Listen to thisI once heard someone give an excellent description of the job of the Child and Youth Care practitioner as a three step process;
Create a safe relationship
Do the change work
Separate and close
We spend a lot of effort and focus on thinking up strategies and techniques to accomplish step 2, but often overlook the difficult business of step 1. Even as we examine the relationship dynamics that create change in people, there have been some important pieces which require more emphasis.
Safe relationships mandate a healthy balance of trust over mistrust in order for both people to be able to shift focus from self protection and then use that energy to feel connected and willing to interact.
The basic trust issues that every youth and family bring into their contacts with us are clearly important to acknowledge and to respect. Child and Youth Care professionals have hopefully been trained to know that this is the first developmental step that has to be mastered in creating connections between themