Cultivating Mental Health Mindsets in The Empathetic Classroom

Speaker 1 It has to be considered of the educator's time, energy, and responsibility by being practical and accessible for use while teaching. So we're not asking for an extra lesson. We're not asking for something that needs a lot of explanation or prep time. So this needs to be something that's more about a way of being rather than another thing for a teacher to do. These are things teachers do need because we encounter that in our teaching all the time. There's a there's a reactive student. There's students who are maybe completely checked out. What can we do that psychotherapy has already learned works to bring people back into the present and engage in this relationship that's right in front of their eyes.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to episode 174 of the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters. Three of whom are Daniel Kearney, Skyler Primm, and Brandon Peters. Thank you all so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad free conversations over the years. If you haven't yet, consider rating our podcast in your app to help us reach more listeners. And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media. Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who's now a licensed counselor that read, the thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them, but the whole thing is gorgeous, he wrote. The author was, of course, my guest today, Maria Monroe Shuster. In the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom, How a Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students and You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward. The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Monroe Shuster's call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we're all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this, we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, Maria, for joining me today. Oh, thank you. And I am more than thrilled that you were able to participate in this. What a great organization to get to partner with in this process. It's a bit of a dream.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, you, Maria. And I just couldn't believe, just from a single email launched, you know, a bunch of other conversations and connections, and eventually, you know, turned into the printed book project, obviously, with our forward in it too, but also your participation in our upcoming conference. I've just really appreciated the the the spark that this one connection from Tom, you know, has launched a thousand other awesome conversations.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it goes to say, right, connections, are so important, and I didn't start this process necessarily with a wide network of people. I live in Montana. It's very rural here. And so having people, that are so personable at a distance has made this process, feel more comfortable and like something that I've been excited to do rather than just nervous about.

Speaker 2 For listeners who might not be familiar with you and the book, can you just tell us about yourself out there in Idaho, your background, and the experiences that led to the empathetic classroom?

Speaker 1 Sure. Well, thankfully, I'm I'm from the neighboring state. I am from Montana, but they're so similar. So I grew up in Northeastern Montana, and this is always an important part of anyone's story, I think, is kind of what shaped your initial lens on the world. And mine was shaped by growing up on the Fort Peck Reservation, and it's the largest reservation in Montana. It's home to the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes, and I grew up there as a white nontribal member, purely just my parents being from the area as well. And so I was able to grow up in this environment that I didn't realize at the time a lot of people didn't exist in. I thought everyone's nearest Walmarts were two to six hours away. You know, you just get used to a different style of life. And for me, it meant, a lot of time for self reflection and boredom, which I now credit as such an important experience for everybody to have in their life at different points in time. And so I was the quiet kid who was really in just enjoyed being creative and was supported in that growing up.

Speaker 2 What would you say about that boredom that was like the I don't know. Was it space for reflection and thinking? What what was it about the boredom of life in Montana that, I I don't know, was the spark for something more creative later on?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think it's not having anybody coming to you and, you know, telling you how to fill your mind or your time or your space, you really have to kind of just learn how to be with yourself and listen to and understand yourself and and also the environment around you as well. So I think that a trait that I still carry with me from my upbringing is is being observant, and that all falls into what I get to do today, thankfully. It's not just get to be observant, but also when do I get to take action on things. So I would say when I was growing up, I realized at around age 13, I wasn't so happy in school, and I probably hadn't been happy for quite some time, but I kind of was sick of it at 13. I think I was like, I feel like I'm a full on adult at 13. I'm ready to see change in the world, so I decided to dress as a moose and go into grade school classrooms, which I was shockingly allowed to do. And I started out by doing kind of health education lessons, high rates of smoking in children at that time on the reservation. And so one thing I talked about was, what's the impact of smoking as Moe the moose? And as I turned into you know, when I was around 16, I decided to confront type one diabetes was also a big component of childhood on the reservation. And so I started going into classrooms and talking about with teachers about what are things they can be doing to model, you know, different lifestyle habits. So from an early age, I've been fortunate to be able to get my hands on, you know, education, and then there's always been this psychology component paired with that as well that I didn't quite see until later on. So going forward from that, I I got my teaching degree and a master's in English so that I could be a really great writing teacher and taught for about thirteen years in a variety of different settings, k through university. So I got to see developmentally all across the spectrum of ages and needs and environments and mostly across Montana, but I also was able to travel to schools both around the world and around the country because this was something that interested me, which was like, how do other schools function? I saw Montana schools, and I grew up in them. What do other schools do? What's working? What's not working? And so I was excited to be part of that discourse from a really young age.

