CHRIS NEWCOMB: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with the focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I’m your host, Chris Newcomb. Thanks for listening to another episode of Peer Into Recovery podcast, and we have a great guest today. We have Sharika Lampkin-Briscoe who is coming to us from Optum Health and is going to tell us about Seeking Safety, a class that she leads there that is beneficial to peers in their work to recover and to achieve maximum health and wellness in their life. So let’s jump right into it. Sharika, welcome to our podcast. We appreciate you being here.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Thank you for having me.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: You’re welcome. We would like to start out with just getting to know you just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your story of origin, where you came from and how you got to the journey to here working in peer support professionally.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Well, I was born in Alabama, raised in Miami, so I know all about what they would call drugs, rap, rock and roll, and everything else.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Those of you who didn’t see that, I flashed the heavy metal sign.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: I grew up in Miami, a lot of childhood trauma, a lot of adversity. I’m a teen mother and I moved to Virginia. So my recovery journey started 11 years ago in April of this year. Mental health and substance use. My drug of choice were prescription pills, oxycodone, whatever I can get my hands on. I mixed it with alcohol because that was the great thing to do at that time. That’s what made me okay. Eleven years ago, I met a different side of life where my son decided to wake me up and say, mommy, do I have to clean you up today because I would normally binge drink and pop pills and randomly pass out and wake up and not know that I had done those things. That was an eye-opener for me. I chose that day to do something different. We all know that that’s not easy. ut five years ago, my wife introduced me to peer support and I didn’t know that that’s what this was called. The recovery story of someone who was an active addiction or someone who wanted to find a different way to deal with life’s adversities by looking at some of the positive things and making sure that I always carry me with me. I’ve been in this field now for five years. I’ve been in mental health for 20 years. So this is just another side to life for me. And this is just my day to day.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: It’s interesting that you bring up that your son had kind of had this aha moment with you. And they say out of the mouth of babes, often truth comes to wreck our categories, to show us things that we may not see. It bears mentioning you grew up in Miami, correct?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Correct.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: And now you live in Chester, Virginia. Okay, so big difference there.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Absolutely.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: No beaches, you know, hurricanes, not too much. That might be a positive.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: I kind of missed the hurricanes. I grew up a kid that hurricanes for us just meant no lights, you know, strong winds. And we could sit on our porch, you know, on my grandmother’s rocking chair and be in the eye of a storm. And it’d be the most calming, exhilarating thing ever. Because we fell asleep to the wind and the rain. And so, you know, while we had daylight, we did things like ram barefoot, racing up and down the street. We engaged with one another. And so Virginia is a big, big, big difference. I miss home, but I think Virginia is a better space for my children. If I could just add some of the avenues from my childhood.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right. Well, it sounds like it was, well, first of all, very brave. As a non-Florida resident, I’m like, no, enjoy the hurricanes. I’m going to stay up here. It sounds like it was a, it was simultaneously, what could have been a dangerous time was also a time of innocence and being connected to kind of more the elemental, elemental things of life. You know, you mentioned Falling Asleep to the Wind, which would make a great song lyric, by the way. Now we can just put our cell phone on.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: I’ve tried that. It doesn’t have the, I literally have to open my window and hear the crickets and birds. Because as a child, that was my safe bubble, locking myself in my room and opening the window and listening to the crickets, listening to the dogs bark, listening to the traffic. Whatever the element could be that, that’s what rested my mind and brought my mind back to ease. And so, in a lot of sense, that’s the part of my recovery journey as well, because it still to this day creates a safe space.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Safety really is everything. It’s an all or nothing thing. Half safety is still half danger. To have that safety as a kid, especially, is absolutely necessary. It sounded like you, in your early formative years, had some real lack of safety going on that made a huge impression upon you as a young person about maybe the way the world works or doesn’t work. And then, how do you deal with that inner stuff going on as it relates to the outer stuff that’s not safe?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Right. So, for me, I think I always, singing was my thing. As a kid, I could make a beat, sing a song, sing a hook to anything. My favorite singer of all time is Fantasia and she’s up there with Whitney houston for me. And I also like indie, so I like India Irene. Very soulful singers, singers that can take you from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum, and they do it so gracefully. That created a safe bubble because I would go in my head to certain things and music was one. I was called a walking radio, just created a safe space.So I would stay involved in the choir at school, in the choir at church. I spoke well as a teenager and so I became a youth minister. And then I questioned the religion too much, kind of like step down because for me, I still have a lot of unanswered questions, but as it relates to my trauma, because to me it’s like how can, at that time it was how can God love me and He allowed this to happen?

