Episode 75: Dr. Kerry King - COMPASSION: See; Feel; Do.

If compassion doesn’t change what we do, is it compassion at all? Sitting in Barbados with Dr. Kerry King, a clinical psychologist whose career sits at the intersection of substance use treatment, mental health care, and faith, we get honest about what compassion really requires when people are carrying pain that doesn’t fit the script. We break down why “seeing” isn’t enough, how faith and mental health can work together, and what small actions can create real belonging in a community.
We discuss:
• Dr. King’s background in co-occurring substance use treatment and mental health systems. 
• The false divide between faith and science and how to live in the middle.
• Why mental health feels complex and why quick fixes fail.
• Compassion as a three-legged stool. 
• The difference between empathy and compassion, and how boundaries prevent burnout.
• How church messaging can miss lived experience around divorce, singleness, and family life. 
• Performative compassion versus being a consistently decent neighbor. 
• What gangs and bars teach about inclusion, connection, and belonging. 
• Small compassionate acts that add up to systemic impact, including diaspora barrels and remittances. 
• Three closing takeaways: pay attention, lean in with curiosity, take a risk, choose vulnerability to remind people they’re not alone 

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Dr. Kerry King, The King Institute, www.thekinginstitute.org

#compassion

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Transcript

Compassion Beyond Witnessing

Dr. Kerry King 0:00

How do we really talk to people in a way that helps them understand that as a community of faith, we see their pain. We see that they have experienced things that did not follow the script. We see that they were left with broken places. We see that the way that we talk about it still does not answer to their pain. And that we're curious enough to ask why, or to ask more, or to say how come? Or to say, let me know, like help me understand where we're getting it wrong. Compassion requires us to do more than bear witness. It requires us to do more than just feel for the person. The piece that makes compassion not voyeurism or not pity or frankly, not even empathy, which comes at its own cost, is the third piece, which is the doing. Compassion requires us to do something. And so it only really is truly compassionate where what you have witnessed has impacted your heart in a way that requires you to take action.

Meet Dr. Kerry King

Grantley Martelly 1:14

Welcome to Above the Noise, a podcast at the intersection of faith, race, and reconciliation. And I'm your host, Grantley Martelly. Welcome to Above the Noise, Dr. K erry King, a clinical psychologist and friend and daughter of other friends. So we go back a couple generations. And we have been talking about, talking about this topic for a long time. And finally, we're here in Barbados, and we're able to get together for a few minutes and just talk. So this is just going to be a conversation. We have one topic we want to talk about, but we may get into other things. It's all right. So, Kerry, introduce yourself to our audience.

Dr. Kerry King 2:03

Sure. Hello, and thanks for the invitation. I am, like you said, Kerry King. I am a clinical psychologist, Barbadian-born. Um, much of my life has been spent outside of Barbados in the United States, where I did my studies. My career, I will say, has been at the intersection of substance use treatment and mental health treatment. So co-occurring disorders. That's really where I have spent much of the last 20 years. And as a person who really grew up in a Christian home under pretty strict orders of conduct, didn't really know a lot about substance use and stumbled into it and found that it was a really authentic space, both in terms of the community of individuals that you work with, those seeking care, but also the people who often themselves were in recovery and wanting to give back and would enter the treatment space. So I always say much of my education I got from people in recovery after I already had a doctorate, because those were the people who taught me what it was actually like. Life on the street. Yeah, yeah. So that's where I kind of ended up by accident, unless you believe in divine providence, in which case then maybe it wasn't an accident. And that's where I have largely stayed. My role has changed. It's become less clinical over the years and become more of an executive role. Um, I have been head of clinical for various organizations in the United States. And um now I consult for a Philadelphia-based firm that I would say is largely a government relations firm. So a lot of the work that we do is in helping states and the and federal partners implement best practices related to quality care for mental health disorders and substance use disorders.

Grantley Martelly 4:16

Do you still have a private practice, or is most of your time right now with the consulting and that aspect of it?

Dr. Kerry King 4:23

I don't currently have a private practice. I actually had a private practice for very many years, but no longer. I think right now my private practice is just doing work in community. Um it's no longer one-on-one. I find I do a lot more showing up and being willing to talk to community groups and church organizations, and that feels like my private practice. I think my art career-wise and just kind of interest has moved away from the individual per se, um, and has become more about the systems in which individuals operate. And so I didn't think of it until you just asked me, but that also is probably the reason why I'm not doing private practice right now and more interested in talking to people in the context of their community and the spaces that they live and work and function. I think my career in running systems and supporting clinical development and systems has shown me that the dynamics of the interplay between people has as much to do with us being okay as anything that's happening inside of a particular person.

Grantley Martelly 5:36

So the community what's happening in the community affects us more than we realize sometimes.

Dr. Kerry King 5:42

We are dynamic bodies in communion with each other, and if we forget it, we will only ever get half the cure.

