Don’t take it personally. . . even if she does
I was feeling down, called a crisis line. When I told her about how happy I was that a couple people had agreed to call other lines so they knew what it felt like, she told me that if I get people who are nasty not to take it personally.
She then spent the next 10 solid minutes without a break telling me about how overworked they are, about how understaffed they are, how they only have small cramped quarters, not enough funding and other lines push their callers on them. She told me about how her co-volunteers take things personally and get triggered by callers and then quit.
I even asked if she really meant that the caller should not take their personal call personally while call takers took calls not about them personally. But it didn’t faze her.
I wanted to tell her to call a line because she was ranting on my call, but she took all my time.
