Left of Greg 033 Susan Berkowitz

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, I'm the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content down there if you're already a subscriber, and it was a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like and subscribe, follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis. So please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks.

Alright everyone, thanks for tuning in. Today we have on the show Susan Berkowitz, who is a speech-language pathologist and deals a lot with folks with special needs students and children, and has been doing it for a really, really long time. To get into why she's going to be on here and why we reached out, I'm just going to go ahead and throw it right to Greg to start off with and kind of tell us and the listeners and everyone out there why we wanted to have Susan on first, and then we'll get into her now.

I appreciate that, Brian, and welcome, Susan. I think you both know today's a very special show for me. I've been working on setting this up for some time now. I would recommend at this point that any teachers, first responders, parents, not only pay close attention to this podcast, but because all our podcasts are free, definitely make sure you catalog this and send it around to your friends.

We're going to talk about a variety of topics today. One of them is AAC, augmentative and alternative communication, is all about communication methods used to supplement or replace speech or writing for those folks who live within and amongst us who might have an impairment in the production or comprehension of either the spoken or a written word. For a long time now, we've wanted to talk to someone on the podcast about the differences and similarities in nonverbal communication, including both gestures and body language, and use of symbolic aided communication in extremities and those emerging situations that we encounter often, and that certainly our listeners and our viewers do.

Brian, you and I both know there are a lot of posers out there, and there are a lot of folks who rely solely on their body language knowledge by tuning into a TED Talk or listening to Ekman, or Navarro, or the Pease family, or some other talking head telling them all the benefits of body language. I'm not a believer in any body language or paralanguage system that isn't based on a slang comparison that works in people, events, and vehicles and has the domains of human behavior, because an individual body language cue without context doesn't give you relevance, and without context and relevance, they don't mean a thing. You could tell somebody that hasn't had the training that this means stress, and it actually means that the person is given a comfort cue. If you tell them this means anger, and it's actually the person yawning.

So nonverbal communication is hugely important, and certainly to our audience. What I posed to Susan a long time ago is, "Hey, let's say rather than targeting an applicant for trying to determine probable cause, let's say instead we're involved in an emergency evacuation." Brian, I'll take you back down to Dallas just a little while ago with the school, and we encounter now a roomful of kids with autism. They'll likely have a unique response to this emerging situation. If you couple that with their likely anxiety disorders, that's going to create a perfect storm for law enforcement professionals or emergency personnel who might not be able to cope with that, or maybe they haven't had training how to use the behaviors that they're witnessing or that the kids might exhibit. So you can imagine how those untrained first responders could actually needlessly complicate what would be an otherwise manageable situation. Just a repetitive training situation could go off into a spiral.

At Arcadia (Arcadia Education Group), we feel the training changes behavior. So Brian and I sought out a subject matter expert in the field, and I was so surprised that there was one that stood out like a beacon. Our guest today, Susan Berkowitz, has provided training in the past to first responders, law enforcement professionals, and court-appointed advocates for non-speaking individuals. Brian, I think she's perfectly suited for our needs and what we do. Susan, I just can't tell you how excited I am to finally have you on the podcast.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. I do have experience here in Southern California. We have fires, which if you watch the news anywhere, you hear all about, and so that's an added concern. I know in my own neighborhood was evacuated a few years ago, and I happen to know there are at least four kids with nonverbal autism living in my neighborhood, probably more. So that's a very real issue for families even in situations like fires, which happen routinely here in Southern California, unfortunately. In addition to those things like school shootings and other emergency situations, when you have kids who are prone to anxiety, who have no idea what's going on, who can't communicate how they feel, aren't understanding, it's out of their routine, yes, that anxiety ramps up really high. Anxiety can show itself in many different behaviors and many different kinds of responses in kids. So for first responders, teachers, to understand where the behavior is coming from and what is being communicated is really important.

No, no, that's brilliant. Brian, one of the things I think — I'm sorry, we're going out of order, usually we talk about your background and stuff like that, but you hit a home run right out of the chute, and we loved that. I wanted to throw something at you. What we found on use-of-force cases and expert witness testimony that we've done — and we've only taught in 53 countries — but one of the things that we've seen is that when a person is stymied by the situation, when a person is overwhelmed by the events and now they're not getting the response from a person they're trying to help or give first aid to, they escalate the level of violence, even if they don't want to. It's autonomic that they'll increase the use of force. For example, they'll think that the person is just trying to resist them when in fact the person is only trying to jump that barrier of communication. Is that a fair statement?