Grantley Martelly 5:48

So, as a

Faith Versus Science False Choice

Grantley Martelly 5:49

psychologist, clinical psychologist, how have you found that to be accepted or challenged within the faith community?

Dr. Kerry King 5:58

Oh Lord. Um, I can't tell you how many times I've sat in church and heard the assault against people who people who have doctorates or people who think they know more than God. It just, I mean, I think it's at the point where I personally find it amusing almost. I think earlier, when I was younger, maybe I would find it offensive because I didn't understand it. I didn't understand what there was that seemed to be this perceived threat about you either had to pick God or science. Right. It felt like a bizarre um dichotomy to me that was not necessary. But I think that it happens on the other side too, where the scientific community, if you will, also is suspicious of faith. And so uh there are a few of us who live in this space where both sides of our world are suspicious of the other side. And how do you sit in the middle of that context and kind of hold space for both of them, knowing that neither one of them is particularly trusting of the other?

Grantley Martelly 7:04

So, how do you navigate that?

Dr. Kerry King 7:06

I mean, I I think I've really gotten good at what did Johnny Cochrane say, if it don't apply, let it fly. I think that I have just become good at that. I can sit in a sermon and listen to the pieces that resonate with me and hear the pieces that might otherwise be offensive and kind of acknowledge that they are not for me. Um, I think I am a person who's realized that I have to that there's something very true about asking God for yourself and knowing for yourself. And so there may be times where I hear something and I wait for conviction that I don't but I also wait for revelation. So if it doesn't apply, I don't necessarily find it offensive. I might find it not applicable.

Grantley Martelly 7:57

Could some of it also be due to just mere um ignorance in the in the con ignorance in the true meaning of the word ignorance, lacking knowledge.

Dr. Kerry King 8:08

Yeah, absolutely. In both contexts, right? In either space. Yeah, sometimes you hear things said about science or said about psychology that you know aren't true. So it's the same thing I tell my child, right? If it is said about you, but it is not true about you, then it is not about you. And I think that's how I feel about psychology too.

Grantley Martelly 8:30

Yeah, that's that's a really good premise. You've got to learn how to differentiate what a price to you or not, not carry the burden of things that you don't need to be carrying.

Dr. Kerry King 8:41

Said than done, right? But you say it enough, maybe you start getting better at doing it.

Grantley Martelly 8:45

And you do it enough. You get to the point to where it becomes a part of your actions and part of what you do and how you represent.

Dr. Kerry King 8:51

You're building muscle, yeah.

Grantley Martelly 8:53

Yeah.

Why Mental Health Needs Patience

Grantley Martelly 8:54

And that that is interesting because, you know, one of the things that has come up, even as I've started this podcast, and I've been talking to my two podcasts, and talking to doctors and therapists, and psychologists, and all scientists, as well as patients and practitioners of faith, you know, and people are coming to realize that this discussion about health and mental health and support in mental health and how our life, we're complete beings. We're not just physical and spiritual, we're also mental. People are becoming more comfortable, or at least it appears to me as a non-practitioner. My my buy-in is a patient and a podcaster. That's my buy-in, right? Patient and podcaster, not a practitioner or a therapist or a doctor. But it seems to me that people are getting a little bit more comfortable about talking about these issues within the context of faith, whereas maybe years ago it was that doesn't apply here.

Dr. Kerry King 10:00

Right. Yeah. I I would say so. I think there's still a misunderstanding, maybe, or maybe it's better to say that there is a desire for things related to mental health to lack complexity. Um in that if you have a cancer diagnosis, you understand that the treatment might be prolonged, it might require multiple trials, it might require consultation with different types of specialists, different treatment options, but you persist until you get it right. I think part of the disconnect is that we don't really understand what the mind is. So disorders of the mind are a little bit like it kind of feels nefarious. Like, what are we talking about? Um, and I think that we have believed that some things that are mental health related are devotedly a spiritual um origin. And so, but increasingly I think that people are beginning to recognize probably a couple things. One is that the brain is an organ and it can misfunction like any other organ in the body. So there's that. And then I think that the other thing is that people are realizing and beginning to accept that there's a lot less shame when we acknowledge that there is a universality to suffering. Bible chronicles a lot of distress, right? A lot of people in the Bible that we hold as our examples were super transparent about the extent to which they were experiencing grief, anxiety, and um depression and self-doubt. Yeah, right. Like, and and that is just examples of people being human. So, so there's some ability to see that and recognize those examples and recognize that because there's this universal experience, it's not just me. Oh, maybe we could do something about it. Right. Um, so there's there's certainly elements of that, I think, that influence more adoption of getting help when the distress is caused by something, a disorder of the mind, if you will. Um, where I started when I said that we like it to not be complex, though. We want it to end quickly. Quickly, right. Right. And so we will, I will have people ask me, um, so what do I do for anxiety? And they want me to give them something really quick that they could do in the moment and that it will solve it for good. And I think to myself, even if you broke a bone, you would not say to your orthopedists, like, tell me over the phone how to set this, right? Like you never would. But because it's a disorder of the mind, we have this expectation that it's something we should be able to handle on our own and that it should happen quickly. It should resolve quickly. Right. That's not necessarily true.

