This space not quite abandoned

There's work stuff that is asking to be blug, and the nonSW blog seems like the wrong place so if this mic is still on...

I'm always a little curious if other social workers get, oh what is it called, Impostor Syndrome? I was talking about this phenom with someone who recently began law school at a Very Prestigious University and apparently people get there and feel all This Is A Giant Mistake and probably have dreams where they show up to class without their head or whatever. It's dumb to think of this happening in social work because, for reasons that are another post, it's a complicated field populated by a fairly high percentage of people who aren't what you'd call brilliant (is this a terrible thing to say?) so why would you feel like an impostor?

Hang on while I redeem myself for a sec. I'm not saying I'm brilliant. I'm probably, in some way I should possibly be frowned at for, saying at times I feel more intellectual than a lot of people who do this work. And maybe that's fine, because what's more useless than an intellectual? It's possible everyone I'm talking about would, if told this, shrug and say: your point?

Anyway it's probably a good corrective when I have a day where I am confronted with the great usefulness meter that constituted by unexpected situations and one's readiness to deal with them, and the needle on the usefulness meter swings from sewing machine to houseplant as I step on the scale.

I think of myself as being on the front line sometimes, because I deal directly with clients and their families and the verkakte systems they have to deal with. But. I have carved out a niche for myself wherein I see a small swath of the systems part, and when I'm outside that niche, I can sometimes be rather helpless.

We have a calendar of who handles "ER" cases here when our supervisor isn't around, i.e. cases where the attorney needs a social worker right away rather than long-term. Today was my lucky day, and they called me over to the courthouse for an ER. I go into the court part and talk to the attorney for a second who says the thing I least like to hear, which is some form of "just talk to him for a minute and see what's going on with him." Answer in head: ok, I talked to him. He thinks the writing on Friday Night Lights has gotten a little slack but that Connie Britton's ability to inhabit her character and her improved accent as well as the ever elusive possibility that Matt and Landry might one day do it have become reason enough to lament its cancelation. Would you like to try again, and be a little more specific?

I got her to clarify that the guy seems to want to be hospitalized and that they might not set bail if we can make that happen. I talked to him in back hall after being sort of insistent with a court officer. "I'd like to be able to talk to him without whispering, ok?" He presented like your average falling-apart, probably mentally ill person. Not quite able to engage, in what feels like non-performed distress, and what I was once encouraged to include in progress notes under the relatively polite terminology "malodorous."

What next? Well, I had to call a colleague. Because the last time I was the person who had to have someone hospitalized was five years ago, and I simply didn't know how to go about it. The answer was: if they'll let him go, bring him back to the office, call 911 like you would any old time you want to hospitalize anyone, and wait. But I was all "does it need to be at a particular hospital? Do I escort the guy to an ER?" etc etc the answer to all of which, from the universe if not my colleague, was "no, and get a grip."

This is a basic thing. People are hospitalized all the time. Maybe there's some resistance in this, in that I think of hospitalization as running the risk of "warehousing" and also of putting a bandaid on the more systemic factors that mean people have to go to hospitals when they're not fitting nicely into the economy. But shut up, me. Doesn't matter. Being a social worker and not knowing some of these basic ins and outs is really not good. It's one of several things that should be reminding me that it's time to figure out whether I'm in or out, profession-wise.

So, that happened.

Oh hey so

Out of the depths of the interwaffle I have conjured or I suppose I should say begun conjuring a group blog on no particular topic. I haven't exactly given up on social work blogging but I think I am for the moment likelier to blog over there than here. I may actually blog about similar topics, but without the restriction of only writing about work-related things. Check it out if you're looking for new reading material. My friends, they are really smart and know many things. Let me show you them, or however that meme goes.

The Mustard Bath

I haven't posted anything in two weeks and I'm having my doubts about whether I'm going to keep doing this. It seemed like a great idea when I started it and for a while thereafter, but right now I can't imagine what I ought to write about.

