I remember It well. It was July, 1986. A patrolling county sheriff squad car drove by my house while I was mowing my lawn. I asked myself: With all the training I have had in counseling, would there be a way to serve my community? The next day I mentioned this to a police officer who was then a student of mine at Bethel Theological Seminary where for 21 years I have taught pastoral care. On the following morning, a St. Paul Police Department lieutenant recruited me to serve as a volunteer police chaplain. I have been doing it ever since. I have done dozens of death notifications, attended to families where fatal accidents, homicide, suicide, SIDS, natural death, or other emotional trauma has occurred. At this writing, in the last month and a half I have attended five deaths. It almost goes without saying that even on my own campus, I am asked periodically to intervene in a crisis situation. Examples would be suicidal students or spouses, domestic disputes, psychotic breaks, or deaths.
*A Recent Intervention*
Recently, I was asked by a local police department to attend to the family and to the child care personnel where a SIDS death occurred. Together with the police officer, I met the mother as she arrived at the scene and informed her of the death of her three-month-old boy. She reacted very strongly, of course, ending up vomiting, hyperventilating, and needing oxygen more than once. As the father, the grandparents, and the parent's siblings and their spouses came, the crowd of grievers grew. I called for another chaplain to deal with the child caregiver, who was also in a critical emotional state. When I discovered that the family had good church connections, I summoned their pastor, who came immediately and was immensely helpful.
The police officer and I prepared the family for viewing the body of the baby as soon as the medical examiner was through with his investigation. We encouraged holding the baby and passing him around to the various family members. The whole process (from being paged to when I left) took almost three hours. I drove away saying to myself, I can do without another SIDS death for a long time to come! I wept later that night as I held my own grown married daughter, who happened to drop in for a visit, saying I needed to do that for my own healing.
*Making Ourselves Available*
Over these past 12 years in this service, I have come to believe strongly in the Importance and necessity of Christian counselors and pastors being available for critical scenes. God reached out to us before we knew him (Rom. 5:8). In our desire to reflect that initiative-taking love, we also reach out to people in trauma and crisis.
Pastors, church workers, and lay caregiver are all expected to be present at situations of crisis. As a caregiver(but not as pastor) in my local church, I visit people in the hospital who suffer from heart attacks and strokes or face surgery. One couple from my church called me to come immediately to an ER when their son was found unconscious in a ditch suffering from an alcohol overdose. Being part of the body of Christ means we are in some sense all responsible for care giving. It's arguable that every counseling client comes for help out of some sense of crisis. However, there are crises that crash in upon us in such a way that we become immobilized and feel helpless to manage. It is that kind of situation that I want to address.
*Officers Who Are in Crisis*
As a police chaplain, police administrators sometimes call me to attend to officers who are in crisis. For example, just days ago, an off-duty officer in his own car was hit by another car. The other driver died. The chief called me to debrief the officer. In almost 700 hours of police squad ride-along, I have talked through shooting scenes with officers, talked about their divorces, deaths of children, grief over colleagues deaths as well as the routine struggles with supervisors, raising children, and conflicts with spouses.
I was summoned in August, 1994, to attend to the families of two officers killed in the line of duty. During that 14-hour day, I led the police chief in prayer for Gods help and wisdom at the operating room door, helped spouses view the dead bodies of their loved ones, and debriefed officers who were involved in a sweep to find the shooter. There were a half dozen police chaplains involved in that terrible day full of sorrow and shock. We often saw on the police officers faces the famous thousand mile stare.
*Training for Crisis Intervention*
Pastors and counselors can obtain special training for such ministry from several sources. One well known training organization is the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc.1 Another is the International Conference of Police Chaplains.2 There is also a firefighters chaplains group.3 These organizations hold annual training seminars regionally, nationally, and in Canada. Training in crisis intervention and critical stress incident management is a regular part of their programming and certification process. It's Imperative for anyone who gets involved in this kind of ministry to:
* develop a network and interpersonal support in order to stay emotionally and spiritually healthy;
* obtain specialized training for critical scenes and how to work with the agencies involved, e.g., police, fire, disaster teams, social workers, Red Cross, FEMA, hospitals, and to avoid transgressing the turf of the emergency workers on the scene, emergency medical services, and coordination authorities;
* shift from ones role as pastor of church so-and-so or counselor from such and such a clinic to the role of community helper, where denominational frameworks or clinical identities do not apply. When we represent the whole community, we must leave our localized identities behind;
* attend to one's own emotional needs following such events, since there often is high emotional cost to responders on such scenes. At the 1995 International Conference of Police Chaplains annual training events, in Bismarck, North
Dakota, Police Chaplain Harold Elliott shared his own emotional pain. As a police chaplain, he worked with the morgue personnel following the Waco, Texas fire in the Koresh compound.
For months afterward, the last thing he would see just as he was drifting off to sleep each night was the burned body of a small girl, with her little shoes sitting on the gurney beside her head. Those of us who get involved in disaster and crisis must face the fact that we will pay a high emotional price for such work. Thorough debriefing and subsequent self-care are Imperative for any of us who work with disaster scenes. Here is therapist directory for your help.
eCounseling.com is the leading provider of online counseling and telephone counseling technologies, and exists to connect people who hurt with people who help, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. eCounseling.com was created by counselors who perceived a need for better online counseling methods. eCounseling.com now boasts a full range of distance and in-person counseling capabilities in video and text chat, HIPAA-compliant secure email, and fully searchable counselor listings, all organized strategically around the top 40 most commonly seen counseling issues. Its directors include Dr. Peter Disoza, who practices therapy at Thrive Boston Counseling.
