In this deeply personal and vital episode of The Power to Be Happy podcast, Joe sits down with Daniel Rylatt, a clinical psychologist and mental health professional, to tackle one of the most challenging yet necessary topics: understanding suicide and how we can support ourselves and others.
Joe and Daniel reflect on their journey of friendship, which began with a walk in nature and led to profound conversations about mental health, connection, and the ripple effects of suicide. Together, they explore the importance of creating safe spaces for these conversations, the power of authentic connection, and practical ways to approach someone who may be struggling.
Daniel shares insights from his years of experience, including the staggering statistics around suicide, the role of connection in fostering hope, and how to navigate sensitive conversations with compassion and care. They also discuss the importance of self-care, resilience, and finding ways to reconnect with the things that bring us joy and grounding—even in the midst of life’s toughest moments.
This episode is a heartfelt invitation to lean into the hard conversations, to show up for ourselves and others, and to remember that even in the darkest times, there is hope.
Episode Title: Hope in Action: Understanding Suicide and Supporting Each Other with Daniel Rylatt Joe: Daniel, welcome to The Power to Be Happy podcast. I’m stoked that we’re here having a conversation again—this time about quite a different topic, about a vital topic, about a necessary topic. I honour you for being here, for being in this space, for making the time for this. But I want to welcome you to the show. How you going, Daniel?
Daniel: Hey, Joe. Yes. Good day. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me along and, yeah, having one of our conversations.
Joe: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it, Daniel. And today, we’re talking about, you know, a difficult topic. I want to probably start with, you know, how this conversation has come about.
Joe: We’ve been doing some workshops in the community, in the city council, and it all really came about from the time when we were out in the bush, out on a walk, out in nature. We were becoming friends, and I learned a lot about you. I also learned that you’re a mental health professional in the space of suicide prevention. And it was fascinating to me. I remember just asking you, like, “Daniel, why do people do it?”
And in that moment, Daniel, when you started to really break it down for me, I remember we actually stopped. Right? We stopped on the path—it was like a sandy path—and you actually started drawing out this diagram on the ground. You said, “There are three factors that have to come together.”
And I remember feeling this mix of emotions. A part of me was excited to learn about it, but another part of me was flinching. I almost wanted to run away. I felt lightheaded, overwhelmed. I thought, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe we’re talking about this. Stop, stop, stop.”
But that’s when I realized: this is a vital topic. This is a difficult topic, particularly for anyone with a history of mental ill health or who’s been through difficult things in their life. So I think it’s so vital to talk about it in a way that’s safe—or safe enough, I should say—using the right language, but also empowering.
And so, yeah, I want to thank you for doing the work that you do in this space for so many years and supporting people. Thank you for what you’re doing. And, yeah, tell us—what do we need to know before we get into the conversation of understanding suicide and how we can support ourselves and the people around us?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, we need to know that suicide is very confronting. It’s a very emotive topic, as you’ve referred to, but we also know it affects pretty much all of us in one way or another.
When we had that talk, I remember the walk and the talk that we had—and getting down and drawing the diagram in the gravel, in the sand. One of the things we talked about then was, you know, I said there is research out there that indicates that for every person who dies by suicide, up to 134 people are affected. That’s the ripple effect.
At first, I thought, “Well, that’s a really large number—how does that make sense?” But if we think about it, people are connected to communities in general one way or another—whether it’s through school, work, family, social groups, sporting groups—and the impact of suicide goes well beyond those first degrees of contact.
And that’s when we’re talking statistics. We start to talk about numbers and percentages and things, but that’s the statistics that are recorded for suicide. That doesn’t capture all of the times that people have attempted suicide or the other people who are having intense emotional crises and might be self-harming or thinking of self-harming. So that’s really, in one sense, to use a bit of a cliché, the tip of the iceberg.
We know that in Australia, over 3,200 people die by suicide every year. That equates to about nine people a day in Australia dying by suicide. And we know that there are other parts of our population that are disproportionately affected.
Daniel: Those parts of the population, generally, we can talk about them in concrete terms—people who are parts of communities that are stigmatized or marginalized or find it much more difficult to access services. That includes people in the LGBTQI+ community and also our First Nations communities.
We know that people in those communities are subject to more stresses in daily life and worse health outcomes overall—both physically and in mental health. Unfortunately, self-harm and suicide, deliberate self-harm and suicide, are also a part of that picture.
But if we build on that—what’s behind those statistics? One way of summarizing that, Joe, is talking about connection—or, in this case, lack of connection.
Daniel: You and I were chatting about this a little bit earlier, and we were actually speaking with some people at the local city council earlier on. It can be easy—I certainly found coming into this space—it can be easy to feel quite overwhelmed and get pushed into a space of hopelessness.
But actually, in defining the problem, we can also start to indicate ways to find a solution—or even if we don’t say “solution,” ways of responding and improving things.
So if we talk about lack of connection, that points to a way out for a lot of people. What can we do if we’re wanting to be supporters or helpers? It’s fostering connection.
We do know that for people who decide they want to end their life, they feel they have no other choice—that they have no way out but to kill themselves. Often, that’s because they have overwhelming or unrelenting emotional suffering.
That suffering can come from a whole range of different causes and sources. It’s usually not simply one thing, but a collection of things—or a building up and layering of stressors and problems that, over time, build up.
Daniel: It can happen quite quickly, of course, but it can also build up over time in terms of what we talk about as psychosocial losses. These are everyday stressors, but when they’re cumulative, they can overwhelm someone’s ability to cope or connect.
That’s things like financial stresses, housing, employment, vocational, relational—a whole series of things. And then these intersect with the person’s situation and their context—whether they are part of a community that is more marginalized, if they’re experiencing mental health stressors, and a whole range of factors.
That’s why, in talking about suicide, the field talks far more about understanding and responding now.
When I started working in this area, probably about ten years ago, we used to talk about predicting and preventing. And we kind of know those approaches don’t get the best results. So now, it’s about trying to understand the individual in their context.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. And I love that you bring that context in because I think it’s so important.
It really brought it home for me when you said that this many people die by suicide. You know, that it’s more, I think, than people who die in car crashes, right?
Joe: So that really puts things in context—how big of a challenge it is for our society, for our culture, to bring suicide into finding more helpful ways to deal with it.
Joe: But, yeah, I want to transition into talking about, you know, when we’re dealing with our own stress, with our own challenges, but also that of people in our life. Whether it’s someone—it might be a friend, it might be a loved one, it might be your partner, it might be someone you work with, or just someone in the community. How do we approach, you know, how do we kind of try to understand where they might be at? If we see that someone is not acting in the way that they usually do, how do we try to gauge where they’re at? And then, kind of, is it even safe to bring up the topic of suicide?
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really good question there, Joe. And perhaps I’ll begin with the last part there. In terms of the understanding in the mental health field, we know that it is safe to bring up the topic of suicide. It’s not that we talk about it gratuitously, of course, but indeed—and I had this fear when I was going through my training—I had a fear that if I asked someone if they were at risk of suicide or if they were feeling suicidal, that I would somehow prompt them or put that idea in their head.
And we know that’s not the case. We know that if someone is struggling or in crisis, quite often they actually feel burdened. They might feel ashamed, they might feel hopeless or helpless, they might feel that no one understands them or that no one else has ever felt how they feel.
