Beliefs vs. Facts

Implementing Cognitive Restructuring

By Carl Reddick

7/12/02

Former Senator Moynahan gave a speech at the Harvard commencement in June of 2002. One of his statements struck me particularly hard. He said, “You are entitled to your own opinion...but you are not entitled to your own facts.” A large amount of the clients we deal with in the criminal justice arena have talked themselves into a set of beliefs that is just not factual. A cognitive restructuring program, coupled with therapy, is a coordinated attempt to separate fact from belief.

Part of the problem with working for the government and working with offenders day after day, year after year is that we begin to think that we have heard it all. Like all humans, we are looking for a completed product that we can point to with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the workday. In this business of Corrections, however, there is never an end point unless the offender dies. I learned very late in my career not to look for the finish line in dealing with offenders. As a result I was usually frustrated and frequently angry with the administration, my co-workers, and, most certainly, with the offenders. I began to realize that this frustration grew our of a need to see an end-product, a successful conclusion to our efforts to accomplish what is so obtusely referred to as the ‘rehabilitation’ of the offender.

Let’s consider some ideas. Of course you have heard that certain offenders cannot be rehabilitated because they were never ‘habilitated’ in the first place. That is, there is no returning to a point where they were successfully engaged in society. Imagine talking to these persons and learning of the twisted childhoods and traumatic events that attended their so-called upbringing. One offender I supervised was routinely forced, as an eight year old, to do combat with the other children of his father’s motorcycle gang. He asked me how he was supposed to know how to behave when he was trained to fight from his earliest childhood. He said that if he lost the fights, surrounded by the drug and alcohol consuming motorcycle gang members, his father would beat him. This ‘father’, as it turned out, was merely one boyfriend in a succession of men who the offender’s mother routinely invited into her house. Multiply this by 80 offenders on a caseload and then multiply it by the number of years you have been in this profession and you get an idea of what I mean by having ‘heard it all’.

But we need to keep in mind that most of us tend to fall into a rut when conducting our business of interviewing offenders. We ask questions that tend to support what ‘we’ want from the offender. And we disagree with the offender when they make statements contrary to our own reality. The trick is to suspend disbelief (suspend DIS-belief) and view your job as a journey rather than an attempt to arrive at a destination. In fact, the ideal mind-set would be that of a person using their position in dealing with offenders who has the luxury of participating in a Living Laboratory. Instead of dreading the next client, we become able to eagerly anticipate what new strangeness in the panoply of humankind we will next be talking with. The Oregon Cognitive Network has been playing with the idea that there is, in fact, a language of supervision that is different from the language of therapy and the language of social dialogue. Of course this was driven by the work of William Miller and Stephen Rollnick in their brilliant book titled “Motivational Interviewing” (1991 Guilford Press).

When I attended the Motivational Interviewing training presented by William Miller himself, I learned the essentials of listening, deciphering, and using the ‘others’ statements as a tool to motivate the resistive mandated offender. Bottom line...the research indicates that if clients show ‘consistencies of behavior (such as resistance or defensiveness) in the counselors office, it appears they do not possess these consistencies before walking through the door.” (“Motivational Interviewing, pp10, Miller & Rollnick 1991 Guilford Press). Admittedly the authors are talking about Alcohol and Drug therapists, but what they are saying is that a lot of the resistance is generated by the attitude of the employee, not the client. We do not practice operating from the offender’s strengths so much as we continue to pick apart his or her weaknesses. Even more unnerving is the theory I currently hold that Probation and Parole officers have, in reality, been trained by the offenders, in how they conduct themselves and perform their job. What a strange turn of events when we find ourselves sometimes decreasing motivation to comply with the supervision program instead of the motivating people. Clearly there are some dynamics at work that are, in fact, counterproductive to the health and safety of the community. It is curious in the extreme that, for example, I qualify with a firearm every ninety days but have never been certified, much less re-certified, on my language and interviewing skills. Have any of you had the same experience?

We’ve learned that there are at least two reasons to ask a question. Certainly one reason is to get an answer but the second reason is much more important when dealing with a mandated offender population. The second reason is to cause some movement toward a responsible lifestyle that protects the health and safety of the community. The question “If I take a urine sample today will it be clean for drugs?” is an entirely different than “When is the last time you used drugs?” Think about this for a minute. The first question will usually be answered, “I think so” or “I hope so”. The second question requires some cognition and reflection on the part of the offender. If it is followed by the question “Why do you use drugs”, you have moved to offender toward a reflection that he may not encounter anywhere else in his social circle. Finally, if you follow this up with a third question “So tell me, how is using drugs working out for you in your life” you could jump started an actual conversation that might meet the second of our goals, to move the offender along in his experience towards a law abiding lifestyle. Where else, in your community, is he having these kinds of conversations? It seems strange to me that the cognitive motivation piece of the offender rehabilitation effort has fallen squarely in the shoulders of the local probation offices instead of the therapists, faith communities, and Mental Health agencies.

Let me take you inside an anger management class now. In Oregon we call these classes ‘aggression and control’ classes. What follows is a list of reasons attendees gave me as their reasons for being in class that evening. These are their actual words, spoken last week. Remember, as you read these sentences, that the sum totals of what we have to work with in this profession are the habits, attitudes, beliefs, and associations of our offender population. What follows is a list of beliefs given that evening, during the 1^st session of a 15-session class in a small classroom on the central Oregon coast. The question was, ‘why are you here this evening?’

