Peer Support Consultant Creates Empowering Narratives
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
Lynnae Brown helps organizations develop peer support services. Her comprehensive consulting service, Belong to Yourself @ Work, provides solutions for the changing needs of today’s workplace. Brown shares how creating empowering internal narratives informs her work, her recovery, and her relationship with grief.
Immersed in Support
“Over a decade ago, I worked in mental health peer support as a training coordinator and then as the director of a peer training program.” Brown begins. “That was my entry into peer support. Before that I was a volunteer story coach for The Moth's Community Program for several years. There, I worked with various groups to help them tell their stories and one of my favorite places to work with people was at inpatient centers for substance users.”
“People in those circumstances are very reflective,” Brown continues. “They are thinking about their lives in ways that other people aren’t. Most of the people I worked with were in these programs by mandate, but they were making the most of it considering that doing the program offered them a lighter sentence or a deferred sentence.”
“I am sober, and a throughline I noticed about working with people in recovery is their understanding of how complicated and nuanced life really is. When we realize that we don’t have the tools to live life on life’s terms, we pick up other things that help us cope and white-knuckle it. Life keeps coming at you and there doesn’t seem to be time to slow down and better ways of getting through things. Some people end up on the other side and some don’t make it.”
Important Distinctions
“When I was working in the peer support program, we had people struggling with substance use and mental health, as they tend to go hand in hand. While this is known as a dual diagnosis, I have a problem with these conditions – and depression as well – being diagnoses rather than simply acknowledged as part of the human experience. Being sad is part of being human, plain and simple. People pick up tools, both healthy and unhealthy, to help them get through the experience.”
“If a diagnosis gives you a template to work with and helps you move forward, great. I get very squirrely around diagnoses because we are in a society that is quick to label you and throw you into a category without getting to know who you are as a person. I am concerned with the idea of not allowing someone to be a nuanced person with very specific feelings in certain situations and unique ways of processing the world.”
“On the other hand, I have met people who have gotten a diagnosis, and it freed them. It gave them a direction to go in. If you need medication to get through life, so be it. My focus is on self-determination. Free will is very important.”
Examining Loss
Brown’s journey through serving others and recovery has included encounters with loss and grief. “Gosh, have we lost people,” she says. “One of my favorite students was a guy who had been in and out of prison for over 20 years on gun charges and drug charges. One afternoon I asked him, ‘When did you know you weren’t going back to prison?’ He said, ‘When my worst day outside was better than my best day inside.’ He died of a heart attack a year-and-a-half later, which broke my heart. I lost it because he was doing so well as a peer support worker. We lost a lot of people during Covid as well.”
Brown offers keen insight into examining guilt-imbued grief over the substance-use death of a loved one. “If someone tells me their loved one died of an overdose, and that they should have saved them, and that they should have done more, I would ask them what they think they could have actually done to prevent it from happening. Unless someone is strapped down to a chair and you are responsible for everything they put in their body, there is not a lot you can do – especially when people are involved in heavy substance use.”
“We know that people who are using substances have to get to the point where they decide for themselves that they are ready to quit. It is unhelpful and untruthful to say you could have done something to stop someone else from doing what they want to do of their own free will. That puts you in a godlike situation to assume that you have the authority to stop someone else’s behavior. If you actually had that kind of power, you would have stopped them from using in the first place.”
Examining the Narrative
“When you are grieving, it is important to identify what story you are telling yourself about the situation and to determine if there is another narrative you can align with that empowers you and helps you to move forward.”
“If you are stuck saying, ‘My person died, this isn’t fair, this isn’t supposed to happen,’ even though it is true and it sucks, you’ll just keep going in circles. You might need to go in circles for a minute, but I am suggesting that you ask if there is another story you can tell yourself, which is equally as true, you can get out of that grief loop.”
“If you are grieving for a long period of time, and no longer engaging with other people, what is the payoff? Are you afraid of life? That is valid, but it is important to be honest about it. Peer support has taught me that when we come from a marginalized experience and we have a need to feel powerful, we will do anything to get a leg up. We all do it to some degree, but when I see that behavior I tend to back away because it comes from a place of fear. Working with fearful people can be very difficult.”
Brown is quick to emphasize that she is not interested in saying mean things or making people feel bad about themselves. In fact, she is focused on the opposite. “The context of everything I say is about empowerment and helping people to move forward in a life that can be very, very difficult.”
“It is understandable that people don’t want to move forward. You can change what you are telling yourself if you are committed to making progress. You can see between the lines and know that you don’t have to do things the way society dictates. If going to a funeral is going to mess you up, you can find the courage to say, ‘No, I am not going.’ These are the types of self-care and empowerment I find important.”
Close to Home
“My cat of ten years, Westcott, recently died,” Brown explains, “Which was very hard. It was quite sudden, and I was not expecting it. He was diagnosed on a Tuesday and was dead by Friday. I have really been leaning into my sobriety and my sobriety tools to cope with this loss – today is 555 days sober for me. It has only been a couple of days since he passed, and I have spent them alone because I have been trying to work my own tools around acceptance.”
“Before you can accept anything, you have to identify and address the unmet need. The reason you’re not accepting something is due to resistance which comes from the unmet need. Once you resolve that, acceptance is easier. The unmet need is that I want my cat, which is not in the cards.”
“The next step for me is that I need to stay as emotionally regulated as I can. They told me Westcott had cancer and that he had weeks to live. I was able to sit with it and converse with my higher power, saying, ‘You’re really not going to let me have him, huh?’ During times like that, when I am trying to listen to my higher power and to spirit as I know it to be, I really don’t want input from other people about what they think is happening with me. I find it annoying and disruptive to my efforts to tune into the frequency of my higher power. I need to be quiet, and I need to be active. I have already started downsizing – getting rid of a lot of his stuff – and it has helped me to avoid getting mad and getting stuck.
“I feel like I am supposed to move on and focus on something else. I feel like Westcott’s death signified my entry into another timeline. I understand the power of story and it is really important what we are telling ourselves. I am quick to work on the narrative about anything that happens to me that empowers me to keep moving forward. If the narrative keeps me down, I have to change the story. I am not going to lie to myself, but I am going to continue to work to find a narrative that I can live with, that feels like the truth, and that helps me to keep going.”
An addendum to this piece will delve deeper into how Lynnae Brown’s service, Belong to Yourself @ Work, helps direct service providers create a sustainable work-life balance while avoiding occupational burnout. Please stay tuned to the September issue of the SADOD FEED Newsletter for the rest of the story…