How to Support a Vulnerable Person

Our high school years are an incredibly vital and shaping part of the human experience. They are also some of the hardest. It is a time when we are still developing and finding our place in the world, becoming our own individual. Throughout this time, although still so young, many experience normative stress, adversity, grief, and trauma. You, reading this, might also have experienced them. The world may have become more welcoming and open to people struggling, with the expansion of healthcare, but there is still an extensive amount of stigma surrounding mental health and these topics. That is why it is so important that we understand how to support not only ourselves, when we face such experiences, but also the people around us, loved ones, family, and friends. You may not even realise they are struggling.

I met Dr Jenelle Tupek at Miroslav Petrovic’s 3-day ‘Fully Alive’ event (see ‘Key to Success: Enlivened Speaking’ article for more details on him and my experience there). I admired her passion for accessible, trauma-informed health care, her kindness, and her valuable knowledge on healing, combining the fields of science, culture, and philosophy, which she implements in her practice. As I got to know her more, I understood her as not only a compassionate and joyful person but an incredibly talented doctor. Dr Tupek is an Australian registered Osteopath and exercise scientist, recognised for her proficiency in human biomechanics, sports performance, clinical Pilates, mental health, and neuroscience. Her insatiable curiosity, holistic approach, and dedication to social progression allows her to extend beyond the constraints of traditional healthcare, embracing diversity, actively participating in community initiatives, and uplifting her patients allowing them to thrive in health, vitality, and wholeness within our global community. You can check out her social pages at: @structure.andfunction and @balancedmembranes on Instagram, and her work at https://www.osteoworks.com.au and https://www.fightcross.com.

Growing up, Jenelle experienced physical, emotional, and psychological abuse from a very young age, living in an unsafe and unstable household. She was brought up to believe that her thoughts, feelings, body, and voice didn’t matter. As she transitioned into high school, when people mistreated her, she didn’t know how to stand up for herself, never having the opportunity to learn those skills earlier in life. Her parents didn’t put any effort into teaching her that her thoughts, feelings, body, and voice were important, sacred, or valued. Her story highlights why she is so passionate about teaching parents and teenagers to learn the skills of effective and healthy communication.

So just how is effective and healthy communication achieved and how can we practise it?

In order to understand how to support others, we must first understand what normative stress, adversity, grief, and trauma are.

What is normative stress?

Normative stress are things that happen on the day to day. It could be feeling pressed for time, deadlines, bills, arguments, competitions, or exams. They are stressors that we process and then regulate from.

What is adversity?

The Oxford dictionary describes adversity as:

“a difficult or unpleasant situation”

A situation that demonstrates adversity could be a break-up, a close one’s death, or some sort of suffering, hardship, or distressful situation. These events are usually more prolonged than normative stressors and take a bit longer to process or work through since they tend to cause more pain and discomfort.

What is grief?

Grief is an experience or emotion that comes alongside certain types of adversity or trauma. It is less about the situation and more about how we feel internally as a result of experiencing such situations.

When you think of grief, you probably associate it with the death of someone close to you, but grief can also be associated with any kind of loss. It is usually the feeling of sorrow connected to some kind of misfortune, when we feel like we’re missing out or have had to part ways with something. Some people can grieve their childhood that they never had or even an ex-partner.

What is trauma?

Trauma is typically split into two different classifications: little t traumas and big T traumas.

Big T traumas are the really obvious ones that are extremely chaotic and awful experiences that may even have been life-threatening. They can be one-off events, multiple events, or repetitive long-lasting events such as injuries, illnesses, medical or surgical interventions, car accidents, refugee crises, war, torture, domestic or sexual violence, or human trafficking. These are all heavily impacting experiences that are extremely significant in someone’s life.

Little t traumas are less obvious. They could be things that happen behind closed doors like bullying at school, or when a child is neglected from a parent who may be too busy or preoccupied with other issues within the household like marital issues or a disabled child. They are usually small doses of emotional abuse, insults, or mockery that happen over a long period of time. The child is left unprotected with no one to listen to them, no one to give them attention, time, love, or care which can leave a negative impact.

Overt Abuse vs Covert Abuse

The term ‘overt’ means visible and ‘covert’ means hidden. So overt abuse are things that are really obvious like physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. These are acts of co-mission which are things that someone does outwardly to someone else. It could be hitting, insulting, teasing, belittling, or even doing things to deliberately frighten them like breaking things in front of them or yelling at them.

