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--- utsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh220h [2017/08/14 12:56] – mmccann
+++ utsfl:classroom:seminars:pbh220h [2024/08/01 14:39] (current) – [Love] mmccann
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 ====== PBH220H: Branching from the Head to the Heart ======
+===== Ignorant or in denial? =====
   * http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/blog/2013/10/07/ignorant-or-denial
-  * There's a difference between ignorance and denial
+    * There's a difference between **ignorance** of the truth and **denial** of the truth.
-  * Questions that you can ask when you find the intellectual/head arguments are coming up against a wall of denial
+      * When people are in denial about abortion, it's very often because of some hidden wound, especially an experience with abortion or some other trauma. That denial is a reaction of the //heart//, and it necessitates a fundamentally different response from us as pro-life advocates. Heart conversations require us to tailor our approach to allow us to address the hurt and pain that these people have experienced that prevent them from accepting the truth about abortion.
-  * Strategies for dialoguing compassionately and sensitively with strangers about sensitive areas of personal history
+      * Example: Testimony - [[https://www.facebook.com/canadiancbr/videos/505970816882818/|CCBR Video: "4 of my friends have had abortions"]]
-    * Ways to covertly make them aware of help, if they might resist a direct offer
+===== Seek to understand =====
-  * [[http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/blog/2014/02/04/strong-minds-tender-hearts|Strong Minds, Tender Hearts]]
+    -  Questions that you can ask when you find the intellectual/head arguments are coming up against a wall of denial:
+        - Head Q's = //what// someone believes, vs. heart Q's = //why// someone believes what they believe [[https://www.endthekilling.ca/blog/2019/06/14/reaching-the-person-beyond-the-argument|Reaching the person behind the argument]]
+         - **"Do you know someone who's had an abortion?"** Testimony: [[https://www.facebook.com/217971845050/videos/856248558126274/|CCBR video - His sister had an abortion]]
+         - **What made you decide to be pro-choice?"** Testimony: [[https://www.endthekilling.ca/blog/2018/03/28/speaking-from-the-heart/]]
+         - **Where does your passion come from?**
+         - What makes this issue important to you?
+         - How did you come to be pro-choice [or pro-life]?
+         - How have conversations about abortion gone for you in the past?
+         - Have you always had this view or has it changed for you over time? If it’s changed, how did that change of view happen?
+         - When in life did you first learn about abortion? What did you think about it then?
+         - What do you think someone like me thinks about people who've had abortions?
-  - Seek to understand
+> “Asking questions from genuine interest builds connection. Connection builds trust. And trust is the bridge that can bear the weight of truth.” - //Mary Schaller & John Crilly, "The 9 Arts of Spiritual Conversations"//
-  - Love
-  - Inspire/impart courage
-FIXME **1.5h talk from CCBR (Notes from Oriyana Hrycyshyn)** -- condense this so other individuals can use it/run it as a workshop; and may need to break this down into more than 1 seminar -- e.g. talking to the post-abortive vs. talking about suffering...
+===== Love =====
+    - Strategies for dialoguing compassionately and sensitively with strangers about sensitive areas of personal history
+        * Ways to covertly make them aware of help, if they might resist a direct offer
+     - What about sexual assault?
+       - Anna Thomson: “If we look at the case of sexual assault, we know there are three parties involved. We have the guilty man, who should be punished (do we agree?) And then we have the innocent woman who has been victimized. So she deserves support (we agree?) Now we have the child, are they innocent or guilty? (Innocent) Okay, so now we have a choice to make. We can either offer support and create another survivor, or we can offer abortion and create a second victim. **Don't you think we should be making more survivors, not more victims?”**
+     - Speaking with survivors of sexual assault
+      - {{youtube>WvnFfdZcwKo?medium}}
+    - Speaking with those whose loved ones have had abortions:
+      - {{youtube>KusOin___a4?medium}}
+    - Is it loving to show AVP?
+      - {{youtube>6LmE0WKLDFw?medium}}
+    - **"What do you think someone like //me// thinks about women who've had abortions?"**
+      - Communicate help available after abortion, share stories e.g. Angelina's story, etc.
+      - Communicate empathy
+        - {{youtube>1Evwgu369Jw?medium}}
+    - "If I had known you when you were pregnant and considering abortion, is there anything I could have done to help you make a different choice?"
+    - "Do you think that if you'd had more support, you could have carried to term?