So by actually addressing the topic or bringing the topic up directly, usually that has a much more beneficial effect. It lets the person know that we’re interested and sincere, and it can help to immediately start to mitigate that sense of isolation or shame. The fact that someone is interested enough and cares enough and is willing to take the time and stop and ask—of course, thoughtfully, sensitively.
Daniel: So, yeah, you talked about noticing someone’s change, and that’s actually the key stepping-in point. Some of the signs when someone is struggling are those external changes—whether it be in their behaviors, their routine, how they look, even their body language.
Are they much more down, unhappy, reserved, or withdrawn? Of course, there can be lots of reasons for those things going on, and people can have a whole bunch of problems they’re grappling with and struggling with. It doesn’t mean they’re suicidal. But in terms of the topic that we’re working around today, it is about being alert to and sensitive to signs of distress.
Because as biological organisms, we’re kind of programmed—we’re hardwired—for survival. So for someone to attempt to end their life or for someone to kill themselves, generally speaking, they’ve got to overcome a whole lot of innate instinct to preserve their life.
And so, people can find themselves thinking along those lines when they have what they feel is overwhelming, unbearable, and oftentimes inescapable suffering. It could be physical pain along with emotional pain.
And so, when we notice changes in people’s behavior, their appearance, or the things they’re saying, then we can start to be—the radar’s out there, the radar’s scanning—and we start to want to respond. But response, of course, needs to be sensitive, compassionate, and really, there’s no particular guidebook in terms of required steps. But there are some fundamental principles.
And so, that’s coming from a sense of being authentic, ideally being able to take some time. So, it’s often—you know, there may not be a better time, so it might have to be a rushed conversation. But where possible, being sensitive again to the time, the place, the setting, and also respectful of the other person.
And really doing whatever we can to communicate that openness, that accepting attitude, and very much what we call a non-judgmental attitude. Because that person’s suffering or their distress—that’s unique and individual to them. And we can’t really ever know what that is like or how much they’re struggling.
So being alert to signs of distress, being willing to actually make a move forward and reach out—or, as is commonly talked about nowadays, you know, reaching out—but connecting or opening and inviting someone into a conversation.
Joe: That makes so much sense. Like, what are—I know some of—we’ll talk about, like, how do you start that conversation? Maybe we’ll kind of even, I don’t know, role-play something like that. But I want to actually ask, what are some of the things we don’t want to say? Right? Because we want to be able to have that, as you say, compassionate—
Joe: —authentic conversation. What are some of the things we don’t want to say in that type of a conversation?
Daniel: Yeah. No, and I’m glad you asked that, Joe. And I do often think about it in terms of—especially, you know, in terms of—I’m someone who enjoys humour, and I know you have a great sense of humour, and we’re always joking with each other.
And from when I’ve got my mental health clinician hat on, I’m thinking, well, where does the humour stop or the blokey humour stop, and, you know, where does some real concern start?
So, some everyday phrases that we use—and of course, we’re not wanting to inhibit people’s speech—but if you are concerned about someone, we want to be talking in a way that helps them to feel safe enough, respected, and that this is an accepting and authentic kind of space.
So, if we especially start with things like, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing,” or, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?”—these are all things we might say to ourselves or amongst our family in a day-to-day conversation.
I’m not talking about that. But if we are opening a sensitive conversation, we’ve seen some signs of distress, and we’re really wanting to inquire authentically and build some trust, build some mutual rapport and respect, avoiding saying things like, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?” or, “Oh, surely it can’t be as bad as all that.”
Those are phrases that are going to close down the conversation. They’re not going to invite someone to feel secure enough. If they’re already feeling vulnerable, if they’re already judging themselves and criticizing themselves, they may feel that they have a terrible burden and couldn’t possibly open up to anybody.
So we need to start the conversation if we can. We all make slips and trips. I’m sure if I watch back the podcast, I’ll hear myself saying things, and I’ll think, “Oh, why did you say that?” So, it’s not about being the word police on each individual word, but getting a handle on those concepts, very much so.
Joe: Yeah. I love that, Daniel. So true. And, like, we’ve got to know what not to say. But, I mean, how would we gauge that? How would we bring up with the person that something is different? Like, as you were saying, like, something changed. Right? How do we have that conversation, especially if the person might be in distress, might be dealing with things from the past, or might be dealing with challenges now? How do we bring it up in a way that’s respectful, but also, like, you know, bringing up those concerns in a way that we don’t just stop the conversation right away?
Daniel: Yeah. Of course. And, you know, you and I have spoken about this in the past where I could say, you know, it’s about noticing things. Joe is normally really bubbly, he’s normally very talkative, and, you know, of course, if I see you one day and you’re a bit down and flat, okay, that might be fine. But if I’m seeing you consistently over a period, I might be saying, “Oh, Joe, I’m just wondering, you know, I’m wondering how things are going. You seem a bit down.”
And of course, we know you might just sort of shake that off and brush it off or say, “No, I’m fine.” Now, depending on what else I know about the situation and about you, and what other signs or indicators are going on, I might kind of leave it at that because I do need to respect you and trust you. You know, in order to build trust and rapport, I’ve got to be able to accept what you say as well.
However, I can also speak truly to my own experience. So it’s not about me talking at you about yourself, but I can authentically say, “Oh, you know what? Look, I’m glad to hear you’re okay, but I’ve got to say, from the way I see things, you’ve really changed a lot recently, and it makes me worry about you. So, you know, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I really do want to check—are you really okay? Is there something more going on? Is there something worrying you or troubling you?”
Daniel: So, you see, I started that by actually talking about my perspective. Because I’ve asked you, and you said, “No, I’m fine,” you know, you sort of brush it off—“I’m gonna talk about it, drop it, leave me alone, whatever, don’t bother me.” And if I feel that there is a need or it’s important, well, I can revisit that, but I’m doing so now from my perspective—what I’m seeing and hearing and how it’s making me feel in relation to you.
Joe: So cool. Because that’s nonjudgmental. Right? That’s just bringing your own experience into it. And that way, I’m not feeling—you know—or the person you’re talking to is not feeling judged immediately. Right? Like, “You are like this,” or, “You are like that.” It’s kind of talking about your own perspective.
Joe: So let’s just say the person brings out the fact that, yeah, there are things going on. They’re stressed. They may have experienced or maybe are experiencing some difficulties now. Like, how do we talk around that?
Daniel: Yeah. Well, one of the first things is to validate that and acknowledge it, first of all. Because I’ve asked you, and now you’ve opened up. You said, “Yeah, it’s not great. This and this part,” or whatever. And now you’ve opened up a bit, I need to honour that and respect that and say, “Okay, you know, I’m really sorry to hear that, but I’m glad you felt you could tell me. Thanks for opening up or thanks for letting me know.”
So, first of all, acknowledging what’s been said.
Daniel: Importantly, you said what not to say. At times, we’re gonna move to a solution, like, “Let’s find a way out of this,” or, “What are we gonna do next?” or, “Let’s put some plans in place.” But if someone’s really suffering and struggling, we don’t want to just come in and shut it down. It can be a closing down again just to offer a solution, you know? That’s pretty similar to dismissing it or minimizing it—just saying, “Oh, we’ll just do this.”
Because if I go to that problem-solving and that fixing—and look, that’s always my first edge. You know, I’ve got a lot of training and a lot of experience in the mental health field, and I still have to have a little kind of voice in the back of my head saying, “Don’t go to problem-solving straight away, Daniel.”
Joe: It’s me. It’s me as well.
