Building kind community
How do peer-led groups work?
Nobody is the boss and nobody is in charge. Together we make the meeting happen by sharing. We are all just helping each other build a helping community. Each group begins with volunteers reading relational agreements out loud for the group. Everybody is welcome to try to volunteer. Volunteers take turns opening and closing meetings and helping everyone to make sure that everyone who needs to share has a chance to share before the meeting ends. The group shifts to open discussion after everyone has a chance to share, until a volunteer helps the group close by reading the check-out prompts 15 minutes before the end of group. It’s okay for volunteers to lack confidence, and it’s okay for accidents to happen, and it’s okay to try again another time. If you offer to volunteer and become too disabled, you can pass at any moment by asking for a new volunteer.
Relational agreements
Relational agreements are mutually agreed upon intentions. This is different than a rule. A rule is enforced by someone or something outside of you. A relational agreement is actually something we want to do, even if we sometimes fail to do it or don’t really know how to do it well. ​The purpose of our relational agreements is to provide all of us with the bumpers or guardrails that we might need to be kind with each other. Chances are, if you are reading this, you might come from a place where there isn’t a lot of kindness. Relational agreements are made to help us help each other with as much kindness as possible.
Who can attend groups?
Anyone who wishes to be kind to others and wants to experience kindness themselves, really. Some groups may have a focus, like Extreme Experiences, so that people might benefit from having the freedom to explore or share some experiences that are very difficult to acknowledge in most spaces, but overall, groups are for anyone who wants more kindness in their life.
What if I cannot prove or explain my experiences?
Survivors of many kinds of experiences can be precluded from speaking directly of those experiences, either through trauma; no experiences of sharing things with others; social invisibility; deliberate disablement; or otherwise. Nobody will be forced to prove their experience or existence. It's just time to be kind.
Do I have to speak?
Regardless of ability to speak or share, you are welcome to just share the space. You can introduce yourself, or you can say nothing, or you can introduce yourself using an alternate name if privacy is a cause of concern for you. We only ask that whether speaking or non-speaking, we follow the mutual intention of being kind with each other.
Feedback
Feedback is not the same as advice. If feedback is requested, we listen and respond by validating the reality of unmet needs and reflecting each other’s innocence. Sometimes, a person may just need to share something with others and wish for no feedback at all. In which case, it is kind to provide no feedback. A person may also request feedback and may even ask the group for specific type of feedback. Each person is the authority of their own experiences, always. We can share from our own experience if asked, and if we choose to.
Connecting outside of groups
Peer-led groups are intended for the explicit purpose of helping people locate and meet unmet needs. If connecting outside of group helps people with that, then that is exactly what group is for. That being said, it is important that outside contact between peers intends to be helpful and beneficial. Some people can have opposing triggers – one person’s need for comfort may trigger another person’s threat response. This can happen in groups. Some people coming to group may have never had the chance to express their boundaries, and everyone needs to acknowledge this reality and offer protection to the most vulnerable parts of all of us. Towards this, we meet together to build guidelines to help people observe, respect, and express boundaries as disabled people earnestly wishing to help each other.
Does group membership have a fee? No.
Kindness and community should not have a monetary cost. We are seeking skilled people to help with fundraising (web support, physical space, etc.) and for funding the Emergency Hardship Program. This program functions to help people who are born into trafficking and/or life-threatening trauma conditions leave those conditions and get the kind of actionable help they need to stay out of those conditions.
Community Guidelines
Help Exists functions to help survivors build community together. Our community guidelines function to help protect the special needs of survivors who are still trying to leave their inborn and still active abuse conditions, and to protect survivors from being forced to demonstrate their disablement, lack of agency, or lack of cultural familiarity. The only customs and traditions that we have are shared agreements to practice kindness with each other.
No solicitation or self-promotion.
During survivors’ eggression from active organized abuse conditions, and in protection of their lacking agency, privacy is nonnegotiable. To maintain everybody’s safety, do not solicit for reporting or public testimony here. We ask that people do not promote products, services, market research, websites, podcasts, etc., and that people do not solicit financial support, or recruitment for religious, political, or professional services, nor share social media accounts for audience-building.
No assumptions about identity.
Some survivors were born into conditions of organized abuse, and from infancy onward had lives and identities formed by extreme harm. We never assume that these conditions ended or lessened, just because the body grew older. Some survivors are here as people who have no outside identity, other than being a survivor, trying to survive a day at a time. Some survivors only experience identities defined entirely by submission and roles imposed by abusers with no internalized sense of who they are, what choices they may have, what rights they may have, what aspirations they could have, and what may be possible for them.
No assumptions about shared culture.
Some survivors were born in captivity or inside of environments engineered by abusers. For this reason, survivors can be disabled from experiencing shared culture with others. Some survivors experience exponentially harmful effects deliberately created by their abusers to ensure that what is co-regulating and comforting for the general population can be especially painful and gaslighting for these survivors.
Emergencies.
Some survivors exist in a fixed state of emergency. States of emergency are valid and real even if survivors remain unable to know this about themselves, especially when it is not demonstrable to or noticed by outside people; and it is not reflected to survivors as even urgent or severe––let alone realized as an emergency. Emergency states may make it inappropriate for others to depend on us during their own non-negated emergencies.
Disabilities.
Some survivors have been disabled by abuse in ways that remain indescribable, and by default, private. Some survivors are deliberately disabled from communicating about what was done to them, and what kind of support they require for healing. We always hold awareness for the needs of accommodations/modifications for our own and others’ disablement.
Lack of agency.
Some survivors are raised to serve others in submission and without agency or choices. Some survivors are disabled from meeting their own needs and interests, including interacting with their own resources, and may not be able to say “yes” or “no” from a place of agency. We always hold this awareness for each other. Regardless of whatever functional presentation may be forced out, states of being totally agencyless and totally disabled must be held as existent and real.
Media and technology.
Some survivors are primed in childhood to interact with media and political events differently than the general population. Cultural artifacts such as religion, politics, celebrity, media, and technology used to socially engineer the population can interfere with meeting the unmet needs of disabled survivors. It is on topic to process how media and technology affect us, but not for the sake of small-talk or co-regulating based on assumptions of shared culture.
Meeting unmet needs.
Rather than measuring our own pain and suffering against the pain and suffering of others, we just respond directly by helping to meet unmet needs. Comparison leads to despair by functioning to disconnect us from our needs and replace our actual needs with competition for worth. This creates guilt and shame and turns survival into a trial rather than a right. In reality being loved and valued does not necessitate others being harmed. Part of recovery is discovering that love actually exists and you are actually worthy of love. We are learning together that having love does not require sacrifice and that nobody is replaceable because everybody is worth more than the harm their body can take and the harm their body can inflict. The only route out is to love ourselves and each other to freedom.