There’s a powerful, hidden skill in suicide prevention.
Read this article and you’ll be able to practice it in every day conversation – maybe even with people in distress.
Who knows, it might help you support someone down from the edge.
It’s called ‘Abstraction’.
Abstraction is very popular and well understood in other fields like computer science, philosophy, art and more.
In the crisis support context Abstraction is unknown so it has no category to fit into.
It’s not quite a microskill, it’s too broad for that. Later on, I’ll propose a new category for crisis support skills called ‘macroskill’ so we can hopefully form tools for more nuance and higher quality care.
Time to get into it, strap in.
Firstly, let’s unpack Abstraction.
Abstraction happens when you hide details.
You ‘abstract’ something by making it more simple.
If you played a game of ‘hangman’ as a child, you know what this looks like. Contrasted with a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, it should be pretty clear.
Abstraction ‘hides details’ while still getting across the main idea.
In hangman you only need to know whether or not you’re still playing – if the picture is complete you’ve lost the game. Leonardo Da Vinci wanted to get across lots of ideas including direction and density of muscle fiber, connective tissue, direction of movement, proportion and so much more.
That’s the what of Abstraction, let’s talk about the why.
Abstraction in Crisis Support.
What exactly makes Abstraction so powerful in suicide prevention?
Hiding the details can help people find hope and resilience.
Imagine a kind of zany situation with me. Your friend is cooking in their kitchen, the cooktop has a raging fire bursting out of control and your friend completely ignores the flames to focus on turning off the alarm.
It may sound silly but that’s how the majority of us work! The smoke alarm (details of our circumstances) gets all the attention while the fire (how we feel) is ignored, neglected and avoided at all costs.
Abstraction helps lower the noisy details to free up brainpower for other things like rationality and problem solving to help us feel better (putting out the fire, in other words).
This is especially helpful when fight / flight / freeze / fawn is activated and people can’t see beyond the aggravating details (it’s not like your friend means to totally ignore the fire).
This weirdness might show up as someone ‘whylighting’ (asking why why why to bullshit themselves into believing they’re getting to the bottom of it while they maintain the exact awful circumstances that destroy them).
It could be someone projecting harsh judgement, focusing on criticising people around them, never able to properly discuss or integrate their own feelings.
It might show up as someone fixating on specific parts of their struggle, wee little details that spiral them into blind victimhood that anyone around can clearly see.
Avoiding our feelings only makes the raging fire worse. Yet our social and cultural make-up typically means it’s super easy to focus on the events / external details. This looks like rationalising, denying, dismissing and avoiding.
Imagine it now, your friend is standing on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, fiddling with an alarm while there’s a raging inferno behind him…
If only you could somehow help him focus on the fire and let go of the details.
How Abstraction works.
When we talk about abstracting, we’re not hiding details to just avoid them.
We’re actually hiding a level of detail which isn’t helpful in this moment, like turning the alarm off.
Doing it the right way feels validating! Because it’s still got the ‘essence’ included, but without all the unnecessary noisy detail which only acts as a distraction for an avoidant mind.
When we hide the details in the right way, in a way that feels acknowledging and validating, it lets us focus elsewhere! We can really attend to how we feel and put the fire out. Once we put the fire out, we can find language, resilience and hope.
This is all pretty dense and theoretical so let me illustrate with pretty pictures, this time by Picasso.
The bull has his details removed layer by layer.
Take a moment to soak in the transformation frame by frame.
You can look at the very last picture in this series and still see the ‘essence’ of a bull, despite it having so very little detail. We want to do the same thing supporting someone through crisis!
The more we hide details and turn the alarm off, the better we can help someone ‘name and tame’ their emotions, unlocking their ability to think rationally again.
My experience of Abstraction done well.
The first time I really felt this happening was after a nuclear fight with my ex.
We were between breakups, somewhere around 2015 when she apologised for losing it at me earlier. The traumatised parts of us kinda took turns starting battles on the reg and I guess it was her turn. Anyway, she looked at me and said something that brought my defenses to a grinding halt.
