Chapter 6: The Power of Peer Support

Read Chapter 5

We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club.

Find out more about the Katie and the Book, or buy a copy here.

The right of Katie Hodgetts to be identified as the Author of this text  has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Chapter 6

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
bell hooks

I was once invited to deliver a one-hour workshop at an international conference on inner development in Sweden. This was a huge deal to me. I’d be inside a historic church speaking to 600 people in person, and thousands more who were joining online. The Resilience Project was moving through a funding crisis and I knew that this was my last shot to find the funding necessary for our continuation. So, it became one of the biggest speaking opportunities I’d had to date. But life had a different plan for me.

The week before, to pacify the stress building in my body and mind, I carved out space for going to the gym and yoga. These are two tools in my Resilience Rucksack (Guidepost 6) to tame stress and balance my breathing; one speeds me up and the other slows me down. But one week before the talk I woke up screaming in pain, unable to lift my head from the pillow without spasms ricocheting from my neck. I stayed still, ingesting pain relief from a horizontal position and texting my team to let them know that I’d be unable to work. When I was finally able to get to the doctor – yes, in my pyjamas – she explained that I’d suffered a shoulder injury. I was surprised, because there was nothing too strenuous about my exercise, which I had been doing for a while. Though I’d kept doing the same moves, I was showing up in a different state. My body was a cave of stress, with nerves, overwhelm and adrenaline stitching themselves into my muscle fibres. All that bracing and tensing had led to a frozen shoulder.

With the assistance of some gnarly pain medication, I spent the next five days drifting in and out of sleep, forced to sleep upright with my arm in a sling. I directed my eyes toward a TV screen and away from the fact that the biggest talk of my life was in four days’ time, and I’d lost a week’s worth of prep. Inevitably, the perfectionist saboteurs in my mind starting yelling, “You’re going to F this up”, “You’re going to humiliate yourself” and, “You’re not good enough.” I had two options. Either I could let the voices win and I could cancel the talk, even though I would physically be able to stand on stage. Or I could surrender to imperfection by finding out not what “perfect” but what “good enough” looks like. But being good enough would not result in going viral, securing more funding or getting a standing ovation. Good enough would be showing up and bravely stepping on stage, rather than cancelling for fear of embarrassment. The win would be to show up as I was, to allow myself to be messy and to acknowledge that sometimes life has a different plan for you. So, on I went.

With a sling, pain medication filling my pockets and an unconvincing “can-do” attitude, I got myself to Sweden, forced to own that I was underprepared and overwhelmed. On the morning of the talk, I woke up knowing that part of the workshop was as much a mystery to me as it was to the audience. The known parts were my introduction and introducing a paired practice of “active listening” for five minutes. This exercise – detailed at the end of this chapter – invites a pair of people to answer the same question while listening deeply, with Person A going first and Person B going second and no discussion or feedback in between. The goal of the listener is to quieten the inner monologue of their mind, resisting the urge to comment and say, “Oh yes, I can relate because …”, and truly listen to someone else. As the speaker, the goal is to embrace the rare opportunity to speak uninterrupted in a stream of consciousness and not be guided by someone else’s response or further questioning. In speaking for a length of time and overcoming the discomfort of being witnessed in our entirety, we may be surprised to see what comes out of our mouth, and what’s been hiding inside us behind polite conversational etiquette. In my introduction I would use data and testimonials from our work to showcase the almost divine, revelatory and soothing impact of being seen, heard and understood by others. I wanted to drive home the message that our answer to the climate crisis could lie in the shared humanity we can salvage from peer support and collective healing.

The audience participation in this exercise was important for me. To have faith in a concept we need to alchemize in our bodies, not just in our minds. Embodied wisdom, the learning we gather from how we are made to feel, is a far greater teacher than statistics and logic alone. For example, the unwavering and non-sensical commitment I have to Sheffield Wednesday Football Club has been alchemized through years of shared wins and losses with others. The value of my best friend is not rooted in her job or her salary or how often she texts me, but in years of shared tears and the feeling of mutual connection, trust and love.