+    - - Communicate care through body language - open posture, smiling when appropriate (especially when initially greeting people), showing concern/mirroring pain when appropriate, angle your sign so it's not a physical barrier between you and person (and so more views!) etc.
+Example: {{:utsfl:classroom:seminars:tikvah.jpg?400|}}
-Heart Apologetics: Consoling the Heart of the Culture
+FIXME Still-face experiment footage https://youtu.be/FaiXi8KyzOQ?si=FeiNadftmw0U4HyN -- "what happens to the human person when (s)he experiences a lack of love?" C.f. Stephanie Gray visiting orphaned child. If someone can't see the difference between right and wrong, it may be because //they// have been wronged. If someone's coming from a place that seems initially heartless, it may be because experiences of pain have closed their hearts off.
-[4-month CCBR Summer Interns | Wednesday May 10, 2017]
-**Overview**:
-  * Introduction
-  * ‘Paint the Picture’ – Understand Who We Are Faced With
-  * What Is Our Purpose
-  * How do We Reach Our Culture? Love.
-  * Talking with the Post-Abortive
-  * Talking with Those Trying to Defend Their Loved Ones
-  * Talking with Those Who Have Experienced Miscarriages
-  * Talking with Victims of Sexual Assault
-  * Talking with Those Experiencing Mental Health Issues & Suicidal Ideations
-  * Perspective on Suffering - Inspire
-  * Meeting Cowardly Lions - Those Who Need Courage
-  * Poor and Terminal Prenatal Diagnoses
-    * FIXME move this to PBA203Y
-  * ‘Be Inspired’
-  * Conclusion
-__________________________________________________________________________________________
- “When you can’t reach the mind with logic, reach the heart with love”
-**Introduction
-**
-When I was 17, I worked as a summer camp lifeguard at a lake just outside of Montreal, Quebec.  Thankfully, the summer passed without any serious incidents taking place – though there was one exception.
-On my very first day, we pulled a 10-year old boy out of the water from underneath a flipped canoe after he purposefully took off his lifejacket and stood up in the canoe to rock it back and forth.  This boy was the troublemaker of the group – he didn’t listen, he wouldn’t follow rules, and he often acted out.
-I was told by the camp staff that the boy had severe behavioral problems as a result of traumatic abuse he had experienced as a child.  Some staff even referred to him as having “Mowgly Syndrome” because while he didn’t interact and respond well to people, he was extremely at ease and comforted by animals and nature.
-I would often see him alone by the lake trying to catch frogs or tadpoles with his bare hands, though not once did he ever say a word to me, the other counselors or any of the other children.  He was so untrusting of people that it was hard to find someone at the camp that had ever even heard him speak.
-Seeing him day in and day out at the lake, I wanted to get to know him but any attempt at making conversation with him failed.  I thought perhaps that if I showed him somehow that I could be trusted, he would open up to me and so the next day I handed him a butterfly catcher I bought for him to use to catch frogs near the lake.  He took it, but said nothing.
-It was only after a few weeks that he took me by the hand to keep him company at the lake and eventually we started spending a good part of the day together as he taught me how to catch frogs and how to fish.  By the end of the summer, we’d spend afternoons sitting in a canoe in the middle of the lake eating skittles, fishing and talking about his favourite animals.
-What that little boy taught me is that the way we communicate with others isn’t going to look the same for everyone we meet.  Because we are all unique, the tools we use to communicate need to be tailored and customized to be unique too.
-In a way, good communication is just like fishing.  You need to use the right bait, cast it at the right time, and place it directly in the right vicinity because that's how you catch fish. Too often, bad communications is simply the result of those using the wrong bait and not knowing when and how to cast it.  What happens is they just end up just scaring the fish away.
-As Justina said yesterday, when we go out to do activism, we must realize that we are encountering people from all walks of life and that no two people can ever have the same life experience.  What we need to be able to do is tailor the tools we have, to reach people where they are.
-You all now know pro-life apologetics 101. You learnt the tools we have at our disposable and how to use common ground, analogy and question to make the pro-life case against abortion. Sometimes though, people will reject and deny the logic you present them with.  Why? Because the reasons they support abortion are reasons of the heart and not of the head, and so there is a fundamental difference in the way they will respond to hearing pro-life arguments.