She didn’t give the standard apology, she added an analogy.
She said; ‘I… I dropped the baby.’
Luckily, we didn’t have an actual baby.
She was using a kind of abstraction (analogy) to help me bridge the gap between her ideas.
I needed to hear more!
She said; ‘when we turn on one another our relationship is defenseless. It relies on us completely, like a baby. We have to defend and protect our relationship, but sometimes… we drop it by accident, to fight. I dropped the baby, I’m sorry.’
From that point on we had this analogy in our relationship toolkit which made a huge difference!
Don’t get me wrong I still ‘dropped the baby’ a LOT and in the end our relationship couldn’t survive because we had too many unhealed wounds, but the power of a great analogy left a huge impression.
Now, abstraction is a skill I practice all the time.
When Abstracting, we find relevant details.
Of all the details describing a crisis, there’s lots to pick.
You could include all sorts of details, big horns, enormous muscles, hooves, the way the light reflects just so on the tail. But of all those details… which ones really matter?
Think about the bull, which details really allow you to understand what it represents? Not many. A tail, horns, legs, a torso. Willy and nuts. All represented by only one single line.
The relationship-as-baby analogy really highlighted my responsibility to protect it.
By putting it in such a simple, defenseless image, I could see very clearly when I did the wrong thing by dropping the baby even though there’s always so many messy details involved! Like who’s to blame! Or my super important and absolutely relevant defences to explain why I’m not at fault! My needs, her needs, often in conflict or unspoken or counter-intuitive… All of that Noise just got in the way of the obvious: what do we do about the baby on the floor? (Hint: pick it up – holy $#!7).
In other words, during my fights I learned how to stop attending to the smoke alarm (why I wasn’t to blame, how it was all her fault = all the ‘noise’) and instead pay attention to the fire (our feelings!).
But how exactly do you know which parts are important and which one aren’t?
Use ‘shared meaning’ to pick relevant details.
Think about the main way crisis support is done.
More than anything else, you listen. No matter which guru, which professional, which industry, which expert, which institution. If you work for the FBI in counter-terrorism, or the volunteer firefighters just hoping to help out occasionally, crisis conversations take the same pathway.
People need to feel seen and heard – so listen.
Feeling seen and heard is what I mean by ‘create shared meaning’.
When you say to me, ‘wow that sounds really tough, Said’ and I say back, ‘thank you, it is’ what do you think is happening? We are creating shared meaning about my situation. You’re validating my experience by sharing an understanding of how I feel in relation to what’s going on. Underneath your words is an important message: I get it and I care.
- Side note = if you want to learn about shared meaning, bookmark this and read it later!
The better you can see me in my circumstances, the better the quality of the meaning we will share.
I haven’t gotten into the literature on all this stuff, shared meaning included, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s so powerful because of the following. Mirror Neurons help us match one another and feel empathy, calm our nervous system. Story telling is hardwired into the function of the language centres of the human brain and turns imagination into real life. We create ‘maps’ we can share, getting way better at strategy by absorbing multiple perspectives, of the world around us and the world inside us.
Shared meaning the feeling of discovering you and your new friend share a favourite book or movie in common for the same reasons.
It’s the feeling of looking at someone else with similar life experience to you and passing a hidden nod that says, ‘I see you’.
It’s the magical invisible glue holding society together.
Abstraction has been helping humans make shared meaning for a very, very long time.
Abstraction is a very old, very human super-power.
It’s been around since forever.
Remember hangman?
Well hundreds of thousands of years ago, stick figures were drawn on cave walls too. Imagine that! You’re gnawing on a bone, never spoken a complex thought in your life (let alone had one!) and your pal grabs a charred stick and draws a stick figure on the cave wall.
Add another stick figure and what looks like the animal you just ate, now you have a ‘picture’.