Grantley Martelly 12:58

Not necessarily true. We

The Three Parts Of Compassion

Grantley Martelly 13:01

had a conversation a while back and just talking, and you mentioned this concept of compassion as something that you had been asked to give a talk on, and that you presented it within a church concept. And I thought it was very, very, very interesting. And I wanted us to spend some time while we're together here just chatting about this concept of compassion and how you see it and how you presented it, and how sometimes we get it right and how sometimes we miss the boat.

Dr. Kerry King 13:33

Yeah, I mean, complex, right? So it at its simplest form, I and this is not originally mine, but um I view compassion as kind of a three-legged stool. So the first piece of compassion is bearing witness to it, right? So first you see. You have to see and recognize that somebody is experiencing suffering. So just basic human awareness of that. And I've come to think that another piece of that that's important to point out is there needs to be clarity around what you're seeing. So the element of what we're doing, education, um, having conversation, leaning in with curiosity, asking for permission to know more, not assuming that we know what somebody else's experiences. Like that's a part of seeing accurately. So first you see, then you feel. That's the second part. So what you have seen, what you have observed evokes something in you. Now, you know, in Barbados, we have this saying where we say it's kind of like um in the South, how people say, Oh, bless your heart. In Barbados, we say Kadir. Um, and so in my mind, kadir is pity, right? Like, um, so I see that you are suffering, I see that you are in distress, and I feel for you, but what I feel might just be pity. Right. So compassion requires us to do more than bear witness. It requires us to do more than just feel for the person. The piece that makes compassion not voyeurism or not pity, or frankly, not even empathy, which comes at its own cost is the third piece, which is the doing. Compassion requires us to do something. And so it only really is truly compassionate where what you have witnessed has impacted your heart in a way that requires you to take action. And at that point, then it's truly compassionate.

Grantley Martelly 15:45

Okay. So bearing witness, seeing, then feeling, and then doing not just pity, but uh genuine feeling and then doing. But you also mentioned something that I thought was interesting and compassion, not empathy. What is the what is the distinction you make there between those two?

Dr. Kerry King 16:06

Yeah. So um empathy is almost an over can be an over-identification with what somebody else is going through, but maybe in a way that makes it feel like it's your problem, right? And so when we talk about in clinical spaces, we talk about like compassion fatigue, which in in reading about this more, because I genuinely became curious, um, in reading about it more, uh, one one um clinician noted that maybe we should call it empathy fatigue and not compassion fatigue. Because empathy in a way makes us feel like this what we feel is this is our problem to solve, right? Like it is mine. I am now carrying the emotional burden of your pain. And that is not what compassion is, or I'm carrying the emotional burden of your pain in a way that does not allow me to set limits for myself. And that is also never true. The difference is that compassion gives us perspective on why you are experiencing what you are experiencing in the way that it's hitting you. And then it allows us to support you in making progress from that spot in a way that progress is still defined by you. I don't get to tell you what progress is.

Grantley Martelly 17:38

Progress is defined by the person.

Dr. Kerry King 17:40

The person who is having the experience. Yeah, I can't have more attachment to the outcome than you. Again, I told you that everything I learned, I learned in practical application. There was um a gentleman that used to work with me years ago, and he had a saying that was pretty famous. He would say, he would say, Doc, I'm prepared to do anything I can to help anybody in here, but you know what I'm not gonna do? I'm not gonna shove a mule up a ladder. Like the visual always stuck in my head, right? It was like, I'm gonna work hard, I'm gonna do everything, but I'm not shoving a mule up a ladder. And I've used that so much in teaching and in working with um, I used to supervise doctoral interns a lot. And when you start this work, you're always trying to figure out like, am I doing it right? And one of the things that I would say is when you feel like you're shoving a mule up a ladder, that's probably a cue to reassess your approach. That's yeah, it can't, it can it can't feel like that.

Grantley Martelly 18:48

Maybe too too bought in. Yeah, you're doing too much. Too bought in. So how does this apply then? Let's take this again, you know, seeing, feel, and doing. How does it how does it apply in reality?

When Church Talk Misses Pain

Grantley Martelly 19:00

How can a person apply it in reality, um, in their faith community, in their workplace, in their homes, wherever they are?