Daniel: It’s a normal reaction, so it’s not wrong. But if we are having these sensitive conversations, we’ve actually got to be, as much as we can, prepared to tolerate that distress.
Because, you know, when there’s distress or fear or whatever it is, there are a couple of main reactions people know—fight, flight, freeze—and there’s a few others we can build onto that. But if someone talks about a problem, one instinctive reaction is to kind of avoid it and run away, and that might be why I don’t even ask you. Or another is to make it go away by fixing it.
But if I try and do that, I’m not actually listening to you and understanding what’s going on for you. So asking about how the person’s feeling, kind of attempting to empathize with that—or at least, even if I can’t understand it, again, you can pretty rarely go wrong by being authentic and talking about your own experience.
So I might even say—you might tell me the dilemma or the problem—I say, “Wow, you know, I guess from my experience, that’s something I’ve never really encountered, but I can see or I can hear or I can sense or I can feel that it’s really troubling you.”
So I need to be able to validate that and acknowledge it. You might even say, “Look, thank you so much for trusting me with this, Joe.” Because if you think about it, I might be—now that I’ve asked that question—I might be the first person in your entire life you’ve talked to about this topic or about how you’re feeling right now.
Daniel: So acknowledge it. Allow it to be there without running away and without trying to close it down and fix it. It doesn’t mean, of course, approving of it, but acknowledging that it’s there and that it’s real for the person, and thanking them essentially for opening up their zone of trust to you.
Daniel: That’s so powerful.
Joe: And, you know, it’s that—yeah. It’s that being authentic. It’s just really listening in. It’s just having that back and forth to try to really understand what’s going on for that person.
And let’s just say that, you know, you notice in that conversation that the person is going through a tough time. Maybe they brought it up in some way, and you sense that they’re not in a good space. They’re struggling.
But how do we then—let’s just say we talked about—how do we move from “They’re struggling” to “I’m worried that you might be thinking of suicide?”
Daniel: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. There’s a couple of broad ways. I’ll try not to make it overly complicated, but one we might call the normalizing or external viewpoint, and the other is the person-specific or internal viewpoint.
So, you might tell me certain things have happened in your life, or this is what’s going on for you at the moment, or things have happened in the past and now it’s come back and affected you. So I’ve acknowledged the reality of that, I’ve expressed some empathy and sympathy or some support, and I’ve thanked you for trusting me.
And then, if nothing explicit has come out but I’m worried about it, I can say, “You know, Joe, often when people are experiencing those kinds of things, sometimes they can get into a crisis situation and they can even start thinking about suicide. I’m just wondering, have you been thinking about suicide?”
Daniel: So that’s that external or normalizing perspective. There’s a mental health professional—he’s actually a psychiatrist in the US—called Sean Shea. He has a clinical institute that he’s founded there, and he’s published several books and techniques on how to ask questions about sensitive subjects. It can be about mental health, it can be about physical health, and of course, mental health and suicide are very sensitive and sometimes even taboo subjects.
So, he coined this and labeled it the normalizing approach, saying, “Lots of other people who have been in similar situations have felt this. Just wondering if that’s how it’s affecting you.”
The other way is what Sean Shea calls shame attenuation, but it’s like what I call the internal or personalizing approach. And I might use that particularly if I know you a little better. When we’ve got a closer relationship, I might say, “You know what, Joe, just hearing about all of that makes me think. I’m wondering about you, and I’m wondering if, given everything that’s happened to you and how you told me you’re feeling, you’ve been having those thoughts. I’ve seen how withdrawn you are. I’m worried, and I’m wondering—have you been thinking about suicide?”
Daniel: I shouldn’t, by the way—if we go back and watch it—I probably wouldn’t have said “worried” because I don’t want you to then worry about me worrying about you, if I can put it that way.
Daniel: But then again, I think that’s also true because, you know, you’re not ever gonna be in a place where you can perfect it.
Daniel: You haven’t got the script there perfectly.
Joe: Yeah. You’re not gonna say, My dear friend… Oh, hang on. So yeah, let me rewind
No, that’s totally right. But I wanna also focus on the fact that we are being very specific, right? We’re not—again, you know, we talked about things we want to avoid using phrases like, “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid or silly, are you?” We’ve been very direct, right? So we’re saying things like “suicide” or “killing yourself.”
Daniel: Yep. And just before I respond to that, I’ve talked about the two approaches—internal, external, general, personal. Neither one of those is right or more right than the other. It depends on the situation, the feel. If you don’t know what to do, just mentally flip a coin and choose one. It doesn’t really particularly matter in most circumstances.
Joe: And you could probably even switch between them in the context of one conversation.
Daniel: But then, to come to the question you asked now—yes, if we’re actually concerned about a suicide risk, and we’re gonna have this conversation meaningfully, we need to actually know what we’re talking about.
Daniel: Because there are many times—as you said, I work as a mental health professional—and sometimes I’m interviewing someone and I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is where the conversation’s going.” It might be the source of it, it might be anywhere else, and it’s not until I ask those clarifiers that I realize, “Oh, okay, I was on the wrong track. We’re not heading down this pathway, it’s about something else.”
Or, you know, you might be telling me about your problems, and the example we’ve used today is, say, someone’s lost their job. That’s why I have to understand—what is the meaning and the impact on that person?
Because to me, for instance, losing my job—that would be, “Oh my goodness, this is terrible, this is a disaster. How am I gonna pay my rent?” and all of this kind of thing.
So if I think about it from my point of view, I’m gonna impose that view on you. That’s why I need to put my own perspective aside and be genuinely there to find out your perspective.
Because for every time that someone loses their job and I say, “Oh my goodness, that’s terrible, you poor thing, how are you gonna cope?” they might go, “Yeah, it’s great. I really wanted to get out of there, and I’ve got this fantastic opportunity.”
Daniel: So, we’re wanting to have a laugh a bit, but I’m not joking about that. It’s about the person—what the person’s perception and interpretation of those events are.
Because you might be really down on it because, yeah, to play with the job theme, you might have decided you’re taking your career in another direction, and you’re feeling really bad because you don’t want to tell your boss. You’ve got a really good boss, a really good company, a really good manager, whatever it is, and you feel like you might let them down.
So in that little scenario I’ve just painted, you’re actually feeling really down because you’ve got an exciting project, but you’re worried about how it’s gonna impact on you.
So until I find out the extent of that feeling, I might be trying to problem-solve something that’s not there.
Joe: Yeah. Totally. I love that because that goes back to being authentic and listening. And so let’s just touch on that for a moment because I think this is so vital. Especially for people like me who love to jump in and problem-solve or are sometimes tempted to assume things, right? Like, “Oh, this is how I am. This must be how everyone else is.”
How do we become more empathetic and really try to listen by taking the other person’s perspective in a way that’s rooted in compassion?
Daniel: Well, it’s those—and you pretty much answered the question in the way you asked it—it’s about being very present, what we call active listening.
In fact, I’ve worked in mental health for 20 years now, and it’s only about two or three years ago that I actually discovered a deeper meaning of empathy. I thought I knew what sympathy and empathy were, and it wasn’t until I was running courses and workshops in these areas that I realized I had it wrong.
I used to think that empathy was me putting myself in your position—mentally imagining what it’s like for me, Daniel, sitting there in Joe’s chair running the podcast.
Daniel: That’s wrong. What empathy actually—like radical empathy—is, is me doing what I can to imagine what it’s like for you in your chair. Not what it would be like for me in your chair, but what is it actually like for you?