Some of this, too, is spillover doubt about my place in this field, I'd imagine. There are days when I think I'm not accomplishing a damn thing, and on those days, I look around at other jobs a little, and they all sound unappealing.

Do you have days where you'd rather do something else completely? It's tough because I'm still on board with the idea that jobs that chip away at the upfuckedness of the world, even impercetibly, are better than jobs that contribute to it or do nothing. But then I also daydream of work that pays me enough to wipe out my debt.

Maybe inspiration will strike. We'll see.

More about breasts than you were maybe expecting

I talked to a worker at another agency about a client of mine. Often revealing. She said of the client's mother, calling her "Mom" the whole time which I find is a thing you either do or find extremely grating, "she's doing a lot of splitting," which is, o god, o Montreal, so true.

It's one thing to be on the business end of splitting when you're a therapist...well ok and since not every one of the vast hordes who read me is all "and then you won't believe what Melanie Klein said to little Richard*," I will pause to mention that by splitting I mean the habit of people who are for whatever reason of stress or personality disorder regressed beyond the ability to tolerate much ambiguity to cast the people they're interacting with as either all good or all bad, on my side or against me. If it's not something you've thought about it, I am betting you will next time you're around it.

Because who among us goes through the day without dealing with Axis II disorders? Who indeed?

Right so anyway when it happens to you as a therapist, it's fine or even good because 1) you're sort of in the right stance not to be knocked over by such things and 2) it's useful, at least if you put any stock in these things. (Say, did anyone read the thingy in Harper's about psychoanalysis? Me neither! I mean I didn't finish it. I've been talking to my shrink about my failure to follow through on things, though, so I'll get back to you.)

When you are subject to splitting as a non-therapist, it's just disconcerting. If you're the good guy*, you can feel a little skeeved by the twenty-foot wave of positive transference, unless you're any of us in their second year placement and you get to briefly enjoy the sensation of "oh wow, I don't know what I did, but I'm the best therapist EVAR" until the other shoe drops. And when the other shoe drops (and, again, in the current paragraph, you are not a therapist. Keep up!) it just feels like the client is being an asshole you are not paid enough to put up with.

Client's Mom was sort of a good person to deal with on our first meeting, from my explicitly limited perspective where good=gives good copy for a two-hanky Pre Plea report. Two thumbs way up for eloquent mitigation! Better than Cats! And I was the good breast and she was forthcoming, focused, and appreciate of my help. Who can ask for more?

What always happens here is that you turn into the bad breast because public defenders are hard to reach--lots of cases, in court most of the day--and as this crazy but interesting prof I had once said "sometimes the breast has to answer the door." And in this increasingly strained metaphor, which is a danger of psychoanalytic thinking actually, the breast is actually the entire organization so when the lawyer is bad, I am bad.

What can one do but make a valiant attempt to understand why it's happening? And have a milkshake, maybe, because self-care is important? Ekh, sorry to bring up milk, probably not the best idea after all that. I mean right, what one can do is try to make sure that Client's Mom*** is in therapy herself, and hope that the therapist is good, and hope that therapy really can do something about the gestalt that conditions overmuch splitting such that Client's Mom does not come off as a raging asshole to too many people, and keep it in perspective that there are bigger problems than the possibility that none of this will happen.

I once watched a woman I worked with at a library win what could have been a yelling match with an angry patron (q: who could be angry at a library? a: lots of people!) by just nodding and agreeing and "Oh gosh I that does sound frustrating"ing until the person calmed down enough just to be a category 1 pain in the ass. It is good to keep in mind that the social worker's task is, in some situations, not to fix anything just because it's presenting, but rather to do whatever works to keep everyone more or less friendly while the bigger picture stuff gets worked out.

[For anyone who is all "why are you blogging about social work but not saying anything about the actual goddamn cases?" I would say, 1) watch your language, but also 2) I keep wondering the same thing. I think maybe it's because I'm obviously not going to share actual details because, duh, gigantor ethical fuckup, but I've noticed that when I anonymize things, they sound fakey. So, we'll see what happens with that...]

