Sarah Holtz talks with Scott Sharot, crisis intervention trainer

SS: My recent training went very, very well. I was very, very pleased. It was a 40-hour class, advanced crisis intervention training. These were officers that had been on the street for a while. Most of them had been on for quite a while.

It was a very difficult scenario of a jumper off a bridge over I-40. We do three variations of each one. Each one had something to do with psychosis, mild psychosis, a little more severe and then really severe psychosis.

SH: What does crisis intervention look like in that kind of scenario?

SS: It really looks like listening, asking the right questions, trying to build some kind of rapport with the person standing on the bridge, making empathic statements, not trying to go to the solution right away and definitely not ever getting in physical proximity to the person.

We shared stories today among the officers about people that have died. They stopped allowing people to go near anybody on the Golden Gate because many, many law enforcement people have died. Those are the kinds of things that can happen. It can be very, very dangerous.

SH: When you and I first spoke, I think you mentioned dealing with a cadet who was flagging or failing, and it was because there was something going on in his life. He had some of his own emotional baggage that was coming out in the crisis scenario that you presented. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that happens.

SS: This can happen. It’s not frequent, but it can happen. What happens often is that something in the scenario is so real and pushes a real hot button issue or a PTSD occurrence because they’ve experienced that in their own lives. Self-disclosure is a very tricky thing. We warn people that they can self-disclose but they have to do it judiciously. They can’t let that self-disclosure take them off into their own emotional things.

The most dramatic version of that was during a role play I did for a demented person who is drunk and trying to bang on the door of his house that he built at two in the morning. The people living in the house called the police. “This guy is banging on the door and screaming for Betty.” That’s the call. That’s all they know.

When the cops come up, they immediately say, “Sir! Sir!” He said, “What do you want? I didn’t call the police.” “Sir, what are you doing?” “I’m trying to get Betty to open the damn door. This is my house.” “Sir, this is not your house.” Probably not a good thing to say. “This is my house! I built this house!” On it goes and he’s drunk on top of it. The guy had to do a time out at one point because he got very emotional.

There are professionals there to help people. We are also coached beforehand about something that might get in the way and we will specifically not do scenarios with certain people that may be triggered by a rape or something like that. That’s definitely part of it too.

What happened with this gentleman was he stopped for a time out and said, “This is so hard. My dad has Alzheimer’s. This guy is so drunk. He’s being such an idiot. I’m losing it.”

The feedback that was given was so beautiful. We just said, “Can you imagine that your dad left the healthcare facility, snuck out, went to the old bar he used to hang in and people bought him drinks and got him drunk and then he walked over to his old house and tried to get in?” The guy started crying.

All I have to do is be a human being, right? Yes, that’s all. Think about your dad being this person. We all pejorative. We all look at somebody the way they dress, the way they look. Treat this guy like he’s your dad, your daughter, your son whatever is going on. It will help you.

SH: It seems like a difficult line because what you’re trying to access in a lot of these cadets is empathy and compassion and being able to connect the scenario back to their own lived experiences but at the same time, being a cadet or an officer, you do have to compartmentalize. When you’re on the force, you’re doing your job. What’s that line between accessing your own emotion and backstory and putting on the hat and doing the job? Where do you draw the line?

SS: I would say that the focus always needs to be on the other because that’s going to change the whole way that you perceive. If you’re really there to help someone, to be honest, honesty is not as easy as it looks. If you’re an officer and you’re having trouble with something, you can excuse yourself and have your partner take over.

Or if you made a mistake, admit it right away. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I can see that that set you off. It would make me angry too. I’m really sorry.” In other words, what is really going on here?

If you definitely know before you even go out there that is a really hot button issue for you, you might not want to take that call. There is self-awareness that everybody has about those kinds of things, some more than others. Hot button issues don’t go away, that’s the sad thing. We just learn how to deal with them. We really do. We have to learn how to deal with them.

SH: I’m wondering what role if any implicit bias training plays in the kinds of trainings that you do. Does that come up at all, implicit bias with regards to race, class and gender?