The problem was, I hadn’t yet decided what question I would be asking the audience to use to tap into this connection and shared reverence, and now my workshop was in two hours’ time. I thought through some questions that could encourage us all to dig a little deeper, such as: What’s standing in the way of you being your biggest, brightest self? What does the world look like to you in 15 years’ time? What do you wish for your children? These questions are important, but they felt too enormous, too extensive. I didn’t know what to ask, and sometimes when I don’t know the answer, it feels more pertinent to hand it over to something bigger than myself. To this day, this is one of my most “am-I-having-a-breakdown?” moments. Maybe it was fatigue or the strong pain medication I was on for my shoulder, but I went and spoke to a tree. I walked out of the venue and found the biggest, wisest looking tree and sat beside it. I asked the tree, “Oh wise one, Oh one of hundreds of years of seeing and witnessing, Oh one of exceptional listening capacity, what should I ask the audience today?” I waited for a voice that I knew wouldn’t come, for words unable to be articulated. And inside me, I heard the tree whisper back, “How are you?”

My inner saboteurs laughed in delight, “You can’t stand on an international stage alongside some of the most infamous international speakers in neuroscience and inner development and offer: ‘How are you?’ I could go to the shops, to the bus stop, to the doctor and be asked that question – I hear it ten times a day. But at a conference I’ve paid to attend, I’m looking for something a bit more profound!” Suppressing these voices, trusting the tree and having close to no time to think the decision through properly, I walked back into the church and waited the final 15 minutes before my slot. I took a deep breath and walked on stage. The last thing I heard was the rush of blood pulsating through my brain and the host in my ear whispering, “Katie, rock them!”

I got up on that stage in my best suit and spoke through my work for about 40 minutes, approaching the moment of vulnerability at speed. I took a breath, declaring honestly that I’d been mulling over what to ask them all morning but neglecting to share that I was now following the advice of an oak tree. I shared that we’d be exploring three very simple words: “How are you?” and began instructing the audience how to do the exercise.

I was accompanied by a pianist during the talk, who started softly playing music as strangers reshuffled to pair up and begin an eye-gazing exercise: staring into each other’s eyes for a few minutes in the hope they could really start seeing each other. What started as muffled giggles and fidgeting quickly settled into what I can only think of as magic. I was profoundly moved to see strangers with tears in their eyes, smiling. My saboteurs tried to creep in, commenting, “Wow, and now you’re crying on stage” but I was too distracted by the wave of awe spreading across me. I then invited the pairs to answer the simple, yet powerful question “How are you?” They each had five minutes to answer the question without interruption.

In closing the exercise I saw people wiping tears, hugging and exchanging phone numbers. I opened space for feedback afterwards and it was overwhelmingly positive. Some felt it had deepened their roots of connection and others that it was “incredible” how moved they had been by having asked and answered such a simple question. Another commented that it had allowed her to feel like a “majestic tree”. At the end, I received that standing ovation.

Vulnerability: Our Untapped Superpower

Sharing how we truly are, be that full of sorrow and hopelessness or inspired and deeply motivated, is letting ourselves and others in on the secret of what it means to be alive. “How are you?” is not just a greeting, it is a doorway – a doorway to more than just taking action without burning out. Every changemaker, who may appear to be a superhero to the watching world, possesses the soft underbelly of a sensitive human being. Our underbelly is our most vulnerable part, but not our weakest. It’s one of our greatest sources of strength, because vulnerability breeds connection and mutual understanding. To see each one of us with a soft underbelly – We share a common wants, needs, insecurities desire to feel witnessed, and fragilities – creates seen and supported kinder changemaking by others. spaces where we are less inclined to shame each other for not doing enough. Beyond our justified rage, our chosen fights, our chosen tactics and our location in the world, we share a common desire to feel witnessed, seen and supported by others.

