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Criminal Justice Reflection

Decent Essays

In this week’s class, we learned about the difficult situations that might arise when dealing with the criminal justice system and such things as trauma, mental health illness, and substance misuse. In addition, great emphasis was put on displaying resilience towards these situations in order to ensure that we make our self-care of utmost importance, and to guarantee our success in the criminal justice system (Abramson, 2017, Lecture on Mental disorders, trauma, and substance misuse). Furthermore, the knowledge and skills I have learned throughout the class and from the conference on dealing with trauma, mental illness, and substance misuse, will hopefully aid myself in the criminal justice system, as it is likely that I will be exposed to …show more content…

Likewise, later when I have time to reflect on this reaction, I tend to feel embarrassment and shame since I have the perception that it is shameful to react to this type of situation by freezing up, rather than reacting by engaging the event. However, according to Jeff Morley (2017), this reaction of mine happens to be a normal experience to an abnormal experience, and not something that I should be embarrassed about, thus, I hope to not beat myself up if I do react by “freezing up” again, and if I am still harsh on myself, I can then utilize the skills of mindfulness and meditation to reduce these symptoms, and display self-compassion (Belter, 2017, Lecture on A Brief Introduction to Mindful …show more content…

For instance, since the American Civil War, there has been a myth placed that soldiers who return from war with PTSD are as weak for not being able to deal with traumatic events, when no human should ever have to experience such events as witnessing their friends death (Abramson, 2017, Lecture on Mental disorders, trauma, substance misuse). Likewise, I find it disheartening to know that for those that try to receive assistance for their illness, they not only have to deal with the consequence of their mental disorder, but also the stigma that has been attached to it (Shebib, 2016, pg. 277). Furthermore, an aspect of anger that stood out to myself, is when dealing with anger, one can use paraphrasing to calm the individual down (Abramson, 2017, Lecture on Difficult Situations & Understanding Anger). Prior to this concept, I had been under the assumption that it is difficult to deal with frustrated individuals, perhaps even impossible, and if the moment arose where I had to act, I usually had the tendency to tell the person to calm down, to leave the place, or remove myself from the situation. In addition, at first, I felt that by paraphrasing when someone is angry could cause them more irritation; however, I realized that it does sense that if people want to be heard when angered, the correct manner in responding

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