Speaker 2 One thing I didn't know, Maria, until I was reading your about the author section when I got the physical copy of the book is there's a a bit in here that says that you spent time at a groundbreaking school in India that was featured in a documentary called Daughters of Destiny. What is going on with that? That sounds so cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, again, back to that lots of free time growing up in Wolf Point, Montana, I read about a school that was in India that was trying something completely different than had been tried before. It was started by a person who was from India, and they said, you know, how do we change what's going on with the caste system in India? Because right now, we have a caste that is considered below the caste system, the Dalit caste. Sometimes they're referred to as untouchables. And he said, you know, how do we provide them a world class education so that they start to have a voice in society? And so that was Shanti Bhavan, and I went there mostly just to learn from the school and say, what are things that could be interesting to bring back to Montana? Because we too are rural, and we face a lot of similar issues when it comes to poverty in the state. And so I was able to teach the first class that graduated as eleventh graders. I ended up teaching Shakespeare studies when I went there. They were the first entire class in India from that part of the caste system that all graduated together from high school at the same time. They've all gone into college, and most have received master's or ongoing PhDs right now. And so these are students who have pretty much dedicated their lives to shifting, you know, what would have been a very different life story for them. And so I was able to kind of be witness to that whole dynamic. But I definitely came in as an observer, not a teacher. I was a teacher, but I learned more from them for sure.

Speaker 2 And is this I just was googling it while you were talking. Is this the Netflix documentary Daughters of Destiny from 2017? It reads, five girls from India's most impoverished families attend a boarding school designed to create opportunities as they strive for a brighter future. Kind of sounds like it's playing around with the cast idea there without naming it specifically in the description, but is that the documentary?

Speaker 1 That is the documentary. Was able to one of my students was Silpa who is featured in the documentary. And, thankfully, I was not there at the time. I probably would not have wanted to be featured in a documentary. That's not my comfort zone. But these students, because of their upbringing, were so passionate and so dedicated to their educations, and Shilpa was one of the students who was just so open with me about her experiences, and she's now in child psychology specifically, so I've gotten to kind of follow her journey as well.

Speaker 2 Wow. That's incredible. I'm so curious too to know just what what did you notice when you went out in the world trying to find these different things, and how did it influence you and your perspective on home when you came back and reentered classrooms in, you know, Montana, or was that the transition to you towards, you know, more counseling work?

Speaker 1 That kind of led to the majority of my teaching career was was centered around that. I came back excited about education. I think growing up in school systems where not for all classes, but a majority, they are guided by a textbook. And the textbook is opened at the beginning of class, and you read, and then you take a test, and then you leave the classroom. To me, it was invigorating for the first time in life to get to witness classrooms where the students were just so excited to be there and were asking questions and were informed and engaging in debates with their teachers and kind of the rest of the world falls away, I think, sometimes when teaching and education is done really well. Like, what's happening in that moment in the class matters so much, and I definitely got to experience that in Shanti Bhavan in particular in that everything that we discussed was important. They were debating going issues going on in the world. We were talking about how, you know, the ideas of Shakespeare are still happening today, and they were wanting to do more with that. And so it was a real opportunity in each of these instances to, number one, realize, like, we have so much here, and we often take it for granted, and we kind of get sick of it, and we get bored of it, and we say, ugh. You know? But there was something about going back to really, I guess, kind of focused in a in a simplified way sort of educational environments where it's, you know, it's not about the handout that you're creating or, you know, it's it's about a bigger picture. It's about how is this gonna how are we gonna use this in the world? How does this shape our our way that we think and we interact? Because these kids, especially in India, their dreams were to become leaders and change makers in the world, and so that changes everything. And that can be every kid. That can be any school setting. And, you know, growing up, oftentimes, I think I felt more like school was a obligation. It was something you had to do instead of an opportunity.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's the difference between an education that's more or less on autopilot, because the plan is just to do the next page in the textbook, and you can see, I mean, even if you're an observant child, you can see, oh, this is this is just how school is. We're gonna be on the fiftieth day of school. We're gonna be on the fiftieth page of the textbook or whatever that pacing is, as opposed to what you're describing in your experiences abroad, particularly in India, are really purpose driven education. You know? In this in that context, even liberation from an ancient caste system, like the restructuring of of society around new norms and the education that's required to not just imagine, but to navigate a path towards that. That sounds a lot more fulfilling than, okay, class. Open up your math book to page, you know, a 123 and do the odds, you know, in the homework section. What I'm I I'm so curious then too. What was the transition for you as as somebody who clearly was a, you know, passionate, driven educator, sounds like you made really incredible connections with students everywhere you went. So what what did you see either in that work or in yourself that said, I need I need to switch hats for for listeners? Maria is now a licensed clinical professional counselor, if I understand LCPC correctly. And, yeah, what what prompted that role change for you?