In other words, humans have this innate ability to represent an idea by making a symbol for it. Words, images, numbers, letters, symbols, emojis are all common abstractions of our day to day life we probably take for granted, yet it’s a miracle no other animal can appreciate (far as I can tell…).
Imagine next to your cave picture of 2 stick figures and an antelope is a different picture of 15 stick figures and a bull.
Even without having words for ‘bull’, ‘antelope’, ‘danger’, ‘kill-this-one-with-a-small-group-and-this-one-with-a-big-group’ you can understand the message! This is the power of abstraction. By ‘abstracting’ ideas they can be represented and given from person to person. We share the meaning. Abstract thinking is the cornerstone of mathematics, leading the way to crazy stuff like me typing these words on my little device to send data into space so you can read it in the future.
This Abstraction above takes the form of drawings to illustrate something to help survive, fight against danger or hunger, work as a team.
They have also been used a zillion times to illustrate more etherial things, through poem or lyrics, passing wisdom along through the generations.
For example, check out this old koan.
Sufi and other schools use Abstraction as a teaching tool.
Have you heard the Sufi story of The Blind Men and the Elephant?
A group of blind men are invited to touch an elephant. One by one they each claim to know the truth, having first surrounded and then touched the part of the elephant they can reach.
‘I know the elephant, it is a wall – strong and immoveable.’
‘How can you say that? It’s clearly a fan – good for blowing wind.’
‘No it’s more of a tree without branches.’
‘Be careful fools! It’s a snake, it might be poisonous.’
‘Can’t you tell that’s a hose?’
The group all disagreed and eventually come to blows.
Each of the blind men was partly right, yet also wrong.
The elephant is much more than it’s individual parts, but like laying claim to any truth, we’ll never get our hands on the entire thing – so we need to work with other people to build a more complete picture.
Before Sufis told it, this parable was meant by the Buddha to show how academics can become closed minded once they form a belief. I like how it can also illustrate self awareness more generally.
The different parts that make up who we are can act like a group of blind people, each touching a section of our subconscious, believing this or that about ourselves. Life has a way of revealing how wrong we are about ourselves in the hopes we finally receive the lesson.
When I was young I was often confused by my own behaviour, this is probably the reason why.
I had access to only some parts of my own subconscious. That’s why I’m so obsessed with helping you develop shared meaning, it gives you the benefit of other people’s perspective to throw light into the dark corners!
Who knows, maybe one day you’ll have a suicidal teenager on the verge of opening up to you and a well placed abstraction will help bring them through their crisis.
Later on we’ll get into the details of how to actually do abstraction in crisis support, but first there’s some important caveats to use it responsibly.
As with all powerful tools, it can hurt people.
If we don’t treat Abstraction with respect, it’s dangerous.
The limit of your ability to abstract something well, is the exact degree to which you can perceive someone.
What does that mean?
If you can’t see people very well, you don’t see what they can see.
Imagine you see two people having a sign language conversation, using their hands back and forth to make shared meaning, they’re clearly communicating heaps of ideas with humour, nuance and sophistication. You try to speak to them too with your limited sign language, only to realise that you actually speak different sign languages.
You feel embarrassed, like walking up to an Italian and saying, ‘parlez vous francais?’ only to be scowled at.
If you don’t have a good understanding of who you’re communicating with, you run the risk of embarrassing yourself – or worse.
In crisis support, you have to deepen your perception of yourself over time, so that you can deepen your insight of other people over time.
When Abstraction isn’t done with respect, awful things happen.
If we look at mathematics done poorly, this is the difference between sending people to space and back, or sending them… just to space.
Abstraction requires many dimensions to be done responsibly, I wont dive into it in this post but sign up for emails if you’d like to stay up to date when it comes out.
A short summary: Abstractions need accurate insight and tentativeness to pull off, both of which are skills you can practice.
Imagine doing mathematics and using totally the wrong numbers! That’s what it’s like if you ‘hide details’ the wrong way by abstracting someone’s situation badly.
