## Informal * family * friends * peers/colleagues * community ### "Support System" > The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist—who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree—referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives.[^2] David Foster Wallace, ["The Depressed Person"](https://harpers.org/archive/1998/01/the-depressed-person/) ## Formalized See ["Comparisons of Helping Professions"](https://www.msdc.org/docs/default-source/msdc/comparison-of-helping-professions_.pdf).[^1] ### Committed listeners > A committed listener is a person who will help you fulfill your declaration. They won’t do the work for you; rather they will support you, remind you of what you care about and help hold you accountable to your commitments. A committed listener is invaluable – we often will practice for others or take risks for others when we might not do it just for ourselves. An external accountability structure can make all of the difference. > > Your committed listener is a person who cares about you and your declaration. They should also have the capacity to both support you and call you to account, when needed. We suggest you share your commitment sheet with your committed listener. Let them in on what you care about and what you intend to change or make happen. Then connect with them weekly. Even if it is a 15-minute call, weekly contact keeps your declaration in front of you and in action. Generative Somatics, "Declarations into Action" (via personal correspondence) ### Co-counseling > Every Tuesday morning at nine, the phone rings. It’s Teri, and she’s there to me for half an hour. It doesn’t matter what I talk about and whether I cry or complain or work through something that's bugging me or, as is often the case lately, think out loud through some chapter of this book. It doesn't matter if it’s interesting to her or not, because it’s not about her, It's about me. At the end of thirty minutes, I thank her, she says, “You're welcome?’ and then I listen to her for thirty minutes. Now it's about her—whatever is on her mind, whatever she needs to cry about, rant about, or ponder. > > This is a co-counseling session, and it can be short or long: two minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour or two. It includes talking, crying, laughing, or storming about something, A skilled listener can support you into extraordinary depth. Besides getting a certain burden off your shoulders, you come out of it with a new perspective and reevaluate your situation, hence its other name, Re-evaluation Counseling. I learned it forty years ago, and it built a foundation of emotional fluency I am thankful to have. [[Martin, "The Art of Receiving and Giving"]] [^1]: I have in mind a similar, more-detailed document I'm now not able to locate. [^2]: In the story, the obsessiveness—indeed the near-*formalization*—of this lopsided arrangement is rather the rub.