Absolutely, absolutely. We take a look at a lot of the behaviors that we see folks who either have autism or some other disorder and are non-verbal, and we often don't recognize that 99% of those behaviors are communication. They're trying to tell us something. Things like anxiety can manifest themselves in so many different ways: in aggression, in tantruming, and withdrawing. So for anybody to understand a particular child and what they're doing in this situation, if they don't know them and don't know the context of their behaviors, it can be very, very difficult. And as you say, yes, it can escalate the behavior very quickly.

Right, and we got right into exactly why Greg reached out and wanted to have you on here. Because like we talked about, in these high-stress events, reading behavior and understanding what someone's trying to communicate— these are rapid judgments sometimes in some of these situations that we have to make. We go through our life doing that. Then what we always say, like Greg said, when we teach a little bit of body language, it's a very small part of what we do because we go from big to small. But we say, you know, you don't jam a square peg into a round hole, right? This is what it likely means under normal human behavior. And we say "normal" just in a clinical sense of, this is what normal physiological reactions a person would have. But if they're not having that physiological reaction, that doesn't mean they're guilty or doing something wrong. It just means they're not having that normal physiological reaction. So you say, "Well, why is that?"

And this is a perfect example of one of those situations that a lot of, especially our listeners in law enforcement and first responders and folks who work in hospitals and schools, come across: "Well, I'm not seeing this normal reaction, so it must be this person is up to something, or it must be they're doing something wrong." When in fact, what you're talking about is, no, no, there are people with different mental health issues or different disorders, especially when you talk about folks with autism, right, and how they express things or their reactions in those situations. So, yeah, I like your example you talk about the fire. How do those examples — are they different? Give us some examples. Hey, this is what someone on the autism spectrum, this is how they might try and communicate. How would that be different than what I'm used to seeing?

Again, there's a wide range.

Brian's loaded question. We can make it, we can make that question as small. Just give some examples.

I know that was a big question. But there have been a lot of examples in the news, unfortunately, recently: law enforcement encountering individuals with disabilities, either in a store pushing and maybe appearing aggressive, or lying down in the middle of the road and not listening to instructions to get up, not understanding why they can't be there. So there have been lots and lots of different contexts where there have been interactions with law enforcement and people who do not react and respond and behave the way neurotypical individuals do.

And there is really such a wide, wide range of neurodiversity and how those things can manifest. So you might get an individual who doesn't follow directions, and it's not because they're being non-compliant, it's because they don't understand the question, or they are so anxious in the situation that they can't process the language. And that's a really, really important thing for first responders, for teachers, for parents to remember is that for all of us, when we're upset, we have a hard time processing language. The "I'm so mad at you, I'm speechless, I can't even say how mad I am" happens to all of us. So for an individual who doesn't understand and doesn't have the language to communicate that, and has difficulty processing language at any time, once you get them upset or scared or anxious, language processing goes out the window. You can give them directions that ordinarily they might be able to follow, and it's just, it's not going to happen. And to know that this isn't defiance, it isn't the individual refusing to do what you want him to do, it's the inability of him to understand what you want and to make himself do what it is you want him to do. And that's that's huge.

Susan, you're too young to remember this, but I'll take you back about 35 years ago. [Music plays briefly] In law enforcement, they came up with the term EDP, which meant an emotionally disturbed person. What we saw is at the end of the '80s — correction, the end of the '70s, beginning of the '80s — there was a huge spike in use-of-force capers that would come up. Police officers have an internal time schedule where we've got to get to the next call and we've got to clear this call. Back then — I'm not saying that the threat, I'm saying it's what it was back then — when they went to a domestic, rather than trying to do something about the domestic situation or de-escalate it at all, it was this was gospel: "Listen, if we have to come back here one more time, one of you is going to jail." Now, that didn't help anybody, and there were a lot of victims that spiraled out of that.

We learned — law enforcement learned — that now if I can go to this situation with EDPs — I apologize, I'm being besieged by a choir at this point. What happened is I saw on Van Dyke, just north of 8 Mile, an old veteran cop, an old gray hair, walked up in a female just prone out immediately when they were arresting her. She said, "Listen, you can take me to jail, but I'm having an anxiety attack. You just got to give me a second to process this. The world just got really big." I could tell from her language that she wasn't playing a game. She wasn't, this wasn't an act to get out of going to jail, because a lot of people come up with amazing acts. None of the coppers at the scene that I was witnessing had a framework for that discussion.