Speaker 1 Like so much of my life journey, I think it it's collecting this sounds so robotic, but collecting data and then doing something with it and realizing something needs to change. I I don't do well in life with a sense of feeling static. Anybody who's known me is like, oh, there's Maria. She's doing now she's doing this next thing. To me, they all make sense in my mind as far as, like, why I'm doing what I'm doing. So the mental health challenges over the years, I would say, have piled up as I'm teaching, and I didn't quite realize it. And it was both my own and my students and their parents and our communities, and they were all playing into what was happening in my class and in my schools on a daily basis. And I oftentimes, especially when I was new to teaching, you know, you're really trained as an educator to to sort of complete the lesson, you know, like, on the content, get through the material, get through the test. And at a certain point, when I had relaxed enough in my teaching and I was, like, really feeling humanized with my students, I realized there were oftentimes so many reasons why they were not connecting with the content, and it was not a lack of desire or even interest on their part most of the time. And I got more and more curious about what contributes to student disengagement, student shutdown, but then also watching teachers around me also similarly fall into patterns of either reactivity with their classrooms or even myself sometimes in finding, like, woah. I just, you know, I just yelled at my students to get, you know, to get control of this classroom that just felt overwhelming at times. And I myself would feel so exhausted by the end of a day of teaching, you know, somebody would have to peel me off the couch in order to get up to eat dinner after a school day. And, you know, you can do that maybe for a little while while you're in your early twenties, but I was starting to realize, woah. This is not sustainable for me or for my students or anyone. And I think the time that it hit me the most was right around 2019, and I was teaching eighth graders at the time. And if anyone's ever taught eighth graders before, like, you know, that's like a that's a it's a unique moment in our development, and it's a unique time in our society the way we've sort of constructed being an eighth grader even. And so these eighth graders are both told you're still children, and at the same time, they're given adult responsibilities, and they were pissed. You know? They were understandably done, done with the way schooling felt, done with adults telling them what to do and what to think. And I loved that. I loved that about those kids. And I also felt responsibility as an educator and as a school system to sort of follow through on some sort of a plan. And that was the first time I think I felt safe enough as an educator and informed enough to say, actually, I think there's something more valuable here than just following this scripted plan. And I happened to work in a school at the time that encouraged it was a place based school, and part of my schooling had been in place based education. And so I said, let's scrap the plans for the year. Let's actually figure out what's going on here in this room between all of us right now because we're not talking to each other anymore. Nobody is laughing. There's no tears. It was just a sense of emptiness. And the question that I asked that is in the book that ended up kind of prompting everything was who who feels who doesn't feel seen here? Who feels unseen? And I thought it was gonna be maybe one or two students, and then we would start to work on that dynamic. But it ended up being the majority of the class that raised their hand, and that was the most telling moment when they looked at each other in the circle, and they all almost had their hands raised. And you could see in that moment, the judgment that had been there about each other and what they were thinking suddenly started to shift, and that was exciting to me. And so I I shifted that entire English curriculum that year to be a mental health English curriculum, which I had to do some research on. I had to figure out what that meant. It had to be context specific to living in Montana, to kids in 2019, the things they cared about. And so we got into it all, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't always perfect. I didn't I wasn't always the expert on everything that came up, but I did get to say, hey. I think I'm a pretty good guide here, and I'm I can communicate, and I can help everybody communicate with each other. And it it was a pretty impactful year. And from there, I said, I think I need something more formal in my training, and so I returned to school. Thankfully, we have a really great counseling program at Montana State University, and so I was able to go locally and get this really excellent education in counseling.

Speaker 2 To go back to those eighth graders, were they receptive of the changes that you had made then to be more responsive to those mental health needs when you were teaching them? Yeah. I would say, you know, you can't always

Speaker 1 fully understand or mind read anyone what's going on, but the participation increased, the vulnerability increased, the ability to, you know, just talk about some really meaningful but challenging ideas. And and for me to you know, as an educator too, to trust a little bit that that we can do this. You know? There's always fear, I think, on the part of educators to wade into more challenging territory, and I and I certainly didn't do it in a way that was you know, I tried to be intelligent and mindful and aware of how I was doing it. You couldn't just kind of be too messy with it. And so it did take a lot of reflection on a daily basis to say, how did that go today? Did I ask the right questions? You know? Did I did we get to some place? What what went wrong today? And and exploring that a little bit too, but I had to kind of let go of my own fear as an educator of maybe always following the rules or doing everything that always makes everyone happy and be willing to say, I think there's real value in exploring the discomfort that exists in my classroom and that there's plenty of you know, if you wanna take a test on it too, there's plenty of English skills that we can we can tie these to. And we did, and the writing was the writing was superb for my students. The thinking and that's to say the thinking was superb from my students. They were really, really thinking about things, and, yeah, it was a pretty incredible year.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I imagine the transition from being probably both physically and emotionally, and then intellectually disengaged. You know, they're kept at a distance from the content, you know, alienated from themselves and the environment to a shift where, like, they're included, perhaps for the first time, in authentic thinking, and then authentic writing. And the feedback loops between all of those things is a real shift. And I I so second what you were saying there too. I think eighth grade is such a magical, There's so much magic in like those middle school years, but I think school doesn't know what to do with these kids who have as much agency, you know, and they have so much energy and ambition, and it just feel like schools waste that. I don't know. Or or disregard it or don't, you know, were were handed some excellent, you know, just like raw materials, and we don't know quite what to do with it. Sounds like they were in very excellent hands with you there. Thinking of that was like 2019, you had said. So even pre COVID and seeing the trends and the data and, obviously, for anyone who either taught through it or had their own children experience any aspect of what that was like and coming out the other side to the extent that we're that we're out of that. We're hosting you next week. It'll be after the conference for people listening to the podcast, but you'll be part of a panel discussion that is grappling with this question. Right? How do we, deal with some of the most pressing issues in education, in 2025 and beyond? And I just wanna ask you, Maria, what do you think is now the most pressing issue facing education today?

Speaker 1 It's a valuable exercise even getting to ask that question. So I'm appreciative of it for that chance as an educator to even get to and answer that. And I played around with a lot of different ideas, but I think in the end, what it came back to is something that's gonna sound really simple, and it's fear as the most pressing issue in education. And, specifically, it's our inability oftentimes to know how to work with fear constructively.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What does that mean to engage with fear constructively?

