What is Lived/ Living Experience & Peer Support?

Someone with a lived/ living experience is someone who has direct experience of something. For example, someone with lived/ living experience of bipolar means the person has a diagnosis of bipolar. Someone with lived/ living experience of disability is someone who has a disability. The slash to include ‘living’ alongside ‘lived‘ is to provide acknowledgement that often, the subject of lived experience is something that stays with the person. Someone lives with disability- it doesn’t go away, therefore past tense isn’t necessarily applicable.

Similarly, peer support is a relatively new type of support provided by trained peer professionals who also have a lived/ living experience. Peer support sees these professionals’ work informed, to an extent, by the lived/ living experience of individual peer supporters and connect on the basis of mutuality and shared understanding, among other things. That means a peer is more likely to have a degree of inherent knowing about what you might be generally experiencing, because they’ve been there too- support from others who understand, because we’ve been there too. Having said that, it should be noted that a peer supporter will not have the exact same experiences as you, but they will have some lived/living experience they are trained to connect on the basis of, and possibly some similar experiences.  

Peer support operates on the principles of:

• safety

• trust

• CHIME

  • Connection

  • Hope & Optimism

  • Identity

  • Meaning

  • Empowerment

• Respect

• Mutuality

• Possibility