Bread for
the Road
Free, for anyone who accompanies

Companion to The Wounded Companion

Being finished. Sent the day it is ready.

The Wounded Companion Handbook

For the person a wounded person turns to. Not a course and not a manual of technique: the working practices of walking beside someone, gathered for parish volunteers, prayer teams, catechists, small group leaders and anyone who has ever been the one someone told.

A linen cloth folded in four and spread on a wooden table, the creases meeting as a cross

Most people who accompany the wounded were never trained to. They were simply the one who was there, and then the one who was there again. The Handbook is written for them. It assumes goodwill and no qualification, and it tries to hand over the things that took me twenty years and a fair number of mistakes to learn: how to stay without taking over, how to know your limits before you reach them, how to hand someone on to a doctor or a counsellor without it feeling like abandonment, and how to keep yourself whole enough to be there next time.

It keeps every safety truth exact. Confidentiality has limits. Care is not replaced by prayer. Some things must be reported. But it says them in a companion’s voice rather than a policy’s, because a guardrail can breathe life too.

It is free because it should be. Put your address below and it will be sent to you the day it is ready. You will be on the letters list as well, and one link at the foot of any letter takes you off it.

Once a month. No selling your address, no tricks to keep you. One link to leave, in every letter.

The Handbook stands on its own; you do not need the main book to use it. The Wounded Companion is the fuller account of why we accompany and what it does to the one who does it.