Speaker 1 I kind of arrived at this thinking about, like, we know that fear impacts so much of our ability as humans to engage in the world, to engage with other humans, to engage with issues. And it's not only adults, but it's it's children. As a as an LCPC now and as a counselor working with children, I get to see on a a daily basis what fear limits in the world, and it's so big right now, what it's limiting. And I when I start to think about, okay. So what is it that people are fearing? What are those commonalities between adults and children and and political viewpoints even? You know, in ideologies, what are those commonalities in our fears? You know, the big one is losing a sense of control, losing a sense of familiarity and safety, and those are really kind of deep down biological innate fears, and those are operating fairly strongly in our world right now. And we try to be so advanced sometimes and just, like, focus on the technology or the, you know, the techniques. And, like, the truth is is, like, we're operating from a pretty basic part of our psyche at this moment in history. And we have been throughout time in different ways and different forms, but it's taken on a different form at the moment right now. And I wanna be clear to to say that fear is a really valuable emotional state, and it's not one that we should ignore or dismiss. It's there for survival purposes, and it helps us either adapt in order to survive or it helps us to shut down in preparation for death. And so it's important for us to listen to what the fear is telling us rather than try to get rid of it. And what I see in my counseling practice when clients usually start with me is they try to shove their fear under a rug. Right? That's why they're there is because they're living incongruently in life. So they're trying to show up all smiles and happy and positive, but meanwhile, they've got this, like, rug full of fear underneath them that's just, like, causing them to feel unstable. And they're like, I'm not sure why I'm here. I don't know why I'm anxious, why I'm depressed. You know? Can you help me? So fear is real, and we do see our fears founded at times. So I also don't wanna say, oh, you know, fear's overblown. Sometimes we fear things aren't real, and sometimes that is true. But, also, sometimes our fears are founded. And I think that that's where our survival instincts are really kicking in right now is that some people in our country, in our world are experiencing their fears founded, and we're all witness to that as well. Right? So we play out our fears through observing things happen to other people as well. So our nervous systems are taking a hit right now in our culture, and, you know, I see as young as five year olds in my practice who have some pretty big adult and very realistic fears. And so we can't fully dismiss those fears, and it's really affecting how we interact with each other as stakeholders in the educational environment. So it's affecting how we interpret what somebody else is saying even sometimes, or it's affecting funding and access to education, and it affects how we view changes in the educational environment, that fear. And it pretty much turns down our ability to be creative, to be collaborative, to have wonder, and curiosity. And so those are all turned down, and what's turned up right now is our reactivity. And so when we become reactive as humans, we start to look for ways to control things more tightly, so our our management aspects of our personality come out pretty strong. We wanna change things. We wanna fix things, and we also isolate more. We disconnect from other people because, you know, we see this person over here, and and we we say, oh, they have these ideas. I need to be away from them. I don't wanna get near them. I don't wanna connect with them. And, of course, that's all a choice for each of us how to connect or disconnect, but that's where my thinking's really been at these days as a clinician and as a former educator is, you know, when when are we no longer choosing to disconnect? When is it biological disconnection? And when do we need to work to override some of our narratives within our system that say disconnect and say, actually, maybe I do need to connect right now. Maybe we need to put fear on the table a little bit more as adults in our school systems and say, you know, what is this fear we're talking about? Let's dig into it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned fear is Frank Herbert's Dune, you know. Fear is the mind killer, and that's more than, I guess, a clever sci fi cliche, because I think fear based thinking and fear based decision making is, as you had mentioned, just driven psychologically, neurochemically from a different, you know, place than other types of thinking. And we're seeing the consequences, not just of individual fear based thinking and decision making, But as you had mentioned too, the systemic outcomes of that, and the stress and the anxiety that it all leads to, I think it's really important and powerful for us to name it and put it on the table. But I'm thinking, right, of the solutions that I've seen, right, pitched to schools in particular, like about how we begin to resolve this thing. And like I went to CASEL, c a s e l. I don't remember what the heck it stands for right now. But I went to their big old conference in Chicago last year, and on their, on their, floor of the conference are all of these different booths selling schools products. Right? Tracking tools, SEL, this social emotional learning that, and, you know, things that you can deliver to students through an LMS, and it'll gather feedback and, you know, do all of the buzzwords and language and everything else. And I think what I'm hearing from you in your response to the most pressing issues that we're facing today, I don't hear a language of SEL or social emotional learning. And I don't see a lot of that in the book. I didn't see index entries in here for SEL, social emotional learning, anything like that. Is that an intentional choice for you to lean away from a commodified language of SEL and towards the way that you're speaking about it in this podcast?

