Experience in common
What does it mean to have experiences in common?
In a mental health context, peers share common experiences of social and emotional distress. This shared experience can help people connect with each other, regardless of how openly they discuss their experiences.
These shared experiences can be broadly defined or can be more specifically linked to a particular mental health diagnosis or experience, for example, hospitalisation. Peers may also connect over other kinds of experience.
Specific aspects of people’s identity – including gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, disability and migration status – may be critical to people recognising each other as peers. Crucially, people have control over how they identify themselves and who they identify as peers.
Why is important to have experiences in common?
When people come to peer support, it’s important that they feel comfortable enough to talk about difficult issues. This is easier if peers know they’ve been through similar things.
Many peers talk about the relief of feeling they’re ‘not the only one’. This can be comforting and reassuring, especially if someone has been struggling alone for a long time. The feeling of being together with other people who understand what it’s like to experience social or emotional distress makes it easier to open up and help one another.
When talking with each other, knowing that someone may have been through similar problems can help people to feel empathy with each other. For some, it’s liberating not having to explain themselves again and again, because in peer support other people ‘get it’. Where people are able to feel empathy and mutual understanding, they are able to build trust with each other.
It’s important to understand that while people accessing peer support may have had many similar experiences, these experiences will not be exactly the same. Recognising, respecting, and valuing those differences alongside the things that people have in common is important.
"It’s comforting to know that all those people are going through the same thing, just like a little group community. [There’s a] comfort of knowing that these people are feeling the same way you are."
What can it look like in practice?
Peer support is often organised for particular groups of people. This means people may have at least one thing in common, but may have experienced a number of things that make their situation relatively distinct. For example:
- Peer support for people who have been migrants or refugees, some of whom may have experienced trauma.
- Women-only peer support, including common experiences of domestic violence.
- Peer support for people from the LGBTQ+ community.
- Peer support for people with learning difficulties.
Peer support doesn’t have to be focused on particular groups of people. It can be open to anyone who has experiences of emotional distress. However, there has to be experience in common that people clearly share – and that the people involved are aware of – in order for peer support relationships to form.
"When you’ve got racism as the base of your issue, you are more than likely going to find solutions that are race-specific or that have got a racial dimension. So that’s how we end up being of a particular racial group; because the root of our problem, we believe, [is] racialisation."
Reflective questions
- Who is giving and receiving peer support? What are our shared experiences?
- Do people who join have more than one kind of experience in common? Which experiences?
- What are the challenges, if any, of focusing on our shared experiences in peer support?
- Are there people who might not find this peer support helpful? Are there people who might not be able to contribute appropriately?
- If there are people who don’t fit the peer support criteria at the current time, how would we tell them this, and how might we help them look for relevant support?
- Are there any practical or cultural barriers to people joining? Is our peer support unintentionally excluding people, for example, by not having disabled access or failing to use diverse images of people in our publicity materials?