Daniel: And we can never truly know, but we can try.
Daniel: But in one of our other conversations about this topic—I know on the weekend—I mentioned it’s something you can Google on YouTube. Look up on YouTube, there’s an interview, and the guys in Northwest Mental Health actually put me onto this little clip. It’s about two minutes long, and it’s a news report about an interview with this fellow, Darnell, the bus driver.
I won’t talk you through it now in detail, but if people are interested, they can look it up. Darnell’s actually a bus driver in the US, driving across a bridge with a busload of commuters during the morning peak. And there’s someone on the bridge, and they’re actually on the other side of the railing on the pedestrian bridge. There’s a car bridge, a pedestrian walkway, and a railing.
So Darnell, he stops the bus in the middle of traffic. Yeah. He calls back to base to ask them to call the ambulance. And he gets out, and he actually goes up to the person. He doesn’t rush at them. He’s a really big guy, and the person on the other side of the railing is quite small—a small woman.
And Darnell’s a bus driver on a busy bus route in the morning. He’s put himself in that position, that person’s position. You know, it seems kind of really obvious, but he noticed it, and he stopped. Cars are going past, people are cycling past—you can see it in the footage from the dash cam in the bus.
And Darnell decides—he realizes there’s someone in distress. You know, who’s gonna respond? So he gets out, he stops the bus, gets out, and he says—he just says to the lady, “Ma’am, would you like to come back onto this side of the railing?”
Daniel: So he’s responding to what’s there. He doesn’t need to ask her what problems she’s got. He doesn’t need to ask her how she’s feeling about them, you know, in that sense.
We don’t want to overcomplicate it. That’s why I love this example. Sometimes, when we’re running a workshop for professionals, I show that at the end of the day. I say, “Okay, we’ve just spent eight hours learning all of the theory and the techniques and practicing them, and here’s a bus driver that can do the whole thing in two minutes.”
Daniel: Because he just says, “Ma’am, would you like to come back on this side of the railing?”
Daniel: And as I mentioned to you, Joe, he’s a big guy. The lady in particular is quite small. He actually sits down on the ground so that they’re on the same level.
Daniel: So this guy’s brilliant. He plays American football, he drives a bus, and he does a perfect suicide awareness and response.
Joe: Yeah. In two minutes.
Joe: Love it, Daniel. I think that’s such a perfect example of how you kind of cut straight to the chase. Right? You don’t—you know, and obviously, every situation is different. Every situation is different.
But still, sometimes you can just be there. And I think that’s what we’re talking about—what you’re really talking about—that right level of empathy. You’ve been there with a person in the moment.
You don’t bring your own opinion, perspective, or judgment. You’re there. You’re helpful. You’re ready to listen. You’re ready to support.
Joe: Now, let’s just say the person you’re talking to is—yeah. Maybe you ask them in a way that is direct and will not be misunderstood, right? “Are you considering suicide?” or, “Have you had thoughts about killing yourself?” Now, let’s just say the person said, “Yeah.” You know what? That’s something that’s come up—or whatever way they say it. Like, what do we say or do then?
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m thinking back to the start of this conversation this afternoon. There are going to be clues in that already as to how we can respond.
Because there’s some understanding of what’s going on for them, but also, as we’ve just spoken about—bringing in, you know, referencing the general response that Darnell epitomized—is that people often have their own resources, their own ways of coping. In times of crisis or stress, they can actually lose touch with those or forget about them.
So it’s not all about an expert mental health clinician intervention—that there’s someone else who can magically sail in and keep someone safe. There’s a whole range of things. I often talk about it in terms of a pyramid or that sort of triangle, with the base being the person’s own resources.
Now, for that example with Darnell and the woman on the bridge—her own internal coping resources—they’re overwhelmed at that point. But for the rest of us, in our own conversations, in our own lives, for ourselves or our loved ones or people we work with or people we know, it’s important not to forget those things.
So that’s things like our walk—that’s how we got started on this conversation, Joe.
Daniel: Because you ring me up or message me, “Daniel, when are we going for a walk?”
Joe: Yep. Yep. Because that time just doesn’t arrive by itself, does it?
Daniel: No. We have to make a conscious decision to make that happen. I have to put it in my diary. I have to make sure I protect that time. And sometimes I ring up and go, “Joe, sorry, I can’t make it. We’ll do it next week or the week after.”
But there are internal coping mechanisms. It’s things like going out in the garden, reading a book, calling a friend, going for a walk to the beach, patting a dog—all of those things.
So I mention that because it’s important not to lose sight of those.
Daniel: And to know that there’s a whole way of responding and supporting.
So, some of those things—those internal, self-directed things that we already have or know—I was speaking to someone once, and they were actually quite an accomplished musician. They played a number of instruments, and they were in a really quite terrible situation.
And I said to them, “You know, the weekend’s coming. Are you going to play one of your instruments?”
And they kind of looked at me, and they’re like, “What are you talking about?”
And I said, “Well, you’ve just been telling me you play this and this and this and this.”
And they said, “Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that.”
Of course, they hadn’t forgotten, but they had lost touch with that. They had become disconnected from it.
And I asked them about it, so we sort of, you know, settled on one of the instruments. I said, “Where is it?”
They said, “Oh, it’s in my wardrobe, at the back of the wardrobe, up on the top shelf.”
I said, “Do you reckon when you get home, you could take that out? And maybe on the weekend, you could play that instrument?”
Daniel: So I’m not being flippant about this. We all have—everyone has—some sort of way of coping that they’ve forgotten about or lost touch with, and usually, that can be reactivated.
Then there’s the next thing up the pyramid—social contact. And that’s kind of just connecting with people, catching up with friends, inviting a friend for coffee.
And there are two ways of doing that. One way can be, if you like, keeping that privately to yourself. Like, “I want to catch up with my friend. Let’s go see a movie, or let’s go for a coffee, or let’s go for a walk at the beach.”
And I’m just taking—I’m just making use of that social connection to help sustain myself. I don’t, for whatever reason, want to open up to them. I might not need to, but I’m reinvigorating that social connection.
The next level is what we might do if—because we talk about these issues—I would feel quite comfortable. There are lots of people I wouldn’t ring up and say, “Oh my gosh, I’m having an emotional crisis. I don’t think I can cope. Could you come and help me?”
Daniel: Like, I know they would, but I would feel really awkward about that.
Daniel: But I wouldn’t feel awkward calling you up and having that conversation.
Daniel: Because I know, through our conversations we’ve already had about this topic, I know that you would want to be involved.
Daniel: And I know that I wouldn’t have to start back at zero or one in the conversation. I could start right where we are in the conversation.
So there’s social contact that’s kind of more general, and then there’s the more specific—that trusted friend, the mentor, the person you’ve shared all sorts of troubles with in the past—that sort of connection.
And then there’s the professionals.
Daniel: So it can be a counselor, GP, or a drop-in center. You know, we were around in Frankston last week, and they’ve got a drop-in center through the library, through the council there, where there are some social workers on hand. So people might know about those local resources.
And then there’s more specific—there’s going to the GP and saying, “Actually, I think I need to speak to a mental health professional, mental health social worker, or a psychologist.”
Then the top of that pyramid is actually the acute health services.
And so they’re things like the triple zero emergency line or the local crisis team or the emergency department. And you can go and seek help there. If that’s not the right spot, they’ll tell you. They’ll let you know and redirect you to where the right spot is.