Speaker 1 I love that you brought awareness to that. It was so interesting that you picked up on that. And I and I thought, yeah. What is going on there? Because there's definitely something there. Right? And I think in part, it's that I always side with the student when it comes to perspective in the end. You know, I've sat in in staff rooms, and and and I know sometimes it's like, okay. There's this educator's perspective going on, but there's also this student perspective going on or there's an administration perspective going on. And I have a hard time not really hearing what I'm what students are telling us and understanding it from their lens. And I think in some ways, it's because I my child part of me is still really strong. Like, I'm very connected to that aspect of myself. And so what I you know, I first wanna say, like, organizations like Castle are, you know, trying to move things in a good direction. Right? Like, I think with that fear piece, right, like, we're all looking for solutions, and we want them to be approachable. We wanna package them, and we wanna help people get there. And I think, you know, we could even say, right, with my book that that same concept could happen to something like that. Right? Like, here it is. It's packaged. It's you know, you can use it, but I that maybe the difference that I kinda wanna bring out here is that when we work too hard sometimes to sort of create phrases or concepts and simplify them, we forget how complex and interesting we are as humans. And I think that students pick up on that sometimes that, like, when we just come at them with a script of what we think we should be saying and doing, in quotes, should be, they know that that's not authentic, and oftentimes they lose interest. Like, what's the point? Right? And so I hear 12 year olds in my office now saying things like, ugh. We had SEL today. And, you know, that seems to be kind of a similar and and these things spread amongst the culture of those age groups too. Right? It's like once something is uncool, it's gonna be uncool really fast. And I think as adults, it's important to ask, hey. What's going on here? Why, you know, we have missed the mark on this? And, you know, maybe it's important to recognize that, like, within certain age groups, like, talking about emotions is a really dangerous concept as far as being accepted within your peer group. You know, if you're in a middle school classroom and you say, I'm sad, as much as an educator, I would love that type of environment, that's not necessarily where they're at in their identity development to make themselves so vulnerable. And they're being so smart in some ways by by holding their cards to their chest a little bit more. Right? Like, we shouldn't fault them for that either that sometimes we get to lean into and can lean into the viewpoints of our students rather than trying to force feed something else. And so I guess maybe the the sort of way I tried to take a little different route with my approach was putting the focus on the educator and the educator's mindset and instead of trying to change the student saying, hey, educators. It's okay to have these human experiences going on inside of yourself, and you can navigate them at the same time as navigating these with your students. But it is a little bit complex at times, and there's some gray area, but but you can handle that. And here's some sort of, you know, things from psychology that could be really helpful to doing that within yourself and within your students. So, like, you know, I always say if teachers can learn to be just a little bit more, in a good way, self centered, their students actually will pick up on that and and love being in their classrooms because the teacher's taking care of themselves. It's not just the teacher focused on the student and trying to change them.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It is so interesting, isn't it, to think of earlier in the conversation we had mentioned on the kind of the content standards curriculum side, how an emphasis on that ends up being alienating for students who don't feel connected to that, and then we would say that the solutions to the anxiety or mental health or these other things come in a similar package. Right? We do SEL as the as the kid was telling you about in the same way that we do English and math, check a check a box, and call it a day. It's so funny. We've gotten the same feedback. You know, we do student feedback, student focus groups with with kids all across the country. And, you when we ask them about these SEL programs, they'll tell us it's a prompt that they do on their Chromebook. When they open it up for the first time, half the kids don't take it very seriously. They just hit a number because it's another thing they have to do to kind of do the things that they want. Another half say that they don't, they intentionally don't put a lot of personal things in there because if they say that they're, you know, they're feeling a one out of 10, well, that'll trigger an intervention. So it's kind of wrapped up into, I think, well intentioned things. But kids, to your point, you know, say, I'm having a bad day. It doesn't mean I need to take half a day and go sit and talk to an adult about this. So they'll intentionally, you know, say, oh, I'm at a five because it's below that trigger. And another half or another half. Yeah. Three halves. Another third. This is why I should've paid attention to math. No. They'll they'll say, you know, they just stopped doing it, and nobody ever said anything about it. So then for schools, if they're making decisions based on the SEL data, it seems like it's not very good data to make decisions about compared to just sitting down and talking with like a cross section of eighth graders about like, hey, what are how are you feeling about school, about life? What are things that we can do to help smooth that process out? Like, that's building a relationship and just giving you better, more actionable data. So I think your, intentional or not, way of shifting that language from social emotional learning, which, you know, kinda brings this checklist attitude and practice to mental health mindsets, I found myself adopting, you know, that same language as I was thinking about, oh, how do I help improve my mental health mindset, or the mental health mindset of teachers and students and learners? It just, I think, little reframes like that really go a long way.

