In today’s world brimming with conflict, it’s not unusual to personally experience stress, grief, panic, even trauma.
The ministry Spiritual First Aid™ offers the free downloadable PDF resource, 14 Self-Aid Fact Sheets, which provide a quick reference overview of the following common everyday mental health challenges:
When stress and anxiety take hold during life-threatening criminal or terrorist self-defense and church security encounters, your body can feel like it’s working against you—your heart races, your chest tightens, and your mind starts spinning. But one of the most powerful tools for calming your body and mind is breathing.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Concealed Carry Daily Prayer ]
Spiritual First Aid™ has created two complimentary resources to help you regain your composure in critical incidents.
1. Breath-Based Grounding Techniques: 3 Evidence-Based Exercises to Reduce Stress and Restore Calm introduces three evidence-based breathing skills to help bring you back to a state of calm and focus:
For example, here are the steps in the Box Breathing Pattern:
Gentle Response is the organization founded by John Riley, a retired police officer and certified crisis intervention specialist with the National Anger Management Association. He and his team travel all over the United States conducting Conflict De-escalation Training seminars.
SemperVerus attended this excellent seminar, held in Immanuel Church, Holland, Michigan, May 14, 2023. With Mr. Riley’s permission, here are notes we took during that seminar and scenario training:
• “A gentle response defuses anger” Proverbs 15:1 (MSG)
• Conflict de-escalation: lowering the intensity of an agitated person to minimize a potentially volatile situation from becoming a critical violent incident.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, A Prayer for Church Security Team Members ]
• Peacemaking and de-escalating people’s anger is the goal, while staying alert to your own personal and public safety. When overwhelmed, stay safe and be an expert witness.
• Mindset Priority: Each church security team member must have a “ministry mindset” — Every contact (even eye contact) is a ministry opportunity to represent the mission of the church. Don’t let your actions be heavy-handed and damage that mission.
When confronted by a criminal or terrorist deadly force threat, human performance experiences extreme stress, affecting the potential victim’s self-defensive cognitive, physical, and emotional ability.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Chart: The Spectrum of Potential Threat Personas in Self-Defense and Church Security ]
Police veteran, founder of Critical Incident Review, and use-of-force expert Jamie Borden, explains in his book, Anatomy of a Critical Incident: Navigating Controversy, the many critical factors that must be taken into consideration when evaluating police officer behavior in these highly complex encounters.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, The 5 Elements of Self-Defense Law ]
Law enforcement officers are the book’s target audience, but the following split-second decision-making elements excerpted from the book also apply to responsibly armed self-defense citizens and church security team volunteers facing life-and-death conditions. Where the word “officer” is located in the book, it is replaced with [defender] in this excerpt:
[ Read SemperVerus articles on the topic of CHURCH SECURITY ]
• Tunnel Vision — The phenomenon where a [defender] becomes narrowly, visually focused on a specific threat, potentially missing other critical elements of the situation.
• Auditory Exclusion — A temporary inability to process or encode certain sounds, often due to high stress, which can lead to missed commands or critical background noises. This is not an individual going deaf; rather just not encoding or filtering the audible stimulus, affecting the ability to recall later. The question becomes: not was the sound audible in the evidence, rather, was the sound perceived or heard by the [defender].
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Concealed Carry Daily Prayer ]
COGNITIVE OVERLOAD: