Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Episode Transcript

Transcript edited by Miri Newman and Ricardo Bravo

Guest Introductions

Carrie: Why don’t we go around the room. Sharing about yourselves is great.

Leila: I’m Lee, a prevention peer educator with OAP. Based in the WRC at Cascade Campus. They/Him pronouns. 

Heather: I am Heather Hagelberger, the preventionist with OAP. I have been here since January of this year, so it’s been exciting to get to start this work with OAP and my pronouns are she/her. 

Michelle: My name’s Michelle and I am a student advocate with the Accessible Education and Disability Resources Center. My pronouns are her. 

Carrie: Hi everybody. My name’s Carrie. I am a transfer student for Portland Community College. I work in Accessible Education Disability Resources. So thank you for agreeing to an interview for a podcast episode about relationships. I’m gonna go ahead and jump right into our interview questions. Heather and Lee, why don’t you guys tell us a little bit about the project and give us some background, feel free to throw in some of your own personal background as well. We’re here to talk about the Red Flag, Green Flag project specifically, but we also wanna be introduced to the office and the work that you guys do. 

The Roots of OAP at PCC

Heather: Yeah! So I can start a little bit with some history. OAP started back in 2019, before the pandemic. But prevention and advocacy work has been happening through the WRCs and the QRCs here at PC for stellar years prior to its inception. OAP stands for Outreach and Advocacy Project. I don’t think I’ve said that yet. So the WCS and the QCs recognized that students were needing support and confidential advocacy. So they went and got a grant to be able to start this project, it has just evolved from there. Started initially. With a focus on confidential advocacy, providing direct care and support to students who have experienced gender-based violence. By hiring me this year, we’ve been able to branch out into more of a prevention focus as well, which has been super cool. Being able to connect with our students and bring students on as prevention peer educators has been really neat. Lee, do you wanna talk a little bit about your journey to OAP? 

Leila: I am switching careers essentially. I came back to school to do the human services program at PCC. Crisis intervention and gender based violence trafficking, advocacy stuff has always been my niche. I don’t remember ever applying for OAP, but I applied for the QRC and the WRC. In those interviews they were like, you’d be great for OAP. I might have applied for OAP too. I don’t remember. It fits really well with what I am doing in my own work.

Why OAP Had to Exist

Carrie: Thank you for sharing that background. Tell us how you built this program and why you built it, and what kind of things you saw in the community that made you realize it was important to have a program like OAP. Then specifically the Red Flags in Green Flags Project, which I’m super fascinated by.

Heather: So the prevention piece of OAP stems from my personal experiences and my work experiences. Lee shared about their career change and why they’re back at school. I did that myself, probably close to 15 years ago where I was a nurse for several years. I went to nursing school, and that was what I thought I was gonna do. I wanted to help people and continued working, within the medical field, I came to realize that my passion was not in helping people with bandaids and moving on. It was trying to understand what was happening in their lives. What we can do to prevent these continued violations, these continued experiences of violence that they were experiencing. So I went back to school. I found myself learning about human trafficking, specifically sex trafficking. It was one of those things that hit me upside the head because for me, looking at my past and experiences, I knew I was very close to having that experience, personally, so I knew what helped me not be exposed to experiences like that and wanted to see where we as a society could potentially start making shifts in culture to make it safer for people so that those experiences. Those vulnerabilities weren’t reasons for people to harm others. So I started working with victims of human trafficking. 

Carrie: I see a large honorable goal, but you said you see vulnerable people and protecting them from being exploited. Can you talk about the types of vulnerabilities that you have seen or that are necessary to protect from being exploited? Because I think addressing who the community is, that’s gonna be a big part of our outreach as well. 

Heather: Sure. Honestly. It’s gonna sound really simple. But it’s a community. When we isolate others from being exposed to different thought processes, different ideals, we really start to isolate. People when they’re young and they’re vulnerable. It keeps them from being able to have critical thinking skills and understand how to have safe relationships with other people who might be different from them or who might have different experiences. When you don’t know how to deal with people who are different, it’s hard to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m blaming anybody, ’cause I don’t wanna blame anybody. 

Carrie: If you don’t want it out on the air, just say take that part out. I’m a professional, but here the conversation can be a real promise? 