SS: It does frequently and in fact, it is a very difficult thing to change. It’s very difficult to change. I’m not going to candy coat this. I was doing a training on a roof. There were two role players, one on one side of the building and one on the other. It was a nine-hour day, a very long day. There was a jumper off the roof with a knife.

They have red guns or blank guns, guns that shoot blanks and a blank taser, but they can use them. We had to change the way the scenario worked because if I held the knife like I would hold the knife to use it, they would feel threatened even though they were 25 feet away, so we held the knife like a dead fish.

I was crying, going through this crisis and they opened the door to the roof. Some of them would just barge out with their gun drawn and I would jump off.

The thing that was interesting at the end of the day was that we do a debrief and the other actor on the other roof came in and I came into the debrief room and he happened to be African American. He smiled and said, “How many times did you get shot today?” I said, “Twice. How many times did you get shot today?” He said, “Eight.” Oh dear!

SH: We’re here with Scott Sharot, actor and crisis intervention coach.

It seems to me that there is some issue too with perfectionism. You can’t make a mistake even if it’s the smallest mistake. Obviously, there are small mistakes like “I shouldn’t have said that,” and then there are big mistakes like, “I shouldn’t have pulled my gun out and shot someone.”

SS: It’s huge and admitting you don’t know something is really hard.

The thing that really gets my goat mostly when working with cadets is when they try to go to the solution right away and they’ll say things like, “We have resources.” Even the way they say it falls flat. What resources? “Well, we have lots of people that can help you.” Okay and … they don’t know what the resources are.

The way to deal with that simply is to say, “I’m new at all this. I don’t know what the resources are, but I am going to call my captain right now and get you a list or a website that you can go to with resources to help you with this problem.” Honestly, you don’t know, but you’re going to do your darndest to help find out where you can go with this problem.

SH: It seems like you have to do this interesting dance. If you get too many feelings involved, being warm and fuzzy, then you get dismissed, but you can’t be too militaristic either. You have to do a dance in between and find middle ground.

SS: Right, and the key to that is really what my acting teacher at the Neighborhood Play House said (I did three years at the professional program in New York) is that his whole definition of acting is living truthfully moment to unanticipated moment in imaginary circumstances. That’s what makes this work powerful. You’re living moment to moment truthfully. What you say has to do with what they say and how they say it. It really is a dance. If somebody is not on the same page, it’s going to change, the whole thing is going to change.

Sandy Meisner, the person who started all that was brilliant in teaching that and getting people to understand that acting is not acting, it’s reacting to what you’re getting. It takes two to tango. That’s a real important part of all of this.

The thing that I mentioned earlier is so important, the human being part. It sounds like it’s so easy. It’s not because people want solutions. They want to get to the core and solve the problem.

SH: What potential do you think these trainings have for lay people, people who aren’t in law enforcement or in medicine? What value can we derive from your teachings?

SS: I am so glad you asked that question because I have segue-wayed this training and what I do into training teachers, into training salespeople, front desk people at hospitals, all kinds of people that need help with customer service with dealing with the public and even dealing in relationships with each other.

Even in a relationship, in a family, in any situation that you’re dealing with communicating, particularly with difficult subjects, using these techniques is very, very helpful; “I” statements, empathic statements, pauses. A pause is a very powerful thing when you’re communicating making sure you reflect what you’re hearing so the person knows what you’re hearing. “I think I heard you say …” “What I heard you say was …” or “Wow, I’m sorry, that really made you angry.” If you’re wrong, they’ll say, “No, it didn’t make me angry! It made me completely frustrated! Why are you not getting this?” That kind of thing.
It is so helpful in every day life in dealing with customer service on the phone (oh dear) and in dealing with anybody in life, it’s very, very helpful because if you do it incorrectly, if you do it wrong, it’s going to escalate.

SH: I think it’s fascinating that you’ve explored the most dramatic scenarios, the most extreme, whether it’s suicide or addiction, these extremes of the human experience and I think it’s fascinating that you can take those extreme places and apply it to the most mundane things whether it’s customer service or dealing with a loved one.

SS: Absolutely. It’s real. It’s emotion. It’s real and there it is, so how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it effectively?

