Podcast
Ep. 9 Transcript: Forensic Peer Support with Dawud Nubian
Transcript
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with a focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. Thank you for joining us. I am your host, Danielle Donaldson. In this episode, I’m going to be speaking with Dawud Nubian about forensic peer support. Mr. Dawud Nubian is a returning citizen who has spent most of his life on drugs and in and out of jails and prisons. He has over 20 years of recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. Dawud is the CEO of Project DETER. Inc., a nonprofit agency committed to recovery, reentry, and family reconciliation. As an advocate for improving reentry efforts, he attends resource fairs, advocates for criminal justice reform, and is a statewide volunteer for the Department of Corrections. He has a passion for helping returning citizens remember, get free before you get free. Dawud developed a curriculum for forensic peer support while incarcerated and submitted it for approval to both the Virginia Certification Board and to the Association for Addiction Professionals. Each organization has granted him an Educational Provider Status. To date, he has trained over 100 forensic peers and five trainers in Virginia. So hi, Dawud. Thank you for joining me. How are you doing today?
DAWUD NUBIAN: How are you doing, Danielle? Thank you for having me.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Oh, it’s great. Great to have you be here. I’m excited about learning about this topic. But before we get in to that, would you just give us a brief overview of how you got started working in peer support?
DAWUD NUBIAN: My journey started while incarcerated. I started helping men who were illiterate learn how to read and write and write letters to their families. I didn’t know there was peer support until I was released and found and met a young man who did not know how to sign his name. I have a passion with helping individuals better themselves. So the end result is that now they can read, they can write. Peer support is just helping someone who’s been in the same situation as you have, and you have come out better for it. I remember that when I was diagnosed with manic depression, when I entered into the Department of Corrections, I couldn’t spell my full name. And a guy came and helped me. This was in 1993 when I entered in, and I couldn’t fully spell my name. Drugs, alcohol, suffering and struggling with my mental wellness. Everything was cloudy to me. And so, someone helped me. And he helped me with such kindness in a very harsh environment that I just couldn’t believe it, because I always thought there was something behind him helping me. And found out that he had true, genuine concern about helping me better myself. And that’s how I started. I found my example, and it was an example. He’s serving a life sentence. He’ll never get out. But he helped me see a better side of me.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: That’s such a great definition, I think, of peer support in general, because it’s not just restricted to the world of recovery. There’s just so many ways that you can provide peer support. So I thank you for sharing that one.
DAWUD NUBIAN: Thank you. You’re welcome.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: So before we get into it, for those who may not know, would you please just explain what forensic peer support is?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Okay. All right. Forensic peer support, it’s a training in how to help individuals who have histories of struggle and suffering with their mental wellness. I don’t like the word mental illness. I don’t use the word mental illness because I struggle and suffer with my mental wellness. I get well and I do recover. Criminal justice involvement and individuals who have similar histories. I would not have understood forensic peer support until I heard a young man share my story, but he didn’t look like me. He didn’t come from my background, but he had my same story, same abuse, same drug addiction, same struggle with mental wellness. And it amazed me how small the world was. So forensic peer support is helping individuals and supporting them who struggle with their backgrounds, their histories, have a lot of trauma from their past, from being incarcerated, from before they were incarcerated. And just helping them find their way, just giving a helping hand, not a hand out, but a hand up, and actually letting them see themselves who they really can be, and letting them themselves find their own direction, find their own way, and really see the success in everyone’s life. Forensic peer support is just like regular peer support. The only difference is the lived experience of those who have been involved in the criminal justice system.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Gotcha. Okay. So, I’d love to ask you how you were inspired to create this curriculum. And what kind of work did you have to do to, how long did it take you to create it? And I develop curriculums myself as well. So, as part of the, it’s just curious, you know, from a fellow peer standpoint, what inspired you? How did this happen?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Well, I was taking college courses while I was incarcerated. My proctor, Dr. Raymond Tatami, told me to write my story, you know, write my story. And while I was writing my story and putting everything down and journaling, it started in, what, 1998. Started journaling my experiences and everything. And once I gave it to him, he said, you know, this is a curriculum. Because everything I talked about was not just my experience, but how I got through it. What I had to do, I didn’t understand the word resilience until he gave it to me and helped me give a proper definition of it. A lot of individuals who have been incarcerated, who were incarcerated before they were incarcerated. That’s a powerful statement. I never heard that before. But someone gave that to me a long time ago. He said, I was locked up before I got locked up. So I wrote, sat down. I wrote the curriculum one session at a time. Started doing a workshop. The