Covert abuse are things that are a bit more hidden like neglect. These are acts of omission. It could be being physically or emotionally absent, ignoring someone, pretending they don’t exist or aren’t important, or excluding them from group activities. These acts can still be very impactful and traumatising.

Overt and covert abuse are interpersonal trauma, when someone is traumatised or negatively impacted by their relationship with another person. This can fall under either big T or little t traumas depending on the severity, as well as being able to coexist. For example, someone can be physically abused and psychologically abused over the same time period.

Further Impacts

In addition to the obvious psychological distress these experiences can cause someone, they can also cause physical symptoms, which as an Osteopath, Dr Tupek sees a lot. This is something called ‘somatisation’. They are persistent physical symptoms that are not attributable to any verifiable or conventionally defined disease. The physical expression of psychological distress. This distress can cause symptoms like chronic headaches, fatigue, dizziness, irritable bowel syndrome, sleep disturbances, tinnitus, blurred vision, jaw and breathing dysfunction, and muscle aches or pains to manifest. This is why it is so important that teenagers and parents know how to recognise these signs as a reflection of the individual’s state of being.

So now that we learned a bit about what each of these topics are and their impacts on a person, we need to know how to act when someone around us may be suffering.

How to Support Someone Dealing with Psychological Distress

1. Have compassion, empathy, and an open mind.

Jumping to conclusions or answering for someone can make them feel misunderstood and unsafe, causing them to retreat and not share what’s really going on. It’s important to create a sense of emotional safety where they can comfortably share what they are ready to. As a parent or friend, you might think that you know them well and have the right to know what has happened, but at the end of the day it is their trauma, and it may have impacted them a lot. They will speak when they are ready to. Always be guided by their wants and needs. Use open-ended questions that begin with ‘what, when, where, why, or how’ so that the person can elaborate as much or as little as they like.

2. Avoid re-traumatising or frustrating them.

It’s important to understand that giving unsolicited advice often isn’t helpful. When someone opens up to you about something unfortunate that has happened to them, they often aren’t looking for advice, they just need someone to listen. Insisting that you know what to do takes away their power and may cause them to feel misunderstood, as often you don’t actually know the depth and complexity of what they have suffered. Choice and control are often lost during traumatic events which is why it is so important that you don’t continue to take that away when speaking to a vulnerable person.

3. Sometimes external help is necessary.

Again, if you are the parent or a friend of someone suffering, it may seem like you should know everything and be able to support them through these tough times. For some people, family and friends are just what they need, but for others, the people closest to them are exactly the ones they don’t want to know about it. It’s important that you respect their boundaries and don’t force any information out of them. Look for guidance via online mental health services or hotlines and work with them to see if they’d like to talk a professional.

Those who suffer from such extreme and unfortunate circumstances, often don’t know how to self-regulate or work through such difficult emotions and thoughts, and feel too ashamed, or embarrassed to talk about them, especially teenagers.

The same goes for the parents who don’t know how to communicate with their child and often end up saying the wrong thing or ignore the issue and hope that it will resolve itself. It was the same for Dr Jenelle and for me.

Learning how to speak with assertive and respectful language and being present are extremely useful and necessary skills for everyday life. This is the type of communication that people appreciate, respect, listen, and respond to. People do not respect passive aggressive, manipulative, or controlling language. It only creates separation, distrust, and disconnection.

At the end of the day, feelings are a normal and vital part of living that we need to learn how to accept, acknowledge, communicate, and transform, in order to evolve, live freely, and flourish as human beings.

If you’re interested in more on healthy communication, check out one of Jenelle’s favourite books, ‘Say What You Mean’ by Oren Jay.

To finish, I’d like to acknowledge Jenelle’s extensive help in writing this article. She is extremely well-spoken, educated, and practises what she preaches. She has provided me with an exceptional number of notes and information on all that was mentioned in this article, not to mention, the topic was also her idea! I highly recommend checking out her social pages at: @structure.andfunction and @balancedmembranes on Instagram, and her work at https://www.osteoworks.com.au and https://www.fightcross.com.

Please share this article with loved ones to spread the word on such an important topic.