In Chicago, birthplace of my master's degree and my seasonal affective extravaganza.
Today a few things happened that had something to do with something. One was that I ate at Harold's, which is not really worth talking about here but it's pretty much reason enough to love Chicago. Even if I sort of, ok, don't. Longer story.
One was that I had lunch with my old supervisor and talked about a thing about supervision we both find kind of interesting, to wit: the fact that it tends to have elements both of therapy and plain old administration, and nobody really talks about this balance much as it's happening.
I had two really me-centered internships in grad school. I wasn't asked to do tasks my supervisor wanted to get rid of. I was treated as someone who was there to learn, and whose training was a priority. I'm very grateful for this. One placement was at a residential HIV facility and the other at a community mental health center, famous at my school for being a great place to intern if you were really interested in psychodynamic therapy. (Yes, it's a long way from what I set out to do to my current tenure at the Lemonade Society, which I have just decided to call my current job. I suppose plenty of us don't do what we thought we were going to do.)
My supervision at the first place was a little like therapy, in that it was a regular hour a week where I could say whatever was on my mind, and was encouraged to. I think I was probably sort of overwhelming, because I had no idea about anything. I remember launching into some monolog about what I called "therapeutic affect" which was just my way of asking basically "should I try to talk like a shrink?" (Answer, courtesy of the next few years: no; you will simply end up doing it.)
Supervisor J had a terrifically helpful calm and certainty, which made for an excellent "holding environment" as they say in the biz. Some of it was just how he is. I know this now because we've been friends for years. Some of it was him seeing his role as, in part, that of the therapist. I feel certain this is true. The analytic therapist, I should say, as there was a lot of that kind of reflectiveness that, depending on how you feel about that kind of thing, gives you enough rope to hang yourself or teaches you negative capability in a really important way. Obviously I lean toward the latter view.
So then second year rolls around and I go to the community mental health center and am a therapist, hilariously. I don't think I was awful but I was certainly not a pro. I quickly learned that supervision can only do so much--in the actual therapy hour, you are in there on your own.
I'm not a kid person, by the way. I don't have an easy rapport with kids. It's something I accept and occasionally take a perverse pride in just because it's fun not to be on the same page as everyone once in a while. A woman in the seminar I had to take to supervise interns two years ago said something to me like "oh it's just all worth it when you get to work with the little ones, isn't it?" and I can't deny I kind of enjoyed saying "oh I try not to work with them, if at all possible."
So I really didn't want to work with kids, but the thing is good fucking luck with that if you're at a community mental health center. Supervisor S was pretty sensitive to my nervousness about it, but there was only so much she could do, and of course she rightly thought it would be important in a lot of ways to go ahead and work with them anyway. I ended up just having two all-year kid cases, and I think back on them fondly and wonder what the hell they're doing, but in the moment, a lot of it was terror. And it gets worse, because parents who put their kids in therapy are terrified too, and accordingly can be hard to deal with.
Wait, what was the point of this...
Well, S was pretty orthodox about some basic analytic stuff, sometimes in ways that drove me mad. Talking to her in supervision about kids in particular, I would say, oh, something like "what the hell do I do when she talks about cutting herself?" and S would tilt her head and say "huh...what comes to mind? what do you think?" And I get this technique, of course, but I also was not at a stage where I could use it. I knew nothing. I wanted some goddamn input.
Another thing she did that was really hard for me to deal with was the psycho-a tic of turning everything around. "[Client] seemed really angry with me," I would say, and again the head tilt, and "it sounds like someone was angry with someone, anyway." One time we sort of brought it into the room in a way neither of us knew what to do with. She told me it sounded like I had some hostility toward the parents of a child and I said "I'm wondering if you have some hostility toward them" and she seemed really thrown by this.
Suddenly I'm talking more about doubts I have about analytic stuff than supervision and whether it should be like a therapy hour, and I guess that's fine...
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Funny thing my client's mom said
"He'd give you the shoes off his back."
I should probably avoid making a regular "kids say the durndest things" deal of this, but I liked this one.
I should probably avoid making a regular "kids say the durndest things" deal of this, but I liked this one.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Community
Many thanks to Social Work Blogs for the link! Really, I think a blogospheric community for social work could be a great thing, not so much because the blogosphere is teh futurez as because the work we do is better when we have more people to toss it around with.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Part Whatever
I think I dropped the thread of the "My Horrible First Job" narrative long enough ago that it may have a sort of "Uncle Lenny Who Wants to Continue His Story Even Though You're Clearly Not Into It" quality now but hey.
One of the things about this job that I still can't figure out is that I am almost sure it was objectively horrible, but the people there all seemed...not exactly happy to be there, but not to get how bad it was. This may mean that I simply wasn't cut out for it. I get that. But I really don't think so.
How I figured it out was by trying to bond with them over how terrible it was, and getting nothing but a puzzled shrug in return. Even the ones who did hate it there didn't seem to be hell-bent on escape as I thought they should be. Take R, this Russian guy who participated in what I still insist was the clinic's policy of medicaid fraud, though some form of this idea would eventually get me in hot water, which I'm bound to write about later.
So R was a Russian, and Far the Fuckaway is filled with Russians. These are somehow not the same crew as you find down the Fuckaway Peninsula in Brighton Beach, where they have this whole community and their own restaurants and groceries and, it is known to be true, mob, really a whole Russian society in a concentrated neighborhood, bleeding out some into the borough.
Anecdotally, I'd say the ones in FtF were the ones who didn't make it, fell through one crack or another. This is a sample error, of course, because I only saw the ones who went to a Medicaid clinic for mental health, but the neighborhood just had a stench of surrender about it, and from what I know about it, again anecdotally but in any case from people other than myself, it just is not (or was not then) a place you would live if you could make anything else work.
