Peninsula Charity Turning Outward

 Vicki Scrimger and Alan Cook are happier from helping people

Vicki Scrimger contemplates the reflective listening that is done at the Community Helpline. Photo

The rewards of helping others are well known to Vicki Scrimger and Alan Cook, who are among the volunteer angels of the 40-year-old Community Helpline, one of the Peninsula’s enduring and well-known altruistic organizations.

Scrimger, a marriage and family therapist, has been helping the Helpline for more than 30 years, about the same time she has been in practice.

She helps train the Helpline’s “listeners,” who take about 8,000 calls a year from people with depression, anxiety and a host of other difficulties. She also serves as an ambassador for Helpline, spreading the word to school students and urging her clients to volunteer, with the Helpline or elsewhere, for the therapeutic benefits of helping others.

“I started volunteering as a Girl Scout and got turned on to it,” she said. “You’ll never be depressed if you do volunteer work.”

Cook, a retiree who writes mystery novels, has volunteered as a listener and trainer for about 10 years.

“It is rewarding to me,” he said. “I like the feeling that I’m helping the callers by listening to them.”

It’s a type of listening that is developed through 45 hours of training that includes talks from therapists, psychiatrists and other experts, about 20 hours of role-playing call scenarios, and support from experienced volunteers on a listener’s initial calls.

Listeners encourage callers to say how they are feeling, and reflect back to them what feelings they are hearing.

“We teach people how to reflect feelings,” she said.

“We don’t solve anybody’s problem,” she said, but often by the end of a call, the caller has identified his or her own possible solutions.

 

Gender shift

Scrimger started out as a facilitator-trainer when she was getting her master’s degree at Long Beach State, then went on to work the phones, and to teach listening and facilitate the trainings.

Scrimger also takes part in the Helpline’s speaking engagements at schools, and takes part in a volunteer fair she founded at Peninsula High School.

“When I do something, I go all way,” she said. “I love Helpline.”

She and her husband Jim also volunteer for the Habitat for Humanity housing organization.

At Helpline, Scrimger has seen a sea change in the gender demographic of people seeking emotional help, with men calling much more, and seeking individual therapy much more as well.

“There has been a dramatic change in the last decades,” she said. “People want to have emotions in their lives. They want to understand themselves. They want to have clarity, and an unexamined life is not worth living.”

Before, men “were locked up. I believe that’s why men have heart attacks. It’s really hard for many men [to open up] but they’re working hard. People are so much more open now. It’s time to uncover, discover, and discard what they don’t want in life.”

 

Depression common

Most callers are dealing with depression, anxiety over specific situations or circumstances in their lives, loneliness, drug and alcohol issues.

“People basically have the same questions 30 years later – a little more drugs and alcohol, and sexual stuff. We didn’t have [as many] questions about STDs 30 years ago,” Scrimger said.

The listeners are ready.

“The training covers everything — depression, anxiety, runaways, loneliness, even sexual or pregnancy issues, STDs, and even suicide. Drug and alcohol are one of the big problems now,” Scrimger said.

“It’s hard to teach listening; most people want to give advice,” Scrimger said.

“Everyone can learn,” she said. “Adults can be harder to teach. They can be set in their ways, and want to tell people what to do.”

The listeners have lists of community resources at their fingertips, so they can give information on substance abuse rehab facilities, places to get food, 12-step organizations, or a suicide hotline to call.

 

Youth movement

Many young people – age 15 and up — volunteer with the Helpline to perform the community service that will help them get into college, and stay on as facilitators to help with the ongoing training sessions, she said.

“And a lot of kids come because their friends are coming to them for help. They are being asked — about drugs, alcohol, suicide, sexually acting out – and they want to get better at helping,” Scrimger said.

She is energized by the enthusiasm of the young volunteers.

“They have the energy, they have the juice,” Scrimger said. “They have their whole life to look forward to. They have the hope.”

The Helpline survives on donations and grants, and on its major yearly fundraiser, delivering to peninsula homes about 25,000 telephone directories published for the benefit of Palos Verdes Hills Nursery School, an effort that requires about 100 drivers and scores of youthful runners to leg the directories from vehicle to door.

The Helpline operates 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, and organizers have been seeking ways to return to 24-hour status.

 

 

Volunteer bug

When Cook joined Helpline as a listener a decade ago, he already had been bitten by the volunteer bug.

“I was coming off one volunteer experience and I wanted something new. Because I live in Palos Verdes I had always heard about the Helpline. I was a psychology major in school, and I thought, this sounds like fun,” he said.

“I called and talked to Colleen [Program Director Colleen Sass, the Helpline’s only paid employee], and came to a class, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Cook works the phones and serves as a training facilitator, helping with the role plays.

“The class is very good. The primary thing the class teaches us is listening skills. Anybody can use them, not just people answering calls on the Helpline,” he said.

“We talk about anxiety, substance abuse, depression, sexual orientation, domestic violence, including teen dating violence. We get all kinds of callers,” he said. “Although it is not specifically a suicide hotline, we do get some suicide calls.”

 

Rare calls

Calls from people who might be “immediately suicidal” are rare, but must be prepared for.

“In those cases we are more proactive. We ask, are you suicidal, do you plan to hurt yourself? Do you have a plan, how would you do it, when would you do it. If they have a gun we ask them to put it in another room while we talk — we’ll feel better talking to you if you are safe at the moment,” Cook said.

“We stay with the caller as long as necessary, and in some cases refer them to the suicide hotline,” he said.

The listener might make a “contract” with the caller asking him or her to call back the next day.

“We try to get them to see a ray of hope, somebody they love or somebody who loves them, to come up with basically a reason for living.”

Some callers are referred to the Helpline from a suicide hotline, if it is determined that they are not imminently suicidal.

 

Opening up

“Most of our callers are depressed to some extent, some more or less than others, and we get quite good at handling depression calls. Perhaps the hardest calls to handle are from people who are very depressed or suicidal.”

Some callers have been diagnosed with conditions from OCD, to bipolar disorder.

“We get calls from people who are out of work, people who are having financial problems, people who are disabled and unable to work.”

Financial problems are common these days, Cook said.

“And we probably get more calls now from people who are actually what you would call psychotic instead of just neurotic, probably because funding for programs for these people have declined, and they have fewer places to turn,” he said.

“We do get calls from people who have trouble talking about their problems. They might be first-time callers, or maybe they have never talked to somebody like this before,” he said.

“Basically what we do is give them space, give them room, and give them encouragement. We try to elicit feelings from them, and help them acknowledge those things. It helps that someone is listening to them, and not judging them, not giving advice,” he said.

“If people are given enough space, and see that we are actually listening to them, we find them coming up with things to do, suggesting solutions to their own problems,” Cook said.

In addition to the internal rewards from helping others, the old psych student finds it interesting volunteer work.

“You get to know a lot about people I guess, about the human race. I get a chance to go back to my college days in that respect,” he said.

“I also like people who work as volunteers, a lot. They are great people, really dedicated, good people. If I do say so, I think we get the cream of the crop at every age level.”

The Helpline can be reached at 877-541-2525. PEN

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