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Cathy Cave: Welcome everyone to today's webinar.
This is a first in a series.
My name is Cathy Cave, and I'd like to welcome everyone and to think about Wellness in Peer
Support.
In our panel today we have Peggy Swarbrick who is the creator of the eight dimensions
of wellness and a senior consultant with SAMHSA's Program to Achieve Wellness.
We have Johanna Bergan who is the executive director of Youth MOVE National.
We have Tiara Springer-Love who is a youth advocate coordinator for Families on the Move
in New York City.
We have Beth Mangiaracina who is a trainer for the Mental Health Impairment Project of
Albany, New York.
My name is Cathy Cave and I'm the co-director on SAMHSA's Program to Achieve Wellness.
So, welcome.
So, the views expressed today during this training do not necessarily represent the
views, policies, and positions of the Center for Mental Health Services, the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or the United States Department of Health
and Human Services.
So, today in Module 1 on the Wellness in Peer Support we're going to have an overview of
our content for this whole webinar series, and we're going to hear from some peer supporter
voices who are people who are actively engaged in doing this work.
The goal of our webinar series is to offer suggestions of practices and strategies for
maintaining personal wellness for family members, caregivers, and peer specialists who are involved
in the work of supporting others.
The strategies can be applied in different environments.
So, we have peer-run and family-run organizations.
We have community mental health centers, and people can apply these strategies at home.
So, as we're thinking about our approach to the work of supporting others, we asked everyone
to think about how you can apply this information to your life and your work and support in
your work of supporting others.
I'm going to turn the program over at this point to Peggy Swarbrick who is here with
us today, and if folks could just bear with us for a minute, we're having a little bit
of technical difficulty.
Dr. Peggy Swarbrick: Hello, this Peggy Swarbrick, and thank you very much for listening in on
the Wellness in Peer Support, Enhancing Personal Capacity for Wellness today.
I'm really excited to be here and to talk to you a little bit today with our colleagues
here to really understand really some of these strategies that can really enhance our capacity
for doing the good work we do.
What we wanted to start out with was a definition of peer support, and really one of the strong
foundations of the work that many of us do in the work of peer support is based on the
work of Sherry Mead with Intentional Peer Support.
We really find that her definition and her work is really very central, and so we wanted
to put up this definition, that peer support is a system of giving and receiving help among
people with shared experiences, based on respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement
of what is helpful.
I think what you're going to learn through this series and today and the follow-up is
to really understand this definition and how it really actually plays out in a variety
of ways, many different ways, direct one-on-one, could be in groups, can be on the phone.
Peer support is delivered in many different ways and again in a variety of settings.
It can be in traditional, non-traditional settings, and really what we see more and
more its non-traditional settings, in the places and spaces that many people find are
more comfortable and really where a lot of good work around helping enhance recovery
and wellness can happen for people.
So, we wanted to just start off with that and to just highlight that.
The essence of the peer support relationship is again really important.
It's about relationships, folks connecting with one another providing this peer support.
As a peer, many times what we think about on terms on what is our peer-ness, it's about
having shared experiences, and there's a variety of types of experiences that people share
amongst each other, but a lot of times the idea that we want to be thinking about is
the sharing of things that we have a similar connection around, many times a challenging
situation.
Basically, one of the things we want to think about is how we work through connecting on
that challenge, but then how we overcome and where we can help to learn from each other
to help one another to transcend those challenges and really again enhancing our personal capacity
for wellness, which is the theme of this series is how do we enhance our strengths, enhance
our skills, build that resilience to help one other.
So, as a peer, there's that shared experience.
Similar life experiences as well as challenges, and it's the challenges and how we creative
ways been able to overcome those things really makes that foundation of that relationship.
One thing that is so essential when we think about the peer support relationship, what
makes this so very different is that partnership and that equal playing field that people are
on when they're doing this work, that we really are more on an equal playing ground when we're
dealing with the connection with people and not being in this hierarchy relationship with
people and telling people what to do or feeling as though we have this wisdom and power that
we can impart to people.
It's around sharing each other's experiences and helping the person to come to that understanding
of what their strengths are, what their ways of coping, and what their ways of moving forward
in their life.
So, really, this is so important, again not only about the peer piece that we think about,
but the support piece.