So there were lots of them, and they surely had some combination of depression-the-brain-thing and depression-the-life-thing. But both are treated with meds, because circumstances are expensive to change, and you had all these middle-aged to old Russian people coming in for their meds once a month* and then, because of clinic policy, they'd come in once a week for counseling.
Now this is a good thing. If statistics are your thing, one hears there are studies showing therapy + meds works better than meds alone. I just happen to believe it as a matter of instinct, though I think the question is a bit more complicated, in that therapy helps certain people at certain times, and for instance you can do meds + therapy for a while with depression, and the combination may teach you how to deal better with depression such that you can just keep up your Zoloft or whatever (and maybe drop that too, or maybe not) and not go to therapy forever. Or for other instance, contrary instance, if you are a seriously mentally ill person who is being bombed with antipsychotics because they have to do something with you and people who are on three antipsychotics are usually too sluggish to be crazy in inconvenient ways anyone has to do anything about, therapy is some of the time going to be an exercise in futility.
This was silently acknowledged at Fuckaway. R saw the Russian clients, like twenty of them a day, and billed for full sessions, which is just absurd. I'll never understand how this wasn't caught during audits (ah, audits. The raison d'etre of Medicaid clinics in a way that demonstrates the assumed order of horse and cart these days, or perhaps I mean the agency of dog and tail in the wagging process.) My impression is he would talk to them, give them a little helpful advice maybe if they functioned on that level, and send them on their way.
Some cultures are more therapy cultures than others, if these generalizations ever mean much. Russians, I came to think, didn't see much point in talking about their problems. A lot of them were Jews, and you know, there's a certain culture of expecting and resigning oneself to unhappiness, see also under Freud, Siegmund and Mahler, Gustav. (I know. Mahler converted. But he was what my Grammy Hall would call a Real Jew, and no two ways about it.)
Every one of my own Russian clients--thankfully there weren't many, because I very quickly discovered the difference between language skills adequate to having an informal conversation or ordering a plate of vareniki and a glass of soviet mystery fruit beverage have very little to do with the kind of detailed, can't-skip-a-word-if-you-don't-know it verbal engagement of therapy--I say, every one of my own Russian clients resented our time together and made it clear they wanted their meds and on their way. Maybe this had nothing to do with Russianness. Maybe it had to do with my own poorly masked ambivalence or otherwise my iffy clinical skills. I can't know.
R lived in the Bronx, by the way. His commute was, doubtless, murderous. It's a mystery why he stayed there unless it's because the job was so demoralizing as to leave one in a state of defeated immobility. He was a sweet fellow, and you know what, I think he did quietly** share my bewilderment and disdain for the place. But I bet he's still there.
TBC I suppose...
*The psychiatrists were all Russians. I actually just called to see if one of them still works there because one day she read something inconsequential I wrote as a tiny piece of advocacy for a client and said to me "you won't be here long. You're too good for this place." It wasn't based on much, but it was the only kind thing anyone said to me in 10 months at that place and I think I may drop her a little note and say: I'm in a better place.
**Because I'm on Russia anyway, I thought of a line from Akhmatova: "there, everyone spoke in a whisper." Alright, my clinic wasn't exactly the lines to the prison in Leningrad, but there certainly was a culture of paranoid faked complacency. More on that soon, in fact.
One of the things about this job that I still can't figure out is that I am almost sure it was objectively horrible, but the people there all seemed...not exactly happy to be there, but not to get how bad it was. This may mean that I simply wasn't cut out for it. I get that. But I really don't think so.
How I figured it out was by trying to bond with them over how terrible it was, and getting nothing but a puzzled shrug in return. Even the ones who did hate it there didn't seem to be hell-bent on escape as I thought they should be. Take R, this Russian guy who participated in what I still insist was the clinic's policy of medicaid fraud, though some form of this idea would eventually get me in hot water, which I'm bound to write about later.
So R was a Russian, and Far the Fuckaway is filled with Russians. These are somehow not the same crew as you find down the Fuckaway Peninsula in Brighton Beach, where they have this whole community and their own restaurants and groceries and, it is known to be true, mob, really a whole Russian society in a concentrated neighborhood, bleeding out some into the borough.
Anecdotally, I'd say the ones in FtF were the ones who didn't make it, fell through one crack or another. This is a sample error, of course, because I only saw the ones who went to a Medicaid clinic for mental health, but the neighborhood just had a stench of surrender about it, and from what I know about it, again anecdotally but in any case from people other than myself, it just is not (or was not then) a place you would live if you could make anything else work.
So there were lots of them, and they surely had some combination of depression-the-brain-thing and depression-the-life-thing. But both are treated with meds, because circumstances are expensive to change, and you had all these middle-aged to old Russian people coming in for their meds once a month* and then, because of clinic policy, they'd come in once a week for counseling.
Now this is a good thing. If statistics are your thing, one hears there are studies showing therapy + meds works better than meds alone. I just happen to believe it as a matter of instinct, though I think the question is a bit more complicated, in that therapy helps certain people at certain times, and for instance you can do meds + therapy for a while with depression, and the combination may teach you how to deal better with depression such that you can just keep up your Zoloft or whatever (and maybe drop that too, or maybe not) and not go to therapy forever. Or for other instance, contrary instance, if you are a seriously mentally ill person who is being bombed with antipsychotics because they have to do something with you and people who are on three antipsychotics are usually too sluggish to be crazy in inconvenient ways anyone has to do anything about, therapy is some of the time going to be an exercise in futility.