Now we have to teach, you know, SEAL Teams that are going into areas where they don't have language ability, and we have to deal with a situation. Things are happening very rapidly. What I loved, Brian, is I will early and often drive people to Susan's website. She's a best-selling author, and you've got to read what this woman has put in print. What I loved is your stuff was hand-in-glove with how we teach when it comes to, "Listen, look at all the signs, because all the signs will be pointing that there's a problem here." And the problem, if it's with communication, there's an alternative. That's what you spent most of your life doing: teaching people alternative forms of communication.

So I want to throw a loaded question, as I like to simplify stuff. This is the universal sign for joking, which I'm going to do if I swallow it. Does there exist, or is there sort of a universal way to try to get there quickly with somebody that's having a language issue, not communicating well? How do I get them on track and say, "I understand, let me help you?" Right there I just looked like Koko the gorilla, the signing gorilla, doing that. But there's got to be a way. How do I do that best?

Sometimes just using the sign for "help" will do. "I'm here to help." We began to teach — back in the '70s, teach signs — and that's where I started teaching signs to kids with autism because we discovered that folks with developmental disabilities could learn signs easier than they could learn to speak. They weren't talking, but we could give them signs. We were not teaching them sign language; nobody in the deaf community understood any efe signs, but they worked in context, they worked in the environment. We still frequently do that. We still teach these kids a lot of signs because it's a whole lot easier to sign "bathroom" than scream it in the middle of the movie theater. We still use that in class as instructors. We're in very big auditoriums, and so we still use that. Brian uses this [gestures], I'm still not sure what that means. [Laughter]

So we'll discover that there are certain signs that a lot of nonverbal kids know: the sign for more, or the sign for stop, the sign for help. So "stop" or "help" might be good ones to use. The child might understand that you can communicate, he can communicate with you maybe, and that helps. You could also use the sign for calming down. Those are probably the three that would work the best for kids in that situation. It may not work; they again, they may not process. They might, and again, the visual is a whole lot better.

I always tell families to have communication symbols available in the environment. It's a really good idea to, you know, we have the little sticker that you put on the bedroom window for first responders to know there's a child in that room. Also put up a communication symbol for nonverbal or a full communication system so the first responder might see that and recognize that there's somebody there who's not just a child, but a nonverbal child who can't communicate with them. So I like to see that in homes, and I tell parents to do that a lot. That's something that we can do easily and can help first responders, training first responders, to understand some of the signs that you'll be with a nonverbal child, particularly one with autism, who isn't going to respond the way you expect them to.

Right. This is all great stuff. I like the analogy you said a little bit earlier about anger, which I like those analogies because it makes sense to me. What about anger, right? It's hard for me to communicate with anyone when I'm pissed off and angry, and I know how to effectively get paid to shock people, right? So I like that because then it's like, now imagine if you don't have that ability to communicate and you're feeling those same emotions. It's like, okay, now that at least lets me understand how complicated the issue can be, right? Okay, so now I have to take a different approach.

So you brought up a few things too about how people can't do that or have different issues with communication. I know, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's one of them because here in the U.S., to put it in a context of "normal" — and again, this is just in the clinical sense of normal communication — is we face each other, we make eye contact when someone talks to each other. But that may not be the case with other people who don't communicate well. So, and that's certainly not just autism, right?

Asperger's range. I believe that there would be a lot of it. It is a matter of fact, and not being pedantic, but you know that Shelley's father just passed away and was a great guy, but he worked for General Motors in Detroit as an engineer for 38 years. He could not look you in the eye. He was an engineer, and he looked at his feet. When it was a big happy event like Christmas, he looked at my feet. So we never got that.

People coming from Mexico into the United States, they are used to a different type of law enforcement. So many times when they see an authority figure, they won't make eye contact and they look down. I've seen law enforcement mistake that, saying, "Oh, the person's trying not to tell the truth, or they're hiding their emotion." Susan, that's not always true, is it?

No, no, there is again such a wide spectrum of what's appropriate and what's what we consider most of us consider inappropriate, but is very appropriate for certain individuals. You know, there may be a lack of eye contact, there may be unwillingness to be touched and led somewhere, the unwillingness to do... yeah, just lost my word. That happens as you age.