So you don’t have to solve that puzzle yourself. If you’re struggling yourself with trying to help someone, you don’t have to get all the answers right.
But that’s a little bit of it—a bit of a hierarchy. And it shouldn’t be stepwise. You can weave all of those things together.
The other thing you’ve often asked me about is also about those helplines. And I think Headspace and Beyond Blue—they also have some online chat groups.
Daniel: And some of those are 24/7—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not all of them are, but some of them are.
And the people there are trained and experienced. If it’s appropriate for them to help you in that moment, they will. And if it needs something more, they’ll actually let you know and help connect you in.
So, you know, we’ve been doing this sort of little bit—almost a role play, not quite a role play—but, you know, Daniel and Joe, and I’m asking you, and you’ve opened up.
So there might be a time where I say, “Joe, I’m really worried about you, and I think we need to call someone straight away.”
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And if it seems that serious, I need to stay with you until we can make that call, until we can get the professionals involved. Other times, no, it’s fine. It’s like, “Okay, you know, Joe’s telling me he’s on top of it. I know he’s going back home, I know his situation there, there’s going to be someone at home.”
And so we’re getting into the realm now of what we call safety planning.
Daniel: By the way, in case I forget, there’s a really good safety planning app available. It originally comes out of the work of some researchers in the US—Barbara Stanley and Gregory Brown—around US veterans. These are men and women from the armed services returning from conflict zones.
When they were having a crisis, they might be in their town, they might not even know where the local hospital is or what the phone number for the crisis service is. So they realized—even if we just get a piece of paper and write down the phone number for the hospital—when we’re not in a crisis, we can think, we can plan, we can generate.
And we start to lay down some of those ideas, some of those pathways in our neuronal systems. When we’re in crisis, we’re talking about the blinkers coming on. We’re more pessimistic. We can’t be creative. We can’t generate solutions. And if we see outcomes, we usually assume they’ll be negative.
So we put some of that work in when things aren’t so bad into some safety planning. And if people look it up—it’s beyond now. It was auspiced originally from the work of Stanley and Brown, and it was auspiced under Beyond Blue, but they’ve now handed that over to Lifeline, the people behind Lifeline.
So a quick internet search—if you put in “Lifeline Beyond Now safety planning,” it’ll take you there. It’s free, of course. There’s an app you can download for your phone, and that’s probably what I’d recommend. But you can also do a web-based version on the computer.
And it’s got reasonable categories about warning signs, ways of connecting, contact numbers, professional help. But importantly, with safety planning too, again, it’s not about jumping in totally with solutions, but looking at what’s underlying that and looking at meaning or reasons for living.
So when we think about safety planning—well, what are the reasons for living? Now, sometimes people will say there aren’t any, and that’s their experience. But that’s also—remember I said, for every problem, the solution is kind of contained in that. It’s like, “Okay, now we know what we need to work on.”
Daniel: This is what we can think about. This is what we can experiment with.
So safety planning might take time. It might cover an hour. Someone’s disclosed to me that they’re really very much on the verge of making a serious suicide attempt. I need to stay with them, make a call, involve them in that discussion as much as possible. But I also might have to override their wishes.
Daniel: If they tell me they’re at imminent risk to themselves or someone else, I’ve actually got a duty and obligation—an ethical and moral obligation—to respond and call for help.
Daniel: Safety planning that I talked about through the Beyond Now app—that’s a work in progress. And in fact, some other people I work with in the UK—an organization called For Mental Health—they actually advocate that everybody has a safety plan, even if you have no history of suicidal thinking, even if you don’t have a mental health history.
Because, of course, crises don’t arrive at convenient times.
Daniel: Whenever I talk about this, I see a lot of people in the group or in the workshop nodding. Crises don’t arrive at, like, 10 AM on a sunny Tuesday morning. Of course, sometimes they do. I’m not minimizing people’s—you know, adverse events can happen to people all the time.
But generally, crisis situations—they’re at one o’clock in the morning, on a Saturday or a Sunday or a public holiday.
Daniel: So we need to have had things put in place already, if we can, that we can then activate.
And so, having put some time into the safety planning, we’ve already got some things in mind. So that short-term planning, but also that longer-term piece of work.
And that might involve, “Well, I do want to see a counselor, but it’s hard. It’s hard to find someone.” You know, you put a lot of information out through the works that you do, and through this podcast, about people finding a journey to finding what is helpful therapy or what is useful counseling or support for them.
And so that takes time. So if it takes time, it means we kind of need to get to work now.
And what the people at For Mental Health shared with me—and I love talking about it with other people—those crises, they never—they come from left field. The ones that undo us, you know, usually we can’t see them coming. Or if we see them coming, we don’t get to pick the time.
And so they talk about it being like driving a car and having a safety belt and an airbag.
You know, in Australia, we’ve got compulsory seat belt laws. We do have a lower road toll as a result of that, no matter what anyone thinks of seat belts. But we don’t—I don’t, you know, when I drove over here today, I didn’t think, “Oh, I’ll probably have an accident today, so I’m going to put my seat belt on.”
And yesterday, I didn’t think, “No way I’m having an accident today, so I don’t need it. I won’t wear it.”
Daniel: We just put that safety belt on. If we can, we have a car with an airbag in it because we actually accept that when that crisis is going to arrive, it can arrive really unexpectedly and at the worst possible time.
So I need to have that safety belt already fitted to my car, and I need to put it on.
Daniel: And that’s the same with the safety planning.
So even if it’s this discussion that we’re having, you know, we’re activating ideas in each other’s brains. People listening and watching—they’re kind of getting ideas. So all of that’s feeding into this, “Okay, if I was struggling, or someone I love, or someone I know, or someone I just pass in the street is struggling, what could I actually do?”
So that’s the essence of safety planning. Sometimes it’s just in the next hour or the next day. You know, “Is my friend Joe going to be okay till I meet him tomorrow morning?” And then we make a further plan, or we go down to the hospital, or I’m going to sit with him while he calls his GP and gets an emergency appointment in the next day or two.
Daniel: As well as the longer-term safety planning that we might do through things like the Beyond Now app.
Joe: I love it, Daniel. And I love the metaphor that you used of the seat belt, right? Like, we want to try and do things beforehand so that when the crisis hits, there’s something that helps us—something that helps our friends and loved ones—so we can deal with it better when, you know, those blinkers might be on. When we might be in a space where we don’t see other options, where we might not have immediate access to our own resources.
I was really moved by you bringing up that example of the professional musician. Right? Like how the person was in a state of distress where even something that brought them so much joy, so much passion, was sidelined because they were going through a difficult time.
Joe: So maybe let’s touch on that. And let’s touch on—because I think self-care, to me, is really all about your connection with those resources that you might already have. You might take them for granted, or you’ve forgotten about them.
Joe: Like, let’s just talk about that. What are some of the things about self-care? Especially—and I guess self-care is, in a way, part of that safety plan, right? Because we don’t just become resilient when the crisis happens.
Daniel: Yeah. It’s something we hopefully build up over time. Just like, for example, if we want to be fit, we want to be doing something consistently that helps us. I can’t just decide today I want to be fit, go to the gym tomorrow, do an eight-hour session, and then magically I’ve made the decision, I’ve done the hard work, and now I’m fit.
It takes time to build up. And there are ups and downs, of course, and the road—it’s not a straight pathway.