first workshop was just understanding how we can help one another. Because we suffer and struggle with self-loathing, bad self-esteem, antisocial behavior while incarcerated. We don’t like ourselves, so we don’t like others. I developed Forensic Peer Support in this vein, in my development, because I wanted something that would make us or develop selflessness in individuals who have always been selfish. And me, myself, me, myself included. In my addiction, I was extremely selfish. But once I got free from the addiction, I didn’t know how to be selfless, which is that opposite. So I had to train myself in how to be selfless and do it without worrying about repayment. You know, it’s a big thing about just doing something for somebody and not worrying about if they’re going to do it back or remember that you did it or any of these, like that pat on the back. So this selflessness is what helped me create Forensic Peer Support because that’s its totality in one word. It’s selflessness. It’s helping another individual without you worrying or without you being concerned with what that individual can do for you.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Powerful stuff. So once someone has taken this training and have the skills now as a Forensic Peer Supporter, what does a day in the life look like for them when they’re providing this type of peer support?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Okay. I started, like my days started in a halfway house. I came home to a halfway house in Richmond. I’m not from the Richmond area, but I chose the Richmond area because I wanted to get away from people, places, and things. So it starts with in a halfway house, helping guys wherever they are, meeting them right where they are. If they, if, and I thought, I believe the lie that I couldn’t help someone if I hadn’t helped myself. And that’s a lie. I have the basic fundamental skills as a human being to help anybody on the planet. And because I believe that so wholeheartedly, I know I can help anyone. I can help someone walk across the street. I can help someone write. I can help somebody articulate an idea. I can help someone put a business plan together. And these are the things I do selflessly. I don’t worry about what they can do for me, what they remember me or any of these things. But that’s how the day starts. The day starts with, okay, I know that Jeff is looking for a job. Jeff is looking for a job. So, all right, Jeff, let’s go over a resume. Resume is important. Tell me what your goals are. Tell me what your passion is. Tell me what you’ve done while you’re incarcerated. All right? Just resume writing. The day looks like me not only encouraging, but I won’t hand hold. You know what I mean? I don’t need to hold their hand. See, in peer support, we allow the individual to be on their own journey. That’s who they are and that’s what they’re doing. They’re on their own journey. It’s the same thing in forensic peer. With individuals who have been involved in criminal justice systems, they need a little bit more because they really, first, we really don’t trust people. We don’t trust people at all. So someone saying, listen, how can I help you? We instantly get suspicious. Instantly. That comes from our antisocial behavior that we’ve developed while incarcerated. It comes from our past trauma of being, whether molested, betrayed or lying or not having a full identity of who we are and what is our purpose here in this world. So, a particular day is just going out with a mindset that I can help any human being who has been in a situation I’ve been in and not worry about what they can give me or what they can do for me in turn. The barter system is somewhat in behavior in being incarcerated. Don’t do something for somebody because everyone will always want to know, well, what do you want back? Getting out that mindset set me free. It allowed me, I can help anyone now.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: And it’s very empowering. I mean, just hearing you talk about it, it’s just letting people know that just by being a human, you are capable of helping others is an incredibly empowering statement. Do you think that there are any particular challenges out there when offering forensic peer support? Is there a unique?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yes, there is a unique challenge. The unique challenge doesn’t come from other peers. The unique challenge comes from the professionals. The clinicians, the doctors, the bureaucrats, the people in power who haven’t lived this, know that my lived experience is important, but don’t want to see it as the totality of things. My challenges have been presenting the curriculum to those who I know would benefit from it the most, and have been stonewalled by bureaucratic red tape, so to speak, because how did this ex-offender, returning citizen, ex-con, ex-addict write this fully developed program? How could he possibly have done it? We need to see it, we need to read it, and then when they see it and read it, oh, where did you get this from? My whole material is copyrighted, intellectual properties attached to it and everything, but it’s unbelievable that I did it, that I could have done it. Because of my history, when they look at my background, they say, how did you do this? How could you possibly do it? I don’t want to explain it like it was some miraculous revelation. This is my life. This is my life. This is what I always, my purpose for being here on this earth, to help individuals who’ve gone through what I’ve gone through. That gives my, that pays my rent for being here, so to speak. Yeah. It was Martin Luther King who said that. Our service to others is our rent we pay for being here.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Well, you’re an expert, obviously. I mean, that’s what we learn in Peer Support and Recovery, is that you’re an expert in your own life. And that alone qualifies you to do everything that you’ve done so far.
DAWUD NUBIAN: I could have, and then, Danielle, I decided to go back to school. I’m presently in my master’s program.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Congratulations.