This was silently acknowledged at Fuckaway. R saw the Russian clients, like twenty of them a day, and billed for full sessions, which is just absurd. I'll never understand how this wasn't caught during audits (ah, audits. The raison d'etre of Medicaid clinics in a way that demonstrates the assumed order of horse and cart these days, or perhaps I mean the agency of dog and tail in the wagging process.) My impression is he would talk to them, give them a little helpful advice maybe if they functioned on that level, and send them on their way.
Some cultures are more therapy cultures than others, if these generalizations ever mean much. Russians, I came to think, didn't see much point in talking about their problems. A lot of them were Jews, and you know, there's a certain culture of expecting and resigning oneself to unhappiness, see also under Freud, Siegmund and Mahler, Gustav. (I know. Mahler converted. But he was what my Grammy Hall would call a Real Jew, and no two ways about it.)
Every one of my own Russian clients--thankfully there weren't many, because I very quickly discovered the difference between language skills adequate to having an informal conversation or ordering a plate of vareniki and a glass of soviet mystery fruit beverage have very little to do with the kind of detailed, can't-skip-a-word-if-you-don't-know it verbal engagement of therapy--I say, every one of my own Russian clients resented our time together and made it clear they wanted their meds and on their way. Maybe this had nothing to do with Russianness. Maybe it had to do with my own poorly masked ambivalence or otherwise my iffy clinical skills. I can't know.
R lived in the Bronx, by the way. His commute was, doubtless, murderous. It's a mystery why he stayed there unless it's because the job was so demoralizing as to leave one in a state of defeated immobility. He was a sweet fellow, and you know what, I think he did quietly** share my bewilderment and disdain for the place. But I bet he's still there.
TBC I suppose...
*The psychiatrists were all Russians. I actually just called to see if one of them still works there because one day she read something inconsequential I wrote as a tiny piece of advocacy for a client and said to me "you won't be here long. You're too good for this place." It wasn't based on much, but it was the only kind thing anyone said to me in 10 months at that place and I think I may drop her a little note and say: I'm in a better place.
**Because I'm on Russia anyway, I thought of a line from Akhmatova: "there, everyone spoke in a whisper." Alright, my clinic wasn't exactly the lines to the prison in Leningrad, but there certainly was a culture of paranoid faked complacency. More on that soon, in fact.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Hate and the Public Defender
...was possibly going to be the title of my paper, once-before-referenced. It is on my mind today because I'm feeling fed up with certain clients, which is a problem.
It was about Winnicott, see. He wrote this essay which perhaps you have read or perhaps you have not, called "Hate and the Countertransference" or very possibly "Hate IN the Countertransference." I make that mistake about "Sex & the City" sometimes, too. My memory: it is not specific even about things I like and revisit often. One could google. One is not in the mood.
HATC (I am now amusing myself by thinking of it as akin to SATC. There should be a movie version with Kim Catrall. I can see her making some not-very-well-written double-entendre on "good enough mother" in the preview, and sort of putting it over anyway because in point of fact, her delivery is often very funny) is, in a nutshell, about how we ignore/suppress the feelings of rage our psychotic clients produce in us at our own peril. It's one of these things that seems pretty intuitive but it's well said and, in fact, lots of us do need to be told or reminded, whether that's because we've never thought about it or we have a first-year-of-MSW save-the-world thing we never got over.
I should reread it before talking about it in any even slightly public way. I loved it when I read it...Winnicott is big where I did my MSW, and was presented to us by a professor with a kind of infectious enthusiasm, but also it's so different in tone from a lot of analytic writing. Whimsical, almost, at times. And I think of that essay and a couple of other ones we read when I have to think clinically, which in this job isn't that often. I did a seminar for the interns, actually, essentially about clinical thinking for non-clinical workers, and talked about Winnicott. But I'm afraid I pass it on as a street evangelist, more zealous than well-versed.
The thing about it is that it isn't just good advice for dealing with psychotic* clients. I'm trying unsuccessfully to remember specifically why he focuses on psychotic clients, whether it's a matter of scale, or more a yes/no thing, where it's only psychotics due to some kind of, eh, I want to throw around words like projective and pre-Oedipal but anyway something about them that triggers intense, unhelpful transferential reactions in people charged with their care.
I had a client whose story, poorly as it reflects on me, I always end up telling. Mirandolina wanted an electric wheelchair. Needed it like the axe needs the turkey, if you'll forgive a gratuitous Barbara Stanwyck reference. Her doctor, who I worked with, told her she absolutely did not need one; indeed, did not need a wheelchair at all. I got to try and wrestle one out of Medicaid, which was like the setup for a Yakov Smirnoff routine**. To make it all more delightful, Mirandolina was either mildly personality disordered, or just kind of an asshole, depending on how you care to look at it.
One day when it was clear the wheelchair wasn't going to materilize as quickly as if one had ordered it from Zappo's, Mirandolina glared at me and asked me what were my damn qualifications anyway. I just answered her question as if she had asked out of curiosity, failed to engage/escalate, and it was ok. But as I was wheeling her out to her bus...
Well, I should pause to say that I understand obsessives really well, though I don't consider myself one of them. I think if I feared that I had to act on my thoughts, I'd never leave the house, because terrible impulses and images enter my consciousness quite a lot, as if my id had been installed a little too close to the light of day. I wonder sometimes how unusual this is.
But as I was wheeling Mirandolina to her bus, I imagined pushing her into the street. And then felt weird enough about it, the above paragraph notwithstanding, that I told my supervisor, who said basically you have to dig in and enjoy these fantasies because otherwise, in small, passive ways, you'll act out. A very wise piece of advice, this. We laughed about it and I promised that even though I spent two years and a ton of money becoming one of the good guys--social workers: we're like incredibly half-assed, incompetent superheros! who can't fly and stuff!!--I would let my mind murder my client.
