Pushing, Patience, and Persistence: Peer Providers' Perspectives on Supportive Relationships

Little is known about the experiences of peer support providers. This report describes a qualitative study of such experiences drawn from a project offering peer support to persons with mental illnesses who had multiple inpatient admissions within an 18-month period. Interviews focused on peer staff's relationships with participants; identifying and exploring participant interests, strengths, and aspirations; use of self-disclosure; and connecting participants to other services. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using established phenomenological data analytic strategies. Peer staff described a tension between pushing and patience and the need for gentle persistence, the art and value of adopting an accepting and nonjudgmental attitude, and the process of identifying and building on strengths in pursuit of personal goals. The mutual identification between peer supporters and clients represented both an advantage and a potential liability, in that peer staff tied their own feelings of self-worth to the outcomes of their clients' struggles. Rather than viewing the deeply personal nature of peer support as posing risks due to a perceived vulnerability on the part of peer support providers, these findings suggest the need for ways to train peer staff in managing safely the vicarious trauma, frustrations, and inevitable setbacks involved in this work.