Despite what the carollers and the brightly-decorated shopping centres might have you believe, Christmas isn’t piles of gifts, indulgent meals and family celebrations for everyone.
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Long-time Lifeline volunteer Jeanie Bruce knows this better than most.
“I recently took a call from a lady in her 70s, and she’s convinced that her family doesn’t love her. She’s not spending Christmas with anyone, no one’s bothered to invite her to a meal,” she says.
“We probably all have a relative we don’t like, but do we have to tell them that? They always do what they always do, so why do we always get upset about it?”
It might not be a long drive from Christmas lunch to the Lifeline phone rooms in Canberra, but Ms Bruce says it can be a long way removed from the traditional joy of sharing the day with family and friends. That doesn’t stop her volunteering to help out every year she can to work on Christmas Day.
And it doesn’t make the day any less special for Ms Bruce, who has been a telephone crisis support volunteer for more than 10 years.
“I think people who do volunteer, who do either the phones or whether you’re helping with the Christmas dinner or delivering hampers it’s all about just a little bit of giving back to the community in whatever way you can. So to be in the phone rooms at Christmas is one of the better shifts,” she says.
“It’s actually really, really good. It’s a good day to be on shift because you get a mixture of calls. You get the challenging calls, and you really feel you’ve made a difference to someone by being there when they are in a really dire place, and it’s really satisfying to be able to help them or help a little bit.
“You get quite a few people ringing up to say thank you, and that’s nice. And they say thank you for being there on Christmas Day, so they actually recognise what you’re doing and that’s lovely.”
The Christmas period is generally acknowledged to be one of the busiest of the year for organisations like Lifeline who provide support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for those in need. Ms Bruce says it’s a time when all of life’s pressures come to a point, and then we add Christmas, relationships, family, and finances in to the mix.
“If you think about it, life’s challenging all year round … Christmas is just like that extra layer on top of life that adds a little bit more stress,” she says.
“Christmas Day is a really long day for some people. And if by making a phone call to Lifeline it just helps them get through, well that’s a really good thing. Families are hard, and putting us in this kind of false environment that we’re not in any other day of the year puts us under all that extra pressure.”
Ms Bruce says the gamut of calls on Christmas Day runs from the lonely souls who need a listening ear through to those right on the edge and considering giving up on life.
“We’re trained to ask people if they’re thinking of suicide, and that’s not an easy question to ask in our society. A lot of people think that’s very confronting, or if you ask about suicide you’re planting an idea in someone’s head and that’s so not true, not true at all,” she says.
“In my experience people are more relieved if anything that you’ve asked the question about suicide; and if they are thinking about it then you’ve opened the door to talk about it. If they’re not thinking about it, then they’ll tell you.”
The phone rooms in Canberra have five to six lines available for calls, a total of about 300 volunteers, and according to Lifeline training manager Tracey Morgan there’s never a shortage of helpful hands for the Christmas shifts, when all the lines need to be filled.
“Every centre around Australia really does try to make sure that there are more people available because we know in our statistics that there is that spike, so there is that extra effort,” she says.
“I’m sure that it’s hard but as a centre we certainly have a lot of our volunteers putting their hands up saying ‘I’ll do that’ because they know there are people that are far less fortunate than them.
“These people have come away from their families, left their Christmas lunch, left their family at home, to come in and give and support people, which I just think is incredible and again a real tribute to the kind of people we have here at Lifeline and the amazing volunteerism we have here in Canberra.”
Ms Morgan says despite the seriousness of the material dealt with every minute of every day, the phone room in Canberra is actually a bright, uplifting space, decorated for the holiday season, and with a collegiate, friendly feel to it. There are break-out spaces, there’s tea, coffee, biscuits and chocolates on offer, and plenty of light and colour.
Volunteers come in for shifts that last a few hours, and are encouraged to take breaks between calls and speak out if they’re struggling to deal with any issues raised. Ms Morgan says the hardest thing is that whether it’s a volunteer’s first call or their thousandth, there’s no knowing what waits on the other end of the phone.
“You can never prepare yourself, even if you spoke to people who have been here for several years, the minute your heart doesn’t flutter when the phone rings is probably a sign that you need to have a bit of a break, because you can never can prepare yourself 100 per cent,” she says.
“At the end of the day we’re an ear, we’re there to listen and talk about how they feel and just hear them through whatever it is they need to talk about. I always say to our students to never underestimate what that can do for somebody, actually just listening to someone.
“It’s priceless to be able to offer that to somebody, particularly when they don’t have anybody else. Thank god they have Lifeline, because if they truly don’t have anybody else, what opportunity do they get?”
Back in the phone rooms, Ms Bruce says it was a real “a-ha” moment in her training when she realised it wasn’t a Lifeline volunteer’s job to give advice – how could they, when they only have the context of a call that usually lasts minutes?
“The counselling model is very much about listening and providing people with that space to talk. It’s non-judgemental. It’s not about giving advice and finding the answer, sometimes it’s just allowing people that space to talk about what their issues are,” she says.
This philosophy can come to fore at Christmas time, when calls come through like the one Ms Bruce took from that 70-year-old woman who was worried she’d be spending Christmas alone because her family told her that she was annoying and they didn’t want to spend time with her.
“I guess it’s that awful combination of too much food and alcohol and suddenly you think it’s ok to tell Uncle George what you think of him, not thinking what impact it has. That’s the extra sadness of Christmas is that we don’t take into account the impact of our words or our actions,” she says.
Services like Lifeline are an excellent “pressure valve” for those needing to let off a little steam to make it through the rest of the Christmas period. But Ms Bruce says people shouldn’t underestimate their own ability to help out those around them at this time of year – or anytime – as well.
“To ask that simple question, 'are you ok?' is huge. So many of our callers think nobody cares about them. And sometimes it is a courageous thing to ask someone else how they’re going, but to take that courage and ask that question, it’s really important and could make a big difference to someone,” she says.
“At Christmas time it gives people the opportunity to reflect on how lucky you are in your own life, and if you can do something that helps get someone else through the day I think that’s a real positive.”
