On Peer Support and Building Friendships

 

By Kendall Worth

Regular readers may remember my recent BLOG post where I touched on the important contribution that peer support programs can make to helping people in my community. At that time, I indicated that this is a topic that I wanted to explore in greater depth. And that is what I am doing in today’s BLOG.  

The focus of my advocacy and writing is always to address the needs of people in my community, - people who live in poverty in Halifax and struggle with mental health issues and disabilities. This combination of poverty, social anxiety and disability often results in chronic social isolation and loneliness, which only compounds the many difficulties already being faced by these individuals.  

For many in our community, our primary inter-personal engagements are with health care  professionals such as doctors, psychiatrists and social workers. But we have to remember that such professionals are limited by both professional ethics and codes of conduct as to what they can and cannot do in support of clients. They are not “friends” and should not be expected to act like friends.

This is what prompted me in an April BLOG to make the case for a non-professional peer support worker program.  In my opinion, a peer support worker can play an important role in helping people to negotiate that grey space between professional and friend. Such support workers would be a central member of the professional support team but the nature of their relationship with the clients would be quite different.

Social networks of friends are an important element of everyone’s wellness and quality of life, as I have written about here. I am particularly hopeful that peer support workers would be able to help marginalised people develop and maintain social networks of friends. This would likely involve a series of structured conversations in which the peer support worker would help clients work through their answers to a series of often sensitive questions that focus on people’s history and understanding of friendships and relationships. Some of these questions are:  

•      Have several of my friendships ended for similar reasons or followed a similar pattern?

•      When someone asks me for space, do I respect that request, or do I continue contacting them because I am afraid of losing the friendship?

•      Am I expecting one friend to provide more time, emotional support or availability than that person can realistically give?

•      Do I accept that a friend can care about me while still having other friends, family responsibilities, employment, health concerns and a life of their own?

•      When I feel rejected, hurt or anxious, do I immediately assume that the other person no longer cares about me?

•      Could fear of abandonment, past trauma, anxiety or another mental-health challenge be influencing how I react?

•      Have I pushed someone away to protect myself from the possibility that they might leave first?

•      Do I communicate my concerns calmly, or do I wait until my emotions have built up and then react in a way that may damage the friendship?

•      Am I willing to listen when a friend tells me that something I am doing is making them uncomfortable?

•      Can I apologize and take responsibility without immediately becoming defensive or blaming myself for everything?

•      Do I understand that explaining the reasons behind my behaviour is not the same as avoiding responsibility for how that behaviour affected someone else?

•      Am I respecting the difference between receiving support from a friend and expecting that friend to act as my counsellor, social worker or crisis-support worker?

•      Am I also respecting my own boundaries and recognizing when a friendship has become one-sided, unsafe or unhealthy?

•      Am I allowing a new friendship to develop gradually instead of expecting immediate closeness?

•      Am I showing interest in the other person’s experiences, needs and interests, or is the friendship becoming centred mainly on my difficulties?

•      Am I making an effort to maintain the friendship through listening, reliability, kindness, compromise and mutual respect?

•      If a friendship ends, can I reflect on what happened and learn from it without concluding that I will always be alone?

•      Would a friendship-skills workshop, support group, peer-support program or professional mental-health service help me understand patterns I find difficult to change by myself?

•      What is one practical change I could make that might help me become a healthier and more dependable friend?

My own experience is that building and maintaining friendships in my community is greatly complicated by a number of factors. One of these is the social stigma that society at larger directs at people who are poor, disabled and living with mental health issues. I have written about such stigma in many earlier articles, including here and here. This stigma can be an enormous obstacle to people building healthy and sustainable social relationships.

Another source of anxiety and frustration in my community is the issue of invisible disabilities. I have written about this issue as well – see here, and how so many in our society view disability in terms of visible physical conditions, such as the loss of a limb or the need for a wheelchair.  The reality is that many disabled people in our community live with invisible disabilities such as mental illness or chronic pain.  But these are rarely considered by members of mainstream society, which can result in all sorts of social stigma and harassment.

One Possible Approach:

In addition to one-on-one conversations with a peer support worker, another approach to building better skills for the building and maintenance of friendships is that of friendship skills workshops. In such a workshop, one could discuss issues such as setting and respecting boundaries, which are often cited as a major stumbling block to long-term friendships.

I have long promoted the idea of a Social Prescribing Organization to organize such services as peer support and friendship-skills workshops, alongside affordable opportunities to meet different people. This would help socially isolated people to not only make new connections, but also develop the communication, emotional-regulation and relationship skills needed to build safe, respectful and lasting friendships.

But until we can get such a program or organization up and running, I believe that social isolation will continue to be a major problem for much of our community. Surely, we can do better!

 

Kendall Worth is an award-winning anti-poverty activist who lives with disabilities and tries to make ends meet on income assistance.