It's having that empathy and that connection because of those shared experiences and those
shared circumstances that we have had often maybe not so good, but how do we look to the
resiliency of one another and provide that encouragement of one another.
Not direction or advice or telling people what to do, encouraging people and helping
people to assist them on things that they think is helpful and that they are seeking
the help for.
So, it's really learning about what would be helpful for someone and helping to provide
that support in a way that they see has helpful.
It's really the other piece that makes this very different than traditional work that
we do, in terms of our peer support work, is that reciprocal relationship.
It's much more reciprocal, because there's a learning process that's going on together,
that we're learning from one another and keeping that openness.
That we go in there to help activate that strength in the person that we're supporting
and that were connecting with and it's a reciprocal process in terms of this relationship.
So, when we think about peer support, I think it's important as we start to really lay the
ground to better understand this whole focus of the next couple of webinars, we want to
really have a good framework around the definition of peer support and really most important
essence of the peer support relationship, which other colleagues are going to really
talk about this much more.
Now, what we're going to do, is we're going to hear from Tiara.
Tiara Springer-Love: Can you hear me?
Okay, I think I'm talking.
Dr. Peggy Swarbrick: Yes.
Tiara Springer-Love: Okay, because I'm just like talking to myself.
Hello everyone.
So, as Peggy just lovely stated, yes, that's exactly what the essence of peer support is,
and peer support has been something that's been extremely instrumental for me to maintain
wellness and provide effective peer support in my role as a youth advocate coordinator.
Some of my lived experiences within the mental health field as well as the foster care system,
and it was hard.
So, growing up my mom focused a lot on finances, spirituality, physical wellness, but mental
wellness was not something that she entertained.
So, I grew up in a family where mental illness wasn't even a word that we talked about.
I had behavior challenges, and my mom felt as though it was something I was doing to
get attention, and she didn't really realize the effect that being in foster care really
had on me, especially with the role genetics played in my family.
So, by 10 years old, my school counselor, she suggested that I get mental services,
and it was something my mom was not open to, and by 13 I had my first suicide attempt and
by 14 I was finally receiving the appropriate mental health services.
It took a four-year gap before I knew that I wasn't the only person in life who had my
same lived experience.
That experience was not effective going to therapy; however, my mom did place other protective
factors around me.
So, she got me into tennis, and she got me into dance, and I was part of a community
support group with girls who were going through similar challenges that I was going through,
and that was where I learned core values and skills on how to necessarily become a woman.
These programs, they didn't have labels.
They preached about overall wellness and balance.
While I was in this rites of passage program, I learned about goals, and I didn't necessarily
have any goals at 14, but one thing that gave me hope was to graduate high school.
So, graduating high school didn't seem like a solid goal, because I would have been the
first out of my biological siblings to graduate high school.
So, graduating high school to me seemed as though it would have pretty cool.
It would have been okay, but once I was able to find balance and actually obtain that goal
of a high school diploma.
It definitely instilled in me a sense of empowerment that I hadn't felt before, and I don't think
that would have been a goal if it hadn't been for the peers that my mother surrounded me
with.
So, I graduated high school.
I maintained this balance, and then that balance helped me with identifying emotions.
Once I was able to identify emotions and obtain this high-school degree, I then went to college.
I didn't learn how to process my emotions, but I was able to identify them.
Through my process of going to college, I was able to get my degree.
I have a BA in psychology, and in that moment I enrolled myself back into therapy at 19,
even though it was something my mother didn't agree with, I knew that this was something
I needed to maintain balance and to accomplish whatever my next goal was going to be.
So now I'm in graduate school, and I'm getting my master's degree, and the tools that I
have acquired just through the goal of having balance has definitely helped me when it comes
to achieving wellness and when it comes to just maintaining my role was a peer youth
advocate.
So, now that I'm a youth advocate coordinator, I provide the same support to the youth advocates
who are providing the service.
Another piece that I discovered was how important having support was for me as a child.
So, as I'm getting older, I find myself recreating the support systems that I had when I was
younger in order to still seek out those peers so that I can get different perspective about
things, especially being in school and becoming a professional and not feeling lost anymore.
I just remember being in high school feeling lost, and now that I'm exploring adulthood,
peer relationships are the ones that allow me to keep on going and maintaining, whether
it be from school or whether it be at work and finding those peers at work who I have
trusted relationships with and especially my relationship with my supervisor where I'm
open.