To talk about that. Yeah. And one thing, Susan, one thing with that, what I like is you mentioned, like I understand with courts and working with the prosecutor's office or the defense, that's very quick, it's very procedural. But see here, and to all our law enforcement viewers, to all our first responders, ambulance crews, this would be a situation, Brian, where you could work with somebody like Susan and come up with three or four flash cards, and those flash cards could be an immediate, "Listen, I'm not getting anywhere with this person. Try the flash card." That laminated flash card on the visor for a veteran law enforcement. Can you imagine? You could save a life. That's what we're all about here. We're all about brainstorming ways where the common average citizen — a parent right now that's watching our show — doesn't know the best way perhaps to communicate with their non-communicative child. Because, listen, when a baby communicates with mom, they're doing it non-verbally anyway, okay? The first few years of their life, they don't have that ability. But it's not that easy when you add perhaps anxiety or some other debilitating disease or a mental illness that overly complicates it. So, if Susan, I come to you as a parent, not as a teacher yet — and we'll talk teacher later on — but I come to you as a parent, is there a way of testing to see if my child needs additional help from somebody that's a linguist, or somebody that's not communicating at his or her age-appropriate level is a candidate for some form of intervention?

Absolutely. With nonverbal children, it's very easy to tell: they don't start talking, they don't start communicating the way other kids do. So it's fairly easy for a parent to recognize that this just isn't happening. We say that augmentative communication is appropriate for anybody whose speech is not meeting all of their communication needs. So people who are completely nonverbal, people who may be verbal but don't have enough language to meet all of their communication needs. So in the area of autism, you get kids who have a dozen or two dozen words, that's not enough to meet their communication needs. In an adult who's had a stroke or speaks only a half-a-dozen words, not enough to meet their communication needs. So we want to look at providing them with something to either augment their speech or as an alternative to it. Anybody, there's a wide, wide range of folks out there who need some support certainly.

And so now, as a parent, I've got some sort of gating mechanism that gives me an idea that, "Listen, something isn't right." And there's no shame in commenting on it, because here's the thing with sometimes learning disabilities: when I was a kid, I was a little rambunctious back in the '60s, and so right away they said, "Oh, there's a learning disability." But what I had is I had a dad that was born in a place called Stinking Creek Hollow, and his whole family worked in the mines, and they had a very distinct way of speaking. My mom was first-generation German, and my mom learned English, pidgin English, on the way over to America, so she had a very distinct way of speaking. So when I was in school, all I was is a product of my mom and my dad. So my speech patterns were very different. I remember all of a sudden I was in a special education class and they were feeding me Ritalin. It's like, wait a minute, how was this determination made? When we're afraid sometimes what happens is either we're embarrassed to go because we think that somehow we'll be thought of as not as smart as somebody else, or you know, there's a stigma associated with it. Or they overreact and it's like, "I've seen this before," and all of a sudden you're shoved in a little room and given drugs. How do we avoid that? How does mom and dad, how does a teacher stop that pipeline from starting? Does that make sense?

It does. I think we're a lot better than we were in the '60s and '70s. I certainly hope we are identifying the problems and putting our finger on exactly what the problem is and what it isn't. We're not perfect at it. I came out of school around the time that PL 94-142 (Public Law 94-142) was passed, and so we did need all of a sudden to start paying attention to those kids with special needs. For a long time, it was put them in separate schools, but we were at least getting better at providing some services. We've gotten a lot better at diagnosis, certainly, particularly with autism, but with a lot of other learning disabilities and language problems. The field of speech pathology has come a really long way in the last 40 years while I've been in the field. So I think that we in general — and it doesn't happen everywhere, but in general — we are better at not making those mistakes. We're not foolproof, not by any means. I'm in October (AAC) Awareness Month to make people aware of what it is and who needs it and that it's important and it's not shameful.

Yeah, and that's kind of what I also wanted to hit on as well, because you've been doing this for, you know, 40 years or so. And the idea is, I know a lot of these different issues, disorders, especially people on the autism spectrum, a lot of this stuff is kind of just really becoming general knowledge. I would say over the last maybe 10 years, or maybe a little bit longer. But it may have been diagnosed before, but it wasn't understood.

Brian, I think it's a great point. And just going to kind of what you said, how we've grown. Well, now we used to put people, "Hey, you're going to be in this program," and then we've gotten better going, "Oh, wait a minute, that person just needed a little bit of extra attention here and we can keep them in the same school," because I know that's happening and kids are having an aide or teachers come in and work especially with them while they're in the class.

So we like using stuff when we stick to the science of human behavior where we teach, we go, "You know what has stood the test of time, right? What continues to work today that worked 50, a hundred, five thousand years ago throughout human history?" Because that's not going to change. So, because this was, I would say, new back when you first started, people understanding it, what has stood the test of time in terms of things that you've seen that you know, or you can say, "Hey, this is what this person needs," or "This is something that I see commonly." Are there key takeaways that you've seen over your career?

