Nobody is the boss and nobody is in charge. Together we make the meeting happen by sharing. We are all just helping each other build a helping community.
Each group begins with volunteers reading relational agreements out loud for the group. Everybody is welcome to try to volunteer. We want there to be a culture of sharing. A volunteer opens the meeting by screensharing the agreements at www.helpexists.org/agreements and either begins reading, or asks for volunteers to read. Volunteers take turns opening and closing meetings and helping everybody to make sure that everybody who needs to share has a chance to share before the meeting ends. After everyone has had a chance to share, the group shifts to open discussion until a volunteer helps the group close by reading the check-out prompts 15 minutes before the end of group. It’s okay for volunteers to lack confidence, and it’s okay to do accidents, and it’s okay to try again another time. If you offer to volunteer and become too disabled, you can pass at any moment by asking for a new volunteer.
Relational Agreements
Relational Agreements are how we learn to relate to each other and grow in mutual kindness. It is difficult for people – even with the very best of intentions – to avoid hurting each other accidentally. People accidentally hurt each other in so many ways; miscommunication due to implicit cultural differences and the effects of disabilities, for example.
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Being triggered into painful or traumatic states can cause unintentional harm to another person. Like, when a person gets triggered and then can’t go out in public – because flashbacks – and then cancels on plans with a friend, that friend may feel hurt, even though there was no hurt intended. Nobody chooses to have flashbacks.
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Relational agreements – instead of formal rules – function to protect the needs of all people, and help us benefit from each other’s company while allowing for people to repair ruptures that will just happen. Relational agreements are how we come out of isolation and build the kind of community where we just locate and meet each others’ unmet needs. Every person's life experiences are different, with needs unique to their own experiences. Building more kindness together is the only thing left to do.
Intention of kindness.
The entire reason for us coming together is the need for kindness. No one has ever been traumatized, neglected, injured, or humiliated because of too much kindness. For the sake of clarity, kindness is not niceness. Niceness is usually just observing social norms. Kindness requires curiosity of another’s experience, and wanting to help. Kindness requires listening. We ask that group members agree to relate to each other with the intention of being kind.
Peer faciliation.
Our groups are run together by peers. Nobody is the boss, and nobody is in charge. Together, we make the meeting happen by sharing . This means that we agree to do our best to see each other as equals - nobody is better than another person, and each person is authority over their own experience. We all create the group, and the group is the container. This way, no one individual is responsible for making it run.
Privacy.
The group is the container. Privacy in the group helps maintain that container. Privacy is a right, and an expression of respect. In order for people to be vulnerable in group, they need to know that the group is a safe place for vulnerability. People need the space to make mistakes, to speak without fear of recrimination or punishment. Privacy helps make the group a safe container for people to process, express unmet needs, and so forth. We of course understand that people may need to speak about things that they experienced in group with a friend, spouse, loved one, etc. The intention of privacy arises from respecting your own and others’ experience.
No solicitation or self-promotion.
Self-promotion and solicitation do not really build community. We ask that people do not promote products, services, market research, websites, podcasts, etc.. We also ask that people do not solicit financial support, or recruitment for religious, political, or professional services, nor share social media accounts for audience-building. We of course understand that people may be required to do things like this professionally, or in the course of their day. We are just asking that we agree to not do this in group or with each other.
Accommodating disabilities.
All of us - every human - is coming from disability (being a child), experiencing present disability, and heading for some kind of future disablement (older age). This is just factual - in reality, all of us experience dependency. It’s just human. Further, disabilities are deeply subjective. Some people (like a lot of abuse survivors) are able to function executively very well, and yet might be unable to say ‘No’ to another person. This is a disability, and one that tends to be common and yet invisible in our society. Being unable to access or benefit from healthcare, or any social safety net, is a kind of disability. In group, we ask that people be accommodated for the disabilities they experience. We hope that group can function to accept and accommodate the disabilities of all members. A shared load is far easier to bear.
We do not assume identity.
People’s identities are formed by their exposure to kindness and harm growing up. Regardless of someone's appearance, it cannot be assumed that people have any internalized sense of who they are, what choices they may have, what rights they may have, what aspirations they could have, and what may be possible for them in their lives. For these reasons, we make no assumptions about our own or each other’s identities. For example, we don't force people to define their identity and then measure their adversities by this metric.
We do not assume shared culture.
Some people are disabled from experiencing shared culture with others, as an effect of the life conditions that they grew up in. We make no assumptions about each other's exposure to common culture. What people have endured in their lives can be undetectable to the perceptions of others. Towards helping everyone meet their unmet needs and gain accommodations for their disabilities, we must not make assumptions of what another’s experiences may be, based on appearances. We can acknowledge each other’s experiences without measuring them against that of other people’s. We can just validate that people are having a hard time, and realize that culture is entirely relative.
Flashbacks.
If you are here, it is likely that you are already experiencing flashbacks much of the time. By flashback, we mean the involuntary experience of traumatic memory being expressed throughout your nervous system. This can be emotions, sensations, numbness, smells, tastes, movements, and sounds, as well as visual memory. When people experience complex trauma, being triggered is often the normal state of existence, and can be be pretty much impossible to avoid. While we do want to be respectful of each other, it may also be necessary to be explicit and direct about our experiences. If there were easily accessible places for people to process such things, you would probably not be reading this right now. For a lot of people, there are not places to process the reality of what happened to us. A community based on kindness does not ignore reality, but rather observes, engages, and responds with kindness and attunement. We ask that individual members maintain a sense of their own agency in terms of contact with traumatic material - it is always okay to leave group and come back, or modulate your experience by any way you know how. There will also be time to connect with the group on being triggered. Being triggered in a group around complex trauma is both awful and likely unavoidable.
Media.
Media currently seems to saturate and compete for our lives and attention. This can include religion, spirituality, politics, celebrity, technology and social media. These topics often create - incidentally or intentionally - labels and division. For this reason, we ask that people refrain from them during our group. These topics are also not the purpose of this group, and can distract and derail from our actual purpose - to share kindness together, especially in context of trauma, neglect, and abuse.
Meeting unmet needs.
Measuring our own pain and suffering against that others hurts us. If we find our pain greater than others’, our pain is actually in no way diminished. If we have find ours to be less than others, we are likely to feel shame, or to dismiss our own pain altogether. Both of these outcomes are unhappy. Rather, the most productive and helpful response to the pain of an unmet need (which is the cause of lots of pain) is to try and meet it. The most productive response to the reality of a lack of help is for us to work together to actually provide the help that’s needed. Further, having help doesn’t require injury, or proof of injury. Together, we will find that healing involves discovering that no one is replaceable, and that love does exist, and you are worthy of it. We all are.
Friendship and accidental or incidental hurting.
The kindest and most accurate way for us to form friendship, community, and help are for us to try and look at each other in terms of our contexts and intentions. Our intentions may be to help, to love, to protect or connect - and we still might accidentally injure, ignore, scare, or trigger the very person or people we are trying to help. Accidents are entirely unavoidable. We are all human, and despite our best intentions, will make mistakes. Accidents do hurt, and accidents can create messiness and confusion. We want to help each other recover from acc idents, and use them to actually increase friendship. Together, we may respond to accidents as: “I want to see you as much as I want to be seen, and I want to understand your conditions and contexts as much as I want you to understand mine. I want your happiness and mine to be good friends.” In this way, we can use accidental harm as a way to help us understand each other, rather than to shame and isolate us away from each other.