I'm honest.
I'm transparent.
It helps me to maintain my role as a youth advocate so as far as mental illness is concerned,
therapy for me is the same way people go to the gym to maintain their physical wellbeing,
or they see a financial counselor to maintain their finances, I have a tendency to go to
therapy to maintain my mental wellbeing.
So, for me, as you can see on the slide, wellness is key, and I maintain my wellness by maintaining
balance and accomplishing goals.
So, thank you.
Dr. Peggy Swarbrick: Great, thanks so much, Tiara, for illustrating really many of the
things that we're going to be talking about and many things that we know about peer support
and the value of the support and the relationships and really how, what I think is so critical
in this is focusing on the wellness.
Focusing on your wellness, how that builds your capacity for you to take care of yourself,
to build yourself, to become who you want to be and what you can realize your potential
for other things in your life through those goal setting so that you are able to then
provide that peer support for others now, and really kind of give that back, that reciprocal,
really, passing it along, sharing, building.
Again, connection is essential for the sharing amongst those kinds of things and learning
from others, learning from yourself, and now you're giving that back.
I think that is one of the things we see is so powerful in the peer support relationship,
and then some of the research on the peer support is that giving back and the power
of that, how that helps activating and helps continue to keep through our journey of recovery.
The lived experiences.
So, many people could have looked at that story, your story, and look at it from a case
study perspective.
We've all seen these case studies and we hear that case study or that story.
We heard that story from you that you shared of overcoming those adversities that really
you looked at the strengths.
You found those things that you could do for your wellness that built that resilience,
kept that hope alive, and kept that foundation for that peer support.
So, I think really your story, your sharing, your voice has really given us a lens to really
understand and knowing what peer support is and what it can be, and the real important
value.
So, we're going to hear now from Johanna and really thank you so much, Tiara, for sharing.
Johanna Bergan: Thanks, Tiara and Peggy.
This is Johanna Bergan, and I'm the executive director of Youth MOVE National.
MOVE standing for Motivating Others to Voices of Experience, and our work is really to connect
young people who have lived experience in behavioral health and special education and
child welfare so that they can have peer support and peer experiences within their community.
Through my work at Youth MOVE, I've been able to spend so much of the last couple of years
really supporting the development of youth peer support across the country.
Peggy and Tiara, I loved hearing what you were saying, and I'm so excited that I can
bring the perspective that I've been learning from these peers to this series, because Peggy,
just like what you just said, we have found over and over again when we can invest and
care for ourselves while we're in the role of peer, that really allows us to truly offer
support to others.
So, this series focusing on the wellness of youth peers and our role is incredibly important
to our work.
Two important pieces for our discussion today and really throughout this series as we talk
about practicing and promoting wellness in the work of peer support is the practice of
cultural responsiveness and the practice of trauma-informed practices.
I'm going to spend a couple of minutes talking about those two things now.
So, what does it really look like if we are practicing wellness in a way that's responsive
to the diverse culture that we each bring to this work and what does it look like if
we're able to embody and promote trauma-informed practices as we care for our own wellness
and as we support those in the work with us.
So, any wellness practices that an organization we work for may present or practices that
we choose to add to our life must encompass the diverse cultures we each bring to the
table.
We are such a diverse movement and such a diverse workforce, and our wellness practices
should reflect that.
Our wellness practices will look so differently so diverse across our work.
Really, as we're creating a culture of wellness in our practice and work environment, in our
community, we really need to honor the cultural perspective we each bring in order to be well.
This means that we have to create very specific space to have conversations about what does
diverse wellness practice look like and how can we cultivate and nurture that?
I think that this starts very early on in the process, even as we talk about what is
our definition of healing.
What is our definition of wellness?
What does recovery mean to us?
That we can't make an assumption that we have a common understanding of what this means.
My experience is that what recovery means varies from individual to individual.
I think an example of that is when I have the opportunity to work with youth and young
adults and ask them what recovery means, it can be a very complicated conversation, I
think, because as a young person when we think about recovery or returning to something,
we've had a short life, right?
We may actually be looking forward to what we going to grow into?
What will our wellness journey look like in the future?
So we may think about a resiliency journey or a wellness journey and have to really think
about how to encompass the recovery language into our work.