Dr. Kerry King 19:08

Yeah, so um all of my examples always come from what I've witnessed. And I'm always worried I'm gonna tell too much of the story, but I'll tell the story. I went to I went to service yesterday, and it was my marriage ministry Sunday or something like that. And it was such an interesting experience, right? Because the person who was delivering the sermon, he's talking his talking points and following his PowerPoint, and the congregation is having a conversation. And I feel like this is such a Caribbean at the same time. Wow. Such a Caribbean church experience, right? And they're talking. He's talking and they answering. And when they think that he has it right, he's getting the amense and the affirmations, but they're being very clear when they think that he has got it wrong, right? Wow. So he's talking about um, you know, basically the man as the head of the house and how he's to be referred to, and so on and so forth. And these ladies who are around me are saying, basically, if he's treating you right, um, and then contextualizing it. Contextualizing it, right? And then they're like, um, he's talking about the example of being, you know, Joseph being Jesus' stepfather and and what stepfathering should be like if you find yourself in that position. And these ladies are like, yeah, but not taking care of your own kids. And I'm listening to this, and you know, I just found it intriguing, right? But when you listen to what they were saying, they were very clearly communicating their point of pain, right? Like, I get that you are telling me the example of what this should look like. I'm telling you my experience. And my experience has to be honored if you want me to be receptive to anything that you're telling me. And so that might seem like it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it's an opportunity for compassion. Because what does compassion require of us? First, we see, right? So, like, wait, what is what what are you saying? You're saying that this is not connecting. Why are you saying that it's not connecting for these reasons? What am I missing? What don't I understand about your experience that is causing you to break protocol and talk back to me about what I'm getting wrong in this sermon? And then what do you do? What would and this was a visiting minister, so this is not his congregation. But how do you begin to speak to not just what we, you know, why we would consider to be the standard tar talking points, right? So God's blueprint for marriage or whatever the case may be, but how do we really talk to people? People in a way that helps them understand that as a community of faith, we see their pain. We see that they have experienced things that did not follow the script. We see that they were left with broken places. We see that the way that we talk about it still does not answer to their pain. And that we're curious enough to ask why, or to ask more, or to say how come, or to say, let me know, like help me understand where we're getting it wrong.

Grantley Martelly 22:29

Yeah, or or recognizing that half of your churches feel a single parent. Or that.

Dr. Kerry King 22:34

Right? Yeah. And that maybe having a Sunday that is foclusively on marriage ministry, where the sermon starts with asking the people who are married to raise their hand and the unmarried people to raise their hand and the married people to be congratulated is perhaps not like, you know, you're not creating safety. And and I will say, as a as a divorced person, I kind of ran the scan in my head. You know, I told you I'm pretty good at. You know, but as I'm sitting there and I'm hearing, raise your hand if you are, I'm thinking there is a segment of nothing that you're doing is wrong, but also what you are doing is really galvanizing in this moment, and you just let some people feel like they've failed at a thing.

Grantley Martelly 23:24

Yes.

Dr. Kerry King 23:24

Right.

Grantley Martelly 23:25

Creating failure.

Dr. Kerry King 23:26

Yeah.

Performative Help Versus Real Neighboring

Grantley Martelly 23:27

So that brings up an interesting point because not only in like this context of marriage and singleness and that kind of stuff, but a lot of times people of faith want to do something in their community or to say, How can I get involved? How can I make things better?

Dr. Kerry King 23:40

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 23:41

Or our church wants to have a ministry or a compassionate ministry. And and a lot of times we start out, well, we're gonna go and do this.

Dr. Kerry King 23:51

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 23:52

So how does how how does compassion really work if we want to be effective in our community?

Dr. Kerry King 23:59

Right. What is the biggest criticism that gets lobbied against uh Christians? You hear the neighbor say, she is a Christian, or the work may well say, he is a pastor. And it begs the question what behaviors have they seen from us that recall into contrast what they believe a Christian looks like in comparison with the behaviors that they are seeing from us. And so we have to be so careful not to make compassion performative. There's a deep temptation to like kind of outsource compassion in a way that's performative. What might performative compassion look like? And I want to be careful here because you know I got a lot of opinions, and many of them are not endorsed.

Grantley Martelly 25:03

Welcome to the club.