There are. When I started, autism was still called childhood schizophrenia. It wasn't even called that, right? People were still opening their refrigerated mothers, thanks to Bruno Bettelheim. We've come a long way since then, fortunately. I have worked a lot with the folks in the Applied Behavior Analysis field, and there are a lot of those strategies and techniques that have stood the test of time, that are evidence-based. We've changed a lot about the way we work with building language through ABA systems. We don't sit down and do those ridiculous discrete trials over and over and over again and drilling kids. But there are certainly aspects of behavioral teaching techniques that have stood up and been proven over and over again. There's one particular method called Pivotal Response that recently was shown in yet another study to be an excellent, excellent way to build language and communication skills with kids on the spectrum. That has been around for a while, and there's been again a lot of research, has stood the test of time.

A lot of just connecting, one of the things that we've discovered is that kids need to play. They need to play to learn. A lot of kids with disabilities don't get those experiences. They don't get to play with toys, they don't get to play with other kids, they don't know how to interact with things. So if we just sit and play with them and show them how to play and interact with them, that goes a long way to breaking down a lot of barriers and beginning to build some engagement to build communication.

Right. And that goes into — and you could tell me if this is a good way to look at it or not — but I've always seen it because my mom is an occupational therapist, and so I've been around kids or people with different special needs my whole life. So it was never even from a young kid, it wasn't strange or odd to me just because I had that experience at a young age. But a lot of people don't have that experience, right? So one thing I've always looked at, and this goes into just interacting with humans, so we talk about communication, I've been around the world, I've been dropped in countries where I don't speak the language, so you've got to figure something out, right? So with folks like this, I always go, "Alright, well that person, they see the world differently than I do." Okay, so let's start there and then develop a way like, maybe I can see a little bit in their window of how they see things, and they could see into mine maybe. But if I start with the fact that that person sees the world differently than everyone else, I can relate to that in the sense that I see the world very differently than what other folks do. So is that like a good place to start, and where do I go with it?

Absolutely, absolutely. Just finding a common area of engagement, finding something that that child can relate to, that you can interact with them in. In my speech pathology practice, that's often been bubbles. But finding something that engages both of you, meeting them where they are with what interests them. For a lot of years, we looked at people on the spectrum and some of their obsessive or compulsive behaviors, the lining up of the Matchbox cars, and the fascination with trains, and some of those are the stereotypical things that we hear. And for a lot of years, we heard, "You should stop that. Don't let him do that. Interrupt that. Don't let him engage with those." What we really discovered is, no, that's what's going to engage him. Find where he is and what he's interested in. That's how you're going to build communication and a rapport with them.

You know, Susan, you bring up a couple of great points, and I want to hit on them, Brian, if I can. The first one is being embedded with many special operational forces over the years, and going into these places that are not a lot of fun, and many are non-permissive or semi-permissive. Many are either very kinetic or at least higher kinetic action going on. And so Brian, I would challenge you that all the people that got into those situations that were just like you, learned very quickly and thrived in those environments even though they didn't have the language ability or an interpreter or a cultural translator. Is that a fair statement?

Yes.

Okay. Now would you also agree — and I'm taking this from the perspective of having a piece of clear plastic duct-taped to my forearm and a little vis-à-vis marker — anytime that I learned how to say "yes," "no," "stop," "up," "down," "left," "right," "here," "help," "water," those things would go right on my wrist. And I would come up with perhaps a few of those phrases, the meeting of the day: "Salam alaikum," or "Alaikum al-salam." Anything that I could, for example, in a Middle Eastern country that was very different. I wouldn't want to try that, for example, in Hungary or Poland. I'd want to learn what was going on the ground there, you know, "Dzień dobry" (Polish for 'good morning').

So my idea is that objectively, we're talking about finding a common thread of communication, and it doesn't have to be fluency, it can be flashcard-y. And then the second part of that, I think both of you hit on something too. What I've seen is this pendulous swing to hyper-realistic training, and most of that training is at the incident, instead of the preparation for incidents. Listen, we're not just talking about a school shooting. We can talk about tornadic weather. We could be talking about a police raid on a home, and in that same complex there's a special needs person, right? So the idea with this hyperrealism of booting doors and ramming cars and firing paint pellets and yelling and screaming, that's fine, and there's a necessity for that type of training, but not often. And what I mean by that is we're paying a lot of money for that kind of training when what I'm hearing from the experts and what I'm seeing on the ground is if we all sat in a school circle and we just talked, if we had the firemen show up and show what they're going to look like when they arrive and sat down and played with the kids, if we had the officers show up and had the ram (battering ram) sitting next to him and explained to the kids, "Hey, when I come through that door, it's going to be pretty noisy." You start now creating this communication well before the incident ever occurs, so now you're not shocked by all that onset of emergency. Is that a fair statement? You guys see it that way?