DAWUD NUBIAN: Because I found that my lived experience wasn’t enough for them, for certain, for other people, for me to go into certain doors, you know? So, I decided I didn’t just want to open doors, right? I wanted to own the building. For everyone who told me, oh, you can’t come in here, or you can’t be in here, I wanted to go back and says, and let them know that there’s new ownership. That’s my ambition. To let individuals know that it can, if it can happen to me, if I mean me, the kid who was molested by his uncles and his sisters, the kid who had bad, who did heroin at 11, started getting addicted real early and couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, decided that the best thing for me was to be on the streets with gang, with gang members, stealing, robbing, hurting people, and doing all this type of stuff that I thought was really what I was supposed to do. Because that’s all I saw all around me. I thought people going to work every day, doing, going on a job, were the worst people on the planet. But those were my images. So once I found and I discovered that I was the worst person, I stopped looking at everyone else and started looking at myself. So now when I go to guys and I teach them about this, personally those who are still incarcerated, I give them a simple exercise. The simple exercise is this. For 30 days, you are to look into a mirror every morning and say, I love you. Simple task. But it’s like-
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Simple and hard. Simple and hard at the same time.
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yes. But it’s so simple and it’s life-changing. Because I was given that task for 30 days, did it, and I found that I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like myself, I didn’t- none. Because when I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t like what I saw after I got clear, away from the drugs and everything. I didn’t like what I saw. So telling myself, I love you was like weird at first. It was real weird. And then after a while, it felt like the most natural thing for me to do. So I could tell a woman I love her, I could tell my family I love them, right? But how can I tell them consistently and constantly those three words, but I can’t tell myself?
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, we share the concept of self-care and self-compassion, and it’s amazing how hard self-love really is.
DAWUD NUBIAN: It is.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: You know, it really is. It should be simple.
DAWUD NUBIAN: It should be. It should be.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: But it’s definitely a challenge for us all. One thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, does this particular type of peer support have any specific roadblocks? I was particularly thinking, you know, barrier crimes.: Do you have any experience with how to navigate that?
DAWUD NUBIAN: I have. Forensic peer support actually, uh, dismisses barrier crimes because now the record has to be a part of the resume. And the mess of the past is the message for those who are similarly affected. Take, for example, the drug court in Norfolk or in Richmond, which are now really what they call mental health courts. The person, the individual really doesn’t know really what’s going on, right? Even if they’ve been there multiple times, they really don’t know what the outcome could be. Imagine having someone to talk to and talk to you through that process because they’ve been through the same process. See, it doesn’t alleviate what’s happening, but it actually eases the person in their mind and their thinking, helping them to make a better decision than to out natural as addicts and as social deviants, we have the tendency to lie about everything. No, I didn’t want to dare. I didn’t do it. No, no, they made a mistake. My PO sit down. They just don’t like me. Or my the famous one that I the famous lie that I’ve ever lived there, it was the white man who made me do this. So now you’re having someone looking at another person, right, who has been through what you’ve been through and has become now your lie detector, calling you on all your stuff. So you actually get a mirror of your reality, a dose of it, a real look at it. Because peers actually see each other, it’s a mirror image. It’s a mirror. So the child, well, I guess some of the roadblocks and challenges would be that I’ve never had a peer who did not give in. I never had a peer who got never getting it in, whether in the drug court, whether in halfway houses, whether in the jails, and then training peers, other peers once they’ve been released. Okay. Training them even more of how to go back in and help others. It was the greatest resource that we have is not minerals. The greatest resource we have is people, individuals who help each other. That’s what peer support is all about.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Do we have a lot of forensic peers working in this way in Virginia?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yes. Well, I know in the central region in Richmond, Petersburg, Chesterfield, Henrico, I just trained two trainer trainers in the Tidewater area. So they’re in Chesapeake, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth. There’s a training coming up that they’re doing. I’m waiting for I’m waiting to train someone in in the northern Virginia area as a trainer and in the western region as a trainer. What I wanted to do was take like do the four the four central regions of Virginia and train a male and a female. The reason why there are things in forensic peer support that I really give to females because there’s a trauma section in the course curriculum. Females can talk to other females better than males can. Males, sometimes males may be the product of that trauma. They can’t speak to females concerning it. So I like to give the, make my trainers one male, one female, in each region. So they can tag team with one another. In other words, I don’t, yeah, it’s a dual system where they can help one another.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Right, right. They’re providing peer support to each other while they’re providing peer support.