So, a consideration like that when we work with a new population of young adults is one
way that we can start reflecting on how we define wellness and recovery together as we
start this important work.
The other thing that I think we really need to consider early on as we create cultures
of wellness is the impact of trauma.
So many of us have experienced traumatic experiences and luckily, I think we're a part of a workforce
in a time where we are as a whole better able to identify traumatic experiences and to reflect
together of what that means in our individual wellness and within our work.
So, as we work on wellness individually and within our organizations and communities,
I would uphold that we need to think about trauma-informed practices as a core component
of building wellness.
I think that those of us on the call today will really see the value of peer support,
know that we are very capable of changing the conversation from what is wrong with you
to what has happened to you?
When we're able to make that shift at the core of trauma-informed care, we're able to
support each other on a very different wellness journey.
I think that if we can hold throughout this webinar series and the work we do each day
in developing wellness within ourselves and within those we support, if we can hold the
importance of cultural responsiveness and trauma-informed practices, we are building
a really strong base for us to move forward from.
In our work to develop content for you all today, I think for me it's been very important
to look at the overlap of these areas.
It's been important to think about in our day-to-day work how we can recognize the differences
and the sources of our pain and of our journey, and how the sources affect how we craft a
wellness plan and a wellness journey for ourselves, and that it is incredibly challenging, if
not impossible, to separate sort of long-term suffering related to prejudice and trauma
as we talk about wellness.
SO, if these aren't a part of your conversation, I'd invite you to join with us for this series
as we think about and explore practices that allow this to be a part of our work.
So, each of us, I think, can apply this in a couple of ways.
So, Cathy started us off talking about all the different environments that these wellness
ideals and practices could be utilized, and they can start at home.
They can start with us.
So, Tiara, if we follow you down the path that you laid for us, that peer relationships
are what help keep us going and helps us find and stay tuned into the balance we need across
all the dimensions of wellness, then we can really start thinking about what is my cultural
approach to wellness?
Am I acknowledging my spiritual needs, my emotional needs in my wellness plan?
While we are caring for ourselves and maintaining our own wellness, we're then able to pass
on at a much greater capacity that support in that empathetic mutual relationship that
we're able to develop as youth peers.
I think that one thing that has been very powerful in my own wellness journeys is that
finding my voice and realizing that being able to share my own experiences in the mental
health system in a way that had value for others was a huge part of my own realization
that I was even on a wellness journey.
That really until my voice was heard, I wasn't able to clearly articulate what I would feel
like or what my life would be like in a well space.
This, I think, is common across the youth experience of our network.
So, really thinking how you become your own self-advocate and how you can advocate and
speak up for yourself is the first foundation step of being able to be a part of a well
community and to be able to support others around us that will peer relationships with
and being well as well.
So, really carrying with us that we will always need to be our self-advocate and that will
need to stay at the center of our important work throughout is a core part of wellness.
I think as we are self-advocates for ourselves, we are then able to serve as models and to
be able to open the door and have conversations with those that are in peer relationships
with us.
I think it is important also to acknowledge that there can be a disconnect for those of
us that serve and formalize peer roles within an agency for us to think about how and where
our we are own self-advocate voice, when do we need to be speaking up for ourselves and
when is our voice at the table to be speaking on behalf of those that we support and work
with.
That either/or conversation brings a lot of challenges for us to stay well in our peer
roles at work.
So, I'd like to be part of the work that your organizations and your communities are in
to have that be a both-and conversation, that we need to be able to present at work each
day in a way that advocates and meets our personal wellness needs first and that thus
allows us to do our work really well and really effectively.
So, I think we need know from individual journeys and experiences that are focused on our own
wellness can help strengthen our ability to do our work and to offer peer support in the
best way possible, and that we also know that there is a such a mutual benefit to those
that we work with every day when we're able to model a focus on wellness.
Tiara, as you said, a focus on balance in our lives.
So, I'm excited to participate in this series throughout and to continue to explore these
opportunities with you.
I'm also really excited that you'll be able to hear from Beth today, and she's going to
reflect on the role of self-awareness and empathy with us today.
So, Beth, can I hand it over to you?
Beth Mangiaracina: Sure.
Thank you.
So, this is very exciting to me to be a part of talking about self-awareness and one of
the things that I've always focused on, or not always, just very recently I focused on
my self-awareness to support what I do in peer support.
