In working with persons recovering from mental illness, Plymouth Healing Communities gave special meaning to a familiar word: companionship. The use of this word evolved from an attempt to better minister to someone with serious psychiatric illness. That service included a perspective often absent in treating persons with mental illness, recognizing the spiritual dimension of their lives, and validating the lived experience of that spirituality. What does it mean, and just as important, what does it look like to companion someone along their path, open to the power of the spiritual dimension as a force for healing?
The inspiration for this approach came from a street chaplain, Rev. Craig Rennebohm, who spoke of the power of companioning persons with severe mental illness. The scenario of mental health counseling is typically one of face-to-face conversation, the counselor asking probing questions. However, conventional talk therapy with persons with intense symptoms of mental illness notoriously fails and even makes things worse. So, Rev. Craig advised a different path, deceptively simple in method, to minister to a person suffering the storms of a brain disorder. It begins with an assumption that there is a place within, a spiritual dimension, that lies untouched, unimpaired, alive, and well amidst the tempests of the mind. The spiritual dimension of life gains heightened importance significantly when the brain’s faculties of perception are impaired. This area, this spiritual awareness, is largely intact, a touchstone of human connection and connection to a transcendent power. The healing process begins with a simple validation that the spiritual terrain is there, a pulsing source of life, love, and liberation to a soul erstwhile held in the grip of the illness.
Validation of the importance of spiritual life in public mental health work was achieved only after many years of patient struggle. Why was this so difficult to acknowledge? Who does not cry out to God amidst suffering? And what suffering is more acute, more unbearable, than the symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and depression?
The companioning process opens up a healing relationship, walking alongside each other, staking our faith in the shared reality of the spiritual dimension of life. This reality is powered by peace, assurance, goodness, and love. We become open to receiving something that seems to come from beyond ourselves, something we call grace. At any one moment, this reality may be obscured, even opaque, amidst the blinding distortions of active mental illness. But it remains present within us, to be discovered, its power to be realized.
One day I met Chaplain Craig downtown. He was sitting alongside a person on a curb. The person was disheveled, gesturing madly as he talked. Craig made occasional eye contact, but mostly, he just listened, nodding and making a comment. Sitting to one side of the homeless man was the most striking detail of the scene. The chaplain didn’t seem anxious about what to do next. He was just listening. I soon learned that his conversations on the streets frequently led to a walk together to the emergency room of our county hospital, but that wasn’t his primary purpose. However, he got quite a reputation among the ER psych nurses for bringing in homeless people who seemed the most resistant to care.
The act of companioning lends itself to vulnerability, to gentleness. It is walking alongside someone, whether they are alike or different from ourselves, sharing their trouble or bliss, as witnesses to the power of their inner life and allowing them to witness ours.
Some years ago, there was a book that described the wounded healer, the person made vulnerable by their own suffering, to empathy and understanding. As we walk alongside someone, this affirmation of woundedness and wonder reveals the spiritual dimension. We might even have a revelation of the commonality of the human condition, made immediate to us in an encounter with another soul. Our companion may be unlike us in every respect. They are “the other,” the stranger, or so it would seem. We companion each other on the spiritual path and find the tenuous strands of spiritual life that unite us. We become travelers together. No longer a stranger, we walk with a friend. --Paul Carlson, Plymouth Healing Communites Board Member
Plymouth Healing Communities began at Plymouth Church two decades ago, when a dedicated group of Plymouth Church members envisioned and pursued a particular model of breaking the devastating cycle of hospitalization and homelessness for people living with mental illness. PHC provides small-scale housing, companionship, robust community partnerships, and mission-driven property management. Beginning with a single Beacon Hill House, PHC has since acquired additional houses and small apartment buildings in Seattle, as well as a relationship with a Beacon Hill church that provides several additional housing units. PHC remains committed to the belief that healing takes place when people are shown the care, love, and respect that all of us deserve.