You may risk making the fire worse by reinforcing people’s worst feelings – compounding their pain.
Don’t make assumptions.
To avoid assumptions we have to define them.
What is an assumption? What are they in precise terms?
It’s when we accept something to be true without external proof. It’s easy to see in action when someone says ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’ and they receive in reply, ‘Why? I’m not.’
The assumption in this case is that loss equals grief, that there’s a terrible feeling of sadness with the passing of a loved one.
But this assumption could be completely wrong. Maybe their passing contains only relief today. Maybe there’s anger there or bitterness. Would it be right to say, ‘I’m so sorry for your anger’ to someone? Or ‘I’m so sorry your abuser is gone’?
Not really.
Yet somehow with loss it’s more acceptable to project our immediate interpretation without showing compassionate curiosity and finding out how they feel about it.
When we start creating abstractions, it’s really important to look deeply into the value of the what we create by trying to justify our interpretation. What makes us presume they’re sad? What makes us think things are complex? What have they said exactly to make us think, ‘that sounds overwhelming’ or ‘I can see how frustrating that is’?
If our evidence for thinking these things is simply, ‘Well, that’s how I’d feel!’ then we have to try harder and show more curiosity to find out how they feel.
Frustration and overwhelm are the feelings that get most reflected by crisis supporters on service.
Hazard a guess as to why that is?
Recap of Abstraction so far.
Compare a drawing by Davinci with a stick figure, low level of detail equals high level of abstraction.
Some people struggle to change their life because they keep burning down their house (by focusing on alarms, not fires – details, not feelings).
By picking the right details, you can show the ‘essence of the bull’ which can turn the alarm off.
Kind of like making a relationship into a baby, you then get to focus on what matters (’don’t drop it. Or at the very least… pick it back up!’).
Abstraction lets you share big ideas, like cave drawings that show how many people are needed for a hunt.
Abstraction has helped people survive the wilderness or pass on wisdom about life since, you know, forever.
When done badly, it can cause harm or make the fire worse, so lean into the discomfort of self knowledge and learn more about yourself.
You’ve come with me all this way, now let’s get to the good stuff.
Using Abstraction in Crisis Support.
Which details do we hide, and which ones do we highlight?
We’ve made it! At last, the good part.
Take a look at these examples and see what you think.
- It seems like you’re in the middle of this tornado tearing everything out of your control, nothing going the way it needs to but unlike extreme weather which tends to end, this has been going on for months, years now. Tell me how it’s affected things today, this morning…
- I’m hearing you have all these pieces to this puzzle; your home, finances, things with your ex and now the addiction struggles – where none of them fit with one another no matter how you try. What would you really like your family to understand, if you could tell them anything at all?
- It looks like there’s many moving targets and each one bumps into the next so it’s very hard to take aim and make a change. You mentioned this all started around March, what has helped you survive this far?
- It sounds as though you’re feeling torn right down the middle, like one hand is being pulled by your duty to your family and your other hand is being pulled by your heart’s true calling. It’s no wonder you’ve been feeling despondent, tell me about those thoughts of suicide.
- There’s such an intense fear in what you’ve shared, maybe like watching a tidal wave approaching from the distance, unsure of how this court case will play out. How have you prepared for it so far?
Read through these examples above and have a think about what you’re reading.
Why do you like them or not like them?
Which parts land for you versus don’t land?
The more you can answer these questions, the more authentically you’ll be able to generate Abstractions of your own, based not on regurgitating things you’ve seen here, but more on a deeper understanding of how and why you choose as you do.
Feel free to try bash some examples out for yourself.
Over time you’ll have a repertoire of analogies at your finger tips. Here’s a few images to get your juices flowing; wearing a mask versus taking it off, lifting weights, flying in planes and taking off on runways, carrying or releasing baggage, painful shoes on a hot day, finding out your toolbox is missing the most important tool, running out of fuel where it’s not safe.
I trust you get the idea.
