helps give people language. So I could say, you know, I know your baseline. I've known you for you know, a short period of time. But I could say, here's your baseline from what I can observe, And then I could say, you know what today you seem you just don't seem like you have the same energy. You seem really withdrawn. That's a language that I could put out there rather than coming at it either with more of like a judgment or just seeing something and not saying anything, like I can see a shift in you, but I'm not saying anything. So what I think it helps is to give people really simple and this came from our PSA in twenty fifteen, is like, here's the simple language I could say, you look withdrawn, you seem agitated. I've noticed that, you know, you don't seem like you're taking you You're not going to the gym as much, you're not taking care of yourself. Those are all signs that I just need to pay attention to you and then start to ask some questions. And we teach also kind of overcoming some of the resistance, like that I'm fine. You know that's people's natural is like oh no, I'm fine, and it's like, well, how do you overcome some of those.

We'll be right back. So people that want to give an hour are then taught to look for these five things and conversations or in the people they're working with. You don't have to be you can be anybody, but if you're anybody that wants to, we're going to teach you these five things to just look for. And these five things are ways to maybe communicate in a way that is not personal judgmental, but also probably open ended. I would expect to allow the people you're talking with the respond sure, is that right?

Absolutely? And you're right it can be you know, we've done this for employers. It's like that mid level supervisor. You know, how if that person notices. Again, you're looking at maybe at a performance thing, but you also notice a change in that behavior. You can come and attack it at the performance level, and I can tell you're probably going to get a different show up on that person, right because now you've in some respect you've threatened their livelihood, their job, their stability in that organization. But if you came at it to say, hey, I've just noticed over time, like you know, you don't seem like you're not really talking all the team we have team meetings, You're not speaking up. You seem a little bit withdrawn. You know, I'd love to just find out, like what's going on. That is a different conversation than if I start just throw you know, leveling up or adding up on your performance to say you're not getting stuffed done in time? You know, it depends. I always think like you're always are looking for, like what is the goal, and the goal is to find out what's happening so you can address it to get and hopefully together. But I think that it gives a language that we don't use right now, and so we just see an issue and we're kind of attacking the issue rather than going to the person to just like really try to work with them. And I think that's why peer support is so effective, and it's it's very reciprocal. And we have a population that we've worked with for many years, which was the Las Vegas mass shooting in twenty seventeen.

I was going to ask about that. I think it's a great example. No, go, it's a great example of what you're talking.

I think it's a fantastic one because after that, sixty sixty five percent of the people who were in Vegas at that concert, actually we're from southern California. So the next day, including one of our employees, got up, went to California, and all the resources for this shooting and memorials and the events and the money and the victim services all went to police base to Las Vegas. And you had several years that these individuals across seven counties of southern California just went back to their day and went back to their life.

But harboring the trauma and the I mean, can you imagine that? Can you imagine having been diving behind barriers, not knowing where the bullets are coming from. At one minute you're having a blast at a concert in Vegas, of all places living it up, having a blast, and literally it split second you hear noises, you see people screaming and running. You're probably like not able to even conceive of what's going on initially, and then you're diving behind barriers and you're seeing people get shot and die, police are going crazy. Nobody knows what's going on. And then the next day you're supposed to go back to work.

Is trauma and you have no connection because they were so spread out.

And that's what you're talking about now, is now you have no connection to all of what's going on. So not only are you traumatized, your.

Alone, absolutely your alone? And really, who do you tell, like, how do you have a conversation?

Who can even who can even who can even understand what you're going through? A therapist can certainly try, and a friend could empathize, but there's no safety in you really feeling what I feel. Right, So that's what you try to train pure groups to do. You match people that have the same trauma with people that don't, but you teach them how to see the stressors in a way to talk about it right.