Speaker 1 Language is so powerful, and students are, you know, quick to create their own meaning with the language that's used. And if educators aren't pretty adept in their use of language, I think that, you know, students are, you know, just quick to kind of disengage and lose interest if the language feels like it's been repeated too often. And so one thing that I that I say in the book is, you know, it's not about the language. Like, let's just actually put that aside when we're even like, you know, the term mental health is thrown around so much, and and, you know, I have clients that come into my office now that are already using terms like triggers and trauma and all these different things. They can lose power over time when things are too quickly said, maybe not enough depth involved in them. And so I think we have to be really careful, especially when we're talking about something as important as how we function internally as humans to not try to maybe, like, commodify it or, like, you know, just package it up. It's too sacred of space to try to simplify, and so just don't use you know, we don't need to use certain terms. We don't need to repeat mindfulness 10,000,000 times. Like, there's all these different things we can do as educators to just show up as real people in the world, and and it's not always about just having positive emotions. Like, sometimes it's about having some challenging ones and ones that maybe aren't as socially acceptable. We show up as humans as educators, and we carry all those things into our class classroom every single day. And so the conversation I wanna be having is, like, how do we handle those more complex aspects of being an educator instead of just kind of trying to sweep them under the rug and and just say, well, you need to breathe more.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Just like we'll do SEL, we're gonna do our ten minutes of mindfulness, and then we don't have to pay attention to it anymore, and we can get down to the serious parts of of school. I wonder if this is a good time then to sort of talk about the the boundaries or the what you see as the borders between these things. Because I think what I hear you saying in this conversation is that, you know, it it is a delicate area that is consequential to wade into, and shouldn't be taken lightly. And yet, it also sounds like that's something that educators are increasingly facing. So we should have some amount of training and thoughtfulness and intentionality behind that. But I wonder, this is often a criticism too of these sorts of approaches, that where does it where does the line between the educator, you know, managing all wearing all of the different hats of the classroom and and managing so many different students at the same time, where does that role end in the counselor hat? Where do you make the handoff there? What what would you say to to educators about that boundary, or where do you see it now having worn both of those hats?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. And I would say and I've had moments even as I was exploring mental health curriculum where I started to wade into a little too far of that territory of, oh, this is counseling grounds. Right? And, oh, I better go back to school to get a counseling degree. So it can and does happen so easily, and I think we even see it in educators who take their students' issues home with them. You know? Like, I've heard from a lot of teachers I work with now in professional development about how, you know, sad they feel at the end of the day about certain students and what they've been going through, and and that's a clear indicator to me that, you know, some of those really important boundaries have been lost. And the great thing about some of the the things that I'm I'm wanting to bring over from psychotherapy in into education is those boundaries and, you know, the power of, you know, being a clinician and realizing that it's it's important to your sustainability in the profession to have emotional boundaries. And I say it as, like, creating secure attachment with a person, but emotional detachment where you're not trying to live their emotional experiences for them. And so this idea of where is that line is something that has been discussed from scholarly lenses. And so the the the three main sort of roles of educators in mental health that have been clarified are educators as promoters of mental health. So modeling, what is it to be a human that lives a good life? What does it mean to take care of myself, my body, my mind? Collaborators with other mental health, either professionals, school, parents, the child, the student, and then supporters of mental health. So what are the ways that, you know, we can support? So in none of that is the word treatment of mental health conditions, and that's kind of the key distinguisher is in my book, I start to talk about interventions that could be utilized in classrooms by educators who are trained and who are thinking about these things that come from psychotherapy, but these are interventions that kind of are different from treatment interventions, and so I can talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. What's an example

Speaker 2 of that? How would I know the difference as a layperson, I guess?

Speaker 1 That's a great question. So maybe a good example of a intervention that is something that I talk about in the book is is like working with students through the change process. Educators already work with their students through the change process. Oftentimes, we don't talk about it, though. One thing I talk about within there is when you're working with a student who's hesitant to do something differently, it's always their choice to to decide. Am I gonna how do I wanna do this? Do I wanna keep doing it the same way I've always done it, or do I wanna try something new? Here's my teacher saying, hey. Why don't you you know, like, let's let's try thinking about this in a different way. That's engaging in the change process. So one thing that I talk about for educators is noticing when a student opens a door to you. And by an open door, I just mean they seem willing to consider something than what they've always done or something different. And that when that open door happens, you can offer. You can say, hey. Do you wanna try this different way of approaching this? Do you wanna try this you know, you don't have to. And they can either say yes or no, and that that's an intervention in which, as a clinician, I might even do that with clients and, like, I have to figure out when are they ready. You know? It's up to an individual's personal choice as to what they want to do differently in life or what they don't. Maybe they're just fine doing things the way that they're doing them, and, you know, it's never my job as a clinician to say you should be doing things differently. Right? I can suggest, hey. That's not so helpful, and teachers can do that too. Right? Like, gosh. That seems like that really stresses you out the way that you, you know, always study five hours a night for a test. You know, I wonder if there's some other way we can go about this. So I've been working on sort of establishing some really clear criteria for if we were to consider, you know, is this an intervention that's that's could be used by an educator in a school, and is this an intervention that's more along the lines of treatment, and what exactly is that? So I can share those with you if you'd like to. Please. Yes. So the first criteria to figure out so we're saying if a relationship skill is gonna be used from psychotherapy, We're identifying, is it safe, inclusive, effective, and practical for educators and their students? So that's kind of the general overall. My specific points are is it must be considerate of the student's individual autonomy, their identity, and their right to oversee their own internal system and how they choose to engage with their system and that of others. So that might mean, even if there's something in my book that, you know, a teacher says, I wanna try this out. I wanna try out direct communication with my students, or I want to try out, you know, working with psychological flexibility and inner you know, whatever. Right? If a student says no, I am not I'm not comfortable. I don't wanna do that. That's their right. And this is not about because you found something helpful, also assuming it's helpful for your students. And I hear that from parents in my office all the time, like, oh, therapy has been you know, it's so helpful for me. It's been wonderful. And then their kid comes in, and they're like, I have no clue why why I'm here. Right? And so we need to respect the individual autonomy of our students. And then second, it has to be considered of the educator's time, energy, and responsibility by being practical and accessible for use while teaching. So we're not asking for an extra lesson. We're not asking for something that needs a lot of explanation or prep time. So this needs to be something that's more about a way of being rather than another thing for a teacher to do. And then it's focused on increasing teacher and student engagement in the present and reducing emotional, cognitive, and physical reactivity. So we're increasing engagement in the present, which is key, and reducing reactivity. So these are things teachers do need because we encounter that in our teaching all the time. There's a there's a reactive student. There's students who are maybe completely checked out. What can we do that psychotherapy has already learned works to bring people back into the present and engage in this relationship that's right in front of their eyes?

