A Mature Person according to Virginia Satir

The more I read of from Virginia Satir's Conjoint Family Therapy, the more I appreciate her ideas, to say nothing of her skills in practice. Her focus on communication is right up my alley; and her emphasis on self-esteem sets her apart from other old-school systems and structural theorists, who tend not to look at the intra-psychic.

Her description of functional and dysfunctional communication and relational patterns describes pretty bluntly how we can all get so anxious, angry, and generally muddled up just going through life.

Here a longish tidbit on what maturity is:

"A mature person is one who...is able to make choices and decisions based on accurate perceptions about himself, others, and the context in which he finds himself; who acknowledges these choices and decisions as being his; and who accepts responsibility for their outcomes.

The patterns of behaving that characterize a mature person we call functional because they enable him to deal in a relatively competent and precise way with the world in which he lives. Such a person will:

• manifest himself clearly with others.
• be in touch with signals from his internal self, thus letting himself know openly what he thinks and feels.
• Be able to see and hear what is outside himself as differentiated from himself and as different from anything else.
• Behave toward another person as someone separate from himself and unique.
• Treat the presence of different-ness as an opportunity to learn and explore, rather than as a threat or a signal for conflict.
• Deal with persons and situations in their context, in terms of “how it is” rather than how he wishes it were or expects it to be.
• Accept responsibility for what he feels, thinks, hears and sees, rather than denying it or attributing it to others.
• Have techniques for openly negotiating the giving, receiving and checking of meaning between himself and others.*
  

(*This description of maturity emphasizes social and communication skills rather than the acquisition of knowledge and recognized achievement, which in my view derive from the first two.)

We call an individual dysfunctional when he has not learned to communicate properly."

- Virginia Satir, Conjoint Family Therapy

"The Rubber Room" - An example of systemic dysfunction in NYC Schools

I don't want to veer too far from the topic of concern - this is a blog about social work, not schools. But it is about social work in New York City; a lot of social workers work with kids, and if we're working with kids we're going to be involved with NYC school system.

The day after writing my last post on the educational system, I read this article in the New Yorker about what happens to teachers deemed too bad to be in a classroom.

Essentially, teachers who work for the NYC school system get tenure after three years. Once they have tenure, they can't be fired because the United Federation of Teachers, through intensive lobbying, has a stranglehold on the state legislatures ability to reform the system.

What do they do with a really terrible or possibly dangerous teachers who can't get fired? (as well as to innocent teachers who are accused of being terrible or dangerous) They these teachers to a sort of purgatory called the "Rubber Room," where they do nothing, get paid (one person getting $100,000 a year), and wait for arbitration of their case, which can take years. Some will get to retire and collect their pensions (which can be 50% of salary) before their case is ever resolved.

Are these teachers really terrible? Most of the ones interviewed claim to be victims of administrative wrath - written up for speaking their mind. Others point to race as a factor. I'm sure those sitting in the Rubber room are a mix of terrible teachers who screwed up and good-decent oneswho got falsely accused of something.

Frankly, most of the teachers quoted in this article sound like they have some serious personality disorders that they should be dealing with (I know that's not "strength-based," but this is my blog so I can engage in a little armchair diagnosis).

The sympathies of the author, Steven Brill, are clearly with the administrators, and not with the problem teachers and the U.F.T., which comes across quite badly.

Still, even if we accept that in many cases the teachers are the victims, we can agree, can't we, that this is a prime example of how screwed up the educational system is? We are talking about billions of dollars, and a teachers union that has the power to keep people getting paid not to teach. The system of arbitration is endless and byzantine.

This article demonstrates clearly how a system can morph develop a life of its own and become malignant- eventually it exists to perpetuate itself, not to fulfill its original intent.

It doesn't even resemble what it purports to be. And amid that mess, some kids still manage to learn things, and (most) teachers manage to teach them.

How to visit NY SWOG while at work

***UPDATE***
This blog has been updated since I first posted it! See below.

Ever since the internet hit offices, I've wondered why exactly people are allowed to surf the web and get paid for it. If I dragged a TV into my office and flipped it on, it wouldn't go over too well, even if I were just watching the news. Yet the internet is in a strange liminal zone between utility and, well, un-utility: one could use it for work, so it would be difficult to ban completely, even though it is often used not to work (see the Onion artcle "48-Hour Internet Outage Plunges Nation Into Productivity")

I will add that as a social worker I use the internet all the time to find very valuable resources and services for clients, so if I were to look the WWW my productivity would surely decrease.

All of this is to say that I don't exactly want to endorse surfing the net at work, but if you do, why not read a stimulating, entertaining, and informative blog about social work issues?

HOWEVER - guess what: it turns out that all blogs are blocked from my work computer - because blogs are inherently unnecessary for social work, I suppose. Several readers have told me the same thing about their work servers, so I want to let you know that you can (probably) still access NY SWOG at work. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to a blog feed site like Google Reader
   
2. Get a ID and password, or use your Gmail account if you have one
3. When you get to the main Google Reader page, click the button that says "Add a subscription" and type in or paste: nyswog.blogspot.com
4. Click "add", and you are now a subscriber! You can go there any time and see if NY SWOG has new posts.
   

(Obviously this only works if your work lets you log on to things like Google Reader/Gmail. I can, so hopefully you can too.)

Enjoy...but not too much. Now get back to work!


UPDATE - I posted this last night, went to sleep, woke up, and went to work. I decided to see if I could see this post on Google Reader, and found that between yesterday and today, Google Reader has been blocked at my workplace!

