This is a sample post from Lynne Pearl’s series How To Create & Run A Self-Help Support Group on the blog Shine A Light On Life
How to create and run your own Self help Support Group
By Lynne Pearl, PhD
Q: Do you have any final thoughts on the group?
A: The only summary is that I am just very grateful for that part of life now because it has meant a lot to me whether or not it was immediately obvious. When thinking about it I realise over the years I’ve been through an awful lot of stuff that would have been a lot more difficult to deal with on my own.
Even as recently as twenty-four hours ago, I found myself unburdening myself to that group, because of something driving me nuts. I didn’t get any magic pills as a result, just knowing that those people are there, unqualified, unjudgmental acceptance of me.
There are no ready fixes, no cheap advice, but clearly there was some kind of empathic response. Whatever is going on my life it doesn’t change their friendship towards me or their feelings of affection towards me. A very enriching thing, not very commonly found in the way that I have found it. Not very common in our age. I am very grateful for it. I may take some credit for making that group what it is but for the most part I feel lucky to have landed there.
Here are some of the interviews in which people talk about how self- groups have helped them on their journey:
Q: In what ways did the group help?
A: I think a wide range of support, more than a decade and a half. The emotional colours have faded a bit from where I was then, I was miserably unhappy and badly confused about what I wanted for more than a year or two with often times the group helpful just letting me say what I was trying to do, get other people’s reflections, sometimes suggestions, a sympathetic ear and in some cases I didn’t want anything more than having a group of friends around me, living their lives as usual in the normal way. It was reference point for me, I’d been there and could be there again.
Q: Could you speak about what you felt was the most meaningful experience in your self-help group?
J: Hard to say. I guess I would have to generalise. The feeling of acceptance. The feeling that I was, no matter how bad I felt or how bad I thought I was that there were people who knew me well who weren’t critical of me who found no points to criticise or reject me on. Something, no matter how confused I was, something in that experience.
And again another person’s experiences:
Q: Can you tell me in what ways the group helps you.
A: They don’t have to be very educated and know everything about families but just their life experiences, their life experiences you can relate. You can talk about your problems, and they know, at least they know where you come from. If they’re willing to share. I find that in this group there are people who are not very willing to share…but they seem to be scared of speaking up or saying what’s really on their mind. They’re careful because they think they’re going to be judged.
What is a Self-Help Support Group?
Self-help can include many kinds of groups depending on the needs of members, but fundamentally it is a group that can be organized around any kind of need or crisis, but the over- riding importance is of common interest for all members. In many of these interviews the people were in a self-help group due to separation or divorce and were in a group of other people who were in a similar life situation. But groups can be organised around any issue at all, as this is a grass roots movement.
If the groups are truly self-help, they will be run by members themselves and are a grass roots way of networking. They have many aspects, rules, history and how they work, as they may be run in a variety of ways. They have been shown to have benefits for participants, and provide meaning, trust and companionship. They are a fairly recent occurrence though ways of organizing can be found in basic forms all through history and around the world in different cultures and societies. So although for us this a new occurrence, it is also very old.
This Week: Crisis of Belief and What Gives Meaning
This crisis is intimately tied up with the loss of sense of who you are and the eventual change to a subsequent sense of identity, changed from what it was.Part of this sense of who you are may be derived from our family and these issues may come to the front as part of the whole process. As one person said, “When things break apart you can go right down to the ground, questioning the structure, what everything is built upon . . .” People may be catapulted into a situation where they, “question the structure,” that is the foundation and their meaning in the world. From work on grief we know that meaning is not necessarily related to how worthy the object is. In an analysis of Bowlby’s theories on widows and grief one writer tells us: “The depth of commitment to the lost object is not determined by the inherent worthiness of the object but by the extent to which that object somehow embodies meaning for the griever.”. In the case of bereavement through death the loss of meaning may be great (and there is support and meaning available through religious or spiritual systems for the bereaved). One in particular completely loses her trust as part of the process. She says:
Still I was having a hard time letting go. My counsellor said I can’t help you with this. You have to let go. They (the support group) all said you have to let this go, but . . . I couldn’t let this go, so for me joining the support group I had to turn my back. The teaching that I needed to learn how to be a healthy woman. And I joined the support group.
Next Week: Letting Go
How to use this blog
You can use the chapters in any order you like, as they come out week by week, in fact if you don’t want to read the stories you can jump straight in at ‘How to set up a self- help support group’ and follow up with ‘Group Size, Composition and Location.’ But the stories of people who have been involved in self help support groups will probably be a help to you as you go about setting up your own group, in your own locality wherever that is.
In other words this is a manual to get you up and going. At the end of this section there is an outline of all the chapters so that you can get going. Good luck to you, your neighbours, and friends.
In upcoming weeks, we will cover topics such as:
- Giving an Account of Yourself: M’s Account
- Benefits of Self help
- The Care Movement
- How to set up a self- help support group
- Group Size, Composition and Location
- How we create Meaning
- Self-help from the Grass Roots Up: the Origins of the Talking Cure
- Crisis of Belief
- Getting Accepted
- Discourse Sources: Creating a New Identity
- Other Sources
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Resources
© Lynne Pearl, 2021
This is a sample post from Lynne Pearl’s series How To Create & Run A Self-Help Support Group on the blog Shine A Light On Life
