The Value of Lived Experience
Last year I had the privilege of co-facilitating a 20 week peer leadership program. Here’s what I learned: centring lived experience is a unique way to achieve health and well-being outcomes that are otherwise complex or difficult to reach.
I knew from experience that transformative communal learning improves our health and well-being. Not only had I seen the research about it in my last role at a community health centre, I had felt the impacts in my own life. I wish more organizations would train, support, and hire peer supporters. There are more and more peer support training programs available. The model works. It’s no longer new, even if it is still counter cultural to the preference for the expertise of specialists.
Peer relationships help us heal in a way that is unique from hierarchical healing relationships. In their 2006 research Davidson, Chinman, Sells, and Rowe defined peer support this way: “Peer support is based on the belief that people who have faced, endured and overcome adversity can offer useful support, encouragement, hope and perhaps mentorship to others facing similar situations.”
It works like this: When we relate with one another, distinct neural pathways wire us for connection. When we are able to share our stories and have them listened to with care and compassion, we feel heard. When we feel heard, we get a new perspective, instead of repeating the same stories over and over, wishing to be heard. We grow and shape our stories when we’re understood.
Being in a group of people who have common lived experiences helps prevent the re-traumatizing impacts of explaining painful parts of a story again and again. Explaining details that are misunderstood in a conventional setting can be draining or harmful. Instead of putting people in the position of an educator, a shared context allows a person to stay grounded in their own experiences.
Learning to sit with others in pain is a necessary twenty-first century skill. Researcher and storyteller Brené Brown writes, “Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with strangers in person could save the world.” Something in our humanity predisposes us to want to be honest with others who understand and who can hold our pain with us. It’s essential to healing and it’s unlikely to happen in a doctor’s, nurse’s, or dietician’s office. Many emotional well-being skills can be built with a therapist or counsellor, others are uniquely developed through peer relationships.
My role was to co-facilitate a learning space for youth and be accountable for the group process. As a white queer facilitator working with a group of mostly black youth, it was important I named my privilege from the beginning, found ways to de-centre whiteness, and gave an open ended invitation for conversations to happen without me there at any time. We had modules in social justice, trauma informed support, facilitation, arts based programming and evaluation, one on one support, and peer support. Prioritizing lived experience and sharing with vulnerability and accountability made us grow together in unique ways.
The rate of homeless youth in Canada who identify as LGBTQ2S is 25 to 40%. Queer and trans youth disproportionately face family rejection and it’s a painful experience. I’ve lived it myself. At time I feel like those experiences are indescribable to people who haven’t lived through something similar. When we come out to our families, we can lose them. We’re changed in the process and it’s painful and lonely. Experiences of repeated harm can desensitize us to these impacts. Knowing that another way of being with people is possible, is essential to growing our capacity for being well. This is particularly important rewiring after trauma.
Through moments of being well together, where we share our stories and are met consistently with kindness, we help each other raise our standards of how we deserve to be treated. This was what I saw many of us in the peer leadership program developing in our time together. As we honoured our stories and experiences of being human, we filled up our metaphorical bucket of knowing we belong and deserve to be treated well. It sounds simple in theory, yet it’s a complex practice to grow belonging and prevent isolation.
We learned together and built on our collective experiences. We were situated within an organization that prioritizes those who have been marginalized and works to improve health outcomes through an equity oriented approach. I’m grateful for this approach because I see the difference it’s making in the lives of people I care about.
The personal impact on me has been this: I’ve cultivated more courage in the ways I am consistent, accountable, and kind.