Now let’s take a look at one together.
Different parts of Abstraction.
Do you like reductionism?
There’s a zillion things wrong with reducing stuff into parts, however it’s also a great tool to learn so let’s grab this chainsaw and see what we can find out.
As a kid I used to love the process of taking things apart and trying to put them back together, it means keeping in mind an image of how the different bits all connect.
Let’s do it together using the ‘torn in half’ Abstraction from above (example 4).
[It sounds as though you’re feeling torn right down the middle], [like one hand is being pulled by] [your duty to your family] and [your other hand is being pulled by] [your heart’s true calling]. [It’s no wonder you’ve been feeling despondent], [tell me about those thoughts of suicide.]
Under the microscope for you!
What similarities are there?
First, let’s group stuff and remove the punctuation.
[it sounds as though you’re feeling]
[torn right down the middle]
[like one hand is being pulled by] [your other hand is being pulled by] (these are same / same)
[your duty to your family] [your heart’s true calling] (same / same)
[it’s no wonder you’ve been feeling despondent]
[tell me about those thoughts of suicide]
Now we can create general notes and comments.
[It sounds as though you’re feeling]
An easy, open reflection. Tentative in language, not certain. Imagine if it was written with certainty ie. ‘you are feeling…’ very different sensation to receive being told how you’re feeling, versus gently reflected.
[torn right down the middle]
This here is the ‘key’ to our example. Torn right down the middle. In other words, we’re hiding a lot of detail by outlining the nature of this conflict – a two sided split between relationship-with-self and relationship-with-tribe.
[like one hand is being pulled by] [your other hand is being pulled by]
Here, the key abstraction is being linked to the person’s life. It’s not enough to say ‘it’s like a black dog following you around’ because that’s generic. You could say it to one person, you could say it to a million. Connect the abstraction to the person’s experience and illustrate your shared understanding. What exactly does the black dog represent in this case; powerlessness, persecution, terror, violence, what?
We’re looking for evidence that we’re not assuming.
[your duty to your family] [your heart’s true calling]
If any part of your Abstraction may hurt someone, this is it right here. Remember how to tell whether you’re making an assumption or not! You need proof. An assumption is when you forget to actually look for proof of your interpretation, the better the proof, the more accurate your interpretation. Connect your key Abstraction to their life by listening to their story. Focus on the Signal they’ve given you, not the Noise in your head.
[It’s no wonder you’ve been feeling despondent]
This small validation can go a long way, especially to set yourself up to talk about something much deeper. Notice how validation lands? It will only really make sense if it’s tying a connection between an event and a response to the event. Validation needs you to listen to them. You can’t fake, assume and project while also validating as they cancel each other out, your attempts to validate will feel shallow, thin and uncomfortable unless you’ve truly been listening. If you think fake validation feels uncomfortable to you, let me reassure you it feels worse to the receiver.
[tell me about those thoughts of suicide]
Go direct into to the scary stuff. If you’re scared, people can tell so be brave and go where others wont – you never know who may need you to ask. This part of the sentence serves to direct the conversation! Having a gentle yet firm grasp of where you’re going is very important for giving confidence. Sadly, confidnece doesn’t come from training, the only way is through so you’ll simply have to practice and reflect upon your practice.
- Side note = if you’re genuinely terrified about talking about suicide, but you do want to get started and learn how then you’re in the right place. You can do a tonne of free online courses to get you started. Just search for ‘free suicide prevention training’.
Hidden details behind an Abstraction.
Imagine the conversation preceding this example above.
Imagine the level of detail involved in a conversation like this.
There’s a lot of information here!
They spoke in depth about the pain they feel at their mother’s disappointment, the intense pressure from the grandparents, how unfair the disapproval of their father. They spoke at length about how impossible this all feels, how they can’t shake this sense of helplessness and can barely get out of bed. They’ve shared about their grades slipping, their avoidance of classes, their withdrawal from friends and even loss of joy from food and things they love.