Daniel: So a lot of those things are things that we’ve been told, things we know, things we tell other people. Like looking after things—trying as much as possible to look after healthy eating, getting enough sleep, getting a reasonable amount of exercise.
And it’s also reaching that point of accepting, “Oh, well, maybe I’ve got to invest something deliberate in looking after myself a little bit so that I can keep going.”
Daniel: So it’s not about perfecting everybody or kind of getting a rule book out. You know, when we’re younger, in our teenage years or twenties, we can get away with not sleeping, maybe using plenty of alcohol or other things, and not having a really clear diet. But over time, those things—they don’t bolster our ability to cope.
Actually, if they’re covered, we can cope with everything a little bit better. It’s not going to solve everything—healthy eating isn’t going to solve everything—but it can help to underpin that.
Daniel: And it doesn’t mean we have to be like that all the time or every day. But if we’re kind of working towards that, as you say.
Something that really helps people is pets.
Daniel: Often, you know—and there are dog people and cat people, and then there are other pet people as well—but certainly, pets, and there’s plenty of research and science to back that up. Having a pet, stroking a pet, or looking after a pet—looking after someone else, anyone else—can actually have benefits for us.
Daniel: And one thing that people—I know lots of people who have dogs. I don’t have a dog. I love dogs, but I don’t have a dog at the moment. But they say, “Oh, I’ve got to get out for a walk because the dog makes me.”
Daniel: Because the dog doesn’t care if it’s a public holiday or—well, sometimes some dogs won’t go out if it’s raining—but dogs don’t pay attention to whether you’re sick, or it’s a public holiday, or it’s a bit cold. They want to go out for that walk.
Daniel: Especially in most urban environments, if you’re walking a dog—you end up going to a park. And what do you run into at the park?
Daniel: People with dogs, yeah. And you actually get—I used to know all the dogs’ names, and I didn’t know the owners’ names. They were just, you know, Fido’s dad and Spot’s mum.
But allowing some of those things to be in place—and then there are other more deliberate things, as we’ve referenced. That might be, you know, physical activity. We know there are mind-body benefits for physical activity. Physical activity improves our physical health, and it also improves our mental health.
Not everyone has the same range of opportunities or abilities. So it’s working out what works for you. For some people, it’s training for a marathon or running a marathon. And of course, if I look in the media, there are people who can run seven marathons in a week.
Daniel: But it’s not about that. If that’s what works for them, great. But it’s not about that. It’s about, “Will I get out and go for a walk to the park? Will I think about getting a pet? I can’t have a dog, and I like cats, so I have a cat.”
This might sound like really matter-of-fact, everyday stuff. And just because it is doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.
Daniel: They’re not going to jump in and solve the problem on their own. We know that. But just to emphasize, for people who are listening and thinking about applying that for themselves—all of these things actually add up.
Daniel: They all bring some benefits with them. And even if we’re really struggling, they buy us time to get through to the next day.
Joe: Exactly. And it makes me think about those protective layers in that context.
And I know you also mentioned—I just want to bring up something that I think is really important, that really stood out to me when you were talking about it in the workshop the other day—that when someone often has thoughts about suicide, they can be quite intense, but they’re often short-lasting. I just wanted to quickly touch on that.
Joe: That’s the case, isn’t it?
Daniel: Yeah. As much as we understand that—and there are people who have studied this, professionals who have worked with people during suicidal crises, and people who have survived a suicide attempt—we know that the thoughts come and go.
Absolutely. And I don’t want anyone hearing this to misconstrue what I’m saying. They can go, but they come and go, and they’re short-lived.
Generally speaking, the most intense suicidal thoughts—those associated with that intensity—it can’t be maintained. It can’t maintain itself.
Daniel: So they’re generally short-lived. That intense suicidal urge or impulse can be quite short-lived. So it’s about being able to get through that for ourselves or if we’re supporting people.
And this is where I think we were talking about it. It can be about diverting or distracting.
Daniel: And again, I’m not trivializing it, but if we think—if anyone’s ever been a smoker and tried to stop smoking, or any other kind of addictive behavior—those urges can be very, very strong.
But we actually learn that if we can ride out that urge—
Daniel: The intensity might still be there.
Daniel: And we know it could come back. But that intense urge—“I have to act now”—that’s actually quite short-lived.
Joe: So, yeah. Exactly. And I think that’s so important to bring up because those protective layers—those self-care routines, if you will—or just an authentic, compassionate conversation with a friend, that can sometimes make all the difference, can’t it?
And sometimes that’s when you can, hopefully, access the things that you love doing—maybe your passions, maybe your hobbies, maybe rediscovering something that was pulled aside. Maybe life just got in the way, and you didn’t get around to playing that sport, or playing that instrument, or doing that thing with a friend.
So those things become really vital, don’t they? Including things like therapy.
Daniel: Well, let’s say—and that’s why, if I can just jump in there, Joe—that’s because, yes, those intense feelings are very short-lived. And it can be about distracting or diverting or just getting through the hour, you know? Getting through tonight, or this day, or this 24 hours.
But also, yeah, as I said, I don’t want to minimize that. Sometimes people experience that recurrently. So, okay, it’s short-lived, but it’s going to be back. And it’s back again, and again, and again—to the point where it feels unrelenting.
And people can become really quite sensitized to that. Even when there is relative peace, they’re actually on edge because they know it’s going to come back, or they fear it’s going to come back.
So that’s indeed where we want to talk about—if that’s the situation—it is important to think about, yeah, where is the scope? And that’s where I think you were going now—where is the scope for deliberately undertaking some sort of therapeutic endeavor as well?
Joe: Exactly. And, you know, exactly right. And I feel like, for me, therapy has been something that—I had a lot of self-labeling around therapy. I was like, “Well, up until several years ago, I thought, if I go into therapy, what is it going to solve? Or, if I go into therapy, does this mean that I’m broken? Or that something is truly wrong with me?”
But also, another thing that was coming up for me was, “What if I do therapy and it doesn’t help? Then I’m really screwed.”
Daniel: Like, then that means, so there’s a sense of, like, there’s a lot of barriers that get in the way. Especially for many of us who may have, for example, tried having a conversation with a mental health professional, or a GP, or whoever else in that space.
And maybe that conversation wasn’t helpful, or wasn’t what you kind of expected. And you’re kind of going, “Well, I’m not going to do that now.” Right?
Joe: Yeah. Now I’m in the worst position, as I said. “Look, I gave it a go, and it didn’t work.”
So I just want to get your thoughts on that as well. Because obviously, you know a lot about that space, being a clinician as well.
What are your thoughts about therapy and how it can help someone who’s perhaps dealing with a history of personal trauma, or traumatic stress, or maybe ongoing stress or stresses that can lead someone towards suicidal thoughts, or just experiencing a huge amount of everyday distress?
Daniel: So I’ll touch on this idea of problem-solving. It might not solve the problems.
Daniel: It might not make them go away. You know, I might be in an area where the roads authority or the council wants to knock down my house and build a highway.
Daniel: Guess what? Spoiler—therapy is not going to fix that.
Daniel: Therapy is not going to save my house, is it?
Daniel: So what can it do? What is the point?
Well, what it can do is help us kind of process some of that in a different way. And I was almost going to say “deeper way.” I was thinking about that—in a deeper, maybe in a deeper way—but I’ll actually stick with “different way.”
So, any situation in life involves perspectives.
Daniel: You and I are having this conversation right here, right now, but we’ve got completely different perspectives.
Daniel: I’m being really literal about that, Joe.