-Head conversations result from ignorance surrounding the humanity of pre-born children and what abortion does to them, and so it is appropriate for us to use logic and fact to reach these types of people, for when they hear a pro-life argument, they become enlightened, or in other words they have a reaction of the head.  However, if someone is hurting, would it be effective for us to use the exact same approach? No, because when someone is hurting, their response to hearing a pro-life argument will be some form of agitation, or in other words, they’ll have a reaction of the heart.  Heart conversations require us to tailor our approach to allow us to address the hurt and pain these types of people experience that prevent them from seeing the truth about abortion.
-**‘Paint the Picture’ - Understand Who We Are Faced With
-**
-Before we learn how to approach heart conversations, I want us to understand the reality we are faced with when we go out to do activism.
+===== Inspire/impart courage =====
+    - "Who inspires you?"
-If every day in Canada 300 pre-born children are violently lost to abortion, then that equals 600 parents, 1200 grandparents and thousands of cousins, best friends and siblings affected by abortion.  In other thousands of people each day and over 1 million people each year.  This means we can be fairly certain that everyone we talk to on the streets has in one way or another been touched by abortion.
+      - Those who inspire do the right thing and pursue the good, even when it's hard
+    - "Do you think that if you/your mom/your sister had had more support, you could have carried to term?"
-(testimony)
+    - D = S - M
-In 2015, I was doing my first GAP at UCF when I found myself amidst a circle of 5 people discussing the GAP display.  For over an hour we went through the human rights argument, embryology, SLED - every objection the group could come up with and though some of them came around to see that abortion is indeed a human rights violation, one girl in particular remained somewhat aggressive and angry the entire time before eventually stomping away.  Naturally, I was discouraged because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get through to her when I seemed to have been able to get through to the others, and I kept racking my brain trying to pinpoint what argument I could have used or what other analogy may have worked.  The next day that same girl came back to apologize for her behavior, telling me that her mother had been assaulted by her grandfather as a teenager and that her mom had been forced to abort her half-sibling 14 years ago. (pause)
+      - {{youtube>9rYRKZfunJA?medium}}
+    - Diagnosis of a disability or illness
-Like Justina said, When you throw a stone into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps the loudest is the one that got hit. Often times those we encounter that are angry, are people that are hurt and broken, who may have had an abortion or know someone who has.
+      - {{youtube>DBL6fSNghDk?medium}}
+      - {{youtube>5wn6GP4BXcY?medium}}
-**What is Our Purpose?
+    - Inspire men to stand up for women and children
-**
+      - [[https://www.torontoagainstabortion.org/2018/10/05/why-do-we-continue-in-the-face-of-violent-opposition/]]
+    - What about suffering and being unwanted?
+      - [[https://www.torontoagainstabortion.org/2018/05/21/adoption-suffering-and-love-reflections-of-a-powerful-conversation-on-a-rainy-day|Testimony: Adoption, Suffering and Love]]
-And so, (pause) our job is to reach out to our wounded culture, console and inspire their hurting hearts, and to win over people, not arguments, because winning people is what will end abortion in our lifetime.  You heard Justina say the following quote yesterday, and I want to reiterate it because it is so, so pertinent. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Whom you would change, you must first love, and they must know that you love them.”
-Good pro-life ambassadors by nature of their character will win people over and so it is crucial that we show that we truly care about all humans, not just the pre-born but also each born person that stands in front of us.  We can show this through the way we treat people, the way we talk to people, and the words we use, because that will make all the difference.
-It’s A Beautiful Day and I Can’t See it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpcB82aUz4
-**How do We Reach Our Culture? Love.
-**
-Through the way we treat people and the way we talk to people we can show them love and show them that we truly care, but before we can speak, we need to understand, and so the first and foremost loving thing you can do is to listen, for “silent lips are pure gold.” (Diary of St. Faustina, 552) In the words of Mother Teresa, we should strive to “listen to understand, rather than to be understood” because people may not always remember what we say to them, but they will remember how we treated them and how they felt.