I can see only 3 possible explanations:

1. Some higher up is reading NY SWOG and responding accordingly
2. By checking if I could use Google Reader at work yesterday, I somehow got it flagged and then blocked
3. It is just a strange coincidence

I will let readers decide. Of course, this only applies to my agency, so maybe you can still get on... for now...

Social Work Quote of the Day: "His freedom stretches so widely..."

Man’s freedom has roots that are in his very nature as man. It cannot be totally eradicated by circumstances, no matter how severely it is stifled under the stiff iron mesh of neurotic patterns. However, we may also use the expression “free, unique personality” to indicate the person in the fullness of being, when he has reached the top level of freedom. His freedom is such that he is able to give complete fulfillment to each of the facts that go toward making up his personality. His freedom stretches so widely into all corners of his life that he is able to turn each obstacle or adversity into a positive personal value. In freedom, he becomes able to experience his very illnesses in such a way that they help him grow.

– Adrian Van Kaam, The Art of Existential Counseling (p. 52)

Correction regarding Social Work and Nobel Prizes

I recently asked, somewhat rhetorically, "Has a social worker ever won a Nobel Prize?" The implication was no, but, well, it turns out that the answer is yes. I forgot, or maybe never really knew, that Jane Addams, considered the mother of modern Social Work and leader in the settlement house movement in the U.S., was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

To make up for this error, I will feature some of her quotes in my "Social Work quotes of the day." But let's start out with this one:

America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.

This is a great quote. It also ties in with my recent post on education, and my upcoming post ruminating on the relative merits of family therapy.

But I can't help wondering if is this true?

I wonder if America's future was really determined by the great teachers of our civilization, Television and the Internet. Maybe we should watch what TV we watch, what video games we give, and what social networks we join.

Social Work IN THE NEWS (week 2)

Having perused social work-related-news for the last few weeks, I've become aware of a distinct difference between how social work is discussed in the US and how it's discussed across the pond. First of all, social work comes up in the news quite a bit more in Great Britain than in the US, at least according to my Google news alerts. Even more noteworthy, though, is this: over there social workers are almost always associated with being responsible for letting children die. This is in contrast to here in the US, where social workers are generally associated with burn-out and "the welfare office".

Let's take a recent opinion piece from the Scottish Sunday Herald. Granted, it defends social workers against those who lambaste them:

You can estimate the importance of social work by the outcry that ensues when social work fails. The types with firm opinions on the uselessness of "bloody social workers" have their prejudices confirmed, of course, but only after they have demanded to know why the professionals didn't do X, or insist on Y. Suddenly, briefly, social work matters. Inadvertently, yet grudgingly, a truth is recognised: there is no-one else. The social worker is the last line of defence.

Wow: I wonder what the opinion of social workers could be over there, if the public needs to be reminded that they are not just there to screw things up and allow tragedies to occur. (I got a taste of this on a recent trip to the British Isles. Whenever I told people I was a social work student, they tended to look apologetic and say things like, "Hmm. Yes, well it's too bad they get such a bad rap," or "I suppose we need good ones out there." I felt compelled to make clear that I wasn't in that branch of social work at all...)

The perspective about social workers in the media in the UK seems closer to that of ACS workers in New York (ACS is the child protective service of NYC), who are often seen as the bad or neglectful guys or gals when it comes to child safety. They tend to get blamed for tragedies when the news hit the papers, and then ACS quickly shuffles its acronym as though that will solve everything (Social workers in child welfare complain about ACS all the time, for not being clinical enough, for their knee-jerk response of separating families, for not being strength-based, etc.)

Now I wonder: Does "Social worker" over there mean what "CPS worker" means over hear? Or do UK social workers have the training as social workers in the US, but do mostly CPS-type work? Do social workers do therapy, or is this more the the doorbell ringing, "we've come to take your children" type or work? (no disrespect meant to people with that role).

I call on any of my SW brethren and sistren from the homeland (at least my homeland) to chime in.

Meanwhile, back to the article. The author, Ian Bell, makes a few more gestures of respect towards child welfare workers:

Social work is the splint we attach to what David Cameron, another armchair expert, calls our broken society. Without it, dysfunction and disaster would become endemic. In return, its workers are underpaid, insulted and misrepresented.

Nevertheless, he, says, blame must go somewhere. "When a child dies, someone has failed. No other interpretation is available..." "We cannot apportion blame?" he asks, and declares "It would be a betrayal of children if we did not." The implication, it seems clear in context, is that someone involved in the specific case has failed, and should get canned, at the very least. Having a hard job, he makes clear, is no excuse for screwing up.

But I have another interpretation: Yes, individuals can fail at their job; this might have been the case in the recent example he discusses. But the system can also fail, and the system can fail not because someone "on the ground" made a bad decision, but because people were given ridiculous caseloads, or were not provided with enough training or resources to adequately do their jobs. The real "blame" goes all the way to the top - not just to administrators and politicians but the the populace, that says with its votes that the bare minimum should be expended on child welfare.

If you once begin to accept that no-one can cope it becomes all too easy to cease to try.

In other words, it's better to find a face to blame than it is to face reality: that putting social workers or child welfare workers in overburdened, underfunded positions with humungous case loads and asking them to be responsible for childrens' lives is the same thing as saying, "We don't really care, we're just doing the bare minimum."

Mr. Bell makes it sound like the world will descend into chaos and paradox if we don't find a person to pin responsibiliy on. But if he really wanted to prevent more childrens' deaths, he would put more focus on the systemic problems, and pressure his readers to call for reform.

Topic of Debate: SW and therapy

(We're having a debate. Respond in the comments. For each debate topic, I will provide an "argument" and "counterargument" to start things off)

Argument: If you are a clinical social worker or therapist, you should see a therapist yourself.

Counterargument: No, you shouldn't.

Please discuss!