This is all with me today because I think I must not be doing the thing I speak of lately. The reactions I have to my clients is off, at times, in a way that concerns me. When someone calls you and makes some hardly-even-trying excuse about not having called back a program for her daughter (such that her daughter may be a young, new-minted felon soon. Felonne? There should be a feminine form, preferably dainty just to make everything worse) you need to be able to contextualize. You need to get that she's fucking up for a reason.
If you don't, you do what I'm doing lately, which is wanting to sass back at people. The iconic statement I am always aware I could end up using at someone if I were really having the worst day is "Well here's an idea: why don't you stop breaking into cars?" It's a joke--I'd never say it, but it's the abstraction of possible fuckups.
The mother mentioned above did at one point react to my palpable irritability by saying "you don't care about us" at which point I had to do some silent, inner version of a few deep breaths. She had taken my tone or something I said as skepticism about her parenting or her concern for her daughter. It seems almost certain that this was a combination of her projected doubts and my improperly managed frustration. One person or the other is so rarely fully to blame.
What to do? Maybe it's about self-care and sleeping more. Maybe I should be back in supervision so I could have a partner in introspection and keep everything in perspective. Frankly, blogging helps a little, but I can't talk in much detail. And, not to beat this drum again, it's possible I need to do something else for a while.
*God forfend I should start talking about what psychotic means, though it's not the worst idea in this conversation. We'd be here well into the night. And by "we" I mean me because you'd be like "it's been grand but I'm going to go read something coherent now."
**I dunno what the punchline was. Me I guess.
It was about Winnicott, see. He wrote this essay which perhaps you have read or perhaps you have not, called "Hate and the Countertransference" or very possibly "Hate IN the Countertransference." I make that mistake about "Sex & the City" sometimes, too. My memory: it is not specific even about things I like and revisit often. One could google. One is not in the mood.
HATC (I am now amusing myself by thinking of it as akin to SATC. There should be a movie version with Kim Catrall. I can see her making some not-very-well-written double-entendre on "good enough mother" in the preview, and sort of putting it over anyway because in point of fact, her delivery is often very funny) is, in a nutshell, about how we ignore/suppress the feelings of rage our psychotic clients produce in us at our own peril. It's one of these things that seems pretty intuitive but it's well said and, in fact, lots of us do need to be told or reminded, whether that's because we've never thought about it or we have a first-year-of-MSW save-the-world thing we never got over.
I should reread it before talking about it in any even slightly public way. I loved it when I read it...Winnicott is big where I did my MSW, and was presented to us by a professor with a kind of infectious enthusiasm, but also it's so different in tone from a lot of analytic writing. Whimsical, almost, at times. And I think of that essay and a couple of other ones we read when I have to think clinically, which in this job isn't that often. I did a seminar for the interns, actually, essentially about clinical thinking for non-clinical workers, and talked about Winnicott. But I'm afraid I pass it on as a street evangelist, more zealous than well-versed.
The thing about it is that it isn't just good advice for dealing with psychotic* clients. I'm trying unsuccessfully to remember specifically why he focuses on psychotic clients, whether it's a matter of scale, or more a yes/no thing, where it's only psychotics due to some kind of, eh, I want to throw around words like projective and pre-Oedipal but anyway something about them that triggers intense, unhelpful transferential reactions in people charged with their care.
I had a client whose story, poorly as it reflects on me, I always end up telling. Mirandolina wanted an electric wheelchair. Needed it like the axe needs the turkey, if you'll forgive a gratuitous Barbara Stanwyck reference. Her doctor, who I worked with, told her she absolutely did not need one; indeed, did not need a wheelchair at all. I got to try and wrestle one out of Medicaid, which was like the setup for a Yakov Smirnoff routine**. To make it all more delightful, Mirandolina was either mildly personality disordered, or just kind of an asshole, depending on how you care to look at it.
One day when it was clear the wheelchair wasn't going to materilize as quickly as if one had ordered it from Zappo's, Mirandolina glared at me and asked me what were my damn qualifications anyway. I just answered her question as if she had asked out of curiosity, failed to engage/escalate, and it was ok. But as I was wheeling her out to her bus...
Well, I should pause to say that I understand obsessives really well, though I don't consider myself one of them. I think if I feared that I had to act on my thoughts, I'd never leave the house, because terrible impulses and images enter my consciousness quite a lot, as if my id had been installed a little too close to the light of day. I wonder sometimes how unusual this is.
But as I was wheeling Mirandolina to her bus, I imagined pushing her into the street. And then felt weird enough about it, the above paragraph notwithstanding, that I told my supervisor, who said basically you have to dig in and enjoy these fantasies because otherwise, in small, passive ways, you'll act out. A very wise piece of advice, this. We laughed about it and I promised that even though I spent two years and a ton of money becoming one of the good guys--social workers: we're like incredibly half-assed, incompetent superheros! who can't fly and stuff!!--I would let my mind murder my client.
This is all with me today because I think I must not be doing the thing I speak of lately. The reactions I have to my clients is off, at times, in a way that concerns me. When someone calls you and makes some hardly-even-trying excuse about not having called back a program for her daughter (such that her daughter may be a young, new-minted felon soon. Felonne? There should be a feminine form, preferably dainty just to make everything worse) you need to be able to contextualize. You need to get that she's fucking up for a reason.
If you don't, you do what I'm doing lately, which is wanting to sass back at people. The iconic statement I am always aware I could end up using at someone if I were really having the worst day is "Well here's an idea: why don't you stop breaking into cars?" It's a joke--I'd never say it, but it's the abstraction of possible fuckups.
The mother mentioned above did at one point react to my palpable irritability by saying "you don't care about us" at which point I had to do some silent, inner version of a few deep breaths. She had taken my tone or something I said as skepticism about her parenting or her concern for her daughter. It seems almost certain that this was a combination of her projected doubts and my improperly managed frustration. One person or the other is so rarely fully to blame.
