CORRECTIONAL CAREER
SURVIVAL SKILLS
John Shuford
Staff turnover is a major concern for corrections leadership in both prisons and jails. In many states, it is at crisis levels. Some institutions have vacancy rates more than 40% and turnover rates of more than 50%. Much of this turnover rate is among the new hires; many of whom don’t last beyond the first year. Of equal concern is the loss of staff with service of 8 to 10 years and more.
Burnout and Corrections Fatigue, caused by unhealed trauma and chronic stress, is a common experience of those who work in corrections (Spinaris & Denhoff, 2013). If staff turnover is to be reduced, the work culture needs to become less toxic, and the effects of unhealed trauma and chronic stress must be healed in individual staff. In addition, resilience tools need to be made available to staff so that they are able to remain on the job until retirement. I call these tools “Career Survival Skills,” which include trauma and chronic stress healing, and emotional intelligence (resilience) skills.
Published in two parts, this article describes how improving staff retention can be accomplished through
Teambuilding Attitude Conflict Transformation (TACT) trainings. The first article focuses on what trauma is, how it affects the brain, and how TACT training helps the trauma-healing process. The second article focuses on resilience and TACT training as an emotional intelligence inoculation.
Trauma Trauma is defined as an experience that overwhelms the capacity to cope, often impacting every part of the brain. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2013) uses this definition of trauma: “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing.”
Historically, trauma was thought to be the result of a life-threatening event. However, by SAMHSA’s definition, chronic stress also qualifies as a traumatic event with a similar effect on the individual. This is very significant when considering the highly stressful work culture in corrections, which is quite toxic or damaging to those within it. Toxic stress, whether caused by trauma or chronic stress, has the same impact on the brain.
Stress is normal, healthy, and necessary for survival—which is why our bodies generate a chemical response. When we are threatened or in danger, both cortisol and adrenaline are released in the body. Adrenaline energizes the amygdala, our fight or flight center of the brain, as well as the major muscle groups in the body so that we can escape danger.
It also imprints the event in the amygdala without integrating it with other memories. That is done in the hippocampus, but cortisol shuts down the neuropathways to that organ, so no integration occurs.
When the stressful event is finished, the cortisol and adrenalin levels return to normal and the memory is then integrated with other memories as an unpleasant event. However, with trauma and chronic stress, those levels do not return to normal. Instead, the levels become toxic and physically change the brain. If this condition continues over time, the amygdala can increase in size and the hippocampus and neocortex—or thinking part of the brain—literally shrink in size diminishing their function. This can cause significant psychological and behavioral problems for the individual, including depression, anxiety, aggression, inability to focus, PTSD, memory problems, and sleep disturbances.
Toxic levels of cortisol not only affect the brain, but also organs in the body. Too much cortisol can damage our DNA, which is the blueprint for cell reproduction. This is important because most of our cells are replaced on a regular basis. For example, skin cells replace every three to four weeks; stomach and intestines cells in a little over a week; red blood cells every four months; and lung and pancreas cells between one and two years. Some cells are not replaced and last a lifetime, like neurons in the brain and those in the heart and bones.
At both ends of a DNA strand are telomeres that protect the integrity of DNA and enable the cells to reproduce accurately. Too much cortisol reduces the number of telomeres and shortens their length (Siegel, 2021). Without good telomeres (as when there are too few or too short), good cells are being replaced by damaged cells in the body.
This has been related to the development of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and many (if not most) physical illnesses.
Also, high levels of cortisol damage the methyl molecule, which controls how often the DNA replicates. When there are not enough methyl groups to silence gene reproduction, they can activate when they should not be activated (Borysenko, 2021). This is what occurs with cancer—cells reproduce unchecked.
With this awareness of how trauma and chronic stress can affect the brain and body, what can be done? Fortunately, the damage can be reversed.
Clinical Treatment of Trauma There are a number of psychotherapeutic approaches to treating trauma. Some are more effective than others. Some are based on current research, and others are based on well-established—although not necessarily effective—theories. One approach that is based on current research is presented here.
The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) brought in leading international experts on trauma therapy and research for its 2021 Treating Trauma Master Series for practicing therapists. They all agreed that treating trauma is a complicated
process, and there are certain principles for the effective treatment of trauma.
In fact, simply talking about the trauma may not advance the healing process, and could actually cause further trauma. Trauma impacts not only the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain, but also the body. Therefore, any effective therapy must address both the mind and the body (Lanius, 2021).
We know that trauma is held in the subconscious as well as in our physical bodies.
This is visibly seen in how a person carries themselves and interacts with others, and it happens because the body is directly connected to the subconscious (or limbic system in the brain) through the vagus nerve. This is also why emotions are called “feelings”—because we gauge our emotions by how our body feels. This fact is central to healing trauma. Ron Siegel refers to the body as the “royal road to the unconscious” (Siegel, 2021a). Working with our body awareness and emotions is an effective way to work with the subconscious to heal trauma.
Self Awareness An important aspect of emotional intelligence is the self-awareness of our emotions and what they are communicating to us from our subconscious. Each emotion is unique, and our body feels each one differently. The fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery) graphic in Figure 1 shows brain activity by measuring the levels of blood flow in our body for different emotions (Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hariand, & Hietanen, 2014). In the graphic, yellow indicates high energy, red is medium, blue shows low energy, and black is neutral.
When a person is angry, he may clinch his jaw and fists, and feel pressure in his chest. These locations are where there is high blood flow. The person may feel high energy and be ready to take action. Love, on the other hand, has high energy in the face, chest, and genital areas; and depression has low energy in the extremities, indicating a lack of motivation and energy to act.