Dr. Kerry King 25:05

Safe company, right? Um, you know, it's it's easy to give money. You could put min money in the ministry offering plate and say, go go be compassionate elsewhere. Right. Does that meet the definition, right? Like I have parted with my money, but I have not done anything. Right. Because compassion should change you, but I've not done anything. So what is the motive? Um what is the thing that is taking us from so we see, then we feel. What is the thing that's taking us from feel to do? That's where our motive lives. What and and we have got to be careful when we get to the point where we are transitioning from feel to do because that's where we become most vulnerable to being performative, right? Um an easy way, so I'm gonna stick a pin there and maybe circle tread into less dangerous waters. Um what I I will say is that an act of compassion is being a consistently decent person to live next door to. Okay. Being a person who is able to say that they're sorry if they realize that they have done something that was offensive. Consider your impact on other people. Mind your business sometimes, because you realize that interjecting yourself in some ways in a moment is more damaging than it is helpful. And so I mean, again, that intersection where we transition from seeing feeling into the doing. What do we do? And those things do not require a missions budget. They don't require a compassionate ministries offering, they don't require any of that. They just require you to be human. You see that there is a single mother who lives next door to you who is always racing home in the evening. I'll tell you an example of what I consider to be one of the most compassionate things from my own childhood. My mom was an elementary school teacher, primary school teacher, and she was one of those very hands-on people. And you know my parents, so you know my mother was also very busy in the church. So she would come to school and she was that teacher who stayed after school, and she was doing charts and preparing her classroom, she was doing all of that, and then she would race home and try to cook, and she would come back for choir practice or midweek service, because you know the church wasn't open if my mother wasn't there, right? Right. She was often running to district office because she was on some kind of committee or she she was doing, she was always doing. And there was an older lady who went to our church, lived in our community, and was not anybody of particular means. But I remember ever so often she would call the school for my mother and she would say, Um, Miss King, stop, stop by, pass here on your way home. And we would go, and she would have her old-fashioned Pyrex dish filled with whatever and tied up with the little kitchen towel, you know, how we your portable transport. And I always think of that as something that is so deeply compassionate. It was not huge, right? But as a mother myself, you know how many times I wish that somebody would give me a little food so I didn't have to think about what to feed my child in the evening because it's such a, it's like one more thing. When you're already juggling all the balls, it's just one more thing. And here was this person who maybe comparatively had fewer means, but she looked and she saw and she acknowledged that my mother was doing a lot. And and and also my grandmother lived in that community. And my grandmother was known as a woman who looked out for her children. So it was not that this woman thought that my mother didn't have anybody, but she recognized that there was this thing that she could do that would make a difference. And 40-something years later, that stayed in my head, right? Like, whose childcare you offer to watch because you know that they have to work late. They don't have a choice. Why don't you let them stay by me? I'll give them a snack after school until you come home because they're not sitting in the house, they're less vulnerable to predators, they're not on the internet scrolling, they're not doing all of those things. It's not big, but it's deeply compassionate. Um and so in my mind, I kind of feel like those are the things that matter. There's

Belonging Lessons From Gangs And Bars

Dr. Kerry King 29:46

a level of disconnection, I think, particularly from boys who are super vulnerable to what I'll call criminal enterprises. And we should study gangs. Gangs have figured this out. They understand what is fundamental to like human desire, right? We want connection, we want a sense of belonging, we want to understand that we have the capacity to do something that will gain respect.

Grantley Martelly 30:22

Um and we we we make people feel as though they belong. We're inclusive. Gangs are inclusive.

Dr. Kerry King 30:28

Absolutely. You have a purpose here. You have a purpose. Good, bad, or indifferent. You have a way to support yourself, right? You got a lot of money in your pocket. Right. I was talking to a young man the other day and I was asking him how he feels about his prospects, and he was saying, not good. The fight to be a young person, to go to school, to stay in school, to pay for books and petty fees is so much of a higher hill to climb than to accept the hundred dollars from the drug dealer who say, You ain't got nothing. Hold this hundred dollars for your pocket. But then that $100 comes with, hey, hold this five pound.

Grantley Martelly 31:09

Yeah. Strings connected.

Dr. Kerry King 31:10

$400 is yours, is mine. Whatever you make after that is yours, right? It's so tempting when you have nothing to not lean into the something that's being offered. We have not figured out how to counter that because we are afraid of that young man, or we think that he don't want to hear none from us, or for whatever reason.

Grantley Martelly 31:32

Or we want them to be perfect before we accept them.

Dr. Kerry King 31:35

Or we want them to be perfect before we accept them. And so they do not have a counter-argument in their head. There is not another place that they find safety and affiliation. So you go with the option that you have.

Grantley Martelly 31:51

So you said two things there that I want to get back to. You said we should study gangs, and I 100% agree with that because they have figured out that integration, they've figured out inclusiveness, they figured out we may say that their outcomes are negative. Sure. But we shouldn't throw the baby with a bath water. The process that they use for inclusion is very, very effective. So I've said that many times. I also said that we as people of faith need to study bars. We need to go into bars and rum shops, rum shops in the Caribbean context, bars in the American context, pubs in the Brit in the European context, because those are places where people can go as a total stranger, and within a very short amount of time, they're part of a community. There's somebody to talk to.

Dr. Kerry King 32:43

Correct.

Grantley Martelly 32:44

Um there's, you know, even not just the bartender who communicates for them, but I've observed it many times in my travels and being with workmates who drank and stuff like that. And I would never I'd always be the designated driver. But I would watch how the interaction begins to happen in those places. And then I go to church, even as an ordained minister, and I see how how hard it is for us to do that step of inclusion. Because they're accepting without knowing the person at all. It's just contextualization. We are here. Some people call it affinity groups. Yeah. Some of my friends started affinity groups, they're very effective. But it's like an affinity, right? The thing that brought us here, some people are drinking, some people they want community, they're companion, they may be out of town, or like a child you're talking about who may, who may need that sense of feeling, that sense of belonging. And they are accepted without condition.

Dr. Kerry King 33:44

Yeah. There is no hill to climb first.

Grantley Martelly 33:47

None.