What to do? Maybe it's about self-care and sleeping more. Maybe I should be back in supervision so I could have a partner in introspection and keep everything in perspective. Frankly, blogging helps a little, but I can't talk in much detail. And, not to beat this drum again, it's possible I need to do something else for a while.
*God forfend I should start talking about what psychotic means, though it's not the worst idea in this conversation. We'd be here well into the night. And by "we" I mean me because you'd be like "it's been grand but I'm going to go read something coherent now."
**I dunno what the punchline was. Me I guess.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Nobody puts Smearcase in a corner
Hi this is Franklin. How may I provide excellent sentencing advocacy for you today? Heh. I was just thinking about how rotten it would be if we had to do certain empty, ritualistic bullshit that constitutes the most petty of management's ways of hazing labor. Thanks for taking the time to interview with me today, Mr. Person. Have I provided you with an outstanding social work experience?
This has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.
Oh, the subject line. About that. I don't even remember that movie or know the context of the given utterance. I am just thinking today about how I've backed myself into a corner, and how the world of social work, like the larger working world, is too specialized or has too inflated a sense of specialization.
The thing is I have this great job I miiiight be getting pretty bored of. On days when the normal hours, ample time off, and humane work environment don't seem to cast as long a shadow as the monotony of institutionalized class warfare; I say, on days when parting ways with my mattress seems an inevitable path toward stepping into the street and knocking people's hats off, I look around and think: oh shit. Lhude sing goddamn, indeed.
Does this have sort of a lot of profanity* for a blog about social work?
Well so what I'm fumbling my way toward saying is: what the hell else is there to do out there? I've been at this or approximately this for four years. I've supervised interns for two years, but it's not the same as working as a supervisor. Nobody's going to hire me as an institutional shepherd, and rightly so.
I did clinical work (as I started to say many postings ago, and as I will continue saying at some point soon) for a while, but even if I went back to that...for reasons having something to do with New York State licensing that is a whole other kettle of bitter, regretful, occasionally furious fish, I can't make what you might consider a lateral move to a clinical job for someone 5-10 years out of school.
On the other hand, I can't go back to the job of a beginning clinic worker for quite a few reasons involving salary, temperament, authority, dignity &c. &c.
How do people figure this stuff out? Actually I know this one. People work in organizations where there's up to go, and here there is no up, so I'm left wondering what the next step would be in an organization that didn't have essentially one thin layer of social workers.
Some sort of administrative job is clearly the goal, not because it sounds fascinating (to be honest I don't even know what admin jobs entail for the most part) but because I have in some sense settled for a field that gets no respect, and I want to one day be the guy who gets the smallest lack of respect. I want to be more and do more, in the vaguest possible way.
This is not the stuff cover letters are made of.
I may be stuck now in the position, if you'll pardon me while this turns into kvetching, you're in if you ever try to get a job waiting tables. You cannot possibly learn to wait tables, you begin to understand after a preponderance of rejections, unless you have waited tables before. And you begin to wonderin if the people who are now waiting tables have simply always been waiting tables, since there is no logical starting point--it's just tables all the way down.
*"shit" is obscenity, not profanity. But you take my meaning.
This has nothing to do with what I'm writing about.
Oh, the subject line. About that. I don't even remember that movie or know the context of the given utterance. I am just thinking today about how I've backed myself into a corner, and how the world of social work, like the larger working world, is too specialized or has too inflated a sense of specialization.
The thing is I have this great job I miiiight be getting pretty bored of. On days when the normal hours, ample time off, and humane work environment don't seem to cast as long a shadow as the monotony of institutionalized class warfare; I say, on days when parting ways with my mattress seems an inevitable path toward stepping into the street and knocking people's hats off, I look around and think: oh shit. Lhude sing goddamn, indeed.
Does this have sort of a lot of profanity* for a blog about social work?
Well so what I'm fumbling my way toward saying is: what the hell else is there to do out there? I've been at this or approximately this for four years. I've supervised interns for two years, but it's not the same as working as a supervisor. Nobody's going to hire me as an institutional shepherd, and rightly so.
I did clinical work (as I started to say many postings ago, and as I will continue saying at some point soon) for a while, but even if I went back to that...for reasons having something to do with New York State licensing that is a whole other kettle of bitter, regretful, occasionally furious fish, I can't make what you might consider a lateral move to a clinical job for someone 5-10 years out of school.
On the other hand, I can't go back to the job of a beginning clinic worker for quite a few reasons involving salary, temperament, authority, dignity &c. &c.
How do people figure this stuff out? Actually I know this one. People work in organizations where there's up to go, and here there is no up, so I'm left wondering what the next step would be in an organization that didn't have essentially one thin layer of social workers.
Some sort of administrative job is clearly the goal, not because it sounds fascinating (to be honest I don't even know what admin jobs entail for the most part) but because I have in some sense settled for a field that gets no respect, and I want to one day be the guy who gets the smallest lack of respect. I want to be more and do more, in the vaguest possible way.
This is not the stuff cover letters are made of.
I may be stuck now in the position, if you'll pardon me while this turns into kvetching, you're in if you ever try to get a job waiting tables. You cannot possibly learn to wait tables, you begin to understand after a preponderance of rejections, unless you have waited tables before. And you begin to wonderin if the people who are now waiting tables have simply always been waiting tables, since there is no logical starting point--it's just tables all the way down.
*"shit" is obscenity, not profanity. But you take my meaning.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
You can take it with you. Just not most of it.
This was going to be what I posted about yesterday and then it wasn't. Now it looks like something of an afterthought, but it's still interesting to me so it's going to interest you too, dammit. Ok, or not.