+  * FIXME 2020 notes from Maria McCann: [[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CE1TTpfbiLJf4fLqTMWk0lVUk-o8jOtKoJjI3GWbgaE/edit?usp=drivesdk|Heart Apologetics MM]]
+  * FIXME 1.5h talk from CCBR (Notes from Oriyana Hrycyshyn 2017): [[https://docs.google.com/document/d/117MOUnSS46vsWYdrrcUZRJP6YWFBixuCODRzsoB8tJ4/edit?usp=sharing|Heart apologetics OH]]
-When you recognize or suspect a heart issue in a person you are having a conversation with during activism, sometimes it can be hard to know where to start or what to say. The hurt and wounds that people carry with them are not something we may have ever experienced, and while it is important to be gentle, we should never shy away from or avoid a heart issue.  Having someone to listen to can relieve a significant burden and so the best thing we can do in such situations is ask guiding questions and provide a listening ear, with the goal of truly trying to understand.
-Q: Now I’d like a show of hands, who here feels like they are masters of handling heart conversations and that  they can handle any and every heart conversation that comes their way?
+  * [[http://www.unmaskingchoice.ca/blog/2014/02/04/strong-minds-tender-hearts|Strong Minds, Tender Hearts]]
-Q: None of you, okay…and why do you feel that way, what are some reasons?
-Okay, so a lot of what you have said are things that I have said too.  In terms of pro-life apologetics, more than anything, I wish there could be some kind of blue-print on how to handle heart conversations, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel that you are the least equipped person to deal with a heart issue in the moment.
-Unfortunately however, there isn’t a specific formula we can apply to all heart conversations, because all heart conversations are different, and so instead, I’d like to give you some examples of guiding questions you can use when heart conversations arise. That way, you can have a mental question bank on hand to draw from when a heart conversation arises.  Questions are what we can use to guide our conversations and they set us up to love, listen, and understand the broken people we encounter.
-(testimony)
-During my 2015 internship, my first ever heart conversation was with a post-abortive father in his late 40s.  At the start of our conversation, there was no reason to suspect any heart issue – we spoke about human rights and a few circumstances and so I trotted out the toddler and ended with a question after which this man broke into tears and disclosed that the hypothetical situation he had just proposed to me about abortion in the case of financial difficulty was not hypothetical at all, but rather the exact situation he and his wife experienced 10 years ago.  At this point, I set aside the head arguments for a moment and proceeded to simply ask: “How are you and your wife doing?” I let him talk while I listened for over 30 minutes and when I asked if he had ever talked to anyone about it, he told me that in 10 years, I was the first person he had ever disclosed his abortion to.  (pause) In that moment, this man didn’t need me to talk, all he needed was for someone to listen, for someone to help him with the burden he had been carrying in silence for 10 years.  He continued to tell me about his wife and how she’s struggled, he told me about how he wants another child but fears that karma would come back to bite them if they were to get pregnant again, and he even asked me if I was a Christian and if I would pray for him, his family and his aborted child.
-In the words of German Theologian Paul Tillich, “the first duty of love is to listen.”
-**Talking with the Post-Abortive
-**
-It’s important that we remember that post-abortive people are wounded people and that each and every post-abortive person we’ll meet this summer will be at a different stage in the healing process when we meet them. While doing activism like CC, keep in mind that the images of abortion victims depicted on our signs may hurt the post-abortive people we meet, but only because abortion hurt them first.
+FIXME topics=address at least some of the following: overall branching from head to heart; post-abortive women; loved ones of the post-abortive; survivors of sexual assault; women who've had miscarriages; suffering; mental health issues/suicidal ideation
-I’m sure most of you remember a time when you were little and perhaps fell and scraped your knee or palms. When I was little I remember constantly asking for a band-aid whenever I fell off my bike or when I tripped and fell onto my hands because I thought that applying a band-aid would instantly heal my cuts and scrapes.  But when it came time to rip off the band-aid, I would throw a tantrum out of fear that ripping off the band-aid would hurt too much.
-In a way, abortion is a band-aid solution.  If a woman finds herself in a difficult situation and chooses abortion because she thinks it’s the quickest way to make her worries and fears disappear, then she’s applying a band-aid without knowing the extent of the wounds that may form.  And when we confront her with the consequences of the choice she made by showing her the evidence of what abortion did to her child, we need to keep in mind that it may be difficult for her to have that band-aid of abortion suddenly ripped off and her wounds exposed, because that will cause her pain.
-We need to give our wounded culture the truth, but we need to do so with love and compassion, because as Devorah says, “truth without love is ineffective, but love without truth is a lie.”
-In my experience, confronting post-abortive women with the truth about abortion, actually may help put them on the path towards healing.