And yes, and that group when when we finally were able and requested to come in and you know it and into yeah, into Inventory County, California to bring people together. And again this has been unaddressed for a very long time, and so even just finding the people because there's a lot of rules around you know, who are victims and confidentiality, So there was a lot of upfront work just to get access to the population. And one year later, one year and one month later, there was a second there was a mass shooting Inventory County where several of the people who were in the first one were in the second one and was in It was at a bar and gryll on college night, and so one of our employees was actually in both. And what her experience was was that peer support was the support she needed. Now it doesn't mean that it was at the exclusion of therapy, but it has had the most profound effect on her. And now she's of course leading all of our peer support efforts. And I think what she and her and other people who were in that similar situation were able to say was she didn't have to start from za, she doesn't have to explain everything, she doesn't have to have an entire backstory, right, she could say something that someone else is just like co signs right there. They get it, they understand it. And what I loved is that I think this is where one of the places that we showed up, you know a way, and this was our early work into peer support and why we were like, this is something really magical is that we continue to work with them. And they said, listen, we want to do a I think it was the second or third year anniversary. I think it was the third year anniversary. We want to do a line dancing in Thousand Oaks Park and we want the therapy dogs there, and we want to paint rocks, and we want music and beer. Because that was this was all from a country, you know, that's what how they all kind of need sounds fun, sounds fun. And guess what we did. We created that whole thing to make sure that they had that exp We co created it. They told us what they want to need, how they wanted it to feel, how they wanted people to show up, and they got that and that was again, it's just like one piece of your healing process. In the in between, they're meeting, you know, weekly, they're meeting in person. They do ice cream socials like they were doing things. But again, we were just keep going back and you're kind of engineering human connection. You're creating these conditions for people to come together and recipically connect because if you get me and I get you, like we are both kind of going to be elevated in this energy. And if I say something to you and you don't really react to the same with me, like you're like, yeah, I don't know anybody from northern Idaho, that just seems really weird. Like there's there's a disconnection, right, So there's I think that's really what we're focusing on is like how do you keep maintaining that connection? And it has such a healing effect. And now thirteen of the individuals that we're in that peer group are now California certified Peer supporters, which we were able to do through this work to get them here to become trained peer support.

All again giving an hour.

Yeah, absolutely, and they're ready to show up for others. So when you but.

Explain the certified because when you say that, immediately people think, oh, they went to school. No, they didn't go to school. You guys, we.

Provide a lot of training we would love to get into certified and there's a couple of reasons why we haven't done it yet. But the certifieds are going state to state for the most part, and so they do do like a whole education and they take exams and do the thing is and it has that there is And again this might be just a little bit of my own my Jesuit schooling now is there's a part of me that doesn't love for it to be commodified or become a consumered product versus a product that comes from people who use it. So what I like about what we've created with our pair support work, and I just saw it in action for the last couple of days, is that there are tenants that you want to get across, but it's their experience, whatever that experience. This happened to be military, that one happens to be a mass shooting. You are trying to help them make the connection and some of their experience, and then you're putting the nuggets in place about how does the five signs show up for you? How could you lean into this conversation. What are some of the complications of saying this to someone? You know, what are your personal barrier for saying that? So you're really trying to make it feel very connected to them instead of sometimes you know, trainees can become very prescriptive, like you need to show up this way. What I love and what I heard is the nuance, and the nuance is where all the magic happens, right, because that's where it's interpersonal. I'll just give like one brief example, but we were talking about with the military about legal means and suicide risk and how to in locking up. So there's you know, a big push around education around separating people from their from a weapon, and so there's different strategies. It's all very research based, but when you actually talking to folks, you start to understand the way in which either a they work around it or be the complication, the innerpersonal complication, Like what if I take someone's gun and I'm wrong it now they can't get a promotion. That's a real thing that you can't just address in a training that says answered these five questions.

Yeah, that's interesting.

That's the stuff that I'm really interested because to me, that's the in the moment decision that a person has to make, and if you haven't equipped them together, like how do we walk through this? How do we talk through it? How do we dispel some of the things about security clearances. You know, are they going to get their security clearance taken? Well, the statistics says less than one percent of people have a security clearance stripped, like completely taken in the military for mental health. So once you can address that, then you can go back and have a different conversation with folks. So I think that's where I go back to the nuances. You have to really try to listen to people and understand what is their day to day life like and how do you make sure that you're equipping the peer support with the skills that they actually want need day to day.

And that concludes part one of my conversation with doctor Trina Clay, and you do not want to miss part two that's now available to listen to. Together, guys, we can change this country, but it starts with you. I'll see in part two.

An Army of Normal Folks

Our country’s problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big wor 
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