Heather: I’m just trying to make sure I’m saying things in a way that’s doesn’t sound like I’m pinpointing or anything, 

Michelle: You don’t wanna blame, but there is an aspect of accountability. 

Heather: Yes, there is. If we look at our systemic oppressions, everything that our systems are set up as. Systemic oppression affects all kinds of people in different ways. Prior to recording, we were talking about poverty and how easy it is for people to be kept in because of how the systems are set up. To help others who already have wealth to stay in that position, they’re able to continue to make that money. All that comes back to recognizing that community is important. I grew up in a community that stayed among the people who looked like us, and that was for safety reasons. I am a person of color, I know, this isn’t recorded like a video, so a lot of people don’t know what I look like. I am a person of color, I have indigenous roots. A female presenting person and society tells us how we’re supposed to behave, right? We were brought up in expectations of this is your role, how you behave. For myself and my family, they were wanting to push us into assimilation. Where we can be in the shadows as much as possible. Don’t draw enough attention to myself. Because it no longer is safe. 

Green, Red, & Beige Flags in Conversation

Carrie: So what I hear is a power dynamic. 

Heather: Absolutely! 

Carrie: The power dynamic you are interrupting is the dynamic which accepts and normalizes a cultural ownership of one person’s experience, and it can be a collective ownership. As in, you are a child, a woman. You are a property of this culture or an interpersonal relationship of this person. Which some cultures back up.

Heather: Hundred percent. 

Carrie: So we’re talking about power dynamics here and how people are controlled. You’ve seen a lot of control. A lot of this power is being wielded in probably unhealthy ways. That’s why we have the project. 

Heather: Absolutely 

Carrie: Tell us about the red flags, green flags.

Heather: I love that segue there, Carrie, because the power dynamics is the significant piece on this. October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and it was also the start of our fall term here at PCC. So we decided to start off the term strong with a red flag, green flags of Healthy Relationships Campaign. The reason we decided to go with that is because it is linked to Domestic Violence Awareness Month, but it also helped us to do more than just say: Hey, we need to have healthy relationships. This actually allowed us to start having dialogue with students. We had different events that we tabled at where students were able to come and talk to us about their views of red and green flags. We were able to talk about what you do when you see a red or green flag. It was a great opportunity to take that step further of more than just here’s information, and how it looks in your life. If we wanna see culture shift in any way, we have to move beyond awareness and need to actually start shifting culture and looking at what that looks like. Part of that is through the interruption of power dynamics. 

Carrie: Can you define what a relationship flag is? Red or green, or any other color?

Heather: If we want to go to social media, we have red, beige, and green. Flags are like a spectrum. Relationships are a spectrum because people are on a spectrum, regardless of who we are. We’re never gonna do the same thing the same way every single time because culture and community influences how we move throughout our day on a regular basis. When we look at what a red flag is, that’s something that says pause. If we think about a red light on the street, it’s telling us to stop, look around, look for danger. It doesn’t mean that there is danger. It just means we need to pause and take a look. A green flag is hey, this is great. Let’s keep going, let’s keep moving, let’s keep learning, let’s keep growing. Then the beige flag, if we wanna pull that in, that’s really just a thing that someone does. It’s neither good nor bad necessarily.

Carrie: Which is a personal preference between two people. So it sounds like you’re using the word flag as a way to communicate with yourself when you’re in a relationship. And a flag can be something. That you notice like and decide that is a good direction to go in and put your energy into, it can also be something that you notice that you don’t like and you decide is dangerous for you to pursue and a beige flag can be something that you’re just learning about the other person you’re engaging with. And it is relevant information, but it isn’t information that’s going to, Inhibit or, support your personal health. It’s the other person. 

Heather: Absolutely. A beige flag would be, I don’t like to wear matching socks. Something that’s kind of irritating to my partner, but it’s not affecting anybody one way or another. 

Love Bombs & Blind Spots in Relationships

Carrie: Michelle, you throw one in there. What questions do you wanna know? 

Michelle: When is it safe or wise to check your flags? One of the questions I’ve seen was okay, do we jump in and marry this person? Wouldn’t that be your own personal red flag that you could see in yourself?

