“Pick up a
pencil with your opposite hand,” said Jim Peak, chief of construction. “Now,
write your name with it. How does it feel?”
This is one
of the ways Peak explains reintegration, or the process people undertake when
they need to readjust after returning home from extended periods of unfamiliar
or high stress experiences. The process was recently detailed in the
publication Introduction to Type and Reintegration. Peak said the
publication is used to provide guidance and assist service members returning
home from deployments. “Every person returning from an overseas assignment goes
through a period of reintegration to find their ‘new normal,’” he said.
Peak has been
a Corps civilian for more than 38 years and is a veteran of tours in Iraq,
Saudi Arabia and Japan. From these deployments, he said he’s gained an
understanding of what adjustments are needed when returning home and has combined
this understanding with his passion for people, their personality types and how
different personality types work together.
These
personality types he is referring to are the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types,
commonly referred to as MBTI. The MBTI are used to measure how people perceive
and make decisions in the world and base it on the type preferences
extraversion, introversion, sensing, intuition, thinking, feeling, judging and
perceiving. Peak said he made the connection between type and reintegration
after returning home from Iraq in 2003. Since this realization, he said he’s
been pushing to help others that have to go through the reintegration or
‘coming home’ adjustments.
“An
individual’s personality type significantly impacts how they adjust when
returning home,” said Peak. “And it touches several areas of reintegration
including a person’s understanding of themselves and others, the way they
communicate, have relationships, make decisions, handle conflicts, learn etc.”
Peak’s
co-authors, Katherine and Elizabeth Hirsh, collaborated with him to provide
material specifically for service members and not just the individuals who work
with them or have them as loved ones. He said this is why the book applies
directly and speaks directly to service members.
Peak said his
wake-up call happened after deploying to Iraq. “Even after dealing with
reintegration first hand several times, he said, each process is unique,
depending on where you deploy to, where you come back to and if you have family
deploy with you.”
After
receiving his MBTI certification, Peak said he went to a weekend retreat for
service members and their spouses and introduced type and its benefits in the
reintegration process. “Everyone has to reintegrate at some point in their
life, but my focus has always been supporting service members and their
families” he said.
Most people
don’t know that the Army culture is more represented in certain personality
types, which is important in figuring out how they reintegrate verses other
types. This led to Peak’s further involvement with the Type community in the
Twin Cities and eventually the connection with the co-authors of the
publication Introduction to Type and Reintegration for CPP, Inc. “It
took many late nights writing things down, organizing thoughts and getting
something ready for printing,” said Peak. It was published for three focus
groups: the deployee, the support group such as family or friends and the
support professionals.
“Our main
goal,” said Elizabeth, “was to help people recognize their natural personality
or style through MBTI and then utilize this information to make sense of their
deployment and how the experience fits with civilian or non-deployment lives.”
Katherine said they wanted to show “people that there were 16 ways of making
the transition home. This knowledge might help someone returning to recognize
the need to find their own way to reintegrate. “We wanted to empower them to
seek what works for them, not simply what society, family, military buddies,
professionals or official sources recommend,” she said.
Elizabeth
said they wanted to provide reintegration guidance that is specific to their
personality, and in a way that honors their uniqueness, honors their
experience, as well as uses their personal style, as a foundation to create
strategies for future relationships and careers.
“‘How did
writing with your opposite hand feel?’ said Peak, ‘Awkward? Challenging?’” He
said it represents reintegration as a self awareness, as something that can be
positive, not negative. He added that If you approach it like you’re writing
your name with your opposite hand for instance, you can think about and
recognize how you would normally process reintegration.