The philosophy and ethos of self help

Mutuality

The decision to attend a group can be a very positive and empowering step. Some new members will be seeking reassurance that how they feel, act and cope is 'normal'. Others may be seeking inspiration from those people who have lived through the situation and have survived and thrived. The reasons for choosing self help are varied and often very personal.

Through mutual understanding and support, members of self help groups share their knowledge and expertise in coping and find common solutions through the collective wisdom of the group. This pooling of information and joint problem solving creates a wealth of information which individual members can draw upon at times of need. Self help support groups attract and appeal to people who want to help themselves. Groups foster a sense of personal responsibility and self awareness which can lead to a greater sense of control and mastery of their particular condition or situation.

Reciprocity

People go to groups to meet their own needs; they may stay on to maintain their gains and to meet the needs of others. Hope and inspiration can come from listening to the experiences of longstanding members who have survived, overcome or conquered the situation or health issue shared by the group. Personal stories are the lifeblood of self help support groups and enable members to pull their experiences in an extraordinary way. Members learn new coping strategies, pick up invaluable practical information and benefit from the shared knowledge held within the group.

In time, new comers get a chance to listen as well as being listened to and perhaps uniquely they may swap between these roles throughout their membership of the group. Through sharing ways of managing, members continually reinforce and up-grade their coping strategies, there-by gaining personally through helping others. This reciprocal arrangement is sometimes referred to as mutual aid.

Understanding and acknowledging that as members help, they are in turn helped, encourages equal, respectful and honest relationships. Self help support groups are essentially egalitarian and cooperative gatherings which put shared experience and personal stories at the heart of the group. Priorities may change as treatments and attitudes change, but the core activity of self help remains listening and responding to the 'lived experience'.

Shared responsibility - Shared Benefits

There is much evidence to suggest that people who get most involved in the running of the group will gain most from the experience. Put simply, the more one puts in, the more one gets out. This is particularly true in the helping relationship - it feels good to help; it raises self esteem and can restore a sense of self-worth and self-value. For this reason many groups have developed innovative ways of including and involving as many members as possible in the business of the group. Some have rotating chairs, shared roles, sub-committees and open forums all in an effort to avoid the few doing the most. A broad understanding of how people gain from self help can avoid the pitfalls of having a leader or founder member running all the affairs of the group. Shared responsibility leads to shared benefits, even if at times it doesn't feel that way.

People benefit from self help support groups in many different ways but perhaps the most common are:

• Access to relevant information
• Feeling empowered to take an active role in one's own health
• Increased self confidence and self-esteem
• Opportunities to give as well as receive help
• Learning new practical ways of managing problems
• Gaining inspiration and support from others' experiences
• Feeling more in control and less isolated and alone
• Opportunities to increase social circle
• Opportunities to develop new skills
• Feeling less stressed, anxious or fearful
  

Search for connections but don’t deny difference — it makes us what we are!

I thought I was the only one in the world to go through this — then I met people who had shared a similar experience. They responded, acted and felt just like me. The relief I felt was tremendous.

The need to know that you are not alone with your pain (often called universality) is frequently quoted as the reason people seek out self help support groups. This search for similarity may include both demographic characteristics, age, sexuality, culture, religion etc. and other commonalities of experience, for example shared emotions, feelings, outlook and ideology.

Research shows that people who go to groups hope to meet ’people like them’ and, furthermore, that a sense of belonging and bonding to the group is more likely if newcomers perceive members to be similar to themselves.

So what does ‘similar to themselves’ really mean?

• People who look like them
  
• People who sound like them
  
• People with the same background
  
• People who hold the same beliefs
  
• People who talk like them
  

Seeking out similarities is quite natural on the surface. Young people with a cancer diagnosis will have different needs and experiences from older people with cancer and may reject a cancer support group where the average age is 55, in favour of their own group. However, whilst they may seek to be exclusive in terms of age, their group may be very inclusive — an arena where young people of different cultural and racial backgrounds, gay and lesbian, married and single form a strong bond cemented by cancer and youth and the shared experience that this brings.

Conversely a younger person may think they are looking for age similarity and find instead commonality of emotions.

I felt so much anger when my husband died — I was just 27 with a new baby and a 2 year old. I was furious with my husband for ruining the future we’d planned and for leaving me so young with 2 little girls to bring up alone. I didn’t know how I was going to manage and I felt so guilty about my anger. A friend suggested a self help group and images of older people sprang to mind and I thought how am I going to relate to them? But when I went along to the group I heard people recall their anger, without apology or guilt. I tentatively raised the issue of my own feelings and was relieved by their response. One man, at least 20 years my senior, said -

“Friends and family were able to cope with my grief and sorrow but any mention of anger and they ran a mile. Feel free to let rip, anger is a normal part of grief, its something a lot of us have experienced”.

At that moment nothing mattered but that shared emotion.

Communicating well in a group takes skill, empathy and sensitivity. The skilled self helper looks for connectors, those areas of shared experience — often the expression of emotions, fears and feelings that are shared across cultures, class and creed. Where differences do exist, for example in how people are treated, the experience of racism, cultural values and norms, religious beliefs etc. — these differences can be listened to and acknowledged. By acknowledging difference the group is recognising and affirming another member’s lived experience that differs from their own.

Where there is difference, particular care needs to be taken not to make judgments about an individual’s reactions and responses to events and circumstances. A good example is the hair loss which results from cancer treatments — the personal impact may be felt quite differently by different people:

• A young woman whose hair is her 'crowning glory'
  
• A Rastafarian whose locks have taken 20 years to grow, providing an outward sign of a religious, cultural and spiritual journey taken in the process of 'locking' their hair (growing dreadlocks)
• A white, middle-aged man who is clean shaven and balding
• A practising Sikh who keeps his hair uncut in accordance with Kesh which is one of the five Ks showing obedience to God and the teachings of the Guru
  

There are of course groups who do serve a single community, for example Muslim women who have experienced domestic violence. These groups may have narrowed down their ‘area of interest’ for a number of reasons, including:

• Shared language making communication easier
  
• Shared religious and cultural values that shape the way they feel and experience their lives
  
• A shared starting point
  
• A solidarity in their minority status (both in their own community and the wider community)
  
• A shared experience of racism, sexism or oppression
  

Some Muslim women who have experienced domestic violence may find the shared experience of a group defined by cultural and religious boundaries helpful. Other Muslim women may actively seek out domestic violence support groups for predominantly white women because they feel that this will suit their needs best.

Managing diversity is a challenge in any group whether it is predominantly black, white or mixed. People will differ in terms of educational achievements, lifestyle choices, life experiences, politics, age, gender and in numerous other ways. By treating everyone as an individual, by listening to and acknowledging areas of difference, members can find a wealth of shared experience, commonalities and connections and enrich the life of the group.

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