Debriefing 1 of 3 (Felix Holland)

Families have been working overseas for a year, two years, six months, ten years, fifteen years, and they’re coming back whether as an individual, as a couple, or as a family.  Facing the challenges of leaving one country going into their passport country and needing to make sure the transition goes well.  One of the new things a lot of organisations are talking about is debriefing.

What is debriefing?

Debriefing is a conversation where you have a chance to talk about yourself, in the different areas of your life having a secure environment, a time frame.  It’s not just after church or after a seminar where you just try to shoot off a thought or couple of ideas that you have.   But you have a secure environment where you talk about yourself, about different areas of your life, about your work, about your occupational situation, about your relational situation.  “How am I doing with friends, with certain people in my life?  Positives?  Challenging situations?”  Then there are the areas that relate to your organisation.  Several people I know have stress in the organizational dynamic area with their leader, with colleagues, etc.  It is just good to have a safe environment where you can talk about this.  Then you talk about your physical situation, your psychological well being, your support—financial support, emotional support from people back home.  Also your spiritual well being—“Has my relationship with God changed?  How do I see God?  Is He close to me?  Do I feel close to Him?  Etc.”  So you have a one hour time frame or maybe longer where the facilitator, the debriefer, asks you specific questions and you have the freedom to talk about whatever you want to talk about.  It is good that it is not a “Oh, you are wrong kind of thing” or “in my situation it was like this.”  The debriefer’s role is simply to listen and to ask stimulating questions.

When should this take place?

There are different times when this should take place.  I would like to start talking about regular routine debriefings.  Every six months to have a time set aside with someone, with a counselor, with a debriefer, with someone from your resource department where you talk specifically about these things.  Another time would be when you return to your home country, end of term debriefings sort of.  Then you wrap up your time overseas and you talk about how it went.  What positive came out?  What didn’t work so well?  What did I learn?  What areas have I grown, etc.?  Just talking about it and receiving stimulating questions can help you sort it out and put them in categories in your mind, in your head and wrap up things.  Another time when debriefing is good is in critical incidence, after critical incidence where you have a high stress situation and you have to talk about it.  So it is facilitated in a way where you just vent.  You talk about certain things and it helps to ‘off load.’

Who needs to be debriefed?  Just the person working?  The whole family?  The children?  Is it different for different people?

Yes.  It is definitely different for different people.  Times change.  It is not only the man who works and the wife who follows.  Just comes to my mind that I just received the handout of the seminar I’m going to speak with the participant list.  On the participant list is the man, then an exclamation point, plus wife exclamation point.  So you see in the whole participant list you see that the man looks more important than the wife.  I think if a wife would have written this, she would have written this differently.  It is a family, the unit who goes overseas.  It is the husband who might have a certain job contract, but the wife has a major impact as well. The children have a major impact also.  So they go overseas as a family unit, as a family system.  Each family member has an influence on the family system.  If my wife has issues, health issues, or psychological issues, it has an effect on me, on my work, on my well being.  Because I care about her and I carry her burdens.  If my children have school issues or relational issues and are struggling in some area, it also has an effect on me as well as on my wife.  So a routine debriefing should be done with a whole family unit.

Okay, so we talked debriefing as an individual, debriefing as a family.  Now, how do you debrief children as children are part of the family?

Yes, children don’t really have the vocabulary to express their thoughts, their emotions, their well being.  Depending on the age group, you need different tools to do this.  We as adults, yeah we can talk—this was like this and I felt like this in this situation and yeah my boss did this to me to make me feel like this etc.  Children don’t have this.  So you use tools like words.  You ask them about this—describe this in this situation.  What happened in this situation?  You can use pencils, painting, and drawing to ask then to draw a picture of their family.  Then you talk about the pictures.

What I like to use is Playmobile—these little dolls.  You collect different figures for your family like one for dad, one for mom, sisters and brothers, and you include a dog and a cat and maybe a hamster.  Whoever is important, whoever this child feels is part of the family unit and then you just play a little bit with those.

Debriefing means, especially at the end of a term, debriefing means that there is a transition ahead—you sort of cross a bridge from one country to another country, from one situation to another situation.  You ask the child to play and to move these figures over the bridge–for example, from Thailand to Germany.  When we did this with this one family, there were a lot of tears.  There were three children there and each of the children had mom, dad, dog, and the family unit together and they had to move them over the bridge.  The parents were not allowed to interrupt them—“We have to do it this way or on and on.”  It was the child that had to do it.  They started smiling and then in the middle of the bridge, they broke and they cried—“I cannot do it, I can’t leave my dog at home.  I want to take my dog to Germany and things like this.”  It gave them an insight into the child’s heart, an insight for the parents as well as an insight for the facilitator, the debriefer.  I was able to ask some more questions, to dig a little bit deeper.  So it helps the child to express what is actually going on in the life of the child.

So it is important to debrief as an individual, as a husband, as a wife, and as a family.  Also allow the children to express their feelings whether it is in drawings or characters.  We’ve said that debriefing needs to be, if possible, every six months, regularly, six months,  maybe at once a year minimum, end of service or before you come back for a time of furlough or deputation, doing it with the whole family.

When we come back for another program we will talk about what we as individuals need to look for in a person who debriefs us.