Since February 20­23, I’ve worked at a person-centred, survivor-led crisis house in a city suburb. It’s an alternative to hospital, supporting people in ‘high-risk’ distress.

Assuming we have space, admission to the house as opposed to a hospital hinges on one key criterion: whether someone can maintain ‘the sanctuary of the house’ – that is, whether they are able to avoid talking about anything likely to be triggering in the communal areas, because the point of the house as a whole is that it offers a relaxing environment for everyone.

The building is, ostensibly, a house. Other than the wheelchair ramp and the tendency for the living room to have people talking in it throughout the night, there isn’t anything that differentiates it from other houses in the area.

I work shifts that are a couple of days apart, and it’s always interesting to see what has changed since my last shift. People usually only stay for a week, so most shifts involve both introducing myself to new guests and saying goodbye to others I’ve just gotten to know. So maybe a couple of guests have arrived or left, maybe a new painting has been blu-tacked to the wall in the conservatory, or maybe there are brownies in the kitchen for us to tuck into, either baked by a guest in the house or store-bought as a thank you upon their leaving. The hi-fi in the living room and the foyer is often on, at a low volume.

An hour-long ‘121’ (essentially a therapy session) is offered to people every day, as well as a shorter ‘check-in’ usually when people get up or if they’re planning on leaving the house for whatever reason (the house isn’t a secure unit). Otherwise, guests are free to do what they like. This can include milling about in their room, playing board games with staff and other guests, doing a jigsaw, maybe some gardening, and so on.

Throughout their stay and alongside these other things, what many people might get up to for hours at a time, is talking shit.

Why ‘Talking Shit’?

In case I need to pander to particular notions of respectability, I would like to declare that the formal title of this writing is ‘The Significance of Low-Stakes Social Interaction in Mental Health Crisis Support’. Personally though, I find it a bit cringe-inducing to put it under the microscope and dress it up in that kind of language. ‘Talking shit’ feels right to me.

The actual content of the conversation often isn’t the point, at least not in terms of the larger offering of a helpful space during a person’s stay. Talking about football, or the weather, or that film with that woman where she did that thing, blah blah….the detail isn’t what matters. What really matters is the space we’re creating, the conditions we offer, and how relate with each person.

I don’t think the therapeutic benefit is at the forefront of my attention when I am talking shit though. What’s on my mind is the dance of the conversation – listening, understanding their meaning, sharing my understanding and responding with my own, etc. You could say that I am trying to offer the ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions’ – and I’d say that I am – but it’s more of a background process. It’s an attitude, as I think it should be – a ‘way of being’, if we’re going to use the parlance, rather than a mechanistic set of procedures or techniques. If I got caught up on my own head about anything as abstract as the ‘therapeutic conditions’ or the ‘actualising tendency’ then I think people would notice and intuitively sense that I’m not quite with them. In the moment, I’m just enjoying the conversation. If you believe in something, you don’t need to remind yourself of it on a constant basis.

Some say that talking shit is one of the things they have found particularly helpful about their stay in the house, and indeed there are a number that don’t engage much in the ‘121’ sessions but prefer to simply chat shit in the communal areas throughout their stay.

In other words, in the midst of a mental health crisis that is severe enough to need the involvement of statutory services, the space for chatting about anything other than their crisis is something which some find particularly helpful in and of itself. I find this interesting and wanted to write about it.

The Need for Talking Shit

If someone is upset or needs to talk in depth about their situation immediately, we invite them into a private space. Maintaining the sanctuary of the house sometimes involves setting boundaries when conversations drift into particularly distressing topics, or even just ones that are likely to be emotive or divisive among the group.

This creates an interesting conundrum for staff to navigate: the challenge of having a genuine conversation in the communal areas while steering away from (a) the actual content or feelings around people’s crises, and (b) abstract topics that may still prove emotionally charged, like political issues.

For me, a starting point can be something as simple as naming a passing thought, a bodily sensation, or a random observation – saying it out loud not because it’s deep or insightful, but simply because it’s true in that moment. In that sense, you could say it’s a form of immediacy. Silence is fine too, of course – this isn’t a relentless thing, nor is it put upon, it’s just if I have something that I feel like sharing (and it feels appropriate),then I’ll share it.

In a traditional therapy room, immediacy is often framed in terms of emotional honesty within the therapeutic relationship – particularly on the part of the therapist. What’s going on internally always has to be weighed against whether it’s ultimately in the client’s best interests to share. The same is true in the crisis house, but the boundary lines around what we do and don’t share are different.

This kind of conversation is naturally stream-of-consciousness and organic. It might start with a staff member teasing a colleague for wearing odd socks (bantering with guests is more of a judgment call but for some, banter is absolutely their vibe), which turns into a light-hearted debate about whether matching socks actually matter. That broadens into a chat about ‘rules’ that exist for no logical reason, until someone casually admits to using shower gel to wash their hair (cue outrage). From there, it’s saving money on shampoo by being bald, then saving money more broadly, then how cheap things used to be, 1p sweets from the newsagent, old magazines that don’t exist any more – and then, somehow, an extended chat about Brookside… and on it goes.