I got snitched off, it’s all about the drugs anyway

My PO got me busted

I was drinking that night and there were hard family feelings

I’m here on trumped up charges

I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been high

I lost control of myself

I was drunk and I beat up ‘somebody’

The police didn’t have any brains...he was stupid

The guy hit me so I beat him up, back

I was so mad I blacked out

My sister is a tweekin’ cop-caller

I did what any man would do

My wife has a drug problem

Social language demands that we question the rationality of each of the statements and tell the listener why we think his statement does or does not make sense. The Language of Supervision, on the other hand, asks us to crawl into the offender’s mind to explore further the ‘logic’ behind each statement and ask for their particular ‘reality’ that would cause them to wind up in the back of a police car, in court, and ultimately in the Aggression and Control class. These statements are all we really have to work with. We cannot undo the past experiences, we cannot even tell if anecdotes about the offender’s past are true or false. So we can’t find ourselves caught up in discussions about the past. On the other hand, the future as described by the offender is usually either grandiose or so hopeless that it bears little resemblance to social reality. That pretty much leaves us with the present.

Notice that all of the statements listed above place the blame squarely on another. Even the statement ‘I lost control of myself’ subtly places the blame on ‘something’ that causes this mysterious ‘loss of control’. The other statements focus on substances, the law enforcement community, or the victim. But all of the actions that led to fact that the offender is currently in an ‘Aggression and Control’ class also happened in the past. The only fresh information is this list of reasons generated by the class that evening. Take another look at the list and read it slowly to yourself. This is your task. Every one of the batterers are absolutely convinced that they have just made a rational statement and have little or no interest in whether you believe them. In fact, if you disagree with them you are playing right into their hands. Their comfort zone, oddly enough, requires verbal combat about the appropriateness of their belief system. They have been engaged in this battle since they reached the age of reason.

This list contains an embarrassing glut of subject matter for the professional to explore. And, please keep in mind, that we are operating on a spot in the continuum of law enforcement that precedes therapy. We leave it to the therapist to help the offender with skills to understand and improve his life. My job is to act as a guide to show those that want to be shown that therapy might just be a good idea. The therapies that might be indicated above include, but are not limited to, alcohol and drug, domestic violence, family counseling, co-occurring disorders and many other issues. Their first stop, however, happens to be the Aggression and Control education class. And because we are the first in line we’d had better be professional in how we address the issue of not only anger and violence but also how we who purport to be Corrections professionals help the offenders think about their situation

The goal of the class is not to stop behavior. We do not flatter ourselves that in 15 sessions of 90 minutes we can permanently affect the psychosocial dynamics of these people. The goal of the class is to educate the offenders into how their thinking patterns work. We want them to be able to answer the question ‘What’s in it for me to be here’. To that end we keep promoting the dissonance between what they wanted on the night of their arrest, and what they got. The list of ‘reasons’ stays up on the flip chart for all 15 sessions and the ‘reasons’ on the list become more and more ridiculous with each passing class.

When someone advises us that he is in the class because his sister uses drugs and calls the police we keep guiding the subject back to the question ‘Who is doing the behavior’. We ask questions about what he would want his relationship to look like. We explore the thinking about male privilege, drugs, and family dynamics that led to his current situation. Inevitably these sessions lead to a place of self-reflection that the offender has never been challenged to explore when conversing in his social circle.

Habits, attitude, beliefs, and associations. The focus must be kept on these issues both during educational session such as the one described above and during routine office visits. The ‘Five Minute Interview’ will be discussed in a later article but suffice it to say that when you find yourself discussing faults of persons other than the one sitting in front of you, you are being manipulated. When you are discussing the sins of the past you are being led down a road best reserved for deep therapy. When you find yourself being blamed for the offender’s current situation you are being blatantly attacked.

Mr. Miller, during his training session, said that one thing to look for when employing his technique is the fact that interviews can become very mechanical. I didn’t understand this statement at the time but now I see that I am developing stock responses. The fact that the offender’s worldview is almost completely different than my worldview is most likely the reason they are sitting in my office. Defensiveness, prevarication, attack, and denial no longer make me uncomfortable. I recognize these as the tools whereby the offender has made his way through life. Or at least made his way though life until the moment he met me. At the point of interacting with me I change the rules. I am convinced that by using some of the tools I have described I can make his experience entirely original. The highest compliment that can be received, at that point, is for the offender to say “I never met a PO like that; he made me think about stuff that I’ve never thought about before.”

Take another look at the list, above. How would you respond to each of these statements if they occurred in a one-on-one interview in your office? Would you use reasoning to show the offender the error of their thinking (social language)? Would you become combative when the offender stubbornly stuck to his reasoning / (social language). Would you rephrase your question to get the ‘real answer’ (interrogation vs. interview)? Were you ever taught the skills to guide an offender through these all-too-common thought patterns? Who taught you and what model did they employ? If the answer is the same as the one I came up with, there is significant work ahead for your agency. My answer was that I learned my job from my co-workers and that there were very real and very deep differences of opinion within the office that led to very different approaches in speaking to this population. These differences of approach led to the splitting of the office into factions and down a path of general antipathy both for the offender and toward the coworkers. I learned that we could do better than this.

Employ a model. Train together in things relevant to the line staff. Practice your responses. Engage your agency partners to learn the language as well. Make the experience in you town, city, or county as standard as possible for the offender. This way he or she will not get conflicting messages from Children’s Services, Parole and Probation, and the therapists. These are suggestions that will add efficiency to your effort, results to your programs, and years to your life.