Prevention Through Empowering Communities

You never really know how you will handle hardship until you have no choice.

We are told, if we need help, that therapists, 911, and organized support groups will get us through it. So, when I found myself in need of support after my first suicide attempt, I naturally dove into all of these spaces because I believed that was how I could heal.

The exposure to these supports sparked a curiosity I had never reflected on before. I wondered, “Why did I have to hit rock bottom for people to see me hurting?”

The circumstances that led to my attempt included trauma in childhood that bled into my early adulthood, along with minimal knowledge of healthy coping and self-regulation. After my attempt, I was showered with linkages to support groups, therapy, outpatient dual diagnosis services, and a handful of 5150 holds.

I didn’t know what I needed during the time of my suffering. For myself personally, the traditional therapeutic spaces felt scripted and inauthentic to my needs. In those therapies, I wasn’t getting to the more deeply rooted issues that ultimately led to my “rock bottom” in early adulthood. What I needed was longevity in human connection; connection that therapeutic services simply don’t have the ability to sustain.

What if we invested more into families, and into communities to give them the tools they need before the crisis hits?

After about a year and a half of exposure to these diverse therapeutic interventions, something in my personal life had been shifting simultaneously, and the timing couldn’t have been more fortunate. My natural support systems, through friendships and parental figures, began to shift in a way that helped guide me at that vulnerable time in my life more than any of these therapeutic spaces were capable of doing. They altered the way I viewed and nurtured my self-healing journey.

The trajectory of where I am today would have been drastically different had I not had these natural support systems built into my life. They filled in the missing pieces and made facing life’s adversities feel bearable and possible.

However, due to my trauma, these types of support systems felt so unknown to me, and I anticipated their departure from my life at any moment.

When I realized that these people weren’t abandoning me like my trauma brain was telling me, it hit me:

“Why couldn’t I have had these relationships, influences, and minds surrounding me while growing up?”

Family and Youth Partners as Natural Supports

The thing that makes natural supports in Family and Youth partnerships different from a therapist or other formal and traditional support services is their willingness to utilize their own personal experiences with adversity, and chose to do so, rather than it being “their job”. Family and Youth Partners have personal experiences that allow them to possess the tools and skills to be able to be present for others.

There are many skills and so much knowledge that I had not been provided as I was growing up. It was later in life, and through my natural support system, that I learned about protective factors and my personal strengths that I could use to handle adversity. I was never taught about self-love, about healthy emotional and physical boundaries, emotional safety, coping skills, red flags and green flags in relationships, or secure attachments. This made me wonder:

• What if we invested more into families, and into communities to give them the tools they need before the crisis hits?
• What if families and communities had these tools readily available, and not only after adversities happen?
• What if we are all taught from a young age that these are the skills that are going to help when life gets hard?

Bridging the Gap

The circumstances in which adversity interjects into someone’s life is limitless; however, the way our society currently responds to crisis is not as diverse and is treated as an afterthought. Some communities, families, and children are forced to prioritize securing safety, finding a roof over their heads or figuring out where their next meal is coming from, which reduces their capacity for, or access to, proactively gaining these important life skills. We can bridge this gap by normalizing education of these life skills in schools, and we can weave in normalcy about asking for help into our community culture when we are facing struggles rather than staying quiet out of fear of stigma.

Experiencing empathy, compassion, and support to face crisis and adversity should be available to everyone. From my experience, when we can ask deeper questions about why things are the way they are, and be open to exploring and implementing new approaches to supporting youth and families before they need it rather than only after a crisis, communities will then have the tools they need to thrive.

Experiencing empathy, compassion and support to face crisis and adversity should be available to everyone.

Reflecting Back to Power Forward

For the last seven years, I have had the privilege of serving families in the Sacramento area as a Youth Advocate, through training initiatives for service providers across California, through my management position, through supporting other peers, and empowering families to solve challenges together. I got into this work because I wanted to be someone I wish I had access to while growing up, and I stay in this work because I see such rich opportunities to be able to share my experiences and provide different perspectives with the hopes of shifting a system that does not adequately serve every community, to one that focuses on prevention and well-being in an equitable and accessible way for all.

 

Read additional articles from this issue of the Wraparound Connections Newsletter!