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Huge question. Very realistic and important question.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Yeah. It wasn’t until I got older that I started to understand and I was able to explain it to my children because it was very protective of them. Because I just, I felt violated and the people that violated me were people that I trusted, that I said was family, that a family that I was born into, a family that I was chosen to, and it just, it didn’t work out that way. So I viewed everybody as the enemy, especially when it came to my children. To me, everybody, everybody represented something and we wasn’t safe. The world wasn’t safe. Nobody was safe.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: What a hard way to walk through the world, not really by choice. You get that message as a child, whether children are not able to, their brain is not fully developed to see the gray in life. And so you can take a bad experience and suddenly like, like if you go to a beach trip and have a bad experience, all beaches are bad and they have great white sharks waiting to come out and eat you. It sounds like there was some, I mean, I don’t know if it’s PTSD. How did you move through some of that to get to a place where safety, or maybe it’s still a process, but maybe more so now than when you were younger, that you feel more safe in the world?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: So once I moved from Florida, I kind of put it in a box. It’s like a treasure box. I put it in the box and I locked it away. I became a whole other person here. You know, that person there wasn’t the person here. And I began to just be a different person. I was able to zone out and be drunk and party and do all of those things. And nobody knew my trauma. Nobody knew my story. And so I would definitely hide it from people because who wants to deal with someone? Who doesn’t know how to deal with themselves? And I knew nothing about PTSD or any of those things. I knew about bipolar. I knew about schizophrenia. I knew about ADHD. I knew about autism because of being in a mental health realm as direct support and a direct support supervisor. But I didn’t know anything about all of the other things. PTSD outside of being in the military. And I’ve never been in the military.

Meeting my wife now five years ago and her introducing me to peer support in the recovery realm and just seeing the work that she was doing in Baltimore with the Impact Group, her best friend and just the different avenues, the different elements of recovery, the different pathways and knowing that my pathway didn’t have to be like somebody else. I was doing it on what I thought was my own for five years before that, six years before that and then she came along and was like, well, hold on, let me give you some tools that help you continue down this road so that if you just don’t happen to stumble, you don’t have to fall, you can pick yourself back up, you don’t have to stay down there and Seeking Safety was one of those things.It was one of those trainings along with RAP and Mental Health First Aid. That was a big part, just being able to check in and take me with me, knowing that every day if I made myself responsible for me, nobody else could tell my story, nobody else could say where I was or what I was doing or what I was thinking, they would have to listen to me.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Twice, you’ve said that in a conversation, you said, was it Take Me With Me? I think it’s how you said it.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Take me with me.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’ve never heard that before. It’s really powerful because when we have the trauma and that kind of stuff, for lack of a better word, we splinter. If we have a bad relationship with family, maybe we become reticent to give our emotional reaction that’s real or what’s really on our mind. But taking you with you, that to me speaks of a real synergy of really being okay in your own skin and I am who I am and I’m okay with that. If you like it, cool. If you don’t, go fly kite.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: In the world that we live in, people always look for a reason to justify their behaviors. Whether it’s, I’m 225 pounds, so someone can come and say, well, you’re fat. Okay. I was fat yesterday. I’m going to be fat today and I might be fat tomorrow. Give me something else. Well, you’re dark skin. Okay. I wasn’t born on the paler side of things. That’s a part of taking you with you inside and out. I know that I live with PTSD. I know I live with severe anxiety. I know that I will forever live with the craving of popping a pill or having one too many drinks. I know that if I am presented with some things that my mind ain’t quite used to, dealing with my past trauma, that that could be the result if I do not put into place the tools from my toolbox, the coping skills, the practices. If I don’t check in with me, if I don’t do some groundings, I can’t end up back there. I can’t end up where I started.