All these details make up the full picture, but at the heart of every crisis is a specific conflict and seeing and articulating that conflict is the skill of Abstraction.
It means observing the trees and understanding where the forest starts and ends.
It means helping someone turn away from the smoke alarm and attend to the fire.
It means finding the points of shared meaning that resonate with the person you’re listening to because of the quality of your compassion and curiosity.
It means capturing the essence of their crisis like Picasso’s bull – in minimal effective detail.
It means helping their inner ‘blind men’ get a bigger grasp of ‘the elephant’.
Think about this person receiving your Abstraction above.
Think about their experience.
Seriously, think about their experience.
Empathy is an act of imagination, so I challenge you to stretch yours right now and take some time to imagine this person.
Imagine someone who’s been struggling for months, laboring over this decision to break their family’s heart or break their own heart. Their whole identity is tied up in how they’ve fit within their family, in the roles they’ve played since they were born and the roles they always believed they’d play right into old age.
Maybe a part of you says, ‘How am I meant to picture them when I know nothing about their situation? I need more details, what exactly is the big decision they’re struggling to make?!’ in which case I’d ask you to take a long, hard look at what value those details will provide you.
Do you have enough information of this person’s experience to be able to create shared meaning?
Can you empathise with the horror of having to choose between the identity you want to have and the one you’ve had so far?
Can you imagine the dread they’re experiencing based on what info you have already?
Whether they’re thinking of going overseas to play soccer, or whether they’re wanting to become a twitch streamer, or whether they want to be a pirate in Somalia, the details distract you.
Where does wanting to stay on details come from?
What part of your body does it satisfy to hear more details?
Not your heart.
Not your stomach.
Not the parts which actually connect to a human being.
A good Abstraction heals invisibility.
If you haven’t taken a moment to imagine this person, please do it right now, think about their day and push yourself.
Do they hear the birds waking up in the morning because they’ve been up all night, anxiously tossing and turning?
Do they feel their stomach grumbling because they’re so hungry, unable to hold down food, or are they feeling gross because the only things they eat are cheap and nasty?
Have they numbed themselves beyond all capacity spiraling into another week of doomscrolling?
Is their room a mess?
How about their life?
When you offer a good abstraction to someone, where the details are hidden in a way that the essence of their crisis is still clear, you create shared meaning.
Let me illustrate, hopefully you can relate to this.
Have you ever had someone surprise you with knowledge of a tiny detail of yourself?
Maybe they notice the new freckle you have, or how you like your coffee, or they remember that one time years ago that you mentioned something in passing and they stuck it away in a filing cabinet in their mind and surprise you with it.
Perhaps you’ve had someone do an impression of you and you’re immediately taken aback in both horror and hilarity at the accuracy.
Do you know that feeling?
It’s the feeling of being seen and heard.
If you can land a good abstraction, you’re creating a shared meaning between you and your companion, be it your client, colleague, friend or family member.
You’re lighting up their whole brain via mirror neuron pathways and literally doing the exact opposite of neglect and abuse.
Understand the purpose of Abstraction through Narcissus.
The word narcissism gets thrown around a lot these days.
It’s become a very popular slander.
You probably hear it all over the place.
But do you know the story of Narcissus?
The story of a man who fell so in love with his own reflection in a lake that eventually he became a flower, drooping over the ledge to gaze upon his own beauty forever.
Pretty sad story right?
Depends who you ask.
In his life he was a vein young man, taken by his own importance. But the ironic part of the story of Narcissus is that it’s really the story of Narcissus and Echo. Ironic for reasons that’ll be clear shortly…
See, Echo rarely gets mentioned, even though she’s just as important.
Echo was a nymph who used to talk so much she was cursed to only utter the last few words other people spoke around her. She could never express herself again except through the words of others.
The next time you’re yelling into a mountainside, listening to your own voice bounce back, remember it was after her the effect was named and yet nobody even remembers her.
