Coping yourself

As Samaritans, we have got a really, really good, strong, support network. There are always two people, minimum, on a Samaritan shift. And a Samaritan shift at my branch is three hours. So when we get there, we speak to another Samaritan, who we refer to as a leader, who's off-base somewhere. And we phone the leader up to tell them that we are here, we are ready to start the duty. The leader then checks with me, "Steve, are you in a good place and is your partner in a good place? Let me have a word with your partner. Let me talk to him, right. Are the pair of you okay? No issues? You okay?" Yeah. Just general chit-chat. So that we know that they are bothered, that they are interested. We check in the diary to see if there's a follow-up phone call for anybody and then we deal with the callers, the texts, the emails.

At the end of the shift, our allotted time, we start the debriefing, the debugging, the off-loading process by talking to the leader about the calls, about the texts. Not names, nothing like that. Just, "I've had a phone call about this and I found it a little bit." "Well, tell me about it, Steve. Talk to me about what it is." And we start the debriefing process then. So, when I'm driving home, I've not got it going through my head. However, if I wake up in the middle of the night and think, "No, I'm still not happy." Then I would do what everybody else would do. Believe it or not, we phone Samaritans. We would just pick up the telephone, 116-123 and speak to the Samaritan. And we even would say, "Hi, Steve, I'm a Samaritan, at... " And we would talk about, "Can I just have a chat to you?" I mean, we do have within the organisation... Right the way up to psychiatrists, if need be, but we keep it down. We support, we debrief and we are there for each other. So that's how we start the debugging process. The same as everybody else. If we have got problems, we go and talk to somebody.