Most people’s experience of community “help” is actually unhelpful—advice-giving, fixing, or trying to make people feel better. Joe argues this happens because the helpers don’t want to feel their own discomfort: “I don’t want to feel the pain of the death of your child, so I’m gonna say ‘feel better’ to you.”
A healthy community instead practices non-judgmental witnessing. At the grief ceremony Joe describes, the container was explicitly set: no judging, no trying to make anyone feel better, just accepting people for how they feel. When the grieving wife saw others actually feeling their own grief alongside her—rather than asking “are you okay?”—she immediately recognized safety.
“What I want is a place where I can be loved for who I am, where I’m at in this moment.”
Signs of a healthy community include: vulnerability top to bottom, emotional fluidity, transparency, no us-versus-them, no obligation, no performance required, healthy boundaries, and no gossip. The absence of these qualities is why most people have experienced community as stifling rather than nourishing.
Related Concepts
- Individual health is tied to community health
- Holding space requires staying in yourself
- How we listen shapes what we hear
- The loneliness epidemic stems from never seeing healthy community modeled