In my journey to uncover the answers to some questions such as: Who protects the protectors? Who cares for the carers? Who transforms those transforming? I have found that “How are you?” – simple and concise – is a doorway to the support and connection we need as humans first, then changemakers. It extends our pronounced sense of global care to each other and ourselves. Through deeply listening and revealing vulnerability, we can find magic, connection, humanity and togetherness, which is the rich terrain of movements and mutual aid – the lining of history books.

“How are you?” may also bring discomfort and unease. For some people of a particular gender, culture, faith, class or upbringing, the expression of vulnerability is discouraged, punished or socially sanctioned. Undoing that work or unlearning those narratives won’t happen in one exercise. It becomes important to develop patience, grow a language for discomfort and fundamentally only to unpack things that you feel you can safely repack afterwards. This mean understanding your emotional boundaries and whether or not sharing some things is more productive with a clinical professional.

In our work we talk about “creative discomfort” or “growing a taste for discomfort”. This looks like nudging up to the line of your perceived comfort level, gently prodding it and getting curious about how moving that line may feel. To give an example, at retreats I’ve hosted I’ve had changemakers come with a predefined boundary line on opening up, not because they weren’t strong enough to let their pain see the light, but because vulnerability is effing scary. Through gentle and loving encouragement, I saw them share things they’ve never spoken about before and the resulting liberation and levity. Imagine holding a stone in your hand with your arms outstretched. Holding it for ten minutes would be manageable. Holding it for 20 might start getting uncomfortable. Imagine holding the stone for days or weeks. It would start to feel extraordinarily heavy, and it would cause pain. Imagine holding the stone for years, and the heaviness with which you’d walk. Sometimes our fear of vulnerability can keep us holding the stone inside in the darkness. When we offer our stories to the light, through supported sharing, we can see them more clearly and see that they perhaps weren’t as scary or shameful as we perceived.

Growing a taste for discomfort is an unavoidable learning of resilience and, in a society of great convenience, we’re not trained for it. Changemaking as a discipline is profoundly uncomfortable; challenging power hierarchies and tipping the balance is thoroughly uncomfortable. Practising discomfort within our inner landscape, in an active listening exercise with people we trust, only serves to further develop our ability to hold discomfort in our external world.

Finally, it’s often difficult to distinguish between healthy vulnerability and over-sharing or trauma-dumping. While vulnerability fosters intimacy, trust and understanding, unchecked emotional expression can sometimes overwhelm others, leaving them feeling burdened rather than connected. True vulnerability is about building bridges, not barriers. At its core, practising vulnerability means sharing personal experiences in an intentional and thoughtful way, as I will outline in the active listening exercise at the end of this chapter. It involves self-awareness, mutual respect and emotional containment, offering parts of yourself to others in a way that strengthens relationships rather than placing undue weight on them. Healthy vulnerability occurs in spaces where trust has been established, for example through the eye-gazing, and it allows for a reciprocal exchange so that both people feel emotionally safe and engaged. On the other hand, oversharing often lacks context and emotional regulation. It may involve revealing deeply personal details without considering the relationship, the setting or the listener’s readiness to receive such information. This kind of unfiltered sharing doesn’t consider the boundaries or emotional needs of others. While vulnerability invites connection, over-sharing can feel like an emotional flood, leaving the listener unsure of how to respond. Trauma-dumping takes over-sharing one step further. It happens when someone unloads heavy emotional content onto another without their consent or consideration of their emotional capacity. Unlike healthy vulnerability, which seeks connection, trauma-dumping often seeks relief, with little regard for how the listener might be impacted. The person sharing may not yet have processed their own emotions and, rather than seeking true support, may instead be looking for an immediate emotional release.

To practise healthy, intentional vulnerability, it’s important to consider three key questions before sharing:

• Is this the right time, place and person for this conversation? Is my sharing respecting the other person’s emotional boundaries?
• Am I sharing from a place of reflection rather than impulse?

Checking in with these simple questions ensures that vulnerability remains a bridge to deeper understanding rather than an emotional weight placed on another. One of the easiest ways to navigate this fine line is by inviting, rather than imposing, deep emotional conversations. Additionally, developing strategies to self-regulate emotions before sharing, through journalling, self-reflection or professional support, ensures that vulnerability remains a tool for connection rather than an act of emotional unloading. In all endeavours, seek not to be a dump truck – be a fork-lift.