When i became a peer supporter and a trainer, I came with 100% behind me the values of peer
support, but as I began working in peer support, I discovered something about myself that brought
more awareness to my own needs.
So, one of the things that I wanted to mention is that my agency, Mental Health Impairment
Project and the supervision that I've received over the last three years has been one of
self-exploration and the permission, the ability to self-advocate and use my voice has been
developed.
One of the things that I appreciate is that we develop our skills and talk about our strengths
in supervision.
So, I'd like to tell you a little bit about what I do now for self-awareness that supports
me in my peer support and training and also in my personal life.
It's a beautiful thing.
So, one of the things I do is I do a self-check-in when I'm beginning a training or I'm talking
to my partner or I'm doing one-on-one peer support, I sort of do a positive intention
for the meeting or the training.
In that intention, I think about what I want to offer to the other person to support them.
I want to offer good listening and open up my curiosity to the person and what they may
be saying, and at the same time, I want to make an intention to take care of myself to
listen to my body and see what I need for myself in the relationship.
Another thing that I do, is I remember that one of the most important things to me in
peer support and in my own feelings is connection with people.
It's kind of goes with boundary setting, because what I discovered was I need to connect with
people so much, that in the past I would look for a connection by doing work for other people,
by offering to help, by fixing for people and in my awareness of myself and the work
that I've done in supervision and through just experience, I've learned to use my voice
like Johanna said and set goals like Tiara said and reach out to my co-workers and my
supervisor for support.
So, I use my voice now to ask for support and ask for help, and what I discovered in
doing that was a flourishing of connection with people.
I discovered that I needed to bring myself to the relationship on a more vulnerable level
and say what I need and express my beliefs, and what happened was some beautiful relationships
have developed in trainings, at work, and in my personal life.
So, that's one of the steps I do.
Number four is that I am very aware of my self-judgment and that it can be very harsh.
I don't know if that will ever go away, but what I've discovered through awareness, self-awareness,
is that I tell myself to look for the evidence.
Like, if I'm being hard on myself about a training or maybe I said something that I
don't think was helpful, I look for the evidence.
Without a doubt, it's usually very positive feedback that I get.
So, that I realized that I do have strengths.
So, I focus on my strengths rather than what I may have done wrong, and it's a very conscious
decision to say, well, what's the evidence?
Let me stop judging myself as hard as I can.
The last thing I do is, I scan my body for peaceful moments.
I do deep breathing, and I ground myself by maybe taking a rock and holding it in my hand
and feeling that rock or sitting down and looking at the wild flowers or even when I'm
driving, looking at the trees and the mountains around us and kind of balance myself and center
myself and notice the beauty of the present.
What I'd like to share with you just to end is that it hasn't been automatic.
It's something that the deep breathing and the self-awareness is something that I am
developing over time, and it's become very automatic.
Every day in every way it builds towards connection with people, the self-awareness.
So, that's about it.
Thank you.
Dr. Peggy Swarbrick: Great.
Thanks, Beth, and I think really hearing the stories and the voices of really peer supporters
in the work that you're doing and the practices and how you really look at your own wellness
and how we become reflective and become self-aware is a real big theme that we've heard today
and we'll continue to hear.
Now as we move, to think about this idea of how we can enhance our personal capacity for
wellness and how we have had two really great examples that we've heard today, we want to
talk about whose responsibility is it for wellness?
When we think about the work that we do, as we talked about that these strategies that
we are talking about can be applied in different environments, whether it's the different places
and spaces where we're working, we want to be thinking really about kind of three different
areas.
First of all, responsibility.
Responsibility has to do with the accountability, control, and decision-making that duty.
So, whose responsibility is it for wellness?
We're looking at individual and organizational.
So, the individual thinking in terms of the series and the context of our work as peer
supporters and also the responsibility of the people that we're supporting.
So, we want to be keeping that in our mind as we think about how to apply the things
that we're talking about today and in the next couple of weeks.
You know, the individual, the peer supporter, and the people we're supporting.
Then, how it fits into the organizational structure of the places and spaces where we're
working, living, and learning, but particularly where we're working and the organizational
structures that can really help build this culture of wellness.
Later in the series, we're going to hear about that, and we have a whole session that's focused
on building an organizational culture of wellness, because it's not just the peer supporter that
is to do this work.