Dr. Kerry King 33:47

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 33:48

So we look at them and we say, we shouldn't go there. That's bad, that's bad. Yeah. Well, the outcome may be bad, but the process is something that we can learn.

Dr. Kerry King 33:56

Yeah, yeah.

Grantley Martelly 33:57

The second thing you said that I thought was very important is the example you give of the lady in your neighborhood who helped. Sometimes people want to be compassionate, people want to do something, and so many times we want it to be programmatic, like you talk about performative. But so many times, again, back to your first point of seeing, she saw something in the community, didn't have to have a committee meeting, didn't have to go and ask her a pastor, didn't have to start a program, didn't have to get a budget. So this is some place that I think I could help. Yes. And many times, you know, for our viewers, uh, you know, we just want that we're trying to get across here that there's so many things you can do without having to have a program or pastor or committee or church by just observing what's going on around you, and how can I be a help? How can I be a compassionate to people? And like you said, it didn't take thing, and the means difference might have been different. But the fact is, I can do this. They reached out to that person and said, not I want to help you, but I'm just doing this for you out of the goodness of my heart. There's no reciprocity in return. And sometimes people are faith, we get into reciprocity saying, Well, we have given, given, given, and they haven't come to church.

Dr. Kerry King 35:21

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 35:21

Well, who said they have to come to church? And we also think So we have an ROI, right?

Dr. Kerry King 35:27

Right. Yes. There is no return necessarily, or the return may not look like you anticipate. And we also link the conversation around compassion to the less fortunate. Says who? Right. Again, when we link the what we feel to what we do, and we talk about being performative. Why do we want to do something for somebody that we consider to be less fortunate? Now hear me clearly. There's nothing wrong. Wrong with that. Right? But there's a certain sense, and um, you know, uh I forget what her name is or Rachel Naomi, I can't remember. But she talks a lot about the stance of the helper, the sense that as a person who is helping, you have to beware the sense that you are in an elevated position doing something to somebody for someone lesser than you are. And I don't care who you are, nobody likes the sense that they are being treated as less than. Less than. Like I don't care what you're doing for me. If it comes with having to feel like less than you in order to get it, then I will resent it at some level. Because are you not also reinforcing my sense of shame? Because I could not help myself. The other thing about what that old lady did that was amazing is that by typical metrics, she was not doing it for somebody who was less fortunate than she, right? It was just truly an act for someone that she could help.

Grantley Martelly 36:55

Regardless of their status, regardless of where they were.

Dr. Kerry King 36:58

Yes.

Grantley Martelly 36:59

And because sometimes that thing we have to do something that helps a person who's lesser than us, we ignore the fact that there may be many opportunities to help people who are on the same level of us, or people who may have not you may consider better than a higher status than you. Compassion doesn't necessarily require status.

Dr. Kerry King 37:16

No, it does not. It does not. You know, so this um I think is just uh an interesting example because sometimes we don't settle to do something that is systemic, but it can become systemic by accident. One day

Small Actions That Scale Systemically

Dr. Kerry King 37:35

it occurred to me to look at the practice of Caribbean people packing barrels. So when we live in the diaspora, packing barrels and sending them home. And particularly in living in the Pennsylvania area, a lot of Jamaican, I ran into a lot of Jamaicans. And we all do it. I think not just Caribbean people, I think we all do it, but I feel like Jamaicans do it with a different level of gusto, right? Um, I don't think there's anybody that could pack a barrel like a Jamaican. And I got curious about like what impact do you have on that? Because when you think about one of the big vulnerabilities of poverty is food insecurity. And if you think about it, packing a barrel does not require much of us. So I go into Giant or, you know, Costco or wherever, and they're selling six cans of tuna for three dollars. And I buy six cans, but I only need two, so two for my cupboard, four for the barrel, right? Buy one, get one free at Target water, laundry detergent, one for me, one for the barrel. And something that in the grand scheme of things does not cost me a lot, particularly if I do it overtime. And then you pay, well, I don't know what it is nowadays, but pay $100 and you ship the barrel home. And that barrel that you have shipped that required nothing of you impacts the food security of somebody or somebody's in your community. Usually more than one. More than one, right? And a lot of the time, what I realized too, and why I call out Jamaica specifically, is because I know, you know, we might send home a barrel because we send in it, you you moved overseas and you left your mother and you're sending it to your mother. But so many times I would see them do it, and they were just sending it back to their community. Their entire family had immigrated, but they were just sending it back because they were aware that it, you know, my kids outgrow pajamas or summer clothes, and I pack them and I send them down, right? Um, so I got curious and I started looking. And this is not just barrels, but when you look at the remittances, so whether it was barrels or money or whatever, if you had a guess about what about how much what the financial impact of that was, what would your guess be?

Grantley Martelly 39:58

I would probably guess in the hundreds of millions.