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: You mentioned that when you met your wife, it was a game changer. What’s one thing that she may have said to you that was a game changer, that like a light bulb went on?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: That I don’t have to live in the shadows of my addiction. That I don’t have to allow my addictions to live for me. That was a big thing for me because she didn’t look at me as, oh, an addict. She looked at me like another human being and said, hey, I have my own story to tell. We’re walking side by side and I’m 11 years and she’ll be 25 years in October. It is a powerful thing to have someone that understands your day-to-day and understands that every day is not going to be good but can meet you where you are and say, okay, let’s practice some coping. What do we need to move from the toolbox or we need to add to the toolbox? How do we need to express this journey? And a lot of it is just giving back in the community and being able to sit and talk to someone else. Being able to share some of my story with someone just to encourage them, hey, you’re not out here by yourself. You’re doing this by yourself. This is what recovery looks like. It’s not all dolled up. It’s not wrapped in a bow. It guards. It bruises. It’s missing teeth and black eyes.It’s missing hair and we’re not thrown away. You can’t throw us in the garden. The damaged parts can be healed.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: The word damaged for a lot of people can be like, oh my gosh. It’s not talking about the essence of the being of the person. Just like if I fell and broke my leg, we wouldn’t be like, oh, Chris is so damaged. His tibia broke in half. He needs to go to the doctor and get it put back together and it’s going to be damaged for a while. But the essence of who I am is not like, oh, he is a complete waste of space because he fell and broke his leg. You know, everything you were saying is the perfect segue into talking about you work at Optum Managed Health Care Company. And how is that different as a Peer Recovery Specialist?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: I’m a registered and I am a registered supervisor. So I have a master’s and a bachelor’s in human services with a minor in psychology. And so I, I’ve worked in every realm, social work. I’ve worked in the realm of therapy. I’ve worked, I’ve worked at a fast food restaurant. So I have experienced on every level. And currently, I utilize the life skills that I have in all of this education. So I don’t walk up to someone and say, Hi, I’m Sharika. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s. Hi, I’m Sharika and I’m a person in long-term recovery.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: And so working in managed health care, how has that been different for you experientially as from the peer perspective to the other places you’ve worked kind of doing peer stuff?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Well, in the community, I have worked as far as peer recovery goes. I’ve been a peer both for the ACT team at a local CSB. I have been the only peer responding to overdoses for a CSB underneath the supervision of the fire department. I’ve sat at tables with doctors that say that MAT is the only way and we’ve got into heated conversations. Taking what I’ve learned in the field, I’m able to put it in on the other side of the MCO world and sit at these same tables with the governors and the stakeholders and managed care organizations and say, hey, this is what we’re missing. This is what the community is missing. This is what we’re missing when you’re talking about peer support, when you’re talking about recovery. This is what’s needed. I am the link between the managed care organization in the community. I go and do trainings, I do visits, I listen to what the problem is, listen to what’s limited, what can be used more, what can we remove? I take it back and I’m able to represent not only the managed care organization, but I’m able to represent individuals like me, people in long-term recovery, people with mental health diagnoses, people that’s dual diagnosed, that don’t even realize it. Just by that. A lot of it’s intimidating because a lot of the language is different. They’re speaking this professional jargon and I’m still saying, hey, listen, this is what it is. So just the segue into the communication part is a lot. But I wouldn’t trade it because all of this experience is life-changing. Because you couldn’t tell me 10 years ago, 11 years ago that I would be in this space.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: It’s a vital role because there are stereotypes about everything in life. Rightly, wrongly, good or bad. Like, oh, Managed Care Company, oh, they’re evil. Oh, the peer support people, they don’t know anything. It’s like, I just want to give you a pill. We have all those things. But all of it has value at some sense. So for what it sounds like is you going in with the peer flag and putting it in the middle of the table and going, okay guys, you guys have some value in what you’re saying. This is the peer flag. Let me tell you a little bit about it and why we hold it high. Because there are people in the community that suffer from X, Y, Z PDQ. And the language is different from what an MCO does. Yeah. And so let me tell you a little bit about that. Do you feel like you get open ears and hearts and minds?