Speaker 2 And it's not that by engaging in those behaviors, then you are becoming a psychotherapist. You are modeling, as you had said, like, how do adults with developed brains and coping skills also deal with Exactly. Their own reactivity in in moments too? How do they help tiny humans with those same struggles in their own developing brains and hormones and chemicals, oh, here are these tools to help us shift from the reactive fear brain to the, you know, the in the present, the thinking brain.

Speaker 1 And the great thing about that is is that it doesn't, you know, it says we don't have to avoid our reactive parts. Like, we can learn to work with them, and we can teach our students how to work with them. You know, I think we turn down so many parts of our personalities as educators because, you know, we want to be good people. We want to be good influences, and those are all important things. And also recognizing, you know, as promoters of mental health, it's recognizing sometimes sometimes I do have a reaction, and maybe sometimes I do regret it. And then how do I engage with people rather than shutting down and just feeling shame? How do I say, hey. Here's how I messed up, and and what can we do differently? What can I do differently next time? And just allowing us to be imperfect as educators rather than something that's up on a pedestal.

Speaker 2 How can we be full, complete, messy, complicated human beings together, recognizing that we're not always going to have the right thing to say in the right correct situation, or, you know, we're not always gonna not lose our tempers or or these other things. But it's then, okay, how do we recover, you know, from that? Get back to a baseline that can allow us to continue to do awesome, cool things together in the classroom.

Speaker 1 Those will make the most impactful relationships is and and that's the same with clinicians and clients is that when you show up as not just a completely neutral party but as another human and you say, let's not avoid, you know, the fact that we're humans in this room working together with two different nervous systems that have two different stories attached to them. Like, let's work through this stuff because the you know, so much of this disconnect we're experiencing in our society is because once we start feeling kind of lonely and isolated and and insecure about ourselves, we stop being interested in connecting with other people. And we also then judge them more too because we've created distance. There's no close proximity there. So so that yeah. Decreasing that reactivity is has to be done in classrooms, and so we have to say there can't be a therapist at all times in classrooms. We actually need educators to know how to reduce reactivity, and that's actually gonna help them feel better by the end of the day too.

Speaker 2 What I find so interesting is that a lot of what you're speaking to doesn't actually come from interventions because those are gonna be those cases in which everything else has failed. Right? And it's still gotten to some point where we need to deescalate or we need to ground or we need to do something. So much of that is actually built into spaces and structures and how people, you know, are interacting and feeling before they ever get to, you know, an escalated state where they're, you know, reacting more than thinking.

Speaker 1 So I would also like to add into this that teachers should not be doing work on their students' past, their traumas, or attempting to heal their students' wounds. The focus of any sort of relationship skill working in classroom should be between teachers' relationship with themselves, the teacher and the student, and the classroom system as a whole. But where we start to step into dangerous territory is where we start to try to think that we know what's going to, you know, help a student, you know, sort of heal a past wound or a trauma, and we start to try to maybe play different roles for that student, and it's no longer as educator. And so that's kind of a big one to just watch out for as as we start to say, hey. There's some helpful things from psychotherapy here. But also as educators, that process to actually work on healing deep wounds is a extensive journey, and it's usually a lifelong one. And in classrooms, we don't have the time, the energy, the confidentiality, the training to properly address that. And so that's when we need to refer out is when we start to say, there are some trauma wounds coming up, and I might have a feeling about how I want to address them. But the best way you can show up for that individual is to just to be a consistent, warm, empathetic presence in their life. And you don't need to buy them anything. You don't need to say, oh, you can come home with me. Like, no. That's where the line needs to cross is we're not there to save our students.

Speaker 2 So amongst all of the other factors that you address for educators in the context of schools, relationships, boundaries, we mentioned play and space, the last topic that you address in the book is called It's All About Power in Schools. And I'm not only curious about how power fits into your perspective on mental health mindsets, but also the personal context in which you're working. You're in Montana. I'd say that's a state that's pretty regarded as a fairly socially and politically conservative one. I'm in Iowa, so I have no room to talk. How have you seen the mental health mindset breakthrough or take root in positive powerful ways in these contexts that might defy those political categories, or how should teachers approach work in, you know, so called red states?