-(testimony)
-Last summer I talked to a girl who had helped her friend get an abortion.  They went to the abortion clinic together and were told that having an abortion would do no more than remove a mass of cells and so this girl agreed her friend should abort and acted as her support system at the time by driving her to the clinic.  When I showed her an image of an aborted pre-born child, she couldn’t believe that they had been lied to and she was eager to be connected to local post-abortive counseling services as she mentioned that her friend had been battling depression ever since her abortion, but that she hadn’t known how to help her or what to do.
-**Talking with Those Trying to Defend Their Loved Ones
-**
-Like this girl I talked with, sometimes the people we meet on the streets may passionately support abortion, not because of an abortion they themselves have had, but because of an abortion that a loved one may have had.
-(testimony)
-I was once speaking to a young man named Scott during a Florida GAP display who I suspected had an underlying heart issue because the head arguments I was using weren’t seeming to get through to him - and so I asked him “Where does your passion come from, do you know anyone who’s had an abortion?”
-Now sometimes even though we ask these “heart” questions, the person we’re speaking with may choose not to confide in us, Scott however, quickly told me that his best friend had recently had an abortion.
-He told me a bit about his friend’s difficult situation and in response, I asked him what he thought of our display and specifically about what he thought I thought about his friend.
-Asking this question, allowed me to hear Scott verbalize his fear that becoming pro-life would mean that he would have to hate his dear friend, and listening to him helped me understand where he was coming from.
-I then asked “Scott - do you think it's possible to love someone but detest something they do?  If your friend drove drunk and killed someone, you would assumedly condemn what she did but wouldn't you still love her?” Scott agreed and so I concluded, “Why not do the same regarding her abortion?”
-**Talking with Those Who Have Experienced Miscarriages
-**
-Being confronted with images of abortion victims may not only impact the post-abortive or those whose loved ones are post-abortive, but also those who have lost children through miscarriage.  Scientifically speaking, there is a distinct and clear difference between abortion and miscarriage - and we’ll have a chance to talk more about that this afternoon, but for now I’d like us to focus on how seeing images of aborted children may affect women who have miscarried their children.
+Resources from Life Perspectives on how to deal with reproductive loss: https://www.lifeperspectives.com/training-tools/
-(testimony)
-I once spoke with a woman named Catherine who was upset that we were doing CC in such a public place because she didn’t think it was appropriate that we trigger women who have experienced miscarriage with the images on the signs we were holding.  I asked her if she had known anyone who had miscarried their child and she replied saying that she had miscarried 3 children of her own.  We talked a while about her experience and hardships with miscarriage and I expressed to her how genuinely sorry I was for her loss.  At this point she told me how these images angered her because she couldn’t imagine how women could choose to not keep their children, when all she ever wanted was to be able to keep hers.
-What we need to remember about women who have miscarried, is often times abortion victim photography can serve as a reminder of the pre-born children they lost.  Now sometimes people who have experienced miscarriages can’t bare to look at the images, and that is totally understandable and okay, though if we meet them during activism and they want to engage in conversation with us, I think it’s important that we let them know that their children’s lives - however short - had value and should be grieved and remembered.
-And so after expressing my sincere apologies for what she had gone through, I told Catherine that it brought me comfort knowing that her 3 pre-born children were so loved and so valued by her and her husband and that her love for her children inspire me to work to create a society were all pre-born children would be loved that way.  She agreed with me that that should be the ideal, and so I told her that was the reason I was there holding the sign that I was.  Because we can’t change the past and bring back lives lost, but we can bring honor to those lives by letting them inspire and motivate us to change the future and save the lives of those that we are able to save – those sentenced to be aborted.
- FIXME blog about Devorah Gilman's mother, who lost multiple babies through miscarriage https://www.endthekilling.ca/blog/2015/10/14/miscarriage-and-children-front-you
-**Talking with Victims of Sexual Assault
-**
-As of now, we’ve talked about how to approach conversations when the people we are speaking with are post-abortive, know someone who is post-abortive, or have lost a child through miscarriage.  These people are wounded and hurting because they have lost someone whether that be by a choice they made or by something out of their control.
-What we haven’t touched on is how to approach conversations with people who are victims themselves. Kianna Owen, whom some of you know, once had a conversation with someone during a GAP display who disclosed to her that she had been sexually assaulted.  The conversation ended with the woman telling Kianna the following: “In a way, I see myself in those pictures: I didn’t have a voice and neither did they. Thank you for being a voice for the voiceless.”
