Group Support Community Meeting Updates #2
Hi everyone, here are the updates relating to the group support community meeting feedback given in our last couple of meetings.
- As some of you are aware, on Thursday 19th May at around 3pm ET, I hosted a trial of a short coping technique discussion in the Member Community Room (MCR). This is a wonderful idea to build more self awareness and inclusive structured engagement within the MCR.
However, whilst there was a lot of engagement in the discussion, the alternate room that was opened to allow people to continue casual chats if they didn't want to participate in the ongoing discussion was not used and many were having unrelated conversations in the room throughout the discussion. For future instances, continuous unrelated chat must be moved to the alternate room, which will be the "Member Hangout Room" at the time of short discussions.
We are working on ways to make this idea work long-term and will update you all when we are ready with moving forward.
- An idea raised in the community meeting was to have a separate support room dedicated to dissociative identity disorder (DID). This idea has been tried by myself in the past in the teen side but it did not work long-term. We are working towards a solution and will update again on this as more information is available.
We are also currently working on getting more discussions scheduled across the group support rooms.
If you are a current Room Supporter or Group Moderator interested in hosting sessions for your, or other sub-communities that you may be interested in, please message @Sher217 for more details. If you are interested in helping to create scripts for discussions, please contact Sher to find out how you can help.
- We hear your concerns for more moderation in the Member Community Room, Sharing Circle and Support Room 24/7 and we are looking to recruit and train Room Supporters and Group Moderators to assist. In the meantime, you can use the emergency mod request form to request assistance with a situation in any room. This can be found in the chat room rules located at the bottom of each chat of any room.
- All suggestions regarding the technical side of the site have been forwarded to the Tech Team. We hope to have additional updates on these and will pass it along as we are updated. We appreciate you being patient during this process.
If you're not seeing your proposed feedback in this post and haven't heard from me about any updates relating to it, please feel free to send me a private message and I can see how to help.
@kieran000
Hey K,
Thanks for the update on the feedback we're receiving!
~ Sher
@kieran000
thanks for the information, much appreciated!!!
@kieran000 Question why not have these coping technique discussion in the General Support room?
@HopieRemi
Hey Remi! Thank you for your reply to this post :)
The idea is to improve structured engagement in the MCR, since many times we see that newbies (and experienced members) do not get included in convos.
So, having at least 30min of discussion there would give a bit more of a chance for newbies and others to become involved with something in there in a more naturally guided way, possibly mixing in with other members and then feeling more comfortable to come again.
Doing these in the General Support Room would not do this, as newbies can’t all access this room.
Oooh @kieran000 thank you
@kieran000 Coping techniques seems to be something that would be better for Support 24/7 than MCR in my opinion.
For a room where the purpose is to keep non-support chit-chat out of the other rooms wouldn't more open chats be better? There can still be some direction without it being a guided discussion. Some questions like what do you have going on this week? What was the last movie you saw? What has been piquing your interest today?
Not really icebreakers, moreso lighthearted questions about recent things. Similar to things you may ask a group of coworkers at lunch that aren't work related.
I agree with this and it might help the regulars feel comfortable @AffyAvo
@AffyAvo @HopieRemie
Thank you for your valid points, I get that these coping technique discussions may be better to be hosted in the support room rather than the member community room (MCR). I will discuss it with other leaders and see what they think.
Also yeah, It might be a good idea for there to be more open chats and those type of questions being asked, so we can try to improve inclusivity and engagement in both Support Room and MCR.
@kieran000 Thanks for listening to our feedbacks :)
@HopieRemi @AffyAvo
Hi again!
Since this idea had been brought up in the community meeting, we’d like to honour this and get it at least trialed a bit more, there will be a maximum of 30 minute discussions per 3 hours (depending on how many people apply when it’s time to start up the applications) and another community room will be opened to act as MCR if people don’t want to participate.
Bringing in both your feedbacks, we could potentially have it done as some sort of open check-in mixed within the 30mins of the guided discussion, focussing on getting to know each other’s story, seeing what their coping techniques have been and what worked for them, if nothing then maybe what they can try in the future to better handle their situations/emotions.
Thank you for the reply @Kieran000 well I look forward to hearing how it goes and you implementing our idea with the already existing idea sounds good. We gotta keep it light x
@kieran000 I hope things go well!
@kieran000
I appreciate the updates, I'll pass this info along.
@kieran000. Im starting online thearpy for the fist time with better help
@kieran000
Deeply appreciate the update! I wonder how we could get more people who regularly use MCR, 24/7 Support, and Sharing Circle to see this more? Maybe we can pop the thread link into these rooms once in a while with a description?
@DichotomousDetia
Thank you for replying to this post. I have just made a taglist and will be sharing it in the group support rooms from time to time, to get those interested in these updates, more aware of them when they happen. Check this post out.
The DID/OSDD scheduled chats in the Trauma Support room are going very well in the Adult section. DID in adolescents and in adults can present differently and have different levels of engagement so I wouldn't judge one side by the other with that. Adolescents have a different neurobiological structure and DID comes with complex trauma, many of them likely still live with their abusive family of origin or around people who instigated the trauma and so their level of activity, openness, and emotional regulation is going to vary differently than adults who have a different neurobiological structure and have more chance to escape their traumatizing environments and therefore have more access to emotional regulation, openness, sense of safety, etc.
@DichotomousDetia
I see, well we welcome DID discussions for sure, which can be held by those who are able to host discussions on this topic in the Neurodiversity Support Room and the Trauma Support Room. Thank you so much for both of your important replies, I have taken it all onboard. :)
