HeartStream Education

CHANGES ... A Bridge to Authentic Community

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HeartStream Education programs for prisoners are designed to:

Assist in creating an environment in a person's life within a community of peers where they are able to face, for themselves, who they are and who they wish to become.
Teach positive forms of socialization and character-development which build on the existing strengths of an individual and are reinforced within a community accountability setting.
Provide training in responding to and instituting life changes through the development of healthy relationships with others.

The CHANGES Program penetrates the psychological armor that most prisoners carry and impacts them in a profound, transforming way.

The CHANGES Program penetrates the psychological armor that most prisoners carry and impacts them in a profound, transforming way. It also provides participants with ongoing interpersonal skills that can be applied to reframe the continuing conflicts and challenges of day-to-day life both in and out of prison. Many prisoners carry a heavy burden of sadness, anger, or shame, which they must purge and get on top of if they have any hope of making significant behavioral changes.

The CHANGES program brings participants into a state of mind where they can choose to be conscious about the choices they make. In accomplishing this work, CHANGES is free of naiveté and sentimentality, open enough to foster the growing sense of vulnerability and dignity that men and women exhibit in our process, and real enough to get the tough work of transformation done skillfully.

CHANGES provides prisoners with the opportunity and the challenge of increasing their level of "emotional intelligence." Emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one's thinking and actions. (Mayer and Salovey, 1993) According to Mayer and Salovey, emotional intelligence can be categorized into five domains:

Self-Awareness: Observing your self and recognizing a feeling as it happens.
Managing emotions: Handling feelings so that they are appropriate; realizing what is behind a feeling; and finding ways to handle fears and anxieties, anger, and sadness.
Motivating Oneself: Channeling emotions in the service of a goal; emotional self-control; delaying gratification and stifling impulses.
Empathy: Sensitivity to others' feelings and concerns and taking their perspective; appreciating the difference in how people feel about things.
Handling Relationships: Managing emotions in others; social competence and social skills.

Through the CHANGES program, participants face their emotions of fear, anger, and sadness...

As is apparent in these five domains, emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in the success of prisoners changing both their perspectives and behaviors resulting in a lower likelihood of re-offending upon release. These skills are also a key to handling addiction to either drugs or alcohol. Through the CHANGES program, participants face their emotions of fear, anger, and sadness; recognize situations in dealing with others when these emotions rise to the surface; how to motivate themselves to change; and how to handle their relationships with others more effectively.

The CHANGES program succeeds for three reasons:

The program addresses the entire scope of a prisoner's life experience, no matter how harsh, using the fuel of revelation about their past to chart a new path. By confronting and making peace with these experiences, a prisoner then begins to take responsibility for the life that they could create, free from the pull of those past negative forces.
CHANGES fosters a group environment where individuals can develop themselves and where they can also feel safe to encourage each other's development. This program is different from traditional group therapy because its foremost focus is on each individual becoming a member of an authentic community rather than doing "self-work" in a group environment. Individual change comes about as each person focuses on creating a healthy community and, as a result, is forced to examine personal patterns of behavior and thought which impede or enhance group cohesion.
CHANGES is successful because of the power of the therapeutic technology and processes that we use. We use sophisticated group and individual processes of an experiential nature, as well as cognitive teaching, all in an environment that is deeply compassionate. The training is a catalyst for prisoners to acknowledge their rage, fear and sadness, and develop a new context for their lives, awakening an internal motivation to take full responsibility for themselves as well as to serve their families and fellow prisoners, and even society at large.

Community Building is a group process which uses principles and guidelines based on fundamental values of personal authenticity and extraordinary respect to assist groups to experience and learn a way of connecting and relating with each other that is above and beyond the normal patterns of interaction.

CHANGES differs from other prison programs in a number of ways, one of which is Community Building. This methodology is based on a group process model designed by the late Dr. M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author of The Road Less Traveled, and has a positive track record in prisoner rehabilitation. Community Building is a group process which uses principles and guidelines based on fundamental values of personal authenticity and extraordinary respect to assist groups to experience and learn a way of connecting and relating with each other that is above and beyond the normal patterns of interaction. The process allows for the kind of deep connection most often seen among survivors of a natural disaster or terrorist act - without the occurrence of the initial tragedy. The difference being that in the Community Building process participants gain a deep understanding and the tools to recreate for themselves this kind of connection in their daily lives. The CHANGES program begins with a three-day intensive experiential workshop, the core component being Community Building. For three long days, participants work through all their resistance and "stories" toward a single goal - becoming an "authentic" community.

HeartStream Education has expanded the effectiveness of this methodology by integrating other modalities alongside the Community Building experience, following up this core intensive with a follow-up curriculum, all of which is specifically designed for correctional institutions. Follow-up sessions enable participants to make consistent, intentional usage of

Embedded in all HeartStream Education does is an understanding that change comes only when both behavior and motivation for change are inextricably linked.

Community Building and all the tools they learn in the CHANGES Program. We believe this curriculum forms the "missing link" between the desire to change one's behavior and the capacity to actually change. Embedded in all HeartStream Education does is an understanding that change comes only when both behavior and motivation for change are inextricably linked. We facilitate this integration of motivation and action within a re-enforcing community of acceptance.

Each follow-up session, led by trained institution staff or volunteers, seeks to reinforce and deepen the powerful shift in perspective evoked by the initial workshop. The weekly sessions are devoted to facilitator-directed processes and coaching, as well as the Community Building process. In addition, participants are exposed to cognitive education in corresponding life skills, in a setting where participants learn things in a fun and interesting way, quickly, and at a very deep level.

We work with each institution individually to assess their current programs and adapt our program to work alongside their current efforts.

HeartStream's CHANGES program for prisoners is not intended to replace other rehabilitative services within a correctional facility. We work with each institution individually to assess their current programs and adapt our program to work alongside their current efforts. One of the strengths of the CHANGES Program is that it acts as a very effective "launching point" for just about any other program, providing the opportunity and incentive for prisoners to choose change in their life. Through this readiness for change perspective embodied in CHANGES, the prisoner becomes "prepped" to approach the current efforts of the institution with a different attitude - one of greater honesty, less game-playing, and more personal responsibility. A prisoner internally motivated to change is better able to get the most out of educational opportunities, alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs, and/or job skills training offered at their facility.

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