-Let this remind us that when we are out on the streets, we are standing up for victims, though not just pre-born victims but those ones still living too.
-Q: When speaking with victims of sexual assault, what kind of questions could we ask to guide our conversations?
-  * How are you doing?
-  * Is the person who assaulted you still in your life?
-  * Have you reported the assault?
-  * Do you have a support system in place or someone you can talk with?
-  * Assaulted Women’s Helpline of Ontario has a 24-hour telephone service providing counselling, emotional support, information and referrals – I like to have their crisis hotline number programmed into my phone 1-866-863-0511
-On a practical note, try to use the term sexual assault as opposed to rape because as I mentioned earlier, the words we use matter, and the term rape can be much more triggering to someone who may have survived it than the term sexual assault
-Just like how every post-abortive person we meet will be at a different point in the healing process, so too will every victim of sexual assault be at a different stage in their healing process.  And so once again there is no clear formula we can apply when approaching such heart conversations – rather it’s all in the way treat these people through letting them know that we do indeed care and that we are willing to listen.
-(testimony)
-Last summer, during a CC in Jackson Square, Hamilton I distinctively remember speaking with one woman who approached me yelling and telling me that I couldn’t possibly understand what it would be like to have to make the decision to abort.  I asked her if there was a specific situation she was referring too and she disclosed that she had been sexually assaulted.  Although she didn’t become pregnant as a result, she was extremely worried by the fact that if she had, she would need an abortion to be able to cope with her assault.  After I asked her a few of the questions we just went over and after listening to her tell her story for about half an hour, her demeanor completely changed.  She calmed right down, grabbed a pamphlet from me and started reading through it, and even wanted to know more about how we connect people to different resources and organizations.  By the end of our conversation, she was thanking me for our work and telling us how awesome this type of activism was.
-I want to stress the importance of showing people, especially victims of sexual assault, that we do indeed deeply care about them because as you may have heard it said, when people ask us about sexual assault during activism, they’re not asking if the pre-born are human but rather, they’re asking us if we’re human.  So keep that in mind when talking with victims of sexual assault – show them and emphasize to them that we care about them and their life, and that we want to help them through the horrible and unimaginable pain inflicted on them by being there to support them in any way they need in that moment.
-Remember that until we understand, we can’t appropriately respond.  And if we start to respond without having listened, then not only will we not understand, but we will have failed to identify the underlying roots governing why someone believes what they believe.
-**Talking with Those Experiencing Mental Health Issues & Suicidal Ideations
-**
-One useful tool that has immensely helped me listen to understand - and not only in the pro-life sphere - is the concept of reflective listening.  Reflective listening is basically a communication strategy involving two key steps: seeking to understand someone’s idea, then offering the idea back to them, to confirm that the idea has been correctly understood.
-I initially learnt this strategy in a Mental Health First Aid course I took two years ago and I find it to be especially helpful when talking with people we meet on the streets who are suicidal or suffer from poor mental health.
-(testimony)
-I recently spoke with a girl during CC with whom the Human Rights Argument and every analogy I could think of were not getting through.  Pointing to the image of the aborted pre-born child on my sign, I finally asked her quite bluntly “so why is it that you think doing this to a human being is okay?”  She told me that she felt that some children would be better off if they were aborted, and so using the technique of reflective listening, I simply offered her idea back to her by saying: “so you think that someone would be better off if they were killed.”  The girl took a long pause and then continued saying she thought abortion would be more merciful than giving birth to a child who would have a hard life. Again, I offered her idea back to her saying “so you think we should kill certain humans before they’re born if it means sparing them from what we think might be a hard life.”  Again, the girl took a long pause and we continued in this cycle of reflective listening until I was able to identify the underlying reasons behind her position on abortion.  You see, this girl had battled depression for years, she’d been on and off different medications of which none seemed to work, and in her mind, it would have been better to have been released from it all before it ever happened.
-Some people who react to our images, and who believe it’s okay to kill a pre-born child, will believe this not because they want people dead, but because they want to spare people from living. And these are the people who wish they could have been spared from living.
-Devorah once had a conversation with someone during CC who said the following “No one in this school knows, but I’ve been hospitalized several times for trying to kill myself.”  And so while it may not be common during activism, and we are by no means trained counselors nor should we act as such, I think it is important that we know the basics for when we are speaking with those who are suicidal or struggle with forms of self-harm as a result of mental health issues.
