Mental Health First Aid

It was early 2020 when I signed up for Mental Health First Aid training. At the time, I didn’t really know why – only that something inside me said you need this. I wasn’t in a formal role that required it. It wasn’t about ticking a box. I just had a sense that this was the next step. That I needed to better understand what people were carrying – what I had been carrying – and how to support others through it.

By this point, I’d started to shift. The pub was gone. The Reiki had started to take root. I’d been stripping away the noise for over a year, but I was still unravelling the layers of who I thought I was. The idea of doing a mental health course made sense. Not as a career move. As a human move.

I remember arriving that first morning and looking around the room. It was one of those community centre setups – white walls, bad coffee, laminated name tags. A group of people, all strangers, drawn together by something we probably couldn’t name yet. You could feel the discomfort. We were all here for something vulnerable, but none of us quite knew how to say that out loud.

The course content was solid – informative, evidence-based, practical. But what hit me wasn’t the slides or the stats. It was the moments in between. The silences after a tough conversation. The realisation that mental health struggles don’t always look like crisis. Sometimes they look like showing up to work. Smiling at the school gates. Pouring a pint.

It reminded me of myself, not that long ago.

There were stories shared in that room that stayed with me. Things people had lived through. Things they were still living through. And I started to see that “support” didn’t mean having the right answer. It meant being there. Listening without fixing. Not recoiling from discomfort.

One thing that stuck with me from that training was the language around holding space – not crowding someone, not rushing to the solution, just sitting beside them. That idea wasn’t part of the world I came from. Operations. Fixing. Getting it sorted. But this was different. This was presence.

Around the same time, I was swimming in the sea, not a lot, but living on an island, that’s just part of the rhythm of life – especially in winter. I loved it. Especially when it was cold. I didn’t know why at the time, but it gave me something. A kind of clarity. A moment where everything else fell away. No phones. No plans. Just breath and body and water.

Only now can I look back and see the link.

I was learning how to be still in discomfort.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this training – the course, the sea swims, the space I was beginning to make in my life – would end up helping me more than I could have imagined. When my daughter began to struggle with her own mental health, it didn’t give me all the answers. But it gave me a frame. A starting point. A sense of how to walk beside someone, rather than trying to drag them to safety.

That’s what this course gave me. Not expert status. Not solutions. Just the beginnings of a different kind of strength – the kind that doesn’t need to fix everything.

The kind that stays.