No.. 2039
Caring for people as people
(We might have) a tendency to objectify people because of their actions and how we interpret those actions: He is the aggressor, she is the martyr, he is an inadequate parent, she is a problem, they are a dysfunctional family. When we label people in this manner, we stop relating to them as humans, as real people with real pain and real needs. When we stop relating to them as real people, we cannot manifest caring.
Caring is not a strategy or a technique evoked at the appropriate moment in working with families. It is a basic way of being, of operating in the world. It is something that evolves developmentally as we move through life, just as the other aspects of our selves evolve. One cannot go to a short course to learn how to care. However, if one is a caring person and one cares about families and individual family members, one can choose how to express that caring.
What counts as caring for one person may, for another person, not be considered as an expression of caring. Thus in our work with families, we need to learn and to come to understand what counts as caring for each of the individuals in the family. It is only in this way that we can construct interventions that may be experienced as caring by all. The following story demonstrates this idea.
In the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to run a residential treatment centre for adolescents. Part of my role was to interview families at the point of intake of the youth into the program. Mary and her mother showed up one early morning for a scheduled intake. During our meeting, I asked the mother how she felt about placing Mary in the program. Her response was, "I feel good about it. I was here when I was her age and it really helped me. I hope that it is going to help her the same. I'm doing it because I'm worried about what she's doing and I care about what happens to her."
You can probably predict Mary's response: "If you really cared about me, you would let me go stay with Dad. You're putting me here because you just want to get rid of me."
All actions are interpreted through the perceptual frame of each individual, according to Bruner (1990). We make meaning of things in our own way. What counts as caring for you, the helper, may not count as caring for the family. In general, however, if we structure our interventions according to the characteristics of a caring response, we have a better chance of having our actions experienced as caring.
Identify what counts as caring for you. What are the gestures, actions, statements, and style characteristics that you associate with caring? What are some actions others might consider to be caring that would n0t be interpreted as caring by you? For each person these will probably vary, just as they will for each family member. In adapting our presentation and actions to fit the needs of the individual family members, we demonstrate our caring about them
THOM GARFAT
Extract from Garfat, T. Working with Families:
Developing a Child and Youth Care Approach. In
Garfat, T. (ed.) (2003) A Child and Youth Care Approach to Working with
Families. Haworth. pp.15-16
