With roots that spread horizontally through a complex rhizome system, a single bamboo plant can become an entire fi eld
Helen: Each day I have a five-minute walk to my office, surrounded on both sides by beautiful landscaped gardens. At first, I appreciated the flowers, the butterf lies, but as the months passed, they became background to my internal ‘ to do’ list. Then, about six months ago, I remember noticing that the gardens weren’t as tended as they’d once been, and that brambles seemed to have infiltrated the beds. I thought vaguely that it was a shame and walked on. It wasn’ t until recently, as I was stepping over the thick, needled brambles that now began to colonise the path, that I realised that the garden was entirely swamped with weeds, transforming the scene to one of neglect and mild menace. I was shocked to find my walk so transformed, and to not have explicitly noticed the profound changes that had been occurring around me. We think that this example highlights the slow creep of
change, the undermining of good practice, the cutting of budgets, the changes in language that can happen over time. There is not necessarily deliberation here or malicious intent, but we can too easily almost ‘wake up’ in a situation that feels ethically abhorrent, where our practices somehow collude with rather than confront the difficulties. In writing this article, Louisa described a situation whereby
she found herself acting in ways that transgressed her own values, and how she thinks this happened: Louisa: My mother was a social worker and taught me to recognise the impact of poverty, social injustice and hardship on people’s lives and to recognise that these things shape the opportunities available to us in life. The significance of context in understanding people has led me to an appreciation that people do their best. Holding onto this belief has helped me to remain curious as to why people make the choices and take the actions
Context 164, August 2019
they do. But recently, I found this hard to hold onto in my work with a social work colleague. We were joint-working with a family where one member had a diagnosis of intellectual disabilities. I’d built a strong relationship with the family, and could see that although some of the ways they had fallen into seemed unhelpful, they were doing the best they could in complex circumstances. My social work colleague struggled to recognise this and seemed to blame the family for the difficulties, holding little hope that change was possible. I struggled to apply the same curiosity to understand the social
worker’s position as I had applied to the family, and instead began to feel frustrated. I entered into a blaming pattern of behaviour in which I acted in ways to protect the family and disengaged with my colleague. It’s interesting that I didn’ t notice this distancing and dismissing pattern towards the social worker developing, despite knowing first-hand from growing up with my mum the effects of pressure on social workers. Perhaps it was something to do with the current pressures of my own job that I didn’ t take the time to consider the social worker’s context or perspectives. But I did know that something was wrong – when I thought of my colleague I had a strong feeling of unease, which I now relate to what Vikki Reynolds calls ‘spiritual pain’. Over a period of weeks I came to realise that my actions were transgressing my value base, and this realisation gave me a chance to act. I asked to meet my colleague without the family and we sat discussing not only the case but also our own professional lives and the systems we work in. We managed to connect, personally and professionally, which relieved the shared frustration and distance between us. We wondered what it was about this reconnecting that was so powerful, and helped the work go in a different
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Supporting people with intellectual disability and autism – resisting burnout and preventing sleepwalking: A conversation between systemically minded psychologists
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