*note capitalization. Not Little Richard. Though Mahler had a session with Freud once, so I guess there's no reason Little Richard shouldn't have talked to Melanie Klein except that he almost certainly did not.
**or to be Kleinian in the way my shallow knowledge of MK allows, the good breast. I reserve for another time tales of my imaginary FreudCore band Bad Breast.
***to the tune of "Stacy's Mom"

Sometimes we win

Friends is an easy show to mock and lament, but one joke I always liked was when Ross was going to China and Phoebe said to him "You're going to have some great Chinese food! Only there they just call it 'food.'" I think it's time to drop the phrase "gay marriage" from our lexicon and just talk about marriage. Ours is the same as yours, fuckers. Anyway, whatever. We have it again in the large, populous state of California until we don't again. I always have to spend 15 minutes with the office door closed when these things happen because no matter the ups and downs of my life as a gay man in the late 20th and early 21st century and the ambivalences that have resulted, it makes me cry when we win.

(It is also always in these moments that I wish I believed in heaven so it could have a special room made of cake or something for the straight people who want us to win. Without them, we'd be toast. Sorry about all the metaphorical carbs. On a diet.)

Blog. Roll.

Added some folks to the blogroll. Maybe I'll put some more non SW stuff on there.

The weird thing is that I was clicking around, following links, and there was one with links like the Cato Institute. Um, libertarian social worker? There isn't even a joke there...

Actual thing happening in the world

So, there's some kind of news on the New York LCSW front, but it's a bit hard to decode.

The history, through the veil of my own muddle: in the last ten years New York created a tiered licensure system like most states now have instead of everyone just being CSW. Ostensibly this would benefit um...clients? Maybe insurance companies?

In fact this would benefit people lucky enough to get grandfathered in as LCSW or those with the foresight to get it quickly, because suddenly a huge class of people were shut out from getting the credential that would enable them to bill insurance companies for private practice, but also to apply for a good number of upper level jobs.

The other beneficiary, it should absolutely be noted, is the licensing board in Albany and ASWB, both of whom could make a lot of new money off the licensing process. Win/win, although more accurately win/win/lose. If you graduated around 2004, you were in the lose, because unless you immediately got a job in what would turn out, several years later, to be one of the approved settings, you were out of luck. Pretty much permanently, because a lot of those approved jobs are clinic work that pays so little nobody in his/her right mind would go back to it after 4-5 years clawing a path up the shallow incline of the social work payscale.

A lot of people got screwed but good. There was an active listserv about it, which was hard to make a lot of sense of but satisfying for bitching, and in any case seems to have disappeared. A lot happened behind the scenes, apparently, though it's been hard to follow because it isn't exactly big news, well-covered. Some debt of gratitude is apparently owed to the NASW for advocating for the broadening of what is an acceptable setting, and this is the news that broke recently.

Me, I spent thousands of dollars and a lot of my time on private supervision. It was a gamble. My work isn't therapy, but for a while the rules were vague and everyone knew it and what you did was hire a private supervisor who saw what you did as clinically substantial enough that you should enter the elect class of those able to increase their earning potential and maybe someday pay off their debt. Everyone knew this. But, of course it could go wrong if someone decided that things were going to be more by-the-book, and it did.

The question here is what it means to create these divides and whether anyone actually benefits from them. It'll never be reformed, because things don't tend to go backward that way, especially when someone is profiting from it not doing so. But in a profession that already has a kind of beggars-can't-be-choosers thing going on in terms of who signs up, it is a wilfull act of worsening to tell a number of the smart ones who sign up anyway to go fuck themselves.

I have the letter somewhere in which I am told to go fuck myself. I wrote back and forth a number of times and was none too pleasant myself. But if I can find the letter, I'm posting the guy's name here and anywhere else I can think of as a tiny protest and a tiny publicization of one of the people who made this field weaker. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought of leaving rather than saying in my meek little social worker voice "oh well! Fucked again!"

Ah, here's some actual information. Which I will now read. Except, eh, part of me has given up on it.