DAWUD NUBIAN: That’s right. That’s right.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: So do you have any recommendations or suggestions for people who would like to get into this particular type of work?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yeah. I just trained that, I just, I did a training on the National Association of Social Workers. Right. Social workers who work in Department of Corrections, in the jails, who work as social workers, as counselors. And they wanted to know how they can better do their job. I let them understand that then I have to take out, you cannot be a peer in your capacity. Because in your professional capacity, you can’t divulge your history. So how do you make it work then for you? So I give them an extra dose of trauma-informed care. Because trauma is the biggest underlining factor in men and women who turn to drugs, struggle and suffer with their mental wellness, or get involved in criminal behavior. Trauma is one of the biggest factors. It’s an underlining factor. So I give them an extra dose of trauma-informed care so they can see it from the person’s point of view instead of seeing it from what they’ve learned through their education. So they may not have had that experience, but now they can feel the person and be empathetic to the person’s plight, and understand a lot better why the person, why the behaviors, what’s the thinking, why all this happens if you understand that there was a traumatic event, that this person is still living and being affected by, even though it happened when they were six or seven.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: So, what is the future? What kind of future do you see for Forensic Peer Support in general or in Virginia in particular?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Well, I believe in Virginia, it’s going to be impactful. In Virginia, not just in Virginia, but in the United States, there was a model created called the Susquential Intercept Model, which actually was a model set up to help individuals map where they can intercept with people who suffer, struggle with their mental wellness at criminal justice settings, in the courts, the initial arrest, sentencing, re-entry, in prison or in jail, re-entry, everything. So, this intercept, this sequential intercept, alleviates barrier crimes. Because, if you don’t have the lived experience, you cannot be impactful at any of the intercepts. So, that has produced a workforce. A job, it’s job creating. There’s already a model being, there’s a model in Alexandria, Virginia, I do believe, of how they’re following the model and implementing it. But the model can be, the model can be implemented by pretty much anyone in law enforcement, anyone at a hospital, anyone in the district probation and parole offices. It can be in any court. It can be at any halfway house, in mental health court. So these people, their background actually helps their resume. You see what I mean? So the barrier crimes, the barrier crime can’t be a factor in this job placement.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, that’s excellent. I love that idea.
DAWUD NUBIAN: So it’s a new workforce. Just like when PeerWorks just started in Virginia, and it was certifications and everything like that. That started a new workforce. Those weren’t jobs. That was career-minding. That started careers for people. But for those who had certain crimes, they couldn’t work in the field. They couldn’t. So a lot of individual got extremely frustrated and irritated for taking this long training and not being able to utilize it in the workforce. So in forensic peer support, a person who has a history of large drug-induced comas can really help EMTs, can help in the hospitals with those who attempt suicide. So here, there’s a new workforce, a new complete workforce in the jail setting, helping those who are coming in through the initial, in what they call the drunk tank, in that initial setting when they’re first being booked. These are all the places where the resource of utilizing peers can be also useful. But the certified peer who doesn’t have this lived experience can’t help. So it must be someone who’s been in that situation before. And it was really, it was really sad when we discovered that 65% of most of the peers who took the original peer programming in 2016 and 17 had barrier crimes. So they couldn’t go into the workforce.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Wow, I had no idea it was that high.
DAWUD NUBIAN: And a lot of them got discouraged.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, right, myself.
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yeah, they got real discouraged. So I’ve trained those individuals. So now they go to work in the jails. Because their felony actually helps them. And with Ban the Box, as a state employee, they can be state employees.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, that’s excellent.
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yeah, the Department of Corrections has, has, under Harold Clark’s, under Harold Clark’s authority and leadership, has hired many ex-offenders to help ex-offenders, really make it, make it in society and never come back. That’s why his drop, the drop in the state’s recidivism rates, because they’re actually getting the help they really need. And individuals are making a choice now not to recommit crimes or go back to criminal behavior.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Wow, do you have any, as we wrap this up, do you have any resources you’d like to share with the audience?
DAWUD NUBIAN: Yeah, they can go to our website at www.detertoday.org. We have a list of our trainings. We do trauma-informed care. I’ve just added into the training CPR and first aid and AED training. I’m going to add TOVA or therapeutic options in the training also. The reason why is I want them, I want individuals just like I was given the opportunity to have options. To actually be able to do, find your niche, help individuals and train other people. Really train, really, really train. I just trained individuals at the McShinn Foundation, which really does a lot of good, great work in helping peers. I want to take the training to North Carolina, Strengthen Peers in Harrisonburg. I just did a big training up there. Strengthen Peers is a great organization also. Lighthouse Recovery with Marjorie is a great organization. So there are a lot of organizations that are helping peers who have this experience of being incarcerated. So there’s so many resources, so many places a person who has been incarcerated can go, that they don’t have to feel hopeless no more. And they don’t have to feel like they have to commit another crime. again, just to eat, just to survive, or just to live.
DANIELLE DONALDSON: Wow. Well, thank you, Dawud, for what you do. And thank you for joining me today. And I also want to thank the audience for listening into the Peer, to the Peer Into Recovery Podcast, which was brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. If you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a review on iTunes. Take good care of yourselves, everybody. Talk to you soon.