Peer Support, Resilience and the Majestic Tree

In 1930s Ohio, two men stumbled into each other’s lives. One was Bill Wilson, a once-successful New York stockbroker whose love affair with booze had torpedoed his career and his happiness. The other was Dr Bob Smith, a talented but similarly self-destructive surgeon, spiralling through his own battles. Bill hit rock bottom countless times, but it is reported that something changed during one of his hospital stays. He is said to have had a profound spiritual moment, courtesy of the Oxford Group, a movement preaching personal change through spiritual practices. Armed with a new outlook but teetering on the edge of relapse, Bill needed someone who understood what he was going through. In an attempt to stay sober while away on business in Akron, Bill ended up in contact with Dr Bob through a mutual connection from the Oxford Group. What followed was a marathon heart-to-heart about drinking, addiction and life. Instead of judgement, they found a bond in mutual struggle and, for the first time, sobriety seemed not just possible but shared. Fuelled by coffee and conversations, the duo decided that this was too good not to share. Over time, they honed a set of principles based on what worked for them – honesty, accountability and a little spiritual hope. What started as two guys helping each other out snowballed into a worldwide movement that changed lives. This is the story of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the 12-step programme and their weekly peer support meetings.

I first heard the story of Bill and Bob through my inspiring mother-in-law, almost 100 years after their fateful cup of coffee. Through weekly meetings, she now has 18 years of sobriety and credits AA for changing her life. Her story is shared. As of 2023, there were 123,000 AA groups across approximately 180 countries, serving almost 2 million people globally.²⁷ The proof? Peer support and embracing vulnerability – to share, to ask for help, to bring our pain to light – is not an optional extra to a balanced life. It’s proven as fundamental in supporting sobriety, overcoming addiction and maintaining positive mental health. The Resilience is built by: AA are one of the most prolific feeling seen, heard and promising examples of and understood peer support and mutual aid, (practising but there are many more, vulnerability  for mothers, men and now, in a community). for activists.

Inspired by Bob and Bill, and the learnings from the peer support in our Resilience Circles, the “resilience formula” below articulates how we begin our journey.

To break this down, we build emotional resilience through peer support, when we practise vulnerability, in a supportive and trusted community. It works because it:

1. Normalizes struggle. Peer support reduces feelings of isolation and shame. For example, hearing “me too” or “I’ve felt that way” in response to feelings of hopelessness reminds us that we are neither alone nor the anomaly. Hearing parts of our own story in others normalizes emotional difficulty as part of life and not as personal failure.
2. Promotes emotional safety. When someone listens without judgement or fixing, it soothes the nervous system and creates a sense of safety. It allows us to process emotions more fully, which enhances our capacity to handle future stressors.
3. Encourages self-reflection and growth. Listening deeply to others and being listened to in return, creates a reflective space. Here we can nurture emotional insights into why we feel certain ways, helping us in the future to identify patterns and coping strategies.
4. Builds communities of connection. Strong social bonds are among the most consistent predictors of resilience. Peer support cultivates a sense of belonging, helping you to feel anchored during periods of instability or hardship. In the inevitable ebbs and flows of life, you might not remember the acronym you learned to deal with burnout in a workshop, but you will be able to WhatsApp someone in your community to talk it through with. Reading this book will help minimize burnout but utilizing it as an invitation to speak more openly with others and building communities of care will transform your life.
5. Reminds us of the miracle of others. This is your invitation to don your miracle goggles. Peer support helps us to see other changemakers not as competitors or saboteurs, but as miracles in their own right. They are a miracle for caring and devoting their time to the cause. They could be donating their gifts to entirely selfish pursuits or working for the fossil fuel lobby. Instead, they are here with you on the fringes of change with their own struggles, desires and insecurities. That doesn’t mean they aren’t flawed – we all are – but see them first through miracle goggles. It will bring you closer to others.