A lot of times I've heard this in my work around the country and my work on the East
Coast.
It's the responsibility of the peer to bring the wellness, and then its heavy load to carry.
It's got to be something that we look at together for everyone to be thinking about the wellness
lens and how do we bring about.
A peer support may take a lead on this and have more of the skill and the experience
in this, but we have to share this organizationally, and we want to think about that.
What are the ways we can build this into the culture?
I think one of the things that we think about in terms of responsibility for the wellness
and how we can do this on an individual level or the peer supporter role is the things that
you've heard in this presentation about self-awareness and self-reflection, and I think that whole
self-awareness that you heard in both Tiara and Beth's, it's constant self-awareness,
being aware of and then making that connection around, okay, how is this going to work me
and helping yourself to come into the work in a way that's mindful and respectful of
the person you're supporting but then that self-awareness of promoting that in others,
because that's really going to be the gift and the skill that you're going to teach others
to be able to do their own work for their own wellness and continue their recovery journey.
So, really, really important to be thinking about this is not just on the peer supporter
for wellness, the responsibility needs to be shared, and it's a sharing with the person
you're supporting or you're working with.
But then there's also this organizational structure and this organizational culture
that we want to build on as we move forward in trying to help enhance the capacity for
wellness that peers do.
The next thing I just wanted to focus a little bit is, again, personal capacity, and I think
this is a really important focus here is to think, and you heard wonderful examples in
our voices that we've heard today, of how we come to this with a holistic approach,
looking at the wellness being the focus for the work that peers do.
In thinking about the physical, spiritual, social, emotional, intellectual, occupational,
environmental and thinking about these areas as seeing ourselves and seeing our recovery
in our moving forward in terms of thinking about from the lens of these eight areas in
our life.
We're going to go into more detail on these, but I just wanted to highlight that wellness
isn't just this endpoint that we get to and we accomplish, but it's constantly being self-aware,
self-reflective.
When we think about wellness, it's a conscious, deliberate process where we become aware of
and we make more choices for a lifestyle or a life that we want.
We heard that.
We want to have a life that we have goals.
We have dreams.
We have aspirations.
The wellness framework gives us a way to look at the different facets of who we are.
We are all made up of these different areas that we have a physical need and thinking
about those and anytime those become really important for being alert, being conscious,
being focused, and being energized to do the good work that we do.
So, it's being aware of these different areas that we start to look again the strengths.
I really think that, that's so important, because if we think about each day, if we
were to look at each area, there is something that we're doing each day, even though we
want more, perhaps or we have aspirations, we probably are doing something to keep ourselves
getting through the day that's meeting our need in terms of the different areas of wellness.
We are definitely doing something.
One of the things we want to be thinking about and one of the strategies we'll talk about
is how do we become self-aware and self-reflective of our strengths in these various areas and
then how do we help others to become more aware of their strengths and help to build
their capacity, build their resilience to keep moving forward towards the things that
people want in their life.
So, keeping the lens of wellness really helps to bring that hope, bring that focus forward,
and again when we think about it fits into peer support that system of giving and receiving
help with shared experiences based on respect, shared responsibility and a new mutual agreement
of what is helpful, this really helps give us the lens to talk through and help one another
share those experiences around our wellness or how we are moving forward towards the different
wellness goals, and respecting where people are.
Many times people get really- in many ways we define and operationalize these areas are
so different and having that curiosity to learn what another person sees how they're
going to build their spiritual dimension, being open to it, not saying I do it this
way, you need to do it that way.
Openness to learn from one another is really, really central to this.
Again, finding a mutual agreement is what's helpful, especially when we know something
is worked for us in some area, continue to make that work for us, but then being open
to help people to explore for themselves what will really help them in these different areas
of wellness.
So, I think one of the things that I find that's just so fascinating about this work
is that when you go in with people and sit down and start to have really honest conversations,
you come out even further along, because you learn so much from other people.
I know in my own work in this, I'm just always open to learning more from people, and it
really then in turn really has helped me to move forward in many of the areas that I've
been trying to work on in my own recovery.
So, enhancing personal capacity really will be around focusing on these areas of wellness
and we're looking forward in the next couple of modules in the next couple weeks going
in more deeply to this.