So a thing about the Manhattan Detention Center, "The Tombs" to its friends, is that if you go there after work because you are a lazy nogoodnik and put it off all day, you can end up waiting in a creepy enclosed area as they fetch your client, daydreaming about how you would get out if there were a blackout. Oh, only me? Ok. As usual. This happens to me in spaces with big clanging doors (or in the case of The Tombs, lots of sliding doors. It's like Bartlett Sher designed the damn thing. Opera joke. Sorry.)
The other thing I do, perhaps to distract myself from the ol' neurotic fantasies, is read things on the wall if such there be. And last night I read this thing about the property that can accompany you from MDC (a county jail) to state facilities upstate if that particular luck is yours. "ONLY the following," says this sheet, and here's what:
1) Books
-Legal
-Religious
2) Religious articles
-Beads
-Kufi, yarmulke
-Religious medals on chains
-Prayer robe and guthra
-Prayer rug
-talit
-talit katan
-tefilin
3) Jewelry
-Watches
-Wedding bands
4) Legal Paperwork
5) Clothing
-Only the items worn when transported
No personal photos
No cigarettes
No toilet articles
No extra sneakers
Ok now I'm not completely sure why this struck me as quite so fraught, I say fraught with meaning. I'll venture this: my dad used to go out to a state prison and teach an English class, and a story he tells a lot is the one about watching new inmates get off the bus and seeing how terribly afraid they were at that moment. And I was just thinking how rotten it is, I guess, that you can't take a fucking photo of your husband/wife/partner/cat/cute niece who always says the funny thing/oldest friend who believes you'll be out of there soon/pony you had when you were a girl in Poland/house you grew up in/whatever helps you shut out realities such as peak oil, the cancelation of Friday Night Lights, and terms of incarceration.
But you can take your legal paperwork, which honestly won't do you much good if you're most people. (You'll take it to the law library and try to find things your attorney missed. You most likely won't.) And you can take your tefilin or your St. Christopher medallion for the happy reason that faith, rightly or wrongly invested, helps people survive the worst. And the not so happy reason that prisoners are easier to control if they think "this is bad, but at least I'm going to heaven later."
Also it's just interesting to see lists where someone tries to be exhaustive about examples of whatever so the kid in back can't raise his hand and say "yeah but what about my guthra?"
So a thing about the Manhattan Detention Center, "The Tombs" to its friends, is that if you go there after work because you are a lazy nogoodnik and put it off all day, you can end up waiting in a creepy enclosed area as they fetch your client, daydreaming about how you would get out if there were a blackout. Oh, only me? Ok. As usual. This happens to me in spaces with big clanging doors (or in the case of The Tombs, lots of sliding doors. It's like Bartlett Sher designed the damn thing. Opera joke. Sorry.)
The other thing I do, perhaps to distract myself from the ol' neurotic fantasies, is read things on the wall if such there be. And last night I read this thing about the property that can accompany you from MDC (a county jail) to state facilities upstate if that particular luck is yours. "ONLY the following," says this sheet, and here's what:
1) Books
-Legal
-Religious
2) Religious articles
-Beads
-Kufi, yarmulke
-Religious medals on chains
-Prayer robe and guthra
-Prayer rug
-talit
-talit katan
-tefilin
3) Jewelry
-Watches
-Wedding bands
4) Legal Paperwork
5) Clothing
-Only the items worn when transported
No personal photos
No cigarettes
No toilet articles
No extra sneakers
Ok now I'm not completely sure why this struck me as quite so fraught, I say fraught with meaning. I'll venture this: my dad used to go out to a state prison and teach an English class, and a story he tells a lot is the one about watching new inmates get off the bus and seeing how terribly afraid they were at that moment. And I was just thinking how rotten it is, I guess, that you can't take a fucking photo of your husband/wife/partner/cat/cute niece who always says the funny thing/oldest friend who believes you'll be out of there soon/pony you had when you were a girl in Poland/house you grew up in/whatever helps you shut out realities such as peak oil, the cancelation of Friday Night Lights, and terms of incarceration.
But you can take your legal paperwork, which honestly won't do you much good if you're most people. (You'll take it to the law library and try to find things your attorney missed. You most likely won't.) And you can take your tefilin or your St. Christopher medallion for the happy reason that faith, rightly or wrongly invested, helps people survive the worst. And the not so happy reason that prisoners are easier to control if they think "this is bad, but at least I'm going to heaven later."
Also it's just interesting to see lists where someone tries to be exhaustive about examples of whatever so the kid in back can't raise his hand and say "yeah but what about my guthra?"
Monday, May 3, 2010
What we talk about when we talk about compassion fatigue
It doesn't take that much energy to feel compassion for people, and it isn't a finite resource. That isn't the problem.
When I heard the term "compassion fatigue" in graduate school, I had a rare moment of living in the present. I filed it away and thought "when that happens, I'll deal with it." Oh, this isn't the thing I already talked about, by the way. It sounds like it's going to be the one about "the stories themselves aren't hard" but it's not. Variation on a theme mayhap.
What's exhausting and makes compassion (or even the ability to have people's stories penetrate through all the accreted formalist familiarity, come to speak of Jakobson) exhaustible is that you hear such a mix of compelling stories and, well, crap, that you begin to feel like the folks in the story who get all "yeah, yeah, we know this one: there's a wolf and it's going to fucking eat the sheep, you asshat."
This is a whole other topic: there are clients who, rightly or not, feel like they deserve our help more, because they seem to want it. So anyway if you see seven clients in a row who seem like anything you do will just sort of leave a soapy film of good intentions on their day and get washed off the next time they have the opportunity to commit larceny, you might do what I did which is to put off seeing someone who really wants help for like two weeks in which you could be writing them a good piece of advocacy.