Heather: We need to live in a community where people are helping us see things that we might be blinded to. Because there’s also new relationship energy. Where you’re like, everything is amazing.

Leila: Every flag in a different color. 

Carrie: Rolling in green flags for the first 48 hours. 

Heather: So it helps to have people around you to keep you in balance, in check, because we don’t always recognize our own red flags. But what was interesting was doing this exercise. During the weeks of welcome, we had students who were. Maybe I do that sometimes. I don’t wanna do that. We were able to just have healthy conversations because behaviors are behaviors. The intent behind them is generally what we wanna look at, but we also wanna look at our impact. Sometimes our intent with love bombing a person isn’t the intent of trying to set them up for failure in this relationship, but more because we are so caught up in this new relationship energy that we wanna text them 20 times a day because we’re thinking about how amazing they are.

Leila: Love bombing isn’t always malicious. 

Heather: Exactly, that’s where we wanna say: these flags are always on a spectrum. You always wanna look at all of the things around it, not just see one thing unless the one thing really is something that’s harmful. Someone harms you intentionally, physically, emotionally, and assaults you in any way. We definitely wanna make sure. you are pausing, stopping, and you are reevaluating because your safety is the primary concern. 

Carrie: Let’s have that conversation. How do you learn to trust yourself? You mentioned community feedback in observing a situation. But I like what Michelle brought up, just seeing a green flag. It doesn’t mean you automatically jump in. Seeing a red flag, following that same logic doesn’t mean you automatically break things off and run away in the opposite direction. If you’re not me, ’cause that’s sometimes what I do. When we move into the topic of being trauma informed and coming from traumatic history maybe with relationships and why this office of advocacy outreach exists. There is a sad history of the power dynamic being exploited and it generally starts with red flags, then escalates. Someone just shows up one day and they’re an actual murderer. 

Leila: One thing that we saw a lot too when people were putting up the flags. A lot of people find red flags easy. But the green flag is where people paused a lot because it’s hard to think of what a green flag really is when you have no idea. Go back to the culture and how we were raised and everything. If you’re not taught what healthy relationships look like, you aren’t taught what green flags are. So then you walk around as if, either everything’s a green flag or everything’s a red flag. 

Heather: If you think about how relationships were shown in movies, even in music and TV shows. There’s so many toxic behaviors that are not healthy. We learned that’s what we thought relationships were supposed to look like. So now our whole society is starting to go: that’s not what we want. What are we supposed to be looking for? A lot of people don’t know, like Lee said. So this is a great opportunity for us to really talk about how we can find those healthy things. How can we hang on to those healthy things within all kinds of relationships, not just romantic relationships.

Hard Conversations, Healthy Relationships

Carrie: So you see a green flag or you see a red flag. You’re not love bombing, you’re not jumping right after it, and telling a person to go away. You are not frozen either. Time marches on. How do you have that conversation and say to somebody, look, I really like you. I wanna find out more about you. I want us to spend more time together. I want us to get married one day. I think more importantly, how do you have that conversation with somebody that says, well, that behavior made me feel very unsafe. I felt afraid when you said that, when you did that. How do you ensure your comfort and your needs are being met as you notice these flags? What is an appropriate way to bring that up? 

Leila: Definitely, if you’re afraid and worried about your own safety. Don’t have a conversation with the person alone. 

Heather: Yeah, a third mediator is always a benefit in those instances. What I would say to Lee’s point there though is: If you’re scared to have that conversation with that person on your own, I would wonder why are you scared? It could be internal, I hate conflict. Hate it with a passion, so I have had to learn within my own relationships, how do I manage conflict? While still feeling safe and comfortable within who I am as a person. There’s a lot of stuff that we hear, but we don’t always understand how to put it into practice. So an instance would be let’s say I was with my partner and we were driving. They had a little bit of road rage for a minute, started screaming at somebody and it scared me because I’ve had car accidents. People have hit me and it makes me super anxious anytime there’s any kind of thing happening in the car. So I would then approach my partner and because of the relationship I have with my partner, I would say: Hey, in that moment, I understand you were having a lot of big feelings. Those feelings caused me fear because of X, Y, and Z. So in the future, if you’re feeling those feelings, can we talk about how we can approach that so you can still express your feelings? In a way that I still feel okay, that I still feel safe that way. I’m not condemning that person for that feeling, but I’m also letting them know that type of behavior made me uncomfortable. If I start to see that they’re blowing up at the grocery store, blowing up at the DMV. Now I’m gonna start to see a pattern and that’s gonna cause me to go okay, something else is going on here. Red flag, 

