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Listen to thisCare workers are frequently criticised for emphasising the negatives rather than the positives in those they are trying to assist. It is the awkward behaviour that gets noticed behaviour which is an irritant to care staff and other residents. We try to counterbalance this by urging workers to make a special effort to notice small achievements, and to adopt an encouraging attitude to residents, no matter how difficult or intractable their situation. But failure does occur, and how we react to it is important for our ability to carry on.
The meaning of failure
Failure can mean many things. A child has been in our establishment for
two or three years, and yet seems no happier, has the same temper
tantrums and has made little educational progress. Another is
continually quarrelling with other residents or taking their
possessions. A young girl becomes pregnant after a long time of
stability and seeming to become well balanced and emotionally mature.
Failure may extend from the relatively minor, such as not dealing with
the mildly irritating clashes in relationships to the inability to
prevent a resident from attempting, or actually committing suicide.
Dealing with failure
How can we deal with the failure constructively, without either denying
its importance or letting it overwhelm us with a sense of guilt?
Initially, we should try to disentangle ourselves and our personal
feeling of failure from the web of possible explanations for the present
situation, by examining what has led up to it. In doing so, there is the
need to take account of the many expectations of residents, colleagues
and state officials, all of which often provide standards of behaviour
and attitudes we may feel we fall short of.
Care workers see the resident being troublesome, making little or no progress or even deteriorating, and may assume that it is because they are not caring enough or have made some error in their relationship or interventions. In unravelling the developing situation which has led to the present, it is quite possible that we may judge that we have made a mistake in our handling of the situation, or that we have not managed to develop a constructive, helping relationship. But this may only be one factor among many.
Reflection
To assume, in a simplistic way, that if only I had been more committed
or given more of some kind of care, the resident would have progressed,
suggests that I was the only person who could have helped, and this
prevents any more discriminating analysis of why progress seems at a
dead end. If we try to distance ourselves from the problem situation,
this might be described as being 'objective' or 'not getting involved'.
In reality, we recognise these as very imperfect positions, because if
we were not involved and open enough to residents, this would contradict
basic principles of care and treatment. So what we are looking for is a
process of personal reflection, often aided by others a supervisor, a
senior, a colleague.
Reflection shared by others has the important feature of testing our own view against that of people not so closely embroiled in our particular situation, or involved in it from a different perspective. More for formally structured, the necessary reflection may take place in a staff meeting, a case conference or review meeting. All these forms of reflection allow the feelings of failure to be used constructively, i.e., the sense of failure is recognised, and is used as one way of exploring reasons for the lack of progress or development.
Reasons for failure
It is worth considering some common reasons for failure which have a
realistic basis. The resident's background may be so deprived or full of
unsatisfying experiences that quick and substantial progress may be an
unreasonable expectation. The staff may have been pursuing an approach
with a resident for a long period without success, but also without
considering other approaches. Alternatively, they may have given up,
assuming that no progress will be made, which then presents us with a
self-fulfilling prophecy. The resident may have been superficially
conforming and coping, but in fact is unable to deal with critical life
challenges, e.g. leaving school or coping with life demands. The list
could be extended indefinitely, but the central point is that the task
of reflection should be performed not to apportion blame, but to search
for explanations which in turn may lead to some change in the resident's
environment or staff approach.
Reasons for failure should not be sought only in client or worker deficiencies. System failures are often critical in their impact. For example, a lack of human resources such as poor staff ratios and poor training of staff; or a lack of basic material resources like appropriate space and equipment, can hamper our ability to promote the welfare of residents. Additional rules, procedures and inefficiency may lead to poor decision-making.
Maintaining hope
Failure, in some ways, is both an inevitable and a necessary part of
this work. The worker, by entering a field of work involving the
personal care and treatment of very troubled people, faces the
possibility of failure from the start. I have suggested that although we
may not be able to avoid the feelings of failure, we can accept them,
struggle with them, and in the process of reflection, make them a
creative part of our work.
There is another fundamental reason why failure should neither be ignored nor wallowed in. Many residents have themselves somehow failed being admitted to a residential place may even be seen as another failure. Unless we are in touch with and aware of our own failures, neither being destroyed by them nor pushing them out of consciousness, it is unlikely that we will be able to help those whose sense of failure may be far more acute and potentially disabling. Equally, with the possibility of failure comes the hope of positive change. Acknowledging and working with failure can be the springboard for more informed practice in the future. Residential work shares this feature of its work with the wider human service professions.
The final word should be left to Jung in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which captures the essence of this concept: The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods."
From: Social Work Today (12) 1.