Speaker 1 It's a big question. Right? And I think that I I might actually answer this similarly no matter what color of state that I was in. The thing Interesting. Okay. You know, that we I think as humans and one thing I get to see as counselors is we always have assumptions. Right? We have lots of assumptions about each other, about what the other side is thinking, and, thankfully, I have a really diverse client practice. So it's not only age. It's not only race. It's not only political views. It's not only sexual and and gender identities. It's it's across the board. And what's wonderful about that perspective, and I wish that all humans could have that sometimes, is when you hear people's innermost thoughts, the ones that they're afraid to put out there for the rest of the world to see, You hear truly how similar they are and how complex we actually are as humans, that there are nuances that in climates that are that are high tension, we sometimes gloss over because we're fearful. Right? It's back to that reactivity. And so if I have to react, I have to categorize someone and potentially objectify them in order to understand how to react to the situation. And as a clinician and as an educator, I've never felt like I can do that, that that's actually really harmful regardless of what someone else's viewpoints are and how they fit into my worldview or not. I think it's important to recognize, like, this idea of having a mental health mindset and just that it's about your way of being. It's not something you have to be doing all the time. It doesn't mean avoiding all challenging topics or avoiding conflict. Like, the beauty of really accepting our humanity is recognizing, yes, we are gonna have differences, and sometimes we might be really heated in those differences because those things really matter to us. So we don't wanna avoid those things, but the only way we're ever gonna get to that dialogue is if we build relationships with people. And I know this is something that a lot of folks give up on in environments like this. It's like, I don't know if I can, and and that's that's each individual's right to say done with that type of relationship. And sometimes it's actually really important for some people too to say, I can't do that anymore. But for those who maybe are like, alright. I think I can still I can still engage in this and try to stay a little bit emotionally detached from what I'm, you know, what I'm picking up on in this person. I always start by looking for shared values with another person. So, you know, even if I have a family that brings a child into my office and they're skeptical about, you know, sending their child to a mental health clinician because of, you know, maybe what they feel like I might say or do or make them believe. Right? There's always those fears of influence. I identify, you know, what what's the shared value here? What really matters? And when it comes down to it, most people say, well, in the end, I was hesitant about bringing my child in here, but they're they're unhealthy. They're unhappy. They're suffering in life, and we need help. And I don't know what to do. And so that moment of vulnerability and and figuring out together, like, guess what? We both care about your child being in a better state and and feeling like living in the world. I mean, so many suicide rates are high across the board now. And Montana, specifically, we're over, you know, double what the national average is. And so we can't mess around sometimes with getting into the nitpicky little details of what we agree with or disagree with. We have to sometimes drill down to, okay. What matters? How are we gonna work together to get there? Because this seems like a really worthwhile goal of having your child feel like they wanna live in the world. And so for me as a clinician now working with this mental health mindset on a regular basis, I realized the importance of regulating my own nervous system in order to regulate another person's. And most times, when people come into a space such as mine and they're feeling skeptical or uncertain about mental health spaces right now, I can see it in their body. I can see it in the way that they're closed off or how tight their voice might be. And my first and foremost job is to say, clearly, within myself, I say, okay. They see me as a threat. Right? I don't feel like I'm a threat, but they see me as that. And and, okay, I have to just accept that and move on. And how do I engage them in a way that reduces, you know, me feeling like I'm a threat and also tells them that they're not a threat to me. Because usually when we pick up on someone else's nervous system being in a highly, you know, fight or flight state, we respond in kind, and we want to, like you know, we wanna meet them there. We wanna fight back. And, actually, the most important thing we could do is help them navigate to a place of safety so that they can be engaging and listening because our the parts of our brain, like our prefrontal cortex, totally shut down when we're in that fight or flight. And so we can't talk. We don't hear things. So if we're not there, like, maybe it's not the time to have a discussion. You know? Sometimes building trust takes time, and that might happen over, you know, a long period of time. So for educators who are facing that in places where their views don't line up with that maybe of some parents or community members or even their students is to remember, like, probably the most important thing you could do is is to work towards feeling comfortable enough around each other that, like, you feel your heart rate reduce, your breathing feels more natural, you're not sweating. Like, you shouldn't be trying to address big things if, like, you're dripping sweat. Like, not the time. Get yourself to a better place first.

Speaker 2 I so appreciate that reframe because if we think about, right, the reflections of the small or the reflections of the large, we would it it just makes sense. As soon as you started talking, I was I had this moment. Well, like, of course, you would approach the relationships and trust and things that you would build in the classroom with your students in the same way that you would approach it with the community or with parents or anything else outside of that. We happen to live in a highly distrustful society, and it takes a lot of work, especially if you're from in an institution to build those, you know, to humanize both, you know, yourself and the eyes of people who may be rightfully distrusting of, you know, schooling as as an institution for, you know, what it represents or its relationship to personal values. But I think, two, to humanize people on the other side of that, as you had said, and not to objectify them as having a perspective or another before perhaps you've ever even reached out and built that relationship. So I I appreciate that clarity that you're bringing to that perspective there.

Speaker 1 Well, Maria, I just so appreciate you joining me today, and obviously then for your book and for your work, and we're looking forward to having you in the conference here in a week. I am so honored to get to be a part of all of it, Nick, and, so grateful to all of the work of everybody in your organization and the and the network and community you've gathered around you of individuals who are excited and and also seem to be ready to engage that fear piece just a little bit and and dig in. So, thanks for meeting me where I'm at today.

Speaker 3 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject. Thank you.