Carrie: So fear is a super understandable emotion for many humans. What are some other emotions that could be associated with red flags but aren’t necessarily fear based or about danger? What if you’re grossed out or you feel offended? What are some other things to talk about and bring up if you just don’t like somebody?

Leila: Personality clashes are going to happen. That’s not necessarily a red flag, it’s just two personalities that don’t mesh with each other. 

Carrie: So it could be a healthy green flag to acknowledge the incompatibility, essentially. 

Heather: Why put yourself in a situation where there is a personality incompatibility that isn’t working if you’re constantly at odds with another person. Why wouldn’t you just say: Hey, this doesn’t work. We’re not communicating well. If we can’t figure out how to communicate, we probably shouldn’t communicate anymore. I wanna just honor the fact that while all of this sounds super easy to do. To put it all in practice, it’s hard. Because people are hard, people are complex. All of us have complex feelings. How I feel today can be very different from how I felt yesterday and how I’m gonna feel tomorrow depending on if I eaten, have I had enough sleep? Some days I wake up and my partner is the last person I wanna see because I didn’t sleep well. It has nothing to do with them. They just happen to be the first person I see. Sometimes we’re just not in good moods and to honor that and say: Hey, today’s just not a good day for me. I’m not fit to be around people. I need to just hang out over here. For me, that’s a huge green flag. For someone to be that self-aware and recognizing my emotional capacity is this, and it cannot be what it needs to be. In order to interact with you today, I cannot meet what you need, but I’m gonna honor you by telling you that. Then, I’m gonna remove myself from the situation so it doesn’t cause issues in the future. That’s another way that we can work through some of those feelings when it comes to red and green flags. 

Consideration is a Huge Green Flag

Carrie: What are some of the positive feelings that are more spectrum and less extreme or noticeable than feeling when you like somebody. The new relationship energy is obviously a huge green flag. We all love serotonin and dopamine. When we see the cute face, and that’s a green flag according to me, what are some more subtle green flags that you should start to look out for? Do they open the door for you? Do they ask if you want something from the grocery store? 

Heather: Yeah. Consideration is a huge one. Do you think about me during the day? Even if I don’t hear from you all day long, it’s a text at the end of the day. Hey, I know it’s been really busy, but I was thinking about you. It’s being open with communication. It’s saying I’m gonna have a really busy day today, and I’m not gonna be able to talk to you. Just want you to know I’m thinking about you. I’m not ignoring you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, or tonight. Do you feel safe around that person? Is your nervous system calm? If your body is always tense, why? That would be my question. Sometimes it’s a personal thing within yourself, and sometimes it is around the energy you have, with the people you’re with. So I think there’s a lot of things that can be green flags that we don’t always talk about. We talk about all of those high intensity emotions when it comes to new relationship energy. But to keep a relationship going. Again, whether it’s romantic or friendship, you have to be intentional. Communicate, you have to understand what it is that they like, what they don’t like, and how that fits into your life. Are you free to share what you like or don’t like? If you’re not able to freely talk about your stuff too, then maybe that person is not the right person for you to be spending time with. 

Carrie: Can you address the power dynamics of it all? We’ve seen how power dynamics can go wonky and having disabilities or having differentials of power in one relationship. I think it’s pretty common and understandable to see power differentials in the workplace. For example, we’re all familiar with the concept of having a boss at work. Being American and modern, most people have this assumption that relationships should be equal. Many cultures don’t teach that. When it comes to interpersonal relationships, family dynamics, for example, What does masking have to do in relationships with red flags and green flags? How can you notice yourself being authentic or inauthentic, and why would that be happening?

Leila: I’ve been in a lot of therapy so I’ve talked to my therapist also about healthy relationships a lot. You can feel it in yourself, you’re not in a safe situation or with a safe person. That’s just learning the signs that your body is giving you which is difficult and it takes time to learn that. Not everyone has the ability to, it takes a lot of practice. But there are signs that you can tap into yourself to figure out: Is this right for me?

