Shared Links (weekly) Dec 22, 2024
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Link – I’ll Get Strong With A Little Help From My Friends
Meeting with others on a regular basis builds strength and resilience in our Mental Health. Friends build each other up to be strong. Part of the reason that I knew traveling for a living was always going to be a temporary thing was this reality. For five years I had only somewhat regular contact with…
Shared Links (weekly) October 17, 2021
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6 ways to protect your mental health from social media’s dangers
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Here’s Why The Cowardly Victim-Blaming of Sexual Assault Survivors Must End
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Talk about mental health, says farmer who lost dad to suicide
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Here are 7 of the best psychology podcasts to boost your knowledge of the brain and human behavior
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What Does it Mean to Hold Space For Someone?
For me, I’ve always viewed holding space in terms of that word, safe. When I hold space for someone I’m not solving their problem, or questioning them. I’m simply letting them be. Whatever that might look like at that moment, and I’m making sure that they are safe. It means making sure that being in my presence, either in person or virtually, is a place where they are free to cry, vent, question, or whatever form of expression is needed to help at that moment. It means being the person who is simply there, listening, offering support, but above all else, keeping them safe, physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.
I also recognize how difficult that really is to do. Many of us weren’t raised to “hold space”, but to fix things. We see someone crying and our instinct is to fix, to do something to get them to stop crying, instead of simply giving them space to cry. Or we want to run out and correct instead of simply allowing people the space to tell their story safe from the worry of the person hearing it will overreact. This is so hard for us, we want to correct injustice, to fight for the people we care about, but sometimes by doing so, we eliminate their safe space to simply tell their story and stop listening to what they want from us. That is the opposite of holding space.
How do you hold space for others, and for yourself?
Shared Links (weekly) March 19, 2023
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Learning to hold sorrow– “What I know for sure, after the work and conversations these past three weeks, is that we need to get better at holding, hearing, and healing sorrow.”
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Teens Know Why Mental Health Is Worsening, Now It’s Time to Listen
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5 Benefits of Solitude and Why You Need It for Your Mental Health– in a world that values productivity over everything, we lose the ability to simply be alone
Sharing – We Didn’t Say ‘Gay’ At My High School. It Almost Cost Me My Life.
Not acknowledging the humanity of anyone is what should not be acceptable. Trying to will an entire subset of humanity out of existence because they make you uncomfortable or some religious leader has told you that they are dangerous is not acceptable.
People die from suicide when there is so much pain that they see no path forward. The solution to that is to connect with them, to show them a path forward that involves being in community with people who accept and support them. Anything less than that is a willful decision to let people die.
If that’s what your beliefs tell you to do, you need better beliefs.