Absolutely. That would be wonderful if, and even with the flash cards, if first responders had a couple of symbols that were laminated that were stuck in a pocket that they could pull out, so that they have that, "Come with me," or "We're going this way," that the children could understand. That would go all the way to helping. And yeah, getting the training, training is difficult. I have had any number of interactions with the police and persons with mental illness here in my area, and they don't have the training, and they don't know what's going on, and they don't understand the reactions. So you get this with folks with disabilities, too, where they want to dig their heels in, and I'm going to cover my ears because it's too loud, and I'm going to resist and get rigid and fall to the ground. And you need to understand where this is coming from. And for the first responders and even teachers to get the kind of training that says, "This is what's happening," is unfortunately not common enough.

Right. And to get to a certain level where you can do that takes time and it takes training and understanding. And you're right, we always want more time for training and education. But so we always try to do what's the basic thing that we can do or understand. So one of the things I liked, because there was an example I saw in the news, I'll bring it up as I tell this, but one of the things we talked about especially when we get down to behavior and understanding body language and kinesics and biometrics and everything that go with that is that if Susan, if we're talking and we're having a conversation, we're going back and forth, and you start to mimic a little bit of my behavior or my actions, I know that's a good thing because that means basically that we're communicating, right? So you're receiving what I'm transmitting, and I'm receiving what you're transmitting. So we're going back and forth, that's good. No matter what the conversation is, at least we're focused, we're communicating, right?

So if I have someone that doesn't have that, one of the things we can do is if I can start to mimic their behavior, sometimes they see that as, "Okay." It's like when you see a dog put its paws down on the ground and its butt in the air and its tail's wagging, it means that it wants to play. If you walk up to a dog as a person and start doing it, they think, "Wait a minute, this person wants to play with me." Right? So I've seen it where there was, I think a photo kind of went viral, sort of. It was a principal or teacher at a school, I can't remember who it was, but there was a kid having these issues who couldn't communicate, and the kid lay down on the ground and put its face down and only looked one way. So what the principal did was walked over there and laid down on the ground next to him, did the exact same thing that that child was doing. And all of a sudden the kid looked at him, and it opened up a window, it opened up a dialogue to now at least start. So I think something you could tell me from your experience, something as simple as basic mimicking someone's actions.

Yeah, a lot of those incidents in the news: little kids getting haircuts and ending up on the ground getting their haircut, sitting down on the floor, and in places like Disneyland or movie theaters or whatever, where a child has just dropped to the ground and somebody has done the same thing, back down to the ground, talk to them where they're at, it really does help a lot.

You know, one of the things, Brian, and I know what folks listening are going to say, "Is Brian trying to say that you're belittling a person, or you're going to repeat one of their tics or their involuntary actions?" What he's trying to say is any communication is better than no communication. So let's go to the police from a hostage negotiation standpoint. If a person is killing on schedule, you have to do an immediate response. If that person stops killing and starts negotiating, for every second, every minute that passes that there's not shooting going on, that's what you have to take a look at and say, "Hey, listen, I can slow time down, give myself time and distance, and start communicating." You're going to say, "I don't have that time, I'm a first responder, I'm in a fire situation, there's a shooting." Hey, listen, you're going to have to find the time or you're going to have to ask for more body bags. Brian, we say that all the time about HBPRA: you're going to pay for the training or you're going to pay for the, you know, the body bags, or you're going to pay for the stretcher.