One of my favourite recent moments came when someone claimed that all crisps in the UK have a sell-by date on a Saturday. This led to four of us rooting through every packet in the house to check. They did, indeed, all expire on a Saturday.

I’m lucky to work with such empathic, genuine colleagues who do incredible work. As skilled as people are in the standard therapeutic stuff though, we have some genuinely world-class athletes when it comes to talking shit; true titans of relational drivel.

It’s difficult to predict or ‘manualise’ from an operational perspective how the space is likely to work on any particular day, and in many ways it is the intuitive in-the-moment basis of it that can make it feel genuine.

The House Vibe

Compared to therapy, there’s a certain lateralness in the support we offer, which took me a little while to get used to. I could work a 10-hour shift and be with the same few people the whole time, and this could include chatting in the communal areas for a few hours, discussing real stuff (i.e. their crisis) in private, and then immediately after basically offering them a therapy session, we are chopping carrots together in preparation for a Sunday roast they want to make for the house.

In standard therapy, it’s usually just you and the client, and they rarely see you interacting with others. I feel that guests in the crisis house see more of me in many ways than my therapy clients do – not because I’m less congruent in therapy, but because the dynamics in the house are more layered and complex. Navigating them draws more of me out.

For example, therapy clients don’t see my reaction to losing at Rummikub (or, occasionally, winning), struggling with a jigsaw, or the kind of dance-walking I do when I’m wandering through the house and a song I like comes on the radio. I am worried that writing about it like this makes it seem like I’m a little too aware of it, as though it’s all a rouse or an elaborate technique. The vital part of the whole thing though, as far as I’m concerned, that I’m kind of just existing in the space as a human being.

Therapeutic Conditions Beyond the Therapy Room

There isn’t much room for the therapist talking shit during a straightforward therapy session – at least, not according to the therapist. Clients might say otherwise.

It is vital to our space though. In the midst of a potentially life-changing mental health crisis, people need to talk about something else – anything else – at least some of the time. Many crisis workers are excellent at their jobs, but if you are only visiting someone for an hour to talk about their crisis, you are likely to only relate to them in that way.

However, many benefit from being seen and heard, at least for some of the time in their lives, in terms other than their crisis. When the relentless background noise in your head is weighing up whether or not to end your life and you’ve done all the talking about it that you can withstand for the time being, shifting focus to anything else can offer some respite. This is possibly only possible to offer as part of a 24/7 service, and in a context in which they know that we can talk about the ‘real stuff’ when they want to. The experience of existing outside the crisis though, even briefly, can be vital in my opinion. In moments when someone’s thoughts are narrowing tightly, some kind of low-stakes exchange can quietly open a small space for relief, an offering that other things exist.

I feel the often overlooked but foundational therapeutic condition of psychological contact is central here. Through these conversations, we gain insight into each other – the guest into us and how we work, and us into them too. We humanise ourselves to one another in a way that I believe can be more difficult in the more linear form of talking therapy. This, in turn, feeds nicely into our ability to offer a space for them to talk about their crisis when we do need to. From this angle, you could say that talking shit is a form of contact work.

While Rogers never spoke specifically about this kind of interaction as far as I am aware, it does fit neatly within the person-centred framework. To the extent that there is genuine psychological contact, there is scope for a helpful relationship, even if circumstances might limit what can be explored directly. The difference is not that therapy space offers something that fundamentally cannot be offered anywhere else, but rather a particularly focused and intentional space for these same conditions to be experienced. To a more limited extent, they can be offered anywhere.

Final thoughts

I’m aware of the stereotype in therapeutic and academic circles of dressing up common-sense insights in jargon and analysis. In this case, the simple truth is that spending time talking about day-to-day things in an attentive, affirming, and genuine environment is good for you. When I put it like that, I’m wondering why I’ve even bothered to write this at all. As a service though, it offers an interesting approach.

I feel self-conscious writing about something that is at its core just free-flowing, friendly conversation – the kind that you might have with friends, if you are lucky. Even with friends though, how often do we as adults meet up to do nothing-in-particular together? As a child I remember meeting up with friends with no plan whatsoever on a regular basis, but I feel adult relationships tend to be more purpose-driven. I think something about how we experience the immediate moment alongside each other is lost in that.

In her book ‘Don’t Talk About Politics’, Sarah Stein Lubrano talks about how the building blocks of our social lives have fundamentally shifted in the last few decades – put simply, people have less friends and spend less time with friends than ever before.

Similarly, when Esther Rantzen launched The Silver Line Helpline to tackle loneliness in older people, she captured the problem with a memorable line: “I have plenty of people to do something with, but nobody to do nothing with.” Alongside the interventions more standardly regarded as ‘therapeutic’, we’re also able to offer something of this more subtle kind of kind of space.

But anyway, this is my contribution to counselling theory: talking shit. I would not be the first to be known for it, but perhaps I would be the first to be known for it deliberately.