Criminal reform: Why wake-up calls are windows of opportunity | Bishop Omar Jahwar | Big Think

The first way to break the wall down, and this is very important, is someone previously went through the same issue that you're going through and they made it. So one of the keys is finding others who have overcome the issues that you are facing. That gives a person a sense of hope.

I say this a lot, that hope does for you -- you can use hope when you don't have product; you can use hope when you don't have a real solution. So hopefulness starts building your resistance to this idea of bitterness and stagnation. You need to have a hopeful outcome, and that hope normally is triggered with someone who says, "I affirm where you are, but I know how to get you past it. I know where we can go beyond it."

Now, that might take a serious -- I don't want to get too theoretical, but we used to call it impact impression. Sometimes you need an impact impression that causes you to wake up and say, "Okay" -- some people call it intervention. Or maybe you need some series of ideas. Or maybe you need an awakening, but there has to be this moment where it affirms that you are not alone.

See, if you think your problem is very unique, you believe that no one else can understand it other than you, so you've got to have some people say, "No, I get that. I get that. That makes sense to me." But that's not all, that's just the beginning.

And so you've got to then travel over this arc of how you move past these small nuances of hurt and pain that keep you kind of constrained. Impact impression is a young man who is operating in a lifestyle that is negative, whether it be drugs, whatever their case, and someone who he loves is killed instantly.

Whoa, how do I respond to that? Do I now become a killer? What's my immediate – is it fight or flight? And it's those lit-up moments, those pictures that become permanent scars or permanent marks on your thought process.

I used to be good, but I realized a death, a loved one who turns on you, those things that really cause you to wake up, it's in those moments that someone has to be there to say, "Wait a minute, let me reorganize what you're looking at and let me take you a little deeper," because if not you will either use it as a way to gain momentum in a negative route or you'll use it to get yourself help, get yourself whole again.

So those impact impressions, I mean, man, I cannot tell you how many young people, when I interviewed them when they went to prison, their first interview they would say, "I was just doing this and then my boy called me..." They were just like: "Wednesday was just like Tuesday," but something happened that Wednesday that changed every other Wednesday for the rest of their life. That's the impact impression.