After going through a break-up, Heldiney called Samaritans. The conversation with a volunteer inspired him to become a volunteer himself. Now, Heldiney is Branch Director of Waltham Forest.
Being a Samaritan is a deeply rewarding thing for me. Perhaps the most powerful thing is that your influence as a volunteer has the potential to go beyond the call itself; you can help undo a few knots a caller may have had in their heart and you can give them a tiny ‘break in case of emergency’ tool for the future too. Giving the person on the phone the right set of questions they can ask themselves to work through their own challenges and for future moments in their lives is a really brilliant thing. I know from my own experience just how valuable it can be.
Around six years ago in 2016, my girlfriend at the time had broken up with me. I think there was a journey of sort of rediscovering some aspects of myself once the relationship had ended. In that specific instance, I had placed a lot of my self-worth in that relationship and when I lost that person, I started to struggle. I was trying to understand what my life meant without that significant other - the future suddenly looked very different. It made me question the meaning of my life.
Samaritans was a charity that I’d heard of loosely growing up, but at the time I thought it was only a suicide hotline. It felt quite extreme to call them. But I thought let me give it a try because I could get that point and maybe speaking to them will help avoid that.
Being exposed to active listening for the first time, where someone genuinely wants to listen to you without an agenda - either trying to solve your problems, or give advice, was humbling. It really changed me. The volunteer separated themselves from sharing and helped me to arrive at something close to a solution by simply asking questions seemed like a superpower to me – I wanted to learn that superpower if I could! I thought to myself, whatever skill set he's developed to be able to ask questions like this - I want to be able to do it myself… So I signed up to be a Samaritan!
The feeling of wanting to become a volunteer was immediate. I still felt I had some work to do on myself before I could apply to be a volunteer myself, but I made a deliberate effort to work through that so I could get to a point I could support others. The first days of training solidified that becoming a volunteer was right for me at that point in my life.
I’ve been a volunteer for five years now and I’m also branch director.
I find it really rewarding. You feel a great deal of responsibility for a certain set of minutes or hours on a phone call where someone is entrusting you with parts of their lives and their minds that they wouldn’t share with the closest people in their lives. The hope is that, not only when a caller reaches out to a Samaritan, they leave that call feeling relieved, but maybe the next time they’re having a conversation with a relative, they can say, “I’m feeling really frustrated now.” Because, through that conversation, they learned that that’s what the feeling is and they can talk about it with others.
