I'm not sure it's a system that loved me back but your blog made me reflect on my experience volunteering as a peer mentor (1-to-1 peer support for people who'd been through a specific mental health service)
The training instilled a kind of risk-centred model around keeping your boundaries and not taking on peoples problems. Nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but the primacy of this framed it as almost like a contamination risk - like you have to wear psychological PPE before interacting with the mad. It also promoted a kind of bureaucracy serving exercise of logging stuff in a spreadsheet (while maintaining anonymity). The work of each session was to contrive their problems into a SMART goal and assign homework.
When i started this i was quite insecure. So while i found the systems a bit blunt, they were also reassuring. I could sit and demonstrate active listening while waiting for an opportunity to deploy the SMART goal framework. If could do that, then i had done a peer mentoring.
I had one mentee, god bless em, who just said to me outright "i don't wanna do any of this stuff i just wanna chat". It sounds so trivial but it felt rebellious to cast off the scaffolding (or cage) and just talk about experiences of psychosis without orienting that to an output or goal. It meant that these sessions didn't provide me with the raw material to build my evidence log and achieve peer mentoring accreditation. But in a way that made it way more mutualistic. I wasn't extracting something for my own benefit (or the benefit of a system) - it was just a pure conversation. Perhaps love (in the bell hooks sense)
I'm not sure it's a system that loved me back but your blog made me reflect on my experience volunteering as a peer mentor (1-to-1 peer support for people who'd been through a specific mental health service)
The training instilled a kind of risk-centred model around keeping your boundaries and not taking on peoples problems. Nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but the primacy of this framed it as almost like a contamination risk - like you have to wear psychological PPE before interacting with the mad. It also promoted a kind of bureaucracy serving exercise of logging stuff in a spreadsheet (while maintaining anonymity). The work of each session was to contrive their problems into a SMART goal and assign homework.
When i started this i was quite insecure. So while i found the systems a bit blunt, they were also reassuring. I could sit and demonstrate active listening while waiting for an opportunity to deploy the SMART goal framework. If could do that, then i had done a peer mentoring.
I had one mentee, god bless em, who just said to me outright "i don't wanna do any of this stuff i just wanna chat". It sounds so trivial but it felt rebellious to cast off the scaffolding (or cage) and just talk about experiences of psychosis without orienting that to an output or goal. It meant that these sessions didn't provide me with the raw material to build my evidence log and achieve peer mentoring accreditation. But in a way that made it way more mutualistic. I wasn't extracting something for my own benefit (or the benefit of a system) - it was just a pure conversation. Perhaps love (in the bell hooks sense)
The local music scene in Denver has been a successful, loving, community-run space in my experience.
Love this …. Thank you