Heather: From my own personal experience, I have learned that being able to take my mask off and just be is such a freeing. I only want to surround myself with people who I can be like that now. For so long, I felt like I couldn’t, it wasn’t safe. So those relationships were very superficial because I couldn’t be myself and be able to really like one through therapy and a lot of building up of my own self-awareness and understanding how my brain works through trauma. The tension released and it was like: this is okay. This is safe and this person’s gonna still be here even after seeing me at my most vulnerable state. That’s an incredibly freeing situation and I hope everyone experiences that at least once in their life. Because being able to take the mask off, even for neurotypical people who present themselves as however society is wanting them to present themselves and not being able to feel like they can be themselves. It’s a wonderful gift to be around people who make your nervous system calm down. 

Leila: I am glad you brought up the neurotypical part, cause I’m in the process of learning 35 years of masking and it does a lot to the psyche and the body. I’m just now finally starting to not mask as much when out in public. The mask is still there, it’s always gonna be there, but, I think there’s also a level of: you just don’t care what people think. With the masking. 

Carrie: I’m literally living it up. I don’t care. I am telling grown men all the time, you are so dumb. 

Leila: I used to have such bad social anxiety, and the first time I went to PCC was in my early twenties. I couldn’t stand in front of the class to give a presentation without visibly shaking, and now I don’t care. So being able to remove that mask for the autism side, but also within relationships is the easy thing you can do for yourself. 

When Fawning Becomes Protection

Carrie: Can you talk about trauma responses and in particular, the fawning response and what that looks like. If you could define it. And, talk about when that comes into play. Then, we can also discuss how that relates to masking autism and power dynamics in society. How we’re all pretending like you said: it’s very typical to project what society wants us to be. We’re trained to think that if we perform we’ll be rewarded. We’re good monkeys. 

Heather: We always heard there’s no stupid questions, but everyone always knew that there were stupid questions. So if we wanna talk about it in a relationship aspect. Maybe something’s happening in your relationship that you’re not sure of, you’re not comfortable, but you’re not uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because you haven’t been in a relationship or you’re getting different mixed signals from that person. When we talk about fawning, people are pleased. It’s appeasing, basically just going with the flow of whatever’s happening until it’s almost too late to feel like you have control anymore of the situation. It is a response, a trauma response. 

Carrie: It’s fawning the same thing as being docile or not caring. A lot of people identify as I don’t really care. Is fawning in response to something specific. 

Heather: Fawning is generally a trauma response due to fears of rejection. Or because you have experienced violence in the past and maybe someone is exhibiting some behaviors that don’t necessarily look dangerous, but feel like they may escalate. So you immediately go into that fond response of: I just need to keep them calm, keep things chill. It’s almost like a preemptive crisis intervention without that acknowledgement. This situation feels uncomfortable, and so this is why I’m doing this. Most people, when they fall into Fawn, they don’t even know what’s happening. That’s where the situation could potentially get out of hand for them. Their nervous system is going into this response of: Something’s not comfortable and I’m gonna go, I just need to keep them happy. Then it’s like: This maybe isn’t gonna be okay for me. People can wind up in dangerous situations long term because they’ve been fawning the whole time and not even recognizing that’s been happening. 

Leila: I like fawning with the red and green flags because that’s a trauma response that you’re doing, but to the other person, that’s a red flag. If you’re doing the people pleasing and they see that. It can be very obvious. 

Carrie: Something that comes to my mind right now, and we all have it in our circles and friendships. The person who’s always apologizing needlessly. Sorry, Sweetie, you don’t have anything to apologize for. Don’t realize they’re fawning. You’re not in an interpersonal relationship with them. So that is a social behavior called fawning. What is a fawn response in reaction to an immediate trigger? So something in the room is happening. What does that look like? Is it appeasing the trigger? The source of the trigger and trying to make that deescalate? Is it, removing or diminishing yourself in ways that are going to deescalate. Make you less of a target, or more compatible to that power dynamic, which requires you to be subjugated in some way.