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: When I started, no. Because, you know, as you just stated, a lot of people that have acronyms behind their names, whether it’s clinician, whether it’s doctor, Esquire, a lot of people look at you like, okay, you’re just an addict that became clean for the moment. You don’t really know what you’re talking about. We went to school for this and we have this education. It wasn’t until my very first interaction, peer-to-peer, he was in the middle of a crisis, and nobody could get him to calm down. I mean, throwing chairs, I mean, everything. I mean, launching at people, threatening to kill people. Nobody could get him to calm down, not the doctor, not the clinician, nobody. I had just come in to work, and all I heard was, we need support up front.

So I come up front to the lobby, and you have to examine the situation, and you have to make sure that everybody’s safe. I just politely said, can I get everybody to remove themselves? This is too many people for one person. This person is overstimulated. You got to give this person some space. Just immediately went into what I knew, which was grounding. Let’s focus somewhere. Let’s start somewhere because we’re not going to be able to talk about the problem if we can’t calm down. I said, because right now they’re looking at us like we need to be in an asylum. And when I say us, I mean me and you both, because they’re looking at me like I’m crazy because I’m standing here, and they’re looking at you like you need to be dosed. And it’s not that we don’t have to be that way. And when I say crazy, I don’t mean in a mental sense. I mean in a, oh my gosh, she’s putting herself in danger. She’s putting herself in safety. Safety, something has to be wrong. But all my training says, give the person a certain amount of distance, but talk directly to the person. Talk to the human being. Don’t talk at them using their diagnoses. Talk to them. And it took about 45 minutes, but I had the doctor’s ear, I had the clinician’s ear, I even had the receptionist sitting there taking notes. And after that, the debriefing was, all right, how do we do this? How do we work together?

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: And it seems to be that way everywhere you go, you have to make an example out of somebody to let them know, I’m more than just a preface.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah. And it’s a school of hard knocks, really versus a school of formal education. And they each have ups and downs, good and bad, or however you look at it. But if you have the two of them together, one person will really look out. But if you don’t and you have two people with those skills and they can work together, look out. Because now you’ve got one. It’s like in the military, they say watch your six, which is watch your back. And so your other teammates are watching for sniper fire behind you. And it’s the same thing when you’re going in to help someone in crisis. It’s like, okay, I can come at it from the diagnostic standpoint. You can come at it from a life experience standpoint. Both are important. And that’s how we can work together. So it’s powerful with the MCO to have you be able to bring that perspective. So you’ve had that same experience in your life with safety. So tell me how that plays into the work you’re doing with seeking safety as a formal group and kind of teaching, and then how your life experience informs that.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: So Seeking Safety is a training that embodies creating a safe space for peer-to-peer interaction. So it can be done with a group of peers, it can be done one-on-one, but it’s putting control back in the hands of the peer itself, but in a safe space. You know, I’m not going to judge you because you told me that you used today. I’m not going to judge you if you told me you didn’t stick to your commitment. I’m not going to judge you if the topic of our group today is empathy, and you tell me that you don’t even know what that is. I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to listen to you. I am here to teach. I am here to learn from you. I am here to help you build a safe way to process, so that maybe next week you’ll stick to your commitment. Maybe next week that’ll be seven more days of you not using again, that you can feel the consistency in change. Pretty much embodies a meeting without a meeting, and it can be done peer to peer. It doesn’t have to be a clinician doing it or a doctor doing it in psychosocial. No, it could be a group of peers sitting together having a discussion.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: As I joked earlier, is whenever two or three are gathered, you can have a meeting in this case. A meeting is a conversation. It’s a physical presence or a Zoom presence in this case, but a presence and then a conversation. Is there a formal curriculum or book?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: There is a formal curriculum.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Read the title for me. Seeking Safety is?