-So to start, just as I gave you a number to program into your phone for victims of sexual assault, here is the number of the Mental Health Helpline of Ontario.  I like to have this number programmed into my phone because it’s not city specific.  In other words, whenever someone calls their number, the first thing they will be asked is whereabouts in Ontario they are, so that the dispatcher can connect them with the appropriate resources in their area.  The other reason I think this is a good universal number to have on hand is because it has a range of services applicable for anyone from those who are suicidal and need immediate crisis intervention, to those with a mental health issue requiring a check-up with a doctor to adjust their medication.
-Now I just finished by last semester at Western University and for the 4 years that I was there, I was a member of the Student Emergency Response Team called SERT, which basically meant that whenever I was on call, I would respond with my team 24 hrs a day to all 911 calls on campus requiring medical attention.  A significant portion of the calls I attended this year in particular, were mental health related, whether that be someone who had been struggling with depression or someone who had actually attempted suicide.
-So I speak from personal experience interacting with suicidal students at Western when I say that the best way to go about having a conversation with such a person is to be as direct as possible.  In the event that someone discloses to you that they have contemplated or attempted suicide during CC, I would most likely pass my sign off to another team member and ask the person I’m speaking with if they’d like to sit or stand off to the side to speak further.
-  * You should then ask the following questions:
-  * Have you thought about killing yourself? (Have you hurt yourself?)
-  * Do you have a plan to kill yourself?
-  * Have you enacted your plan?
-Now to us, discussing suicide and mental health is most likely extremely uncomfortable, however try to think about it from the perspective of the person you’re speaking with.  To be driven to the point that you would consider suicide, a person must feel a pain that is so real to them and so overwhelming that they would choose death just to escape it.  Now if you dance around the issue so to speak and phrase your questions in a way that show you are uncomfortable speaking about their very real situation, then the person you’re speaking with may be less willing to accept your help, confide in you or even stick around for the conversation.  On the flip side, if you treat the conversation in a serious manner by asking short, directed questions like these, then you are letting the person know that they can speak freely and directly back to you about what is going on in their life, at which point you can connect them with professional resources.
-Perhaps some of you are thinking that these questions are much too forward and that you maybe wouldn’t word them so bluntly if you found yourself in this situation – and I’ll be honest, when I first took Mental Health First Aid as part of team training with SERT I thought the same to a degree.  And so the first time I responded to a mental health call back in my first year on the team, I did exactly what I urge you not to do if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.  As the first responder to arrive on scene that night, I went to take a detailed patient history and I discovered that the patient I was treating had scars up and down her forearms.  I casually asked her about them and she shrugged it off saying that it was merely a coping mechanism for her.  Since I suspected there was a deeper underlying issue, I said to the girl “I know this may be uncomfortable to talk about, but can I just ask, have you ever um… thought about um…ending things?”  To which she gave me a vague answer.  It wasn’t until my training partner stepped in and spoke to her using these exact direct questions that he learnt that this patient had not only had suicidal ideations, but that she actually had come up with a plan about how to kill herself and had been thinking about going through with it that night.
-I can confidently tell you that in every mental health call I’ve responded to over the past four years with the exception of the one I just told you about, I have asked these exact direct questions and not only have they always been well received, but I’ve never had anyone get offended or angry for asking them.  In fact, the opposite is true, the more direct I’ve been, the more direct the answer and the more forthcoming the patient has been.
-What about if we encounter minors who are suicidal during activism such as High School CC?  What should we do and what is our legal obligation?
-If you find yourself in such a situation, of course I want you to ask the same direct questions we just talked about.  Try to build a repor with the person and ask them if they’ve ever talked to an adult about their suicidal ideations.  If they respond that they haven’t try and ask if they think talking with someone like a school counselor or parent would help them. Ultimately, we can’t force them to disclose their situation to others but we do have the legal obligation to report minors who are seriously considering suicide.  And so, there are 3 things you should be sure to do if this situation arises.
-First, in the flow of the conversation, try to get some information on the minor, such as their name and grade.
-Second, try to memorize a description of the minor, anything from hair and eye colour to whether or not they have piercings or tattoos – basically anything that can help the school later on identify which of their students is at risk and needs help.