Echo loved Narcissus so when he spurned her, leaving her humiliated and rejected, she cursed him to a horrible fate… To fall in love with him too, as she had.
Echo’s true curse is that she would never, ever feel seen nor heard again.
Way worse fate than Narcissus’ if you ask me.
Doomed only to express herself through the words of others, she’d never have somebody appreciate her internal experience through her external expression. Nobody would ever share her personal meaning again. But second to that… the nature of her curse is to turn people around her into narcissists – unable to truly love others and increasingly self obsessed as they hear more and more their own words reflected back at them.
Echo’s invisibility lives within all of us, as does Narcissus’ self obsession.
If we can strike an Abstraction just right, we break through the curse of both that invisibility and self obsession – allowing people to reconnect, feeling seen and heard by someone else.
Writing Abstractions of your own.
If you’d like to practice making your own Abstractions I have a simple exercise to help.
Similar to previous writing exercises you’ll find around this website please do give yourself permission to get it wrong. Allow yourself to do badly and observe the bad you do. Make sense of it. Reflect upon it. This is the path, this is the way, we all fuck up – get over it so you can grow and help others.
Ask yourself stuff!
What makes a sentence so cringey?
Where could I insert more authenticity into this?
How can I make this feel less best-friendy and more professional?
How can I make this less clinical and more compassionate?
etc.
Instructions for practicing Abstraction.
- On a piece of paper write out a list of 10 of your favourite storylines from films, tv shows and books. Only need one sentence of detail for each one, max.
- For example: Maui hilariously leads a little girl across the world in an epic adventure for glory and because he lowkey is forced to.
- With your list of stories, now write another list, detailing one key conflict from each story.
- For example: Maui has to learn to perceive the hurt he inflicted upon Gaia and take responsibility for (gasp!) how he made a woman feel.
- With your 10 examples, try write out reflections like the Abstraction examples above – how can you succinctly summarise the key to their conflict in as little words as possible? Here’s a couple for Maui at different points in the story.
- It’s like you’re wrestling with yourself, on one hand you’re this powerful demi-god, far above concerning yourself with the goings on of mortals, on the other hand you’re seeing the consequences of your hubris play out and affect those you love…
- It sounds like a flash flood of grief has taken your confidence, before you saw the impact of your actions you knew who you were, your self image was unshakable, now nothing will ever be the same…
For something like this to work you have to really remember the intention behind it.
You’re practicing the skill of hiding the details to allow only the most important things to surface.
If you’ve read this far and you’re starting to have doubts like, ‘oh I don’t know if I have the imagination or time for that’ then let me politely slap you in the face: if you wont give it the time and concentration to overcome your fears and doubts right now, when nobody is there waiting for you and the only thing on the line is your self image, what makes you think you’ll do it when you have someone like Echo or Narcissus, vulnerable, in your hands and thinking of suicide?
Remember, courage is not the absence of fear.
Now, let’s round this sucker out.
In conclusion, practice making analogies.
It’s literally that simple, sometimes it just takes five thousand words to get there.
Practice making analogies that; hide the details, highlight the important parts, help people feel seen and heard, don’t project assumptions and contain proof / evidence to connect to what people have said.
That’s it, that’s the whole conclusion.
Macroskills: A new category for skills in suicide prevention.
I suggest Abstraction is a ‘Macroskill’ so let’s put that in context.
If you’re deep into this universe you would have recognised the microskills above, maybe even saying ‘those ‘Abstractions’ are just paraphrases’.
If you’re new to all this, don’t sweat it just know things are about to get pretty nerdy (as though they haven’t already lmao).
The microskills you’re familiar with come from a solid body of work done by super smart counsellor-psychologist-academics. People who both; worked countless hours on the frontline and also have lots of letters in front of their names to illustrate the size of their brains.
In the future I hope to be one of those people, even though academics makes me want to cut my ear off and take up painting, it looks like a club I would enjoy being part of if I ever get my shit together enough to pay the psychological cost.