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: I said Seeking Safety, a treatment manual for PTSD and substance use, but it goes so far beyond PTSD and substance use. The group itself can be called Seeking Safety or you can call it whatever you want to call it. But it’s so many different topics and activities and quotes. So let’s take this page for instance. It says, coping with triggers. That’s the topic of the group that day. The quotation is, when you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it, stamp it with your personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: That’s a great quote. It sounds like in seeking safety to get people to realize, I already have these qualities. They may have gotten hijacked by PTSD or trauma of some sort. But this safety thing.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: The thing that ties mental health and substance use on all spectrums together is the safety part. So when you’re in active addiction or living with the diagnoses or even on the ID side and you have diagnoses, the thing that plays the most on all of these spectrums is the fact that nobody’s concerned about their safety. Right? Nobody’s concerned about their safety. When we’re using, we’re not using and saying, oh, I’m going to use safely. I’m going to drink safely. You know, in the intellectual disability world, they’re not saying, oh, well, I want my weekly allowance or I’m going to run outside, but I’m going to do it safely. But then when we realize, you know, when we have that moment of clarity, when we have that moment of understanding and we realize everything we are doing is putting our life in jeopardy some way, shape, or form. If I create a safe barrier for myself, and I do mean safe barrier, not barriers, not hindrance. But if I create a safe line, then I know that I can get more done behind this safe line, with this safe line wrapped around me, than I would ever be able to get done just out here. So in the recovery realm, your toolbox is like your vest, right? Your safety vest, your taking you with you, your recovery journey is like your gun, right? Because it’s already loaded, and it’s loaded with all of these things that you already know about yourself, that nobody can use against you. And so then being present, putting you in the forefront is your badge. It’s the badge that says, I have been through some things, but those things don’t hold me back, you know? They’re not listed all over me, but those things don’t hold me back.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: No. They actually propel you forward.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: My test will always be my testimony. My trials will always help propel me into victory, you know? So, and I use air quotes because everybody has their own little tidbit, they want to put it in and how they want to do things. But at the same token, it’s just safety is everything. And once we create a safe space, once we help peers create a safe space, you’ll see a world of difference. And of course, like anything else, like medicine, it’s going to take a while, you know? Like treatment, cancer treatment is going to take a while. HIV treatment, take a while, you know? Detox, it takes a while.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: When the light starts to go on, then it’s like I start giving out like the pom-poms, you know, like the cheerleader pom-poms, like, you can’t do it, be safe, yeah! You know, because you see that enthusiasm, and all of a sudden it’s like, they’re like a horse to water or someone coming out of the desert to an oasis. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is not all there is. And Seeking Safety just sounds like such a great oasis for folks in the desert of uncertainty and lack of safety. So let’s close with this. There’s an artist named Harry Connick Jr. came out with an album in 1994 called She. There’s a song on that record called Safety is just Danger Out of Place. And how important it is with our discussion today, the emphasis on having internal safety, not to the exclusion of external safety, but that internal safety is so important for mental health recovery and continued health and wellness. So Sharika, thank you so much for being a part of our program today and all the great work you’re doing at the Managed Care Organization, reaching out to the community and being a peer liaison to bring help and hope and healing to folks.

SHARIKA LAMPKIN-BRISCOE: Thank you so much.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I’d like to thank our listeners for listening to the Peer Into Recovery podcast, which is brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. And 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 brief review on iTunes. In the meantime, please take care of yourselves, everyone. We’ll see you soon.