To get there and to talk to him was to wonder if it's time to do something else for a while. I felt terrible. He gave what I like to refer to glibly as "good copy" which is to say he didn't tell me his story in stock phrases people use. You know these if your work is anything like mine. "Wrong place, wrong time." "Fell in with the wrong crowd." There are others I'll think of later. He also had gotten me a stack of medical records which eliminated one of the most numbing, I-am-in-a-Kafka-story moments of my job.
More importantly, though, he just didn't set off my bullshit detectors. I am sure they are sometimes calibrated wrong, and maybe he's a con man, and I don't mind that I'm sometimes going to make that mistake. But I feel reasonably certain, as certain as I get, that this guy wants to do something different and feels genuine regret about what got him where he is.
This was the guy I should have rushed to see. It's not important, because there's time, but it's dispiriting.
There's a little more to tell about tonight at the correctional facility lovingly known as The Tombs, but I'll post it tomorrow. The one thing that feels tackable-on is about doorknobbing, the process where a client (usually in therapy) asks a big question or makes a big reveal right as the session is over or a minute past over.
This was really bookending. At the beginning of the session, the guy tells me "I'm a man of faith. I thought about not coming down but then I thought, maybe it's that social worker, and I know you're here to help me get into a program. God is good." Or words to that effect. I don't begrudge people this, though I think it's not a good way to look at things, this "God capriciously chooses moments to make good things happen" theology, as featured on reality shows &c. I just ignore it and put it down to people getting through the day.*
But so the second bookend, it took me off guard. Very end of the interview, guard unlocking the door almost, he says "do you believe in god?" and I thought [sorry, this is going on really long for an afterthought]: I have a few options.
1) Do the old therapist's trick and say some formulaic crap along the lines of "It seems like you're curious about me. Do you imagine I believe in god?" This little act of emotional judo is supposed to facilitate transference, I guess, but I think it's at least half motivated by a wish for privacy and a need to arrange for it without asking for it directly. In any case, facilitating transference is 1a) useless and 1b) impossible when you meet with someone once or twice.
2) Do the old therapist's trick and say something a little more honestly evasive to the tune of "I can see why you'd be curious, but I don't think it's something that really relevant to what we're doing." Actually that one's not a trick. I respect that one.
3) Say "No, I don't" because the guy is an adult who has asked a question and there's little to be gained through options 1 and 2, and my need for people to know there are atheists in the world and sometimes they're the people who help you get out of jail (because religion may purport to be the source of all good intent, but it ain't) is irrelevant, and not valid to bring up on my own, but he asked. I didn't put it on my business card or anything, but now, if things work as they should, a devout person will know that non-believers are sometimes in your corner, failing to be purely evil.
So that's what I did, as you will have guessed.
*and, because I'm not a complete asshole, I leave room for the possibility I'm wrong about all of it. Just I don't think so is all.
Next up: the thing I saw on the wall. Oh, don't worry. It isn't a giant roach or anything.
When I heard the term "compassion fatigue" in graduate school, I had a rare moment of living in the present. I filed it away and thought "when that happens, I'll deal with it." Oh, this isn't the thing I already talked about, by the way. It sounds like it's going to be the one about "the stories themselves aren't hard" but it's not. Variation on a theme mayhap.
What's exhausting and makes compassion (or even the ability to have people's stories penetrate through all the accreted formalist familiarity, come to speak of Jakobson) exhaustible is that you hear such a mix of compelling stories and, well, crap, that you begin to feel like the folks in the story who get all "yeah, yeah, we know this one: there's a wolf and it's going to fucking eat the sheep, you asshat."
This is a whole other topic: there are clients who, rightly or not, feel like they deserve our help more, because they seem to want it. So anyway if you see seven clients in a row who seem like anything you do will just sort of leave a soapy film of good intentions on their day and get washed off the next time they have the opportunity to commit larceny, you might do what I did which is to put off seeing someone who really wants help for like two weeks in which you could be writing them a good piece of advocacy.
To get there and to talk to him was to wonder if it's time to do something else for a while. I felt terrible. He gave what I like to refer to glibly as "good copy" which is to say he didn't tell me his story in stock phrases people use. You know these if your work is anything like mine. "Wrong place, wrong time." "Fell in with the wrong crowd." There are others I'll think of later. He also had gotten me a stack of medical records which eliminated one of the most numbing, I-am-in-a-Kafka-story moments of my job.
More importantly, though, he just didn't set off my bullshit detectors. I am sure they are sometimes calibrated wrong, and maybe he's a con man, and I don't mind that I'm sometimes going to make that mistake. But I feel reasonably certain, as certain as I get, that this guy wants to do something different and feels genuine regret about what got him where he is.
This was the guy I should have rushed to see. It's not important, because there's time, but it's dispiriting.
There's a little more to tell about tonight at the correctional facility lovingly known as The Tombs, but I'll post it tomorrow. The one thing that feels tackable-on is about doorknobbing, the process where a client (usually in therapy) asks a big question or makes a big reveal right as the session is over or a minute past over.
This was really bookending. At the beginning of the session, the guy tells me "I'm a man of faith. I thought about not coming down but then I thought, maybe it's that social worker, and I know you're here to help me get into a program. God is good." Or words to that effect. I don't begrudge people this, though I think it's not a good way to look at things, this "God capriciously chooses moments to make good things happen" theology, as featured on reality shows &c. I just ignore it and put it down to people getting through the day.*
But so the second bookend, it took me off guard. Very end of the interview, guard unlocking the door almost, he says "do you believe in god?" and I thought [sorry, this is going on really long for an afterthought]: I have a few options.