So I would say what I'm seeing is a good, cogent strategy is one, go to your schools, go to the folks in your community, go to your first responders. Your subject matter expertise is there. Go to those places and say, "This is a likelihood, and because it's a likelihood that we may be in an emergency and have to respond to it, let's start talking about incorporating that into every response that we do." And somebody listening right now is saying, "Oh, we do that," because in our weather response, we always make sure there's a person with the ramp and the person with the umbrella. We're talking simple human communication with a spectrum of folks that are prone to anxiety and aren't going to be able to ask for your help, or when you come, they're going to be so overwhelmed by the event or overcome by emotion that they may be debilitated, they're not able to function. So predictive analysis means we go to those incidents and say, "What if?" And I'll tell you, if we do that in the condo complex where we're going to do a warrant service or a raid, if we do that on the EMS rig that might be going not just to the school where people have been trained— because sometimes we train first responders. A good example is in Sterling and Chadron, Nebraska, and in northeastern Colorado, Brian, where for every one of those small communities, they had an activist or a specialist or a linguist or somebody that they could call. But you know what? Where I am, 36 miles from Crested Butte right now, and it's snowing like a madman, we might not have that ability. I might come across a traffic accident and I now have to do something fast. So what I like, and Susan, I really want to talk about the body of work that you've done, and I want to talk about some resources that you have available. What I like is that if I'm off to the side of the road, I can still do something. I learned CPR so I never have to use it. I learned the Heimlich so I don't have to use it. I want to learn a couple of tricks that I can use in this instant that'll help me with AAC.

I think using the signs is one way because you don't have to have any equipment, you don't have a communication system, you don't need it. You can use a couple of signs to indicate that you're there to help, that you want to know if they're hurt. And that's probably the best thing you can do lacking equipment and lacking a communication system. Indicating that with facial expressions and body language and a couple of signs that you're there to help, to stay calm and to give you time so help is on the way. Just those basics.

And I completely agree with Susan, and not that I'm an expert by any standpoint here, but I'll tell you this is not unlike our work in HBPRA, Brian. This is a form of communication, of human communication, that all tribe sets, gangs, world over use. And they are born out of necessity, they're born out of emergency situations. If you look in any community, even the smallest, and there have been actual research studies on tiny, tiny little communities out in the middle of the Sahara, every community that has had somebody who has hearing problems, has deaf members, has developed their own unique system of sign, right?

Yeah, I'd say that would be an inside a family, Brian, I'm guessing that with a small family setting in communities in other countries. Yeah. And that's that's a great point right there. It's kind of what we're talking about as well. We say the stuff that we do, Susan, is universal. You know, the same issues that a law enforcement officer or first responder is going to have dealing with someone who's autistic or has different mental health issues is no different than me getting dropped into the middle of the Middle East, not speaking the language and having to work with someone to deal with them. So I just approach it from that way, then it becomes, I think, less foreign to me, or less — hey, I don't really — I can demystify it a little bit by just relating to something I know. So I want to get to — I know we want to get to what you — you have an actual book and everything that, by the way, your website is so easy to navigate. Make sure that our viewers and our listeners can get there. So I'll put the link up with episode details on Susan Berkowitz. You can Google it, you're the first thing to pop up. But tell us a little bit about your book, and specifically about what you talked about in there, what the takeaways are, what people can learn from it.

Alright, so I wrote the book, which is called Make the Connection. And there's a long subtitle. It's right here, Playing to Speak. Yeah, I wrote it for parents because in my practice, and so I've been doing this for 46 years, the last 22 years I've been in my own private practice doing training and evaluations for parents, for school districts, anywhere somebody asks me. And what I've had over and over and over is the same parents expressing the same frustration, and I found myself repeating the same things, giving them the same information. And I felt like, you know, that's great, I've probably helped several hundred families here in my area, but what about everybody else? And where are all the other parents getting this information? And they're not. So I wanted to write a book that parents could navigate, that it wasn't like a textbook, it wasn't too difficult to understand, and it gave them a step-by-step roadmap: "Here's what you do, here's how you do it, here are examples, here's a way to do it in this situation, in that situation, and the next one." And each chapter builds on the next and tells parents where to go, how to get their kids to start communicating. I had speech pathologists who said, "Oh, write it for us too, because we don't want to wade through another textbook." So I tried to make it applicable to both, and I've had both parents and speech pathologists read it and love it, I hope. So I just, I don't think that there was anything that existed before I put this, and I want parents to have the power to help their own kids.

Right. The other thing too, Brian, and I think you notice it as well, Susan, your site is set up so it's so easy to navigate that you have a bunch of information. It's not just about you, it's not just about the book, it's sort of where I can go and network all of this great stuff. And so that's going to be on the site. Now, I highly, highly recommend everybody that's listening, you've got to go there, you've got to find this out, because if you're an administrator, if you're a boss, if you're a supervisor, this is going to come up. And that paragraph that you put, that we're going to include special needs personnel in our drills and everything, it's not enough. You're not thinking deeply enough.