Leila: Family can turn into triangulation easily. What is triangulation? Triangulation is a system in which a person that is abusing another uses a third party to help them target an individual. 

Carrie: I see. 

Leila: So they’re all in relationship with each other, and the accomplice. To the abuser is, helping push the abuse even further. Hmm. 

Heather: That made me think of a nineties movie. I’m pretty sure it’s: She’s All That. Where there’s a girl. They did the whole ugly duckling thing, she wears glasses and therefore she’s not attractive. As soon as the glasses are off and she does her hair, she’s beautiful. There were two guys in the movie if I remember correctly. One of them was the person who was targeting the girl to make her be the most beautiful person to become the prom queen. The other guy was egging him on, driving the whole situation. When the dynamic between the first guy and the target girl started to change and the guy started to have genuine feelings for her. The third guy then made the effort to disrupt that even more by going around and making sure she knew that it was a bet So that happens in real life. That’s high school romance. When I saw the end of it the other day, I was just like: What? Why did we think this was okay? It’s devastating. So fawning. The way it shows up can be different for so many people. We’re talking in the room, something’s happening. I think that also depends on what is happening. Fawning could be something as simple as: Lee is escalated and I’m slowly backing myself out of the room because that’s concerning for me. But it also might look like me saying to Lee: Hey, you’re getting a little agitated. Are you hungry? it’s the motivation, if I am not threatened by Lee, but I’m seeing that Lee is getting escalated, I might try to say: Hey, I’m noticing your energy is changing. Is there something that you need? Something you’re upset about? I can go into a crisis intervention mode with a full set of ideas and solutions to support and deescalate. If I’m fawning, I’m looking at what’s gonna keep me safe. That is what I’m looking at. Not how do I help Lee, it’s how do I stay safe. We will show up in a way that is what am I doing to keep me safe in this situation? 

The Work Starts Inside

Carrie: We talked about when, how, and what it looks like to observe your flags. What about when you should be ignoring your flags? Because speaking for myself, I’ve got some C-PTSD, sure. That tells me some really insane narratives about random situations according to a trigger. A trigger can be, anything at all. It can be my dog interrupting a train of thought because they stopped to smell a bush. It feels like I’m being grabbed by the wrist and that is a physical sensation that reminds me of a trigger. If I’m paying attention to my flags and I’m acting on my flags, I would be a red flag, Charlie, you smell the bush. What are some other situations in human relationships? 

Michelle: I don’t know, something that’s triggering to you, but just acknowledging what you’re feeling. I think that’s probably important to acknowledge what you’re experiencing and then be in the moment. 

Heather: I think that one of the things that people, especially those of us who have C-PTSD or any trauma related situations or diagnoses, don’t like. As soon as we get those feelings triggered, we wanna run, but that doesn’t allow us to grow. That doesn’t allow us to truly understand why within us. Yes, that person still might be a person that we don’t need to spend time with anymore. That’s okay. But there are times, like you said, that it’s not necessarily them, it’s that they have done something that has triggered us. So we have to sit in our feelings. Dig into that route, find out what that wound is, work through that, and then go to that person and say, not when you’re emotional. You wanna truly understand what’s happening within yourself at that moment. Then, go to that person and say, again, we go with those eye statements. When this happened, I felt triggered. It triggered my mother’s wound, my father’s wound, my inner child. But if you can get to that point and understand it. Cool, but you share that and how that person responds tells you if it truly was a red flag or if it’s within yourself. If I can come to Carrie and say, Carrie, when you said this statement last week, it really activated me. This is why, that doesn’t mean it was your fault. It’s just sharing when you said that, it caused me some feelings. In those feelings, maybe I said something that was not great and I wanna apologize, or I had to excuse myself and you didn’t understand why, that felt disconnected. I wanna come back, do that reconnection, say it’s because of what I was experiencing. I’m gonna own my feelings and recognize that was not your intent. You give that opportunity to say: my bad. Someone who wanted to do something on purpose would say: I don’t know.

Leila: The last relationship I was in, I was talking about red flags, green flags with her. I don’t know. I can’t find any red flags. That itself is a red flag. 

Heather: I wanna acknowledge that therapy is a privilege. Shout out to PCC counseling who you can go to.