Stress First Aid
How you can help a partner, friend or colleague
1. Listen and ask questions that clarify issues, problems and options. Get a picture of the whole situation. When you are distressed your thought processes are blown hither and thither by feelings of fear, anger, frustration, demoralisation. Help explore what is going on without rushing into concrete advice. You are after explanations and understanding rather than judgements (about people).
2. By helping explore issues you help your friend establish their non-futile options and their possible consequences. It may stop them impulsively acting - responding from the pressure of feelings of anger, frustration or fear, before they have explored consequences in a balanced way. Take your time. Get your friend to take their time.
3. Often enough there may be nothing that can be done. The damage may already have been done and/or your friend may have to endure the situation for a time yet. Explore whether this is true or not and what other sources of help there might be.
4. Accept that you may not be able to take the fear, pain or frustration away. You are giving your friend your time and your attention. This is what they need. It may be difficult or uncomfortable for you because what has happened to, or is happening to your friend, makes you feel powerless or inadequate. It may create anxieties that something like that could happen to you, or remind you of painful times when something like that did happen to you, times that you would rather forget about. Be aware of the difference between your own feelings and those of your friend.
5. Think of this analogy. If your friend came to you with a cut you could not undo that, or stop the pain. What you could do would be to help create the conditions for a healing - to help clean the wound and prevent it going septic.The more that you can help clarify why it is reasonable or understandable that the person feels upset in the circumstances that they find themselves in, the less likely your friend is to turn those feelings in upon themselves (I'm a pathetic person, I'm not good enough, I'm a mean person, I'm a bad person etc.).
6. Good help often clarifies why feelings have been generated by the situation - rather than because the stressed/distressed individual is "such and such a person". It gets tricky however if your friend has dropped themselves in it by stubborness, vanity, egoism or other futile kinds of action - if possible draw out failings from your own life as illustrations of futile self-damaging courses of action. If you are absolutely sure and feel you must tell them - then tell them gently and indirectly, allowing them to interpret what you are saying. (Sometimes this is something a friend can do far better than a therapist).
7. It may be that your friend finds a situation particularly stressful or distressing because it drags up memories and feelings out of their own past - the reawakened memories of past traumas, chronic family emotional dramas, humiliations at school. Again help clarify how the feelings felt in the past might be understandable (e.g. in the inexperience and vulnerability of a young person) and help clarify the connection between past and present feelings. Explore how the past and present are similar and how they are different. If this opens up real trauma and your friend's distress level is increasing accept that you probably out of your depth and that more experienced psychological help might be needed. Be cautious - do not rush in digging up the emotional foundations of your friend's personality.
8. Feelings of overwhelm affect everyone. Many people are maintaining the illusion of being OK. They take a while to realise that EVERYONE is doing the same thing.
9. Recognise that there are often external causes of stress which can only be mitigated by collective understanding and action. A problem shared is a problem halved but to make it dissappear you might have to unite with a lot of other folk.
10. Stress and distress affects the muscular system. We say that we feel "tense". If, and only if, you are on a sufficiently trusting relationship with your friend, offer to massage the muscles that are tense. Do not assume that your friend gets tense in the same place that you do. You may get tense in the shoulders and neck - they may feel screaming tension in their scalp. Be gentle at first and be guided by your friend as to the level of pressure to give - use your fingers to "search for" the tense muscles/area and ease/disperse the tension.
11. A hug from a good friend may be more useful than anything a professional therapist can give.
Brian Davey
Mental Health Development Project, 61b Mansfield Road, Nottingham, NG1 3FN
With thanks to Craig Newnes.
© BRIAN DAVEY