And I'll give you a personal example, Brian. Susan, we fly a lot. We fly all over the gosh-darn world, so we're in that fuselage all the time with all those other people coughing and wheezing and sneezing on us. And I'm an old-school guy. Like my glasses, my crossword. I can see perfectly, but I can't read without my glasses. And then like when we're on here, I'm constantly writing notes to myself, so I've got to have my glasses. So being without my glasses, imagine the anxiety. So what do people with glasses for reading have? We've got readers everywhere. We've got the little dollar pair stocked here and stocked there, everything. Just like a smoker is going to have a lighter everywhere, you know, so if they miss one or one goes down.

Now on the airplane, the new thing is that you have to be able to watch a movie or whatever, and these kids nowadays are great at it. But you've got to watch it on this little baby thing. I also have a problem because if I don't have my glasses on, I'm certainly not going to be able to see that, but I can't hear very well at all, too many explosions and gunshots. So I have to use the closed captioning system. Now, on my TV at home, my wife has programmed it on every television so when I'm in a room and I turn it on, it's very simple to find. Imagine being in the hotel, and I have to search through everything, and it's the most complicated junk to try to get closed captioning. Now somebody else, they just turn it up. With my hearing loss, they just turn it up. Doesn't Brian always know what I'm watching? So now you complicate that by, I'm in the airplane back with the rest of the people in 46F. I'm not happy, my crossword puzzle isn't keeping me awake, so I try to watch this little show and there's no closed captioning.

What I'm trying to put into context, Brian, is those issues people are encountering all the time, and they're not going to get easy; experiments, they're going to get harder. And then when the power is out, which happened to how many millions of people last night outside of Houston and Dallas with that storm that came through, and now the lights are flashing, you're going to have some people that come undone. And we talked about increasing human performance: supervisors, teachers, administrators, law enforcement professionals, get a hold of Susan, because if you don't, what's going to happen is you're going to have this discussion again, but it's going to be after the incident with the lawyers saying, "Why didn't we prep for this? This would have been a logical thing." So I'm by no means the poster child for saying a different language ability, but I can tell you, Brian, I get angry all the time when we're on the road and I miss signals. And how many times have I gone to you and said, "I think I missed that signal, what does this person want?" So I can only mirror the anxiety that somebody else would feel in an emergency. And Susan, you're breaking that down, you're doing it by leaps and bounds, you've devoted your life to breaking down those barriers, and I'm proud of you for that.

Thank you. I think for many, many, many years we missed the level of anxiety that daily living, let alone emergency situations, produced in individuals with disabilities.

And I would, real quick, Susan, I would even — don't just limit that to people with disabilities. The number one mental health issue in the world is anxiety.

Oh yeah. I know I've got kids who have it.

Well, we all have a form of PTSD. Susan, you talked about that. One of the things that I like is every once in a while I see that you have a cat. Now I would offer that as much as you can communicate with humans, I would venture that cats are an on or off switch. There's not a lot of understanding. So if you can communicate efficiently with a cat, you can communicate with anything. When Shelley and I had the ranch, we had what was called the Barn Cat Crew that we inherited. And I believe we had 44 horses and probably equally that number of felines. And you could see the thought that went through all their minds and what they wanted by just comparing that against a baseline, and then you could determine quickly what was going on. And so they acted almost as a distant early warning system. When something was different, if it wasn't by plan, you could see that agitation started. So, you know, your system is that simple. Listen, if it's not simple, people aren't going to do it. And Susan, I'll tell you one thing that you probably found your entire career, and we find it too, because we're not using the door ram, because we're not shooting fully automatic weapons. We're talking about thinking and, in advance, critical thinking. People are going, "Well, why do I want to sit through that?" Listen, it's not death by PowerPoint. It's learning how to communicate with the person next to you, with your own child, with your neighbor's child, with your grandchild. So, Brian, I think this has been a long time coming. It's fitting that it's in October, and it's fantastic that we got the subject matter expert on the topic on the show.

Well, thank you very much. And I love spreading that message, that's my mission. I want to get every parent, every teacher, everybody who needs it, the information that they need to communicate with these kids and teach these kids to communicate.

Well, we're certainly going to help do that. And that door swings both ways. So you know that on the website we offer the free podcasts and the free lessons learned to anybody from mom and dad to the first responders, to the military people that are deployed. And now you're part of our family, and thanks for coming on the show, because Brian and I will make sure that when we're out there briefed, we'll tell them about this and tell them how easy it is to hit a link and talk to you.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Yep, thanks for coming on, Susan.