Inmate Step Study Training

I'm a grateful believer in Jesus Christ. I celebrate recovery from addiction and the effects of complex trauma. My name is John. I'm so glad you're joining me here today to go through kind of how to do a step study on the inside. And so we start in Celebrate Recovery Inside with this book is called the 4-in-1 Step Study Guide, which will walk you through the 25 lessons of what we call step study. Some of you may or may not have access to a Celebrate Recovery Bible, but the Bible makes a great companion with the step study guide. It's not necessarily a requirement, but it does add and make add a lot to the study that you're going to be doing on the inside. So as you get these books, it's important to be acquainted with kind of what you have available to you. In the midst of that, it's four different books published into one, but it's going to walk you through the 12 steps in the 25 lesson kind of format. And so the format that we're going to use, and there should be a overlay that kind of gives you the overall kind of flow on what a step study would look like. It starts with welcoming everybody that's there, opening up in prayer. We go around and we introduce ourselves much like what I did at the beginning. It's not a requirement to say that you're a faithful believer. If you're not there yet, that's okay. Your name would be great. We're not here to twist people's arms, but we do reinforce our names. And the reason we introduce ourselves that way is to reaffirm our identity in Christ instead of maybe what our hurt, our hang-up, or our habit is. After that, we use this small little book to use at the very front on page 12 is where the 12 steps are at. That kind of makes it kind of easy to remember. And on the page prior to that is the eight principles. And so at the beginning, we'll start off by reading either the steps or the principles. It helps to maybe alternate every other week. But we just, the way I do it is technique is I will read one of them and then you kind of go around the circle with however many people you have and just take turns reading one of those until you've read through them all. The next important thing then is the two pages over from that on page 15 are the small group guidelines. And these are important. This is one of the critical things that makes Celebrate Recovery a little bit

different as a recovery ministry is that we have these guidelines to help keep people safe, to have a respectful environment for everyone. And these I am going to actually read through here in the moment to try to help kind of explain them a little bit. But they are called the five guidelines that help ensure your small group is a safe place and it says they need to be read at the beginning of every meeting. And so we're going to read them at the beginning of every meeting. It starts with keep your sharing focused on your own thoughts and feelings. We use I and me statements and we limit three to five minutes. If you haven't figured it out yet, you can't change other people. You can continue to try and be frustrated and angry. So if I'm here to work on me, how about I talk about me and what's going on with me. And we ask you limit to three to five minutes so we're not here for 12 hours. The second one is that there's no crosstalk. That's when two individuals start having a conversation excluding everybody else. We want each person to express their feelings without getting interrupted because one it's rude and disrespectful and two somebody had a train of thought now you just interrupted it and now they're getting frustrated and flustered because they can't remember. So we're respectful. We let one person finish speaking and then we move on to the next person. The third one is we're here to support one another and not fix one another. So that means when someone gets done sharing, we're not going to pause the group. We're not going to do therapy sessions where we single one person out and start trying to pull all this stuff out of them. We're not going to offer advice. We let that person finish their thought and then we move on to the next person. And that's really what that guideline is trying to tell us. The fourth one is a little long. It says anonymity and confidentiality are basic requirements. So what's shared in the group stays in the group. The only exceptions if you threaten to hurt yourself or somebody else. So anonymity is kind of a weird word you really only hear in recovery circles. It just means you don't want people to know you come to some kind of meeting like this. In the environment that you're in that maybe is a little bit difficult in that you probably get pulled from one location

and brought and everybody knows what kind of meeting that you're going to. But when I'm speaking with others outside, I don't share that somebody is being part of my group. That's their anonymity to give up and not mine. Confidentiality, yes what we say here stays here. That's very important. We take that very serious. The exception to that is if you are having threats involved, I'm going to have a conversation and kind of find out what's going on. And that might not stay confidential because my first priority is to keep people safe. And then the last one is, number five, offensive language has no place in a Christ-centered recovery group. It just means that we're trying to help each other learn to speak a little bit better, be a little bit more respectful. It's not that I've never heard of used an F-bomb before. We have cuss jars that you gotta throw a dollar in, but we just help encourage each other to speak a little better. It also means when we start talking about that old way of doing things, we try to keep that really generic. We're not trying to outdo each other with war stories. Once I do that, then somebody else feels the need to outdo, and that really gets us focused on old stuff. We really wanna concentrate on what's God doing in us now, and where's he trying to take us. And so rather than going into excruciating detail on trauma experiences or things like that, we ask you to just keep that fairly generic. When it comes to any kind of current or pending charges, we ask you to, again, just keep that very generic and don't get real specific. That way you don't get all wrapped up in each other's cases. And again, depending on where you're at