The eight-week model found that community, particularly an open, safe space where people can feel heard and validated, reduced feelings of loneliness and increased feelings of positive mental health.²⁸ Participants highlighted the importance of communities of care, recognizing that collective action is more effective than going it alone. We now have a validated mandate that leading from our feelings is not a weakness or a distraction, but an effective method for both flourishing as a human and effective activism.

Sitting in vulnerability is not easy. It involves imperfection, honesty, exposure, discomfort and unlearning. But it also includes connection, support, strength and resilience. Like my friend the oak tree, trees develop strong and deeper root systems through exposure to wind and other environmental stressors. It’s a process known as “stressinduced strengthening” and happens when a tree reinforces its own structure in response to adversity. When trees are exposed to wind, their trunks and branches sway. This movement signals to the tree to grow stronger, deeper and more widespread roots to anchor itself. In the absence of wind, trees grow tall but weak. Without wind stress, they fail to develop the necessary structural strength. Engaging with vulnerability and the remaining six guideposts of this book will routinely ask you to sit in and embrace discomfort. But in doing so, your own stress-induced strengthening will begin, and you too can become the Majestic Tree.

EXERCiSE: ACTIVE LISTENING AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH CHECKS

Objective: This exercise is designed to be conducted in pairs, with your campaigning group, your friends, your housemate, your child or members of your family. It aims to deepen connection, cultivate emotional awareness and deliver peer support through the practice of active listening. Participants take turns answering the question “How are you?” while the other person listens without interruption, feedback or judgement.

Active listening is the practice of fully concentrating, understanding and listening to what another person is saying without interrupting, judging or formulating a response while they speak. It requires the listener to be present, minimize internal and external distractions, and provide non-verbal cues of attentiveness, such as maintaining eye contact and nodding.

materials needed:

• A timer (phone, watch or clock)
• A quiet space where pairs can converse without distractions
• Optional: a notebook each for post-exercise reflections

Step One: Setting the scene (5 minutes)

• Sit in a quiet and private setting.
• State and ensure that this is a safe, non-judgemental space where each person has the opportunity to be fully heard.

Step Two: Eye-gazing

• Pair up, preferably with someone you don’t know well and, while sitting relatively close to each other, look into each other’s eyes in silence for 1 minute.
• This is uncomfortable, so expect some smiling, giggling  or fidgeting. Try to just sit in this discomfort and quieten your mind.

Accessibility check: eye-gazing can be uncomfortable for everyone, but particularly those who are neurodivergent. If anyone in your group has an expression of neurodivergence such as autism, they can place their hands opposite each other, facing upward, with fingers close to nearly touching their partner’s, instead of gazing into each other’s eyes. Hand-gazing demands an equal amount of attention.

Step Three: Establish Roles and Guidelines

• Decide who is going to speak and who will listen first. Person A becomes the first speaker and Person B the  first listener.
• Remind the listener to:

˚  Resist the urge to respond or interject with personal experiences.

˚  Focus fully on the speaker’s words, maintaining eye contact if comfortable.

˚  Notice their own internal reactions and thoughts without acting on them.

• Remind the speaker to:

˚  Speak freely, following their train of thought without filtering.

˚  Embrace pauses and moments of reflection.

˚  Welcome silence if that’s required. Silence is okay.

˚  Avoid self-editing or worrying about how they sound.

Step Four: Begin the Exercise (10 minutes)

• Start the timer for five minutes.
• Person A speaks while Person B listens attentively.
• Once the time is up, allow a few seconds of silence before switching roles.
• Repeat with Person B speaking and Person A listening for five minutes.

Step Five: Reflection (10 minutes)

• Use the following questions for reflection:

˚  How did it feel to be truly listened to?

˚  What was challenging about staying silent and resisting the urge to respond?

˚  What did you notice about your own thoughts and reactions?

Final Note: Integrate active listening into your daily life, whether in personal conversations, meetings or moments of support with friends and colleagues.

Read Chapter 7