If that time comes, I hope to work on stuff which makes suicide prevention less bumpy for people to learn and master. Especially toward the skill of navigating from bird’s eye view.
We currently have the ‘micro’ down-pat, I suggest we need a new set of tools and skills to help build the ‘macro’ (I say new but the reality is someone somewhere has probably already done all of this lol, if you know of them please fill me in!).
Macroskills explained.
Think of the difference between a compass and a map.
A compass is helpful often, a map, helpful less often.
But just because you may look at the compass 10x or 50x more often than a map, doesn’t make the map any less valuable or important during your journey..
Imagine going on an adventure with neither! Ridiculous.
Yet somehow we focus a lot on the ‘what’ in crisis support and suicide prevention, spending many hours talking about, using, thinking about microskills, using our compass constantly, grading it and marking it and observing it, and very little on the ‘why’ or the ‘where’. We barely ask trainees, ‘ok so you’re going North very well, very well indeed. But can you tell me why you’re going North?’
As in; Why use this skill here but not there? Where are we going? Why are we going there? Why are we trying to pass through the present moment on our way? Why don’t we collude or self disclose?
All of these kinds of questions tend to occupy much less space in a new person’s mind than the other questions which are much easier to ‘grade’ or ‘mark as displayed’.
‘Did I display a reflection of feeling, yes or no?’ 👈🏽 Level of reflection we expect.
We need to teach people to ask better reflective questions.
‘Yes, I may have displayed a reflection of feeling, but how well connected did it feel to the receiver?’ 👈🏽 Level of reflection I want to encourage.
Abstraction as a Macroskill.
To boil down the purpose of an abstraction into one thing: it is to simplify the complex.
In crisis support this skill belongs with the misfits, a troublesome motley crew of ideas who don’t belong with the others. They’re a little bit ‘meta’ a bit ‘removed’. They’re more concerned with spaces-between-the-things than the-things-themselves, often needing quite a bit of learning to even grasp a basic understanding of them.
Stuff like ‘reflection of meaning’, ‘reading between the lines’, ‘challenge handling’, ‘signposting’, ‘validating’, ‘normalising’, ‘offering reassurance’, ‘interpreting underlying needs’ and many more. They’re confusing because they’re actually made from the building blocks of microskills.
But in the same way your cells are made up of mitochondria and membranes and other things, we need to start languaging this at a higher level, above the micro to build the language of how these skills connect and function.
Imagine trying to discuss a human body with only the level of language such as cell walls and membranes and chemical electrical transmissions. Imagine if we never put all of that together and said ‘this part here pumps blood and it looks like this part here which cleans the air isn’t connecting to it’. The level of progress our doctors, nurses and practicioners have would be held up miles ago.
None of this is new, I haven’t made these skills up, but I’ve never seen them gathered logically together in one place, with a single language bucket to extoll their virtues or make it easier for us as a community of knowledge stewards to really sharpen and hone.
Is this making sense? Little bit more rambling and I will quit flogging this horse (for today).
I’m talking about a series of skills that fit between microskills and act as the glue for the whole thing, they require a cognitive lane change, to soar up above the conversation while you’re still in it, and ask yourself; ‘where do I want to guide this person to, and how can I do that?’
I’d like to humbly submit for your consideration the suggestion of a new class of skills to help crack open an invisible doorway in our collective minds.
Maybe one day this stuff will have a whole bunch of literature on it, on how to make them effective and how to effectively teach them, until then thanks for joining me in the jungle of wild ideas, it does get kinda lonely here ngl.
For now, please think about, talk about, discuss and ask all the experienced crisis support folk around you about the idea of Macroskills. Spread it round, share this post so we can all come together in our confusion and start a really good chat to help people grow their skills.
Lord knows we need skilled listeners at the moment.
This post is written specifically for crisis support and mental health work, if you’d like to read more, click here.
I would really appreciate every stray thought and piece of feedback you have so please do reach out via socials if you’d like to chat.