Family Forum, a confidential support group for people facing difficult times in their lives, invited The Royal Gazette to sit in on its latest meeting for a look at how its members share their experiences.

One person speaks at a time and members leave time for others to speak, and hold what they hear in confidence. A key rule of the group is “trust the process”.

Run since 2009 by Family Centre, the group meets once a month. Last Wednesday night, about 25 people met in a room at Family Centre’s offices on Point Finger Road, in Paget, for a gathering led by Martha Dismont, executive director of the charity.

Ms Dismont urges members to be open to one another’s personal truths as those who wish to speak are heard by the others.

“I come to this group because I feel safe in this space,” one woman said. “This is a confidential space. It’s a progressive group — this family forum is my network of support. We come not only with our baggage, but with our gifts: the talents that we have.”

Members have been left unnamed in this article to protect their privacy.

Describing herself as “an advocate for poor people”, a woman said she had been trying to induce a disabled young man to join.

“He’s marginalised,” she said. “He’s feeling very angry and violent. It’s the only way he can get heard.”

As someone who eats with others at soup kitchens, she said the staff at government-run social assistance departments “need to get more human”. She said: “The people that help us poor people need to treat us with more dignity.”

A woman next to her added: “Every month, this is like a breath of life. It’s scary to me how it’s grown from ten people to 40 — I wonder if we can keep up with it, if we’ll keep what we’ve got as a group. How do we keep our core intimacy and still grow?”

Members both old and young described a sense of not fitting in with society at large, or of being unable to find a place for themselves, which the atmosphere of sharing and respect in Family Forum helped to mitigate.

Several attendees spoke of the recent confrontation between the unions and the Bermuda Government over furlough days, with one man stating that the Island needed “more mature leadership”.

He said: “They could have approached all that differently. But the way they talk to each other, it’s vindictive. It hurts the home, the family, us as Bermudians. They need to think about Bermuda more.”

Saying that he came from a Black Muslim background, one man said he believed that black people fell victim to a culture of self-hatred. “You don’t see other groups acting like we do,” he said. “It’s because we don’t love each other.”

A woman across the room agreed. “How come we can work for everyone else and we can’t work together?” she said.

A common theme in the group discussion was the need to avoid blaming others and to take ownership of their own problems.

With people from diverse backgrounds attending, members of Family Forum try to assist one another.

“One thing I feel the community of Bermuda as a whole needs to sit down and realise is that we need public forums where the youth are educated,” said a young man who was new to the group.

“I don’t know of anything like that in Bermuda. I was born in the States, but my whole family’s in Bermuda. When you’re a kid in America, you have to participate in the DARE programme, for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. We need something like that here. I had my little brother here coming to me asking about cannabis. I told him he’s an athlete, so he can’t be doing that, but he has this challenge being around his friends. He knew what it was and knew where to find it, but didn’t know about the long-term effects.”

A Family Centre staff member said: “Right in this room, there are representatives from the group Pride. You can make contact with them, so they can make contact with your brother. We are a resource to link people to the services that they need.”

Another man commented: “I come here because of the unconditional love it provides to everybody here; it’s contagious.”

Several sounded the warning over the need to pay attention to the Island’s young men.

“They say that Bermuda’s on top of a volcano, but there’s another volcano, and that’s all the people that don’t fit,” one man said. “If people in Bermuda are not prepared to look at what’s happening, then things are going to end up happening.”

Another man said: “You all can talk about business and the America’s Cup, but if we don’t do something with our young men, and they start going on a rampage, then we’re going to have real trouble.

“Bermuda will be looked at as an unstable place. The only thing keeping us afloat is international business and they’re going to be out of here.”

Although some expressed uncertainty over the growth of Family Forum, Ms Dismont said the programme would always be able to accommodate those who need it.

“There are some who move on in time, effectively graduating from the group,” she said. A woman in the group added: “We are growing. I look at it and think, ‘My gracious, what’s going to happen? We are going to get better’.”