As mentioned earlier, trauma is not fully integrated with the brain. When it occurs, the hippocampus shuts down. Therefore, integration becomes the focus of therapy. Buczynski (2021a) states: “When integration in the brain is impaired, it disrupts our ability to balance the nervous system and an unbalanced nervous system blocks our capacity for flexible, adaptive, stable functioning.” This impairs our ability to integrate new information (learning), think clearly under stress, and maintain mutually rewarding relationships (Siegel, 2021).
So, how do you achieve integration? Not by talk therapy alone. Although it does have a role, it is not a central one.
“Talk therapy might not have the hoped-for trickle-down effect to the subcortical brain where the responses to trauma in the body can be resolved” (Ogden, 2021).
And Dr. van der Kolk (2021) says this, “We don’t know to what degree being able to put these deep internal experiences into words will change these brain patterns that get set by trauma. My hunch is not so much or only to a limited degree.”
This suggests that a bottom-up approach would be more effective than a top down one; focusing not on the conscious or thinking part of the brain (the neocortex), but on the subconscious (limbic) part, and that can be accomplished via the body. For example, yoga or tai chi have proved very effective at helping traumatized people become more aware of their bodies. In fact, yoga has proven “more effective than any medication that has ever been studied for PTSD” (van der Kolk, 2021).
Mindfulness and Meditation Other ways to integrate the lower and upper parts of the brain are mindfulness and meditation. Both have proven to increase bodily awareness and increase the length of telomeres. Meditation can be as simple as sitting quietly and observing your breath in and out, walking, observing nature, eating, gardening, and whatever can bring us into the present with an outer or distal focus (Siegel, 2021b).
Mindfulness can be simply going for a walk in the woods or counting with the use of your fingers. At a conference on mindfulness, a group went for a 15-minute walk in the woods and measurably increased the length of their telomeres compared to those who didn’t go walking.
The experts in the NICABM’s 2021 Treating Trauma Master Series agree that the healing process involves direct experience. Dr. van der Kolk (2021) stated: “It’s not about understanding or figuring things out, because that’s not really where the trauma sits. Trauma sits in your automatic reactions and your dispositions and how you interpret the world. In order to really rewire those automatic perceptions, you need to have deep experiences that contradict how you are now disposed to think. You cannot do this abstractly; you need to have experiences that directly contradict how your body is disposed.”
And Buczynski states (2021b): “When we create a new experience that contradicts the lesson that part of the brain has learned from trauma—that can change the way a person with trauma history is wired to respond.”
TACT and Trauma Treatment Now that we’ve looked at trauma and current effective psychotherapeutic approaches to healing trauma, how does TACT relate? We can get a general understanding from what Dr. Ogden (2021) has stated, “We’re never really working with the memory. We’re always working with the effects.” That is exactly what TACT does: Helps staff to manage the effects of trauma by creating connection through community (safety) and empowerment through emotional intelligence skills.
TACT accomplishes much of what psychotherapy does without directly addressing the traumatic event. Consider the metaphor of a fast-moving river with large boulders scattered downstream. These boulders—or trauma—cause much disruption in the flow of one’s life. With TACT, the boulders shrink some.
However, more importantly, the river rises so that the flow becomes smooth, and one can travel with less or little disruption down the river—or through life. There may still be a need for psychotherapy to completely rid the river of boulders, but life becomes more manageable.
In TACT training, participants first create a container of safety, respect, and caring to establish a foundation. Once they have this foundation, they no longer need their protective identities and naturally lower them, leaving them with their humanity exposed. That is how we truly connect with each other—through our core selves. This is where transformation occurs.
This physical and emotional experience directly connects with the subconscious. By connecting with our emotions, we can begin the healing process.
Added to this lived experience are emotional intelligence skills so that the person is emotionally and socially empowered; changing how they see themselves, how they see others, and how they perceive their future; and giving them a sense of hope for a better future. These emotional intelligence skills can be described as:
• attitude skills (self-awareness, empathy, personal responsibility, and emotional management),
• interpersonal skills (listening, assertiveness, problem-solving, and prevention skills), and
• community-building skills (trust, respect, and inclusiveness).
Conclusion TACT trainings are fully experiential. The theory presented here is not part of the training, and the changes that occur in participants are organic and not conscious. Participants become aware of these changes, because they feel and think differently, not because of any conscious plan on their part. They are usually quite surprised at the positive changes, even when they were initially resistant to the training. Part two of this article gets into more specifics about emotional intelligence and how best to train staff in these retention skills.
John Shuford developed the Immersive Experiential staff development training methodology, which can improve staff morale, cooperation between departments and positively transform the work culture. He has been published in national correctional
References
Borysenko, J. (2021). The neurobiology of trauma: What’s going on in the brain when someone experiences trauma?” Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Buczynski, R. (2021a). The neurobiology of trauma: What’s going on in the brain when someone experiences trauma?” Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Buczynski, R. (2021b). How to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma. Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
van der Kolk, B. (2021). How to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma. Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Lanius, R. (2021). How to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma. Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hariand, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.
Ogden, P. (2021). How to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma. Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
SAMHSA. (2013). GAINS trauma principles handout.pdf. Retrieved from https://soarworks.samhsa.gov/sites/soarworks.prainc.com/files/GAINS%20Trauma%20Principles%20Handout.pdf
Siegel, D. (2021). The neurobiology of trauma: What’s going on in the brain when someone experiences trauma?” Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Siegel, R. (2021a). Treating trauma master series; capstone session. National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. 2021
Siegel, R. (2021b). How to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma. Treating trauma master series. Storrs, CT: National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.
Spinaris, C., & Denhoff, M. Depression, PTSD and comorbidity in United States corrections professionals. Desert Waters Correctional Outreach 2013. Retrieved from www.desertwaters.com
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