So, I'm going to turn it back to Cathy now.
Cathy Cave: Go ahead to the next slide.
So, thanks everyone for participating in our webinar today with us.
As Peggy was mentioning and as we've been talking about, this is the beginning of a
series.
So, Module 2, which is next Monday is Wellness in Peer Support and we'll be talking more
about kind of the tips and strategies, more detail about wellness, how to bring that into
both peer support and family support and also helpful in caregiving.
So, there's all kinds of resources and things that we'll talk about to shine a light on
wellness practice as it benefits us as we're doing our work.
Module 3 is about building an organizational culture for wellness.
That will be focusing on how our organizations where we're working in the practice of peer
support can be supportive and offer wellness tools and tips that can be sustained during
our workday.
Then, Module 4 will be about incorporating reflective practice.
Those are strategies to increase self-awareness.
We wanted to take some time to answer any questions that are still in the chat box.
If anyone has anything new that you want to ask questions about.
I know that folks here have been responding to things during our time together.
One thing as you all are thinking about your questions, I will just respond to a comment.
While Beth was talking, there was a mention of kind of the intersection as peer support
providers or family support providers, youth advocates and caregivers, there's a benefit
to us in actually offering that kind of support.
So, in our days that are stressful and our days that where we're questioning whether
or not this is a good idea, a good fit, or we're just not feeling like we have the answer,
it's really again checking yourself first and what is it that I need to bring to the
conversation.
How do I set my own intention, think about my own balance and needs?
And then how do I offer in peer support what I intend to offer?
So, I'm not getting caught up in either saying too much or overextending my boundaries.
It's really thinking about what do I need in this moment to offer the best possible
support to others?
Whether that's youth, families, other adults, really thinking about that, and that in the
offering of peer support there's benefit.
It's different than saying, Oh, I'm involved in peer support with a group of people, and
I'm going to put them into my wellness plan.
That's not what I'm suggesting.
I think what we're saying here is that offering support to others in of itself is beneficial
and feels good and provides an outlet for our experience, strength, and hopes, but it
also means that we have to take care of ourselves so that we're bringing the best of ourselves
to those conversations.
Are there any other questions that have come up?
So, one of our questions: Do you believe that trauma should inform choices in who works
with a particular peer?
I think we have to be careful in assuming that trauma is any one thing.
Many of us, and depending on which study you look at, studies will say that anywhere from
85 to 98% of people involved in the public mental health system are trauma survivors.
So, we can't say with a blanket, well this person has this particular trauma and therefore
we need to have caution about who provides peer support.
I think what we need to be asking on an individual basis, is sometimes people are more comfortable
with someone who's male, someone who's female, someone who understands transgender issues.
We may be thinking that someone can tell us, I want to work in a group rather than one-on-one,
because that feels safer.
Someone may say, I want to meet, but I only want to meet in these kinds of locations,
that it needs to be public, it needs to be a coffeehouse, someplace where there's lots
of public interaction.
Others will say I really want to work in private spaces.
So, we can't use the term trauma as a blanket for making decisions.
IT's really understanding each person and what they're hoping to get from peer support
and family support and from youth advocates.
We've got one more here.
How many hours a week do peers typically work?
How do you manage the reciprocal relationship and professionalism?
Are you discussing the billable type of peer support services where there would need to
be documentation?
So, the reality is that peer support can be offered in many different kind of settings.
It can be paid or unpaid.
It can be billed or not billed.
So, it depends on what your organization is set up to do.
In our thinking about what's a healthy, what's a workload that supports wellness?
How do we think about the demand on peers in work settings?
Those are all really great questions and that there are many, many answers depending on
the setup of your organization.
So, as we're looking at in future modules at organizational wellness tips, there may
be some responses in that webinar that would be helpful in answering the question.
I would also invite people to listen in on all of the future modules, because parts of
this question are answered in the following three.
One is around wellness tips and tools for individuals as we're doing peer support.
Another is around organizational strategy and another is around reflection to enhance
self-awareness and self-care.
So, stay tuned for those and join us for those.
Let's keep thinking about resources that would support the work that you all are doing.
Just to wrap up, what we're thinking about in our future modules are all the things that
you all have been asking questions about today.
Thank you for joining us for this webinar and hopefully you'll join us for all of the
webinars in our series.
Thank you all very much.
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