Personal Safety Net: Friends who will catch you when you fall.
In tough times, it pays to have one, say experts
By CECELIA GOODNOW, P-I REPORTER

As the financial fat hit the fire on Wall Street, my friend Bev, a stalwart from college days, e-mailed her distress at watching 25 years of savings melt away.

"I am shaken," she wrote. "I keep hoping we'll blink and the financial devastation will be over."

Bev was into index funds, I was into real estate (equally screwed), and we brooded back and forth until Bev rallied and posted this uplifting thought: "If anything happens to one of us, the other will be there! We're in this together."

It was a reminder that rugged individualism has its limits in an insecure world. If you've been feeling anxious and antsy -- and who hasn't? -- reconnecting with trusted friends and family is more important than ever.

"I just see so many people who are anxious and afraid, and they want (the worries) to go away," said Seattle counselor and life coach John W. Gibson, who has long experience helping families through crises.

Given the tenor of the times, it's more important than ever that people cultivate relationships with friends, neighbors and family, who are the strongest threads in what Gibson and colleague Judy Pigott call our "personal safety net."

"The idea," Gibson said, "is that in these uncertain and changing times we'll all depend on each other more. And we'll all be able to deal more with unexpected and unwelcome adversity if we're part of a team."

He and Pigott define "personal safety net" as a web of plans, people and resources that can offer us support and peace of mind in good times and bad. At the most basic level, it includes the standard must-haves -- a will, power of attorney and emergency contacts.

But it's the personal connections that make a personal safety net such a rich resource. Think of it as a mutual-aid pact with the people you'd trust the most if your life goes splat.

"It's organized networking," said Pigott, an educator, activist and philanthropist who teamed with Gibson last year to write "Personal Safety Nets: Getting Ready for Life's Inevitable Changes and Challenges" (Classic Day Publishing, $29.95).

They have just published a companion workbook, "Personal Safety Nets Workbook: Get Ready, Get Started" ($17.95), which guides people through the steps of setting up and managing a safety net. How do you ask for help? How do you say no? How do you handle conflicts that can arise when friendsand family rally around a loved one in crisis?

Pigott, who teaches occasional safety-net workshops, said, "There is a 100 percent chance that there will be a change or a challenge in everyone's life where they could benefit from the help of others. But we don't always have the skills or strategy to recognize that."

Chad Lewis, who teaches business at Everett Community College, said the book helped him realize he sorely needed a backup plan.

"What occurred to me," Lewis said, "is, my God, what would happen if I was on my way to work and I ran into a telephone pole? What would happen if my wife, Patty, was incapacitated? We have a couple of shih tzus we adore. Seriously, what would happen to the shih tzus? Would the newspapers just keep piling up at the door?"

Galvanized into action, Lewis pulled together critical information, such as medical and banking contacts, and entrusted it to a few close friends and family members. They talked about what-ifs and agreed to call on one another if they needed help.

"It's this idea of thinking about it before it happens and creating a plan -- a contingency plan," Lewis said. "So few of us are prepared."

Gibson, who has incurable but slow-growing non-Hodgkins lymphoma, knows all too well how this works. He has two safety nets, a large community he calls the "outer circle" and a nucleus of his closest confidants, his "inner circle."

With a blood draw looming on his calendar, he was already anticipating how he'd respond if his prognosis worsened.

"If the results aren't good," he said, "then what I'll do is send out a letter to the inner circle saying I don't know what it means, and I may need someone to help me."

He also knows people can't just drop their lives for him, so he'll be sure to add: "Please don't do anything more than you can do."

Any reason is OK
Personal safety nets aren't just for life-or-death issues. Some people use them to arrange a crash pad for the next power failure. Others call on friends to be a "second set of ears" at medical appointments. One woman recruited a safety-net friend to act as her spokeswoman during a difficult divorce, sparing her the stress of issuing continual progress reports.

When divorce ended Dennis Noland's 27-year marriage, the Seattle man suffered in silence until he read the book and felt emboldened to approach his stepdaughters, his son-in-law, his pastor and a few friends for support.

"I think guys tend to be somewhat independent," he said, "and we're kind of prone not to share and reach out, and (we) try to take it all on our own. What it let me do is let people know I was struggling.

"It wasn't that they were giving advice, it wasn't that I was asking for advice. It was that people loved me and supported me and understood I was struggling. It changes the mindset -- that you're not alone."

Even good times can trigger the need for a support network. During an eight-month voyage to French Polynesia this year, Sally Bagshaw and her husband relied on a web of friends -- even friends of friends -- to keep the home fires burning until their return in September.                             

"Our condo was fine, all of our stuff was well cared for, our bank accounts were fine," said Bagshaw, retired chief of the civil division in the King County prosecutor's office.

Thanks to their extensive safety net, they even managed to score a replacement for an onboard fridge that broke down in the Marquesas, 25 days from their last landfall.

Help arrived in the form of a Seattle woman -- a friend of a friend -- who filled in at the last minute to join them on that leg of the voyage. Hearing of their plight, she bought them a 40-pound refrigerator they could plug into the boat's solar-powered DC outlet. She flew it in from Seattle and delivered it to the Bagshaws on a remote dock in Nukuhiva.

Making it official
Ideally, the people in your personal safety net aren't just fallbacks in time of need, they're the buddies who share the good times as well.

Andy Himes, who works for a nonprofit called Voices in Wartime, said it took him years to learn to open up, but he now has a wide circle of friends who enrich his life.

"Within the last 10 years or so," he said, "I have learned how to have deep, close personal friendships with other men and women. I'd say there are seven or eight people I have coffee with on a regular basis."

Himes has given copies of his personal, emergency information to a couple of those friends, and if anything happened, he said, "I would be able to pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, I need help.' "

Recently he was on the receiving end of an SOS from a woman in his safety net.

"The e-mail said, 'I've really got to talk to somebody -- my mother was just diagnosed with cancer,' " Himes said. "She actually sent that e-mail to four or five friends, all of whom have been having dinner together for years."

As for my friend Bev, there's no question she's got my back -- and I've got hers. That's what buddies do. Now we just need to build in a more formal layer of mutual preparedness.

As Himes said, "Almost everybody's got a circle of friends of some sort. But it's kind of important to put a name on it. We're not just friends, we're a personal safety net and that puts a responsibility on it."

GIVE AND TAKE
Tips from Judy Pigott, co-author of "Personal Safety Nets":

To begin building a personal safety net, list three people you can count on when the chips are down. "Talk to them. Let them know about each other and how to reach each other." In time your network will grow.

Don't assume your relatives will handle everything if you're incapacitated. "Family will do what they can, but you may not live close to family. You may not be close to family."

If you need to use your safety net, evaluate people's skills before divvying up tasks. "You don't want to ask the perennially late person to be the one to take you to appointments."

Don't let guilt and pride keep you from asking for help. "If no one will receive, no one can give. Ask for what you need. Have it be OK to say no."

If you can't accommodate a request for help, be honest and positive. "People should only give what they can give."

Check personalsafetynets.com in for details of classes and workshops, or to order the book and workbook.