Daniel: You’re sitting over there looking at me.
Daniel: And I’m sitting over here looking at you.
Daniel: It’s the same event going on, but we’ve got very different points of view—very different perspectives.
Joe: Because I know I’m right and you’re wrong.
Daniel: Well, apart from that—and I like to indulge that delusion of yours, you know, that helps me to feel superior.
Daniel: So we’ve got different perspectives, different points of view. And there are usually numerous points of view.
When we’re struggling with something, we might go to those blinkers again. We can get really stuck. And this is particularly true where fear and trauma are involved.
We process things in a very particular way, and our brains process and store memories in particular ways. And that can seem like the only way to experience or understand something.
Now, that’s a survival response, so it’s not wrong—it’s not unhealthy. But what it can mean is that, over time, any survival response is really important.
You know, if I’m walking across the road and a car’s coming down the road and I’m in the wrong spot, I’ve got to jump.
Daniel: I might jump and land and break my leg.
Daniel: Was it the wrong thing to jump? No. That’s the survival response—that instinct that I need to do.
But it might mean that I end up carrying with me—carrying in my body or carrying in my mind—things that are still impacting me.
Daniel: So the purpose of therapy and the aims of therapy are to be able to actually come into contact with that in a way that’s just a little bit safer.
We can talk about reprocessing that, or getting different perspectives on that, or understanding that, but also coming to terms with that.
Now, we know—I talked about my fictional house that’s going to get bulldozed for the highway.
Daniel: While that’s approaching, while that’s on the table, that’s really distressing.
Daniel: And I’m going to be really upset and try and stop it.
When it happens, I’m probably going to be mortified. But I probably will move somewhere else.
And again, I’m not minimizing this. I’m not dismissing the intensity of people’s feelings, but I’m just trying to illustrate the point here.
Eventually, I’ll get another house, and I’ll settle in there. And eventually, hopefully, I’ll look back and think, “Gee, I really liked that house, and I miss it. But you know what? This house is pretty good too.”
Or it might be, “That was the best house ever, and I don’t like this one. But at least I’ve got a roof over my head.”
Or it might be, “Actually, I thought that house was great, but this one’s even better.”
So the process of therapy is about trying to come into contact with things that are unhelpful, or blocked, or stuck, or traumatized, or paralyzed in fear, or in hatred, or in anger—and trying to approach those in a safe enough way to encounter them in a different way than what happened the first time around, or what keeps happening in my mind or in my experience.
And to approach those from a different perspective, get a slightly different understanding about them, and start to come to terms with them.
It’s always talked about—the loss of that house was real and really hurtful. That doesn’t no longer exist. But with time, I can come to get a little bit of separation from that. I’m not denying it happened, but I’m starting to adjust to that. And let’s just have a level of adjustment.
It’s like, you know, I’m much less in a hurry now. I mean, much less of a hurry now than I used to be. But I used to want to drive everywhere, you know, at a hundred kilometers an hour or a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour.
And guess what? I just had to adjust to the fact that, well, it’s not safe.
Daniel: Firstly, I stopped doing it because I didn’t want to get a fine. I could only think about myself—“I better not do it because I’ll get a fine.”
And over time, I kind of adjusted to the fact that, well, it’s actually also not safe.
Daniel: And later, it doesn’t really matter, you know? I can just leave ten minutes earlier.
But so again, I’m not making light of people’s past problems or their current difficulties, but just using these as little analogies to illustrate the processes.
So engaging in a therapeutic process helps us to get different perspectives on our problems. It helps us think about them, come into contact with them, and talk about them—often with another person—to help that process.
It doesn’t work for everyone all of the time. It’s not the best thing for everybody. And also, as I think you’ve mentioned, Joe, it’s not just a matter of finding a counselor or finding a psychologist. That might not be the right person, might not be the right fit, at the right time.
Joe: Exactly. Exactly, Daniel.
But I love that it kind of helps you to change perspective and find, I guess, a more helpful perspective on your own experience. It’s not, you know, denying or minimizing your own experience, but finding a more helpful perspective.
Daniel: Well, I guess I’ll jump in on that though too, Joe. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be more helpful—it could just be less unhelpful.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a win as well. And that’s where we don’t—I don’t want to lose track of those as well.
Daniel: Yeah. Because if I set myself up thinking, “I’m going to go to therapy, and I’m going to feel better, and it’s going to help me,” I can come away discouraged.
If I can accept that, well, if I undertake this, I might be just a little less worse off—I’m going to count that. I’m going to count that as a win.
Daniel: But also, you and I have been talking about something really important too, Joe. We’ve spoken about, you know, when we talk about therapy, I always think of what we call “talking therapy.” Seeing a counselor or a psychologist—sitting down, talking.
They might be like an old-school psychoanalytic therapist—they might sit behind you when you’re on a bit of a couch. They might sit face-to-face. They might have a desk.
Joe: You like to do that sometimes?
Daniel: Well, there are all sorts of approaches.
But we’ve also talked about—you know, we’ve talked about walking and walking the dog and things like that—but we’ve also talked about that mind-body interplay.
And that when we’re working on trauma, our memories, our trauma events—we carry them in our mind, but we also carry them in our bodies.
And, you know, I wanted to be able to talk with you about something we’ve spoken about before.
Joe: Exactly. And I’m really glad that you brought this up. I mean, first of all, I just want to mention that we’ve got our guide on PowerToBeHappy.com called Healing Space Melbourne that talks about different therapeutic modalities—not that you have to do one or the other.
You know, different therapists can use a toolkit of these approaches. But it helps us to understand what some of the things are that might work for you.
Is it something that might be more suited to someone who’s more creative, for example? Or someone who wants a more embodied approach?
And one of those things that, of course, we’re going to dive into now is Left Right Hook. That’s also in the Healing Space.
Joe: But it’s something that is near and dear to my heart for many reasons. That’s where my journey into healing from trauma began.
It’s also how we became friends and how we bonded over that experience.
We met through it, right? So let’s talk about it. These days, you’re so involved in Left Right Hook, and we’ve got so many great things coming up.
So first of all, Daniel, tell us about Left Right Hook, why it’s important, but also what are some of the things we’ve got coming up that someone can learn about—and maybe even explore if they want to join in and give it a try?
Daniel: Well, first of all, Left Right Hook—what is it?
Literally, for me, I picture the words. It’s “left” and then it’s “right” as in writing, and “hook.” It’s a deliberate play on words—it’s a deliberate pun referencing boxing.
So, yeah, Left Right Hook was developed by someone by the name of Donna Lyons. She’s actually an associate professor in film and television, but also Donna’s been very open and public in her advocacy and talking about her own experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
Donna actually developed Left Right Hook out of her own experience and her own quest for recovery.
And so Left Right Hook combines a process of expressive writing and trauma-informed boxing.
Daniel: There’s a bit more to it than that, and I’ll get to it in a sec, but that’s it in essence—if we say, “What is Left Right Hook?”
And so, that’s been developed into a recovery program for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And now, for groups that involve women and gender-diverse participants, they’ve kind of opened it up more broadly to people who have experienced other forms of gendered violence.
Now, we’ll get to the guys—to the men—in a moment because that’s a really exciting development I want to talk about.
But yeah, we’re asking that question: What is Left Right Hook?
It’s an eight-week, peer-designed, peer-developed, and peer-led program by survivors of childhood sexual abuse and other forms of gendered violence.