-Third, tell your team leader leading activism that day, most likely either Kim or I.  That way you and your team leader can talk to the school principle immediately after CC and inform them that one of their students is suicidal and needs help.  It is our legal obligation to report any and all suicidal minors, so the more you are able to gather from your conversation with them, the easier it will be to connect them with the proper professionals, because once again we are not trained counselors.
-Remember that the more seriously, confidently, and directly we handle heart conversations, no matter their roots, but especially when speaking with the suicidal, the more a person will feel that they can speak freely and confidently with us, because we don’t want people to feel shame or think that they need to hide from us if our goal is to understand by showing them love and offering to listen.  Only once we do that can we then show them that they have value.  For Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher once said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
-**Perspective on Suffering – Inspire
-**
-Now the most common denominator in all these heart conversations, among all the people whose view on abortion comes from a place of hurt, or from a position that seems heartless, is the concept of suffering - and like Justina talked about yesterday, our job is to provide them with perspective.
-(pause), Q: How many of you have had someone tell you during activism that abortion is necessary because it will prevent children from suffering if they are going to be born into difficult circumstances or something along those lines.
-Okay, almost everyone right.
-In our culture, suffering is something extremely negative – something that we need to get rid of as soon as possible.  What we need to do is reframe it and show people that there is value and beauty in suffering – even though it is hard.
-**Reframing Beauty
-**
-Yesterday, Justina told you how much she enjoyed reading Man’s Search for Meaning during her internship, and I want to reiterate one of the lines that really stood out for me when I read the book and that is: “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
-When we reframe suffering for the people we meet during activism, we share with them the beauty in it’s purpose, and we can do this by using the “Be Inspired” concept and asking the question “Who inspires you”
-**‘Be Inspired’
-**
-In our culture of comfort, we often like to take the easy road whenever possible.  What we often forget though, is that we are inspired by selflessness and by sacrifice.
-And so whatever answer you’re given when you ask “who inspires you”, whether that be a parent, politician, social reformer, athlete, musician or saint - the reasons why the people we meet find them inspirational is at the very core because they all did hard things. Hard things that required sacrifice and suffering.
-Because people that inspire us are those that rise above when others are overtaken.
-Those that look for opportunity in the face of obstacle.
-Those that sacrifice for the sake of others.
-And those that do difficult things in order to do what’s right.
-By their example, inspirational people invite the rest of us to follow and so when it comes to heart conversations, the question is not, “Do difficult life circumstances exist?”  because everyone agrees: they do.  Rather, we want to reframe the question and ask “What are we going to do about them and how are we going to respond?”
-The Be Inspired concept requires you to be able to take the answer that is given to you by the person your speaking with in the moment, and use it to illustrate to them that we are inspired by people who do hard things – who suffer, and who sacrifice.  Not only is it a good tactic to just even get to know and understand the person you’re speaking with and build a repor, but it can be a useful tool in appealing to the apathetic people we meet on the streets.
-If you google the term ‘inspire’ online, the first definition that pops up is as follows:  To inspire is to fill someone with the urge or ability to do or feel something.
-Apathetic people need to be inspired, and they need to be inspired to act.  Even using the Be Inspired concept by bringing in a story or providing an example of someone that we universally find inspirational such as Nick Vojcic, the man and inspirational speaker born without limbs, or Irena Sendler, who helped rescue Jewish children from the ghetto during the Holocaust can be a great tool to help the apathetic people we meet emotionally connect to a real situation.
-And so don’t be afraid to draw from the books you’re reading this summer.  Remember that when appealing to our broken and largely apathetic culture, inspirational stories of real people can give someone the perspective and framework they need to realize that we need to strive to do the right thing, even when it’s hard.
- (time permitting)
-Q: Who here has had a chance to use the Be Inspired Concept in conversation?  Who here can illustrate an example of this or give us a testimony
-**Conclusion**
-I’d like to wrap up with a quote from one of my favourite books, titled //The Little Prince//, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
-“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
-When our facts fail – when we can’t seem to get through to the people we meet on the streets using common ground, analogies and questions, let us delve deeper and look for what is essential for us to understand not just a position or opinion, but a person themselves.
-Because not every day will give us an opportunity to save a life, but every day will give us an opportunity to affect one.
-And so I want us all to go out into our wounded culture this summer that so desperately needs healing with the goal of listening to, loving, trying to understand and inspiring everyone we encounter. Seek to do this and you will be a much-needed light and an ointment to this dark and broken culture.