When I started volunteering at a suicide helpline, I expected to come home late at night with sombre thoughts buzzing around my head before bed. I expected sad memories I hadn’t thought about in years to surface from hidden caverns in my brain. I expected I would hold intimate secrets, and learn fascinating stories about people’s lives and the shared pain that unites us all. I expected it to be a strange experience, and it is, but in a way I didn’t foresee.
Once a week, from
9pm until 1am, I sit next to my colleagues in a large room filled with
computers and ceiling fans, and when the phone rings, I answer it and listen.
There are about 60-100 hours of training beforehand, and ongoing education and
support, but otherwise, this is the extent of my job.
Each conversation
is entirely different because each person is entirely different. If I’m walking
someone through a problem or a panic attack, the conversation might sound like
an informal chat between friends. If somebody is calling because they need to
access therapy or emergency housing, I’m like a dispatch officer, referring
them to the service they need. And then, sometimes, the caller is in an urgent
crisis, actively suicidal and in need of rapid help. In these cases, my
supervisor gets involved and we come up with the right plan together.
I know very little
about the callers. Even giving their name is optional, let alone their age,
occupation, ethnicity or family structure. We don’t push for these details unless
the caller wants to share them, and we don’t share details about our own lives.
And yet these chats can have a profoundly powerful effect – and not just on the
caller. In the six months since I started volunteering, these talks have
overturned the way I handle almost all conversations, and changed my
relationships to a radical extent.
This is partly
because of testing my limits – engaging with the extremes of human suffering
and hardship gives me context for the average. I’ve become more patient and resilient,
and better at staying calm after bad news. But the biggest change wasn’t an
improvement on an existing dimension. It was something entirely new: I’ve grown
very comfortable dealing with unknown information. I’ve learnt to enter chaotic
realms without getting lost in confusion or trapped in the darkness.
A difficult
emotional experience can feel like being thrown into the ocean. You’re
drowning, you don’t know how to swim; you don’t even know which way is up and
which is down. This is where I meet my callers, and I help them find their
bearings.
As I speak to them,
I remember the most important rule of survival: you must not panic. It might
seem like you’re in the bottomless sea of despair with no possibility of
finding a way out, but if you spend enough time there, you can grow
comfortable. You might even play with some bubbles, or poke at bizarre little
creatures you didn’t see at first.
The conversation is
never about me, but it is not entirely about the caller either. It is about a
shared experience of making sense out of their confusion. Even if we don’t know
where we’ll end up at the end of the call, the point is to orient towards
safety and progress, and away from drowning. It’s about learning how to swim –
or at least, how to tread water.
You don’t need to
know very much about each other for this to happen. You can have a completely
anonymous call and still help another person find a solution to a problem,
learn a new way of coping, or find peace with what they’re going through.
What,
then, actually happens on a call?
The first thing I do is ask a few open-ended questions, to get some context
about why the person has phoned. Then I sit and listen, and tell them that it
is very human to have a difficult time. There is a common misconception that
this is the end of it – that I let them vent for a bit and then the call ends.
Far from it. I ask a lot of questions to help process their feelings, and I
help them come up with a plan for how to get through the night.
I have to do this
with limited information, so it is my job to keep the conversation focused on
what’s happening in the present moment, and how to make it better. Even if the
caller were able to tell me their entire life story, I still wouldn’t be able
to form a complete model of their mind in my head – and certainly not to the
point of managing their emotions or telling them what to do.
It turns out that
conversations with friends are not so different. Even when you think you know
somebody, you never have all the information; something always gets lost in
translation. Sometimes you strip away unnecessary banality but, often,
something essential is cut. Friends might avoid the truth because they are
afraid of being judged. They might be unable to put their thoughts into words,
or they might be held back by motives or concerns they don’t even fully
understand themselves. Or they might be expressing themselves perfectly well to
you, but you twist their words because you are superimposing your own models of
the world onto them. To varying degrees, there is an uncrossable chasm between
you and everybody you care about.
There are two ways
you can interpret this. One is the depressing route: to believe that your
friends are not really your friends and that you don’t really know them. That
you will never really know anybody at all. Or you can take the
more optimistic route: it’s not that you know your friends less than you
thought you did, it’s that you know strangers more. You don’t need to have an
established relationship to help someone. Even transient moments have meaning.
This second route
is the one my colleagues and I take every time we pick up the phone.
Conversations on a phone helpline are different from normal conversations in
two ways: we make few assumptions about the caller or their background, and our
goal is for the caller to reach a better emotional state than when the
conversation started.
Consider how this
differs from most everyday conversations. When we speak to a friend, we rarely
give them a blank slate to be whoever they want to be in that moment. We make
assumptions about how they feel based on what they’ve said in the past. We let
past resentments bubble up in our interpretation of their words. We pigeonhole
them. We talk about things that were safe or helpful to talk about in the past
rather than creating a new baseline, a new space for growth or development. The
goal is also different: often with friends, we care too much about our own
reputation, and try to look good in front of others rather than helping them
feel good in that moment.
On a helpline call,
there is no pretence that we fully know what’s going on. All we know is what
the person tells us and our past experience of what worked well on other calls.
We don’t worry about looking good, because it’s not about us. The priority is
to be helpful, not just to appear helpful. We don’t assume
answers to questions, but rather ask questions and listen openly. As a result,
many of the blockages we unwittingly create in our normal conversations are
cleared away.
These skills have
been invaluable to me. Before I started working on the helpline, I tried to
maximise the information I had when solving a problem. If a friend asked for
help, I would attempt to simulate their entire mind in mine, to think as they
would. I now know that this is very draining and rarely necessary. Now, in all
conversations, I try to practise active listening and I don’t assume too much
about the other person – because this limits a person’s ability to see beyond
their current limits and grow. Most importantly, I try to focus on the moment
as it is unfolding to create something brand new.
And often there is
no external problem to solve at all – but rather, a person wants to change
their mental state to be different. There are many problems where more
information is helpful, but sometimes it’s better to meet a person where they
are and to simply imagine – together – a better future. You’re not holding that
person to what you know about them or even what they think they know about
themselves. Instead, you’re letting a person imagine who they could be.
In
the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14
Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
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