and the area that you're at, again, it's not something you probably wanna spend a lot of detail going into anyway. And so that's really at the start of your meeting to lay the ground rules for where you're gonna go. A couple optional elements, if you have the capability, if you can play some worship music, that would be a good thing to kind of set the tone for what you're doing. If you could do a devotional out of the Celebrate Recovery 365, something, again, just to kind of set the tone and get people's minds in the mode of doing this step study. And then we start jumping into the lessons that we have. And so with lesson one that begins here on page 17, it's called Denial. And again, if you do have the Bible, there is an outline that's in the front of this Bible that will walk you through some scripture to kind of help go through that. In the back of the Bible, there's a 30-day devotional. Day one is called Denial, which kind of pairs up with that. And so if you do have the Bible, there's some reading that you can do to kind of help kind of illustrate this as in you're preparing for it. But there's an acrostic, which basically is a word that has letters that you use to carry over into other thoughts.

And so when you work through the lesson, again, hopefully you have one of these books in front of you while I'm doing it. I encourage you just to read the lesson part. It's very short. And so just to make sure everybody's kind of starting with a common reference and a common framework as they kind of jump into it. And then the questions start on page 19. And again, that's where, as a facilitator, I usually start first and I will share my answers. And then I allow, as we go around the room, to let everybody answer. That question with the answers that they have, hopefully they've had that written down ahead of time. In some facilities, you may not have access to a pen. So hopefully they've at least had a chance to read the question and have formulated an answer in their mind before they do that. And then we just basically just work through all the questions in that kind of format. I like to kind of play leapfrog is what I call it. So the same person doesn't have to start first every single time. So I'll do the first one. I'll let the next person, they start number two, and then the next person starts number three. But we're all answering the same question. It's just, we kind of start a little different just to give everybody an opportunity to listen at first

instead of having to be the one that has to answer. Once you get through all of the questions, you can kind of do a preview of the next week's lesson. Remind anything of any announcements or anything else that's coming up at the very end. You can take prayer requests or not, and then encourage you to pray out as a group. And that's really kind of how your step study process goes. Depending on where you're at, if you're in a federal facility, there's an 18 lesson syllabus that you can follow that will walk you through this book. Otherwise, in other facilities, you may not be able to meet every week. I encourage you only do, especially at the beginning, one lesson at a time. As you get later on and the people kind of get in the groove of how the sharing process works, you can begin to double up as you get a little bit farther along, but I wouldn't do that at least through the first two books that are in here out of the four that you have. Step four involves an inventory process and on lesson nine. And I'm gonna do a separate video that kind of talks through kind of how to do that inside. That in and of itself is kind of a long kind of lesson, but I'll just kind of keep it simple and short as you look at lesson nine. You don't really wanna go into a lot of detail. The last thing in the world we want you to do

is to start confessing to things that could get you into further trouble. That's really not the point. The point is to kind of get in touch with the feelings that you've experienced, the experiences that you've had in your life that have kind of shaped you to kind of get to where you're at and help you kind of understand that hurt to hang up to habit kind of process that you've gone through. So again, writing it down is something you're gonna wanna do, but you're gonna wanna keep it secure. You're gonna wanna keep it fairly generic and not make any confessions in any kind of written form. And as you get into the process of sharing, again, something I'll tell. more in another video. It's obviously going to be somebody you need to trust and somebody that you probably have some assurances, some confidentiality as you kind of go forward. So hopefully that helped you a little bit. So thank you all for listening to this and good luck and I'm excited to see what you're going to be able to do with a step study on the inside.