The sessions are about two hours, and they actually spend the first half engaging in some expressive or creative writing. That’s done to a timer. It’s writing to prompts.
It’s designed to trigger—or, if you like, unlock—a bit of unconscious expression. It helps participants get in touch with things that aren’t necessarily part of their conscious, thinking brain.
It’s about getting in touch with thoughts, feelings, and perhaps experiences that are more subconscious or unconscious. And being able to get those out on the page—it’s a way of processing.
It’s a way of bringing trauma or fearful things that are locked in our brains and bodies out into the daylight—onto the page.
And then people are invited to share that within the group because it’s very much a group process.
People don’t have to share their experiences, of course, but they’re invited to.
And then, after a couple of rounds of the writing, there’s a bit of a break.
They actually literally run the program in a gymnasium—often a boxing gym. There’s no one else there. The other gym people aren’t there. It’s a protected time.
Then they actually put on the boxing gloves and start punching the punching bag—maybe doing a bit of work, non-contact work, or work with the pads. And that unlocks a way of expressing trauma, perhaps, or expressing anger, but also connecting and reconnecting with the body.
You know, we’re talking about someone reconnecting with their ability, their art, and their creativity as a musician. Well, particularly if people have experienced trauma or early trauma that’s stored in their body, people can become disconnected from their body or their physical experience.
So the boxing embodies so many things. It’s an opportunity to actually connect and reconnect with the body, but also to ground.
You know, I’ve got a background in martial arts myself, so when I encountered the boxing, there were a lot of similarities there. And all of those modalities—all of those undertakings—involve connecting and grounding.
And this is important for being, literally, safe—safe enough and stable in the world.
So the boxing enables or invites people to connect with their body, experience being whole to a degree, and grounded. But also, yeah, expressing things physically, including anger.
So locating healthy anger and being able to express that and let it out in a safe, consensual, contained kind of environment. And so people can channel their feelings out through their punching, through the physical movement.
It doesn’t have to be boxing. Boxing is what made sense to Donna Lyons in her own recovery journey. I mean, it could be done with walking, or running, or yoga, or ballet. It could be any of those things.
But there is something quite powerful and transformative about connecting with the body and connecting with feelings through the movements, the grounding, and the movements of boxing. That can be quite transformative.
And I know I said to you just recently, but, Joe, when I first heard about Left Right Hook, I thought it was arts—that boxing and writing thing.
Daniel: And then I learned to reorder that. I realized, well, it’s actually writing and boxing. And again, that’s not me necessarily just being the word police. But the writing is about getting in contact with those internal, intangible thoughts and feelings.
Daniel: And what I just want to touch on—something we talked about earlier—is, you know, in Left Right Hook, as the name implies, there’s the writing, and that goes first.
There’s the boxing—that’s activating the body, bringing your mind into it.
But there’s also, of course, the community.
Joe: There’s the third element.
Daniel: The third element.
Joe: I thought it was boxing and writing. And then I learned—I discovered—that it’s writing and boxing. But again, I didn’t quite get it because—
Joe: —until you explained it to me.
Joe: Exactly. And that’s a sense of community, right?
Especially when you’ve been through traumatic events, or perhaps ongoing trauma in the past, or it might be occurring in the present—or being brought to you in the mind.
It’s so important to find that sense of community.
And that sense of community doesn’t necessarily have to be—you know, it doesn’t have to mean you’re constantly talking about trauma or constantly talking about these events.
Just—I know for me, being around, for example, yourself and other people I’ve met through my own journey—it’s just the fact that you are in the presence of someone who has experienced it and has that lived experience.
That’s something so incredibly powerful because you don’t even have to talk about it.
Daniel: Sometimes people say, “Someone else who gets it.”
Joe: Yeah. Someone who gets it. It’s just—it’s just implied. It’s just felt. It’s just this felt sense that exists.
Daniel: There’s this shared understanding.
Daniel: That doesn’t even necessarily require words.
Joe: Which is so incredibly transformative, even on its own.
Joe: Even without the fact that you’re finding a different perspective and bringing your body into it.
But all of those things together become really, really powerful.
And I know there’s, you know, obviously with Left Right Hook, there are different streams, right? You talked about women and gender-diverse survivors.
Daniel: Well, that’s what—again, full disclosure—you and I, we’re almost frauds right now because we’re talking all about Left Right Hook, and we haven’t done the program yet.
Daniel: But yes, so the incredible thing that I’m excited about—that we’re both thrilled about—is that, for the very first time, we’re running a men’s program later, starting in mid-October.
It’ll actually be in Wyndham City. The venue’s in Hoppers Crossing. And it’s the first time the program is being made available to men—to male survivors.
And so you and I are going to be there in our journey of training as facilitators, but we’re also going to be very much taking part in the group.
And so that’s something that people might be interested in finding out about. The recruiting for that is closing very soon, but there are still some spaces available in that program.
We’ll also be doing some research related to that. We hope to show, similarly to the initial research with women and gender-diverse participants, some of the many benefits of that program.
Well, let’s solve something. I mean, I’m just like—it’s funny because I almost have to talk about it as if I don’t know about it. But, obviously, I do, and I’m there.
And so—and I’m also excited to be doing this with you.
So, Daniel, tell me—if someone wanted to find out about the men’s pilot in Wyndham, what would they do?
Daniel: Yep. So, get on the search engine. Just type in Left Right Hook. Even if you don’t spell it the right way, a quick little look around, you’ll find it.
They’ve got a really well-designed and really helpful web presence. You can find out about the various programs.
I’ll also take a little detour to the side as well. I mean, in developing the program—Donna Lyons’ background informed it—they actually made a documentary about the first groups of women and gender-diverse participants who went through the program.
And, you know, as you know—it’s not news for you, Joe—but, yeah, they made a feature-length documentary film that premiered at MIFF, the Melbourne International Film Festival, last year. It actually won the Audience Award.
Daniel: It’s also since won an International Documentary Film Award and is now available, of course, on Netflix.
So if people want to know about the program and get a really first-hand look and feel for it, I really recommend looking at that documentary.
There are screenings around the country from time to time—less so now—but there’s one coming up on the Sunshine Coast in the near future.
The website’s got all of those details. People can put their name down on the mailing list.
But also, if they click on the link for the programs, there’s an expression of interest—or EOI—form. People just put in very basic details: name, postcode, and whether they’re interested in a program for men, for women, or for gender-diverse participants.
And then the amazing staff at Left Right Hook—it’s now built on those first beginnings and, through the documentary, into a charity.
So it’s an organization that’s growing, and they’ve got some really wonderful people behind it—running things like the website.
So, yeah, if people have a little bit of a look on the search engine, find the Left Right Hook website, and then have a look for the programs, they can register an expression of interest.
Well, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your insight and perspective on understanding suicide, finding ways to support yourself, finding ways to support others, but also bringing that into a bigger conversation.
How do you care for yourself? How do we care for our health? How do we seek meaningful support?
And that’s how we kind of ended up talking about Left Right Hook, which is, you know, another way to reconnect with yourself, with your own body, reconnect with other survivors, and find that kind of sense of community and belonging.
But overall, I just want to thank you for your presence and just the things that you do in the world.
Daniel: Thank you, Joe. And thanks for the great work and the advocacy you do—and your Trust+1 enterprises—and, yeah, for making this happen.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if you hadn’t brought all this together and got the two of us in the one spot. So thank you very much. Thanks so much for everything you do and for this opportunity.
