Mind Moves: A chance meeting. An old friend I hadn't seen in a while. We stepped in out of the rain for a coffee.
We chatted as one does about this and that, but I sensed he found it hard to keep his mind on any one topic. His thoughts kept drifting away. He was troubled and confused. He apologised several times for bringing the conversation back to himself. When you're in pain, it's hard to stay focused on anything else.
A popular misconception about psychologists is that we spend our time trying to figure out what makes other people tick. I feel no need to do this. But, like any one of you, I find myself in situations where some listening is called for.
Meeting someone in a difficult space, accepting whatever is happening to them and hearing what they're trying to communicate, can mean a great deal to them. It creates an opportunity for someone to reach a clear understanding of whatever conundrum they are in and to find their own way forward.
My coffee companion was clearly a bright man. He spoke about how depressed he had been feeling lately. He chided himself for spending too much time alone and for self-medicating with food and painkillers. Life seemed to have cut him adrift and he was floundering in a way that made little sense to him.
We all want to feel in control of our lives and we feel very uneasy not knowing what's making us stressed. As he tried to attribute his problems to something tangible, he recounted a litany of painful issues that had made his world less than ideal. But blaming himself, blaming others, didn't seem to bring him any relief.
He wondered if he was mad and asked me for genuine feedback. His request came from a deep fear about his sanity and warranted an honest answer. I didn't think he was mad, but I saw he was in turmoil and suggested he might well benefit from some support, some expertise beyond what an informal chat could give him.
His GP had said much the same to him, but he found the prospect of attending his local mental health service daunting. Once again, it struck me how much we stigmatise those with mental health problems and how much of a barrier this represents to someone alone, with limited finances, who clearly needs help. My feedback was some consolation to him, but his agitation only seemed to grow.
Being with someone in distress exerts a pressure on us to offer helpful advice. But we are most effective as listeners when we can remain calm in the face of agitation and wait for some important clue to reveal itself, in its own time. A good response to someone depends entirely on a sense of timing. I caught myself trying to be helpful and pulled back a little. A little later, my companion hit on an insight himself that changed his demeanour entirely.
As he talked about his turmoil, he began to make important connections between his current mood and specific events that had happened recently in his life. His anxiety, he realised, had begun three months before, following a forced move from the home he had known for years.
Losing his home had been a significant bereavement for him. This loss had taken away his feeling of safety in the world. Being unable to name and grieve his loss, he had been unable to move on in his life. His world had become a place where he felt he didn't belong, where everyone seemed curiously insensitive and unsupportive of him.
This was an important grounding insight, but the "Eureka" moment in our conversation was yet to happen. Like many of us do, he had cut himself off from important supports in his life at the very moment he needed them most.
In his case, he had given up attending a support group that had been a vital and steady source of wellbeing and mental health. Naming this himself produced an emotional shift that was beyond any good advice I might have offered.
There was a visible shift in his energy and his demeanour brightened. He had hit on something that suggested a specific action he could take to make things a little better. He could reconnect with this group. Whatever else he needed to do would follow.
When you're faced with insurmountable problems, the key is to find the "one thing" you can do to make things a little bit better. My friend identified this for himself. As we parted, I hoped that this would be the first step of many he would take to remedy his life. But that was his call.
Tony Bates is a clinical psychologist.