Dr. Kerry King 40:01

Billions. Billions. Blew my mind. I can't remember the exact number, so I don't want to say a number. But it was in the billions, because I remember the bee catching me off guard. And when you think about it, something that is so inconsequential could have a billion-dollar impact on an economy. Me and you doing that. Yeah. Now there's opportunity there, right? Because there's also studies that say, well, you know, if you don't get the systems in place so people could afford to clear the barrel, so people could afford to transport the barrel, so the government is not charging them too much on import taxes. You know, there's uh there's things that have to be solved for. Sure. But the fact is that there is billions of dollars in potential impact from something that cost me.

Grantley Martelly 40:55

From a a lot of small things. Right. A lot of small actions together cumulatively, and not just billions of dollars, but thousands of people.

Dr. Kerry King 41:04

Thousands of people. Yeah. And and and so small, compassionate acts can certainly be leveraged in ways that have systemic transformational impact, but they don't have to start out that way.

Grantley Martelly 41:21

And they don't always have to be one person.

Dr. Kerry King 41:23

Indeed.

Grantley Martelly 41:24

It's many people doing lots of small things that bring the bring the impact.

Dr. Kerry King 41:28

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 41:28

But then we can go on talking about this for a long time because I think, you know, understanding compassion and really bringing it home to the little things we can do and taking out the performative aspects and the status aspects and all that kind of stuff is because a lot of people that, you know, are people of faith are saying, what can I do to help my community? What can I do to help there? And typically the answer is right before them, but we've been taught to look towards a system or towards a person or towards a group or towards a nonprofit. Whereas your ability to help may not be in any of those. It may just be that neighbor across the street or that child down the road. Or you can volunteer to help kids with lessons after school. You know, you may be in a math teacher, you may know math, or you may know science, the things that kids struggle with, or with reading. You know, you could help kids with reading 30 minutes after school doesn't take anything to sit down in your house or to sit down in your veranda and you taught to that. So helping people to understand that your acts of compassion doesn't have to be institutional or large or systematic. Sometimes when you're asking God, I I preach this all the time, when you're asking God, what can I do? Sometimes He's already put the answer in front of you. Yeah. And it's just not packaged in the right packaging that we have been mentally prepared to say this is how it should package. It may be in a brown paper bag. Yeah. But these things. Your answer is right there.

Dr. Kerry King 43:00

Yeah, right.

Grantley Martelly 43:01

But Lord, what do you want me to do? Right there. It's a little thing. But that's a brown paper bag. It ain't blue. Right there.

Dr. Kerry King 43:07

Right. Yes.

Grantley Martelly 43:12

The principle is start where you can. Start with what's in front of you. You don't have to go on a thousand dollar campaign to raise money to help a child learn how to read.

Dr. Kerry King 43:22

Yeah. I mean, it's the example that has been kind of rattling around in my head is um departing in the Red Sea, right? And uh what did God basically say? He was like, What do you have in your hand? And he was like, I can't part. You see this whole big able C Will you expect me to do? And he says, What do you have in your hand? And I imagine that the non pretty, non-King James Version translation was, You mean this piece of stick? What am I supposed to do with this? But like that piece of stick was the entryway into saving a nation. I think you just never know how when you use what you have in your hand, how that impacts the nation. You but you gotta do something.

Grantley Martelly 44:09

You do something. That stick may be maybe more than you think it is.

Dr. Kerry King 44:13

Yeah.

Grantley Martelly 44:13

So I want to switch here again as we ra as we turn the corner. Um I

A Global Conference On Community Well-being

Grantley Martelly 44:17

know that you are planning a conference here in Barbados and it's coming up here. So I want to give you a little bit of time to talk about that and what you're trying to do.