Sarah Holtz talks with RobinTruesdale and Bill Adler producers of the film Sweet Home Monteverde

BA: For me, Quakerism was new. I had not lived among Quakers before and so for the three years I was there, I was really able to witness conflict resolution, peaceful conflict resolution up close. It wasn’t always pretty, I’ll say that, but in Quaker meetings, they could last for hours upon hours, they generally resolve things through essentially consensus decision making and always with respect. That is the thing that was most striking to me, how respectful people were of one another, even when they strongly disagreed. That’s something I think I’ve tried to carry with me.

SH: How did this film come about?

BA: I was living in Monte Verde Costa Rica with my family. We moved down there in the summer of 2012 primarily so that my son could attend the Monte Verde Friends School, which is a bilingual Quaker school. In the course of our time there, I realized that these elder Quakers really had a tremendous story to tell and it hadn’t been told properly, at least I didn’t feel that it had been told properly. That’s why I set about to produce this film on their lives.

SH: What brought you to the process, Robin?

RT: I joined the project about three years ago. He had gathered all of the footage and interviews and really just needed someone to put it together and tell the story. That’s when we began working as a team.

SH: Very cool. I’m wondering for those of our listeners who aren’t very familiar with the Quaker ideology if you could fill us in a little bit about passivism and the ideology that went into this community’s decision to leave the United States for Costa Rica.

BA: Yes, that’s really at the heart of the film. They left in the fall of 1950 and it was during the Korean War. The US had entered the Korea War in June of that year. There were four fellows from Fairhope Alabama, rural Alabama that had gone to prison as draft resistors rather than entering the draft.

When they got out of prison, they had been meeting with others in the Friends Community in Fairhope and they really felt like they could not be faithful, they could not carry out their faith and their belief in passivism and still stay in the United States because every tax dollar that they contributed was going to the war economy at that point or most of them. Let me put it that way.

They began meeting in discussion groups in Fairhope and looked for a place, another country where they could really live out their ideals of passivism and their beliefs.

SH: I’m here with director Robin Truesdale and producer Bill Adler of Sweet Home Monte Verde.

Do you have any favorite quotes from the interviews that you did for the movie?

BA: There’s a quote that I liked from Marvin Rockwell. He said, “I felt it was my duty to try to show as many people as possible how wrong war is.” I like that because he was thinking of the larger world outside of himself and his immediate community in Fairhope. Marvin is somebody who had actually served in WWII as a medic. He experienced firsthand the horrors of war.

When he came back from WWII, he was not about to go back to fight in Korea or serve as a medic in Korea. When he felt that it was his duty to try to show as many people as possible how wrong war is, I think that he was speaking from a place that few others actually knew about because he had experienced it firsthand.

RT: I had written down a quote that’s in the film. One of the interviews was with Robbie Lieberman. She is a history professor in Georgia. I love what she says. She says that “Social movements historically come from some hope of an alternative, some vision that can be shared with other people.” I know that’s pretty philosophical, but I think it’s true. She says we can find hope in really dark times because that’s the way we build movements and make a difference.

I was thinking about the idea of pilgrimage. I would say that what this group from Fairhope did was almost a pilgrimage. They left their home and traveled and went to a place and discovered new things and associated with new people.

I think that pilgrimage, whether it’s religious or just based on a need to learn about what’s out there and find our inner spirituality is a really important thing, especially in times of turmoil. I think it can lead to peace, internal peace and peace with neighbors.

The reason I bring it up is because I did a pilgrimage in Spain in 2018, the Camino de Santiago and that experience of greeting people on a one on one basis led me to learn so much more about how we can create a peaceful environment. Even if we can’t change the world or the society that we live in, we can change our interactions one on one.

I really believe that’s what these Quakers set out to do. They weren’t changing American policy obviously, but what they did create was a change from a very local, centralized base.

In a time right now where we’re experiencing so much heartache and anguish on so many levels, sometimes the best we can do is create peace in our immediate surroundings. I think whether it’s a pilgrimage to a far distant place or just a walk around your neighborhood and waiving to someone in kindness, that is how change can be brought about. I think that’s what these Quakers set out to do and I think we can all do that. We don’t have to leave our country necessarily, but we can create change through kindness and love.