1) Do the old therapist's trick and say some formulaic crap along the lines of "It seems like you're curious about me. Do you imagine I believe in god?" This little act of emotional judo is supposed to facilitate transference, I guess, but I think it's at least half motivated by a wish for privacy and a need to arrange for it without asking for it directly. In any case, facilitating transference is 1a) useless and 1b) impossible when you meet with someone once or twice.
2) Do the old therapist's trick and say something a little more honestly evasive to the tune of "I can see why you'd be curious, but I don't think it's something that really relevant to what we're doing." Actually that one's not a trick. I respect that one.
3) Say "No, I don't" because the guy is an adult who has asked a question and there's little to be gained through options 1 and 2, and my need for people to know there are atheists in the world and sometimes they're the people who help you get out of jail (because religion may purport to be the source of all good intent, but it ain't) is irrelevant, and not valid to bring up on my own, but he asked. I didn't put it on my business card or anything, but now, if things work as they should, a devout person will know that non-believers are sometimes in your corner, failing to be purely evil.
So that's what I did, as you will have guessed.
*and, because I'm not a complete asshole, I leave room for the possibility I'm wrong about all of it. Just I don't think so is all.
Next up: the thing I saw on the wall. Oh, don't worry. It isn't a giant roach or anything.
A few words about a few words
This is a little thing I do that seems probably unimportant: I try to use more or less the same words my clients use. If some kid tells me he smokes weed, I don't later ask about marijuana or pot, though my natural default is pot. If he tells me his mother passed when he was 12, I don't ask how she died but how she passed, though that particular expression doesn't quite taste right, as an old boyfriend of mine used to say about idiomatic/unidiomatic uses of certain phrases.
[Oh this isn't exactly relevant but I think it's interesting so I'm putting it in brackets of optional disregarding: a phrase I don't think I'd end up using back at anyone but that I found sort of unexpected lately is something that I would express as "that made him really sad" comes out, among some of my clients, as "he got really sad behind that." Huh! I love these little verbal fillips in the not very interesting way one loves a lilac or a shade of green: there isn't much to tell about it.]
I think about the limitations of this from time to time. I am emphatically not into trying to talk to kids in some way that implies I'm anything but their dorky middle-aged social worker. I try to be informal because formality in this case is a defense that doesn't make anyone's day easier, and I try to present as eager to understand (as opposed to already in the position of understanding), but I resolutely do not try to pretend to speak their language. I understand why some people in my position do it. Adolescents, maybe especially certain socioeconomic demographics of adolescents that I end up talking to, are like George in A Room with a View: you're lucky to get so much as a yes or no out of them.
At some point, language isn't yours to borrow, and it's condesceding to do so, and probably it wouldn't endear you to anyone to do it. As an extreme example, I hear kids every day on the subway dropping what I'm told is now called the N-bomb at a rate of once a sentence, basically using it as a pronoun. It's the obvious example of insider-outsider language, not even mine to disapprove though it jolts me every time.
There's no thesis here. I once thought about writing a paper about using clients' words. This fellow who lived in the residential facility where I did my first-year internship would use this really funny, maybe deliberately formulaic language and I found myself wondering about the purpose it served for him. I'm tempted to quote an example or two, as I'm fairly sure I read his obituary years later and it feels harmless, but I'm not sure.
Anyway I didn't write the paper because as it turned out I'm not really interested in conferences and the like. Sometimes, though, I still think about R and [oh, fuck it] "Chilicothe, Ohio" (an example he'd use when listing where people might live who were ignorant about HIV) and Winnicott's writing about transitional experience, but also Roman Jakobson writing about words in an almost quaintly systematic way in an essay I think was called "Functions of Language."
I was a linguist once, you see. Or wanted to be.
[Oh this isn't exactly relevant but I think it's interesting so I'm putting it in brackets of optional disregarding: a phrase I don't think I'd end up using back at anyone but that I found sort of unexpected lately is something that I would express as "that made him really sad" comes out, among some of my clients, as "he got really sad behind that." Huh! I love these little verbal fillips in the not very interesting way one loves a lilac or a shade of green: there isn't much to tell about it.]
I think about the limitations of this from time to time. I am emphatically not into trying to talk to kids in some way that implies I'm anything but their dorky middle-aged social worker. I try to be informal because formality in this case is a defense that doesn't make anyone's day easier, and I try to present as eager to understand (as opposed to already in the position of understanding), but I resolutely do not try to pretend to speak their language. I understand why some people in my position do it. Adolescents, maybe especially certain socioeconomic demographics of adolescents that I end up talking to, are like George in A Room with a View: you're lucky to get so much as a yes or no out of them.
At some point, language isn't yours to borrow, and it's condesceding to do so, and probably it wouldn't endear you to anyone to do it. As an extreme example, I hear kids every day on the subway dropping what I'm told is now called the N-bomb at a rate of once a sentence, basically using it as a pronoun. It's the obvious example of insider-outsider language, not even mine to disapprove though it jolts me every time.
There's no thesis here. I once thought about writing a paper about using clients' words. This fellow who lived in the residential facility where I did my first-year internship would use this really funny, maybe deliberately formulaic language and I found myself wondering about the purpose it served for him. I'm tempted to quote an example or two, as I'm fairly sure I read his obituary years later and it feels harmless, but I'm not sure.
Anyway I didn't write the paper because as it turned out I'm not really interested in conferences and the like. Sometimes, though, I still think about R and [oh, fuck it] "Chilicothe, Ohio" (an example he'd use when listing where people might live who were ignorant about HIV) and Winnicott's writing about transitional experience, but also Roman Jakobson writing about words in an almost quaintly systematic way in an essay I think was called "Functions of Language."
I was a linguist once, you see. Or wanted to be.
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