"I Remained."

The Stories That Built Us

There’s a misconception that you need to fully understand the circumstances of someone else’s life to be able to support someone well. I don’t think that’s true at all.

The young people I’ve supported weren’t looking for someone who had lived exactly what they had lived through. They were looking for someone who would simply spend time with them someone who could be with them as they were, rather than focusing on the circumstances that brought them there.

By the time a young person reaches Family Friends, chances are a few people and systems have already let them down along the way not intentionally, but it happens. What you do as a befriender is cut through all of that.

With Harry, it was our weekly walk.

To anyone watching from the outside it probably looked like nothing special just two people walking a mile, getting a coffee, sometimes a cake. But for Harry it meant a lot. That small rhythm, week after week, created something steady. His social anxiety eased during those walks. He had someone to talk to. Someone to sit with. A friend.

Young people rarely open up in the same way adults do, face to face across a table. It tends to happen side by side. I know that from my own children as well. Walking together gave us that space.

Over time that simple routine built trust.

So when I later heard that Harry had made a suicide attempt, it was obviously deeply worrying but something in me felt that perhaps it hadn’t been quite as final as it sounded. I may have been naïve, but my instinct was that what mattered most was that he knew I was still there.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Family Friends handled it very well. They assessed the risk properly and worked closely with his mum. During that time we adjusted things for about six weeks our visits were at home rather than outside. We sat, watched TV, chatted. Harry still wanted to see me, and that felt important.

Eventually we went back to our routine, our walks, coffee, cake.

In many ways I felt quite privileged. I began to realise what an important role I was playing in this young person’s life. I even went on a suicide awareness course and learnt things I never expected to learn.

But the biggest lesson was much simpler than that.

I remained.

That’s the key: consistency. Letting a young person know that, like clockwork, you will be where you said you would be, at the time you said you would be there. It might sound small, but when a young person’s life has been shaken by challenges, those things matter enormously.

For a while I sometimes wondered how much difference a couple of hours every week or fortnight could really make.

Then I realised something: just as they were in my mind, I was in theirs.

You begin to matter to each other.

My next match, Marcus, showed that in a different way. His mum would sometimes say that he didn’t want me to know if he had stepped out of line at school. Not because he thought I’d tell him off but because he wanted me to think well of him. There was a sense of pride in that.

Harry and Marcus were very different young people, but there was something similar too: the time together was theirs. Someone focusing just on them and what they needed.

And I also noticed something else.

Those five minutes at the beginning with their mums mattered too. Often they just needed to let off a bit of steam. To feel heard. Because by the time their child reached a service like Family Friends, they may already have been through many systems where they felt treated as a problem to be solved rather than people to be listened to.

So what makes someone good at this?

For me it’s quite simple.

I like young people, and I’m reasonably good at understanding them. There’s far more that connects us than separates us. Once you cut through all the reasons you might think you have nothing in common, you realise we are all just human beings.

You don’t have to share someone’s background, struggles, or life story to care about them.

And if you think you might be good at something like this you should have a go.

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