Humanizing everyone has been a big piece of my Prime Directive since starting to speak publicly about safe driving and safe living habits. You can lead a horse to water unless he still wants beer. You can send a person to a DWI class, take away a driver’s license, fire them from their job, send them to a jail or prison, or even watch their sacred marriage vows get decimated…because they still want beer. I’ve met addicts and alcoholics from all walks of life. Judges, lawyers, corrections staff, treatment center professionals, police, regular Joe or Jane members of society, poor or rich, smart and mentally deficient, teachers and students, and the list goes on and on. Alcohol and other substances don’t discriminate.
In early recovery, I encountered a Fellowship of Equals through the 12-Steps. I went on to secure Restorative Justice training through Washington County Court Services and started partaking in Healing Circles. Offenders and Victims both had a true Voice to describe and detail how crimes impacted their lives or explain what conditions lead up to the commission of an offense. No one needed to pull punches, but no one was allowed to bully or denigrate victims or offenders in the Circles. That’s the role of the Mediators, to keep the peace and allow a healing atmosphere for everyone impacted. Both victims and offenders design consequences together, upon which a judge would review and co-sign as a sentence if the plan was not in violation of Due Process and other legal considerations.
Over the years, I came to believe that everyone deserves to have a Voice. Sometimes those that deserve forgiveness the least, need it the most, for it not only heals the victims, it also may lead to a cessation of reduction of offender recidivism. No one has a right to get in the way, to be an obstacle, to a fellow human being getting well. If they want to get well, we have to let or help them get well and heal.
The problem is, a traumatized mind does not trust people, systems, and rules to be interested in helping them. If they were abused as a youth, especially perniciously, then trust is not first on their list of reactions to someone stepping into their lives, even when they have the best of intentions. Even cops suffer from Compassion Fatigue, and like any other victim of repeated trauma, a condition known as Trauma Bonding might arise. Victims hanging out with victims who co-sign their trauma. It’s a real pandemic, even getting so bad that people get addicted to misery without knowing it. An addiction to judgment is even more lethal, for such resentful souls will climb into hell itself to build pedestals to the ones they hate the most.
Some people call contaminated consciousness, ‘Stink-Think’ AKA ‘stinking thinking.’ If we add substance abuse to stinking thinking, that’s when people really go off the hook. Hence the idea related in the textbook of an Anonymous 12 Step Program: ‘We didn’t have a drinking problem. We had a thinking problem, and drinking was just a symptom.’ Time and time again, I've seen people pour alcohol on a problem, and end up admitting later that they sold their freedom for a drink.
The ironic reality is that once someone becomes addicted to substances or alcohol, a therapist meaningfully accessing a practicing abuser’s thinking problem is nigh to impossible. That being said, someone’s a person commits a minor offense while inebriated, and gets a ‘Nudge from the Judge’ and ends up in Drug Court, or gets sentenced to attend an Impact Panel where I or one of my fellow speakers work to open and heal hearts and minds, so the cycle of offenses ends. We never start with the premise that our audiences have a guilt-shaped hole in their hearts into which if we stuff enough guilt, shame, blame and pain therein, they’ll never do it again. If that worked, impaired driving and other offenses would have been all but eradicated in our country. ‘Lock ‘em up and throw away the key’, increased jail/prison sentences, and other pain-inducing stimuli doesn’t work on addicts and alcoholics.
But here is where it gets difficult. It’s where the rubber hits the road. And you know me, here comes the G-Word again. If we are ENTIRELY ready to let God removes all of our defects of character, then we will begin to fully enjoy a new freedom and a new happiness beyond anything were heretofore imagined. Entirely ready mans complete honesty, no secrets, no judging of self or others. Our defects no longer belong to us; they belong to God. Most addicts/alcoholics don’t seem to get there until their lives have become impossible to navigate.
How can one turn their will and lives over to a Higher Power if they themselves believe they can mange live themselves? Sometimes people sit in their car in the middle of the highway of life, but the car is out of fuel and yet they rock forward and backward in the driver’s seat, screaming about how it’s the car’s fault and never understand that they and the car are connected. They have a broken relationship with a car, but stay in the bad marriage of sorts, and never consider that a power greater than their own thinking can restore them to their original condition (car and all). Either junk the car or bring it to a mechanics’ shop. The same applies to people.
Treatment for addiction fixes the car and driver. Locking the car up in an impound lot for years on end fixes nothing. It keeps the lot attendants and tow truck drivers employed, pays for the administrators and HR infrastructure, etc., but it does nothing to alleviate the problem.
Time to shift gears on my arguments a little hit here. When it comes to living in solutions rather than problems, everything is about balance & respect, both on a personal level and a social level. But especially when constitutional & civil rights are involved, we have to be diligent and offer transparency. IMO, TRUST in GOD means that in God's Economy and my free will to surrender; it means that it is impossible to be off of one's spiritual path, no matter what anyone says or does.
Peace is an inside job. No peace, no justice.
With justice, we need Peace Attractors (Officers of the Peace), NOT law enforcement. Police should be like Aikido experts, where the force rendered against them is redirected and the only harm done happens because of the energy expended by the aggressor. This should be the Peace Officer's duty on the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual levels. But if the police are suffering from untreated trauma, and view themselves as victims in Trauma Bonding (an aberrant view known as the Thin Blue Line), how will we ever interface with conditions of the arrestees as themselves being Trauma Victims?
Someone has to be first to trust. Who will it be? A couple of thousand years ago, someone said to love your enemies, but we all keep producing justifiable excuses. Justified anger is the ugliest, most lethal resentment of all. Will you embrace and attract peace, or will you try to FORCE justice, and become part and parcel of your own personal police state?
Here’s a quick YouTube video I put together on this topic of policing and transparency. I didn’t study it out and maybe it’s not professional quality, but I hope you get something out of it.
https://youtu.be/gzz91MX21ps