Dr. Kerry King 44:28

First, you're giving me an opportunity to can to correct a misconception. It's a global conference. It's not in Barbados. It's a virtual conference. It is um occurring on June 3rd and 4th, 2026, and it's online. Um it's the International Institute for Community Well-being. And part of the reason why we decided to focus on community, I told you that in my work, I do a lot of systemic work. I'm helping governments figure out, you know, how to craft policy and how to help providers understand how to implement and how to measure success and how to do all of that. But everything that we know about the data tells us that a sliver of the people who are in distress show up in the system of care. A sliver. And so that means that most of those people are existing in our community and will never interface with what we would consider to be the behavioral health or mental health care system. And there are also people who are not experiencing what you might consider to be diagnosable distress, but are experiencing life is just hard. I turn on the news and I feel overwhelmed by what I see as policy decisions that I think are impacting me, or I'm seeing murders, or I'm being worried that, you know, what does it mean that we woke up in Barbados and I happened to be here a few months back, and we woke up one morning and our airspace was closed. We, and I think that that hit Beijing's pretty hard because it was like, wait, what? What happened? What do you mean our airport, our airspace is closed, but we didn't do anything? But I think it it was such a clear reminder that in this time, there's so many dynamics happening around us that we do not control, but that impact our perception of if we're safe and if we're okay and like of what will happen next and and all of those things. And that kind of distress may not necessarily show up in the mental health system. It may not knock on the door of the mental health system, but it impacts the way that people think, the way that people feel, the way that people show up as parents and partners and employees and drivers on the road merging into traffic who are angry and like, you know, like it just shows up in life. And so for all of these reasons, we really wanted to focus on what is occurring in our communities that cause distress, what's happening there, and how do we tackle it? Because the other thing that is kind of more prevalent in this time than ever is noise. Everybody got an opinion. Everybody is posting, everybody is an expert, everybody has something to say. And the problem with 30 seconds sound bites is that they tell you enough to draw you in, but not enough to help you understand what to do about it. Right. So we're living in this age of sound bites and too much information, but nobody is really clear on what is driving this. And are there things that we could do? Because the work of the people who put no flashy thing is to catch your attention and to activate your system, right? But once your system is activated, how do you feel like you are okay to go about living in this world? Right. That's really a lot of the premise behind the International Institute for Community Well-being. It looks at um what we call globe sourcing solutions. So if I am sitting in Chicago and I find that I am a community who is struggling with racial tensions and feeling like we need to grapple with racial healing, I might try to reinvent the wheel or I might ask myself, are there other communities around the globe that have had to come to racial reconciliation? South Africa probably has, right? Germany probably has. What do they know that they could teach us? If we are worried about criminal enterprises taking over the lives of young people, and we ask ourselves, how do we battle with this? There are communities that have been dealing with the cartel and the mafia and for generations, but have found ways and means to take care of their young people and point them in a direction that's productive and beneficial, in spite of that. When we look at systems where they are no psychiatrists, they are no psychologists, but they have created a way to rally around women who are experiencing trauma and leverage small resources to allow these women to build a way of sustaining themselves and their children. If we want to solve for that, maybe we should go ask them. And so it's kind of those things coming together that's really fueled this conference. So, so ironically, the conference is really driven by compassion, right? Because first we see, so we want to do some accurate understanding of what is driving all of this. Help me to understand what it is that I'm seeing. And um, then we feel a true sense of like what is happening for others, opening up our capacity for concern, but then helping people to understand what they can do, big and small solutions. What can you do? So that's what we're gonna spend two days in June doing.

Grantley Martelly 50:21

And what how do you get more information about it?

Dr. Kerry King 50:24

Um you can jump on our website. It is Icw-global.org. Or we also have an IICW global page on Facebook and one on Instagram.

Grantley Martelly 50:39

Okay, Facebook and Instagram. All of them are IICW.

Dr. Kerry King 50:43

IICW, International Institute for Community Well-being.

Grantley Martelly 50:47

Okay, and that is virtual, so anywhere in the world you can you can log on.

Dr. Kerry King 50:52

Anywhere in the world, you can log on from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on June 3rd or 4th. Register ahead of time so we can send you a Zoom link.

Grantley Martelly 51:03

If people want to get in touch with you or get more information about Kerry King and the work that you do, or maybe even your consultation or your work, how do you do that?

Dr. Kerry King 51:13

Sure. You can jump on my webpage, which is the King Institute. Um, and that's just the King Institute.org.

Grantley Martelly 51:23

That's a great name. Yeah. Kinginstitute.org.

Dr. Kerry King 51:29

King Institute.

Grantley Martelly 51:30

The King Institute.org.

Dr. Kerry King 51:31

Now there's another King Institute that is not me.

Grantley Martelly 51:35

This is specifically the King Institute.org. The King Institute.org. And they can also email you from there as well.

Dr. Kerry King 51:45

They can email me at either info at the Kinginstitute.org or Kerry, K-E-R-R-Y at the Kinginstitute.org. Either one.

Grantley Martelly 51:54

We will we will put that also in our show notes and places how people can get in touch with you.

Dr. Kerry King 51:59

Appreciate it.

Grantley Martelly 52:00

So Kerry's doctor Kerry, thank you for the conversation. Thank you. I hope that um you enjoyed it. I really look forward to it for a long time. And uh I think it was very, very good. I think our audience would find it to be very informative just to help in those areas where we talked about. So as we close, what are what are three things you would like people to take away from this?

Dr. Kerry King 52:23

Yeah.

Three Takeaways And Listener Actions

Dr. Kerry King 52:24

Um pay attention. So look around, notice where the opportunities are sitting right in front of you. Lean in with curiosity. Just ask the next logical question. If you see and you don't understand, or you worry that your intervention might be not appreciated, ask somebody's permission. You know, would it be okay if I? Um and then the other thing is be willing to take a risk. And we didn't cover this one, but I'll say this one. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is to let somebody know that they're not alone. And sometimes that looks like choosing vulnerability ourselves. So choosing to tell somebody your story so that they understand that the thing that they are experiencing is not peculiar to them. That sometimes is the most compassionate thing that we could do for another person.

Grantley Martelly 53:24

Thank you. And that's a great point to end our session on. So thanks again and really appreciate your time.

Dr. Kerry King 53:30

Thanks for the invitation.

Grantley Martelly 53:36

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