We are joined today by Sarah Dickinson, who is a volunteer with Samaritans, a registered charity aimed at providing emotional support to anyone in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. She’s going to tell us a little bit about the rationale of the organisation, what it does, how one can volunteer and how it might relate to the Middle Way?
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MWS Podcast 73: Sarah Dickinson as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_73_Sarah_Dickinson
This made me think about the value of reflecting things back to other people as an integrative process, and how it works. There seem to be parallels both with various types of talking therapy and with focusing, in that it must enable people to simply be more aware of the different potential desires and beliefs in themselves – to loosen up repressed content, in other words. If the Samaritan intervened in the distress in any way, it might just set up a new repression, but if the person in distress is coaxed into opening up different aspects of their thoughts, presumably an autonomous integrative process can ensue. Would that be a fair way of describing it?
Then there’s also another, much more practical, thought, which is about whether the Samaritans use video conferencing. Since this is now widely available via Skype, is it something the Samaritans have explored? Or would it be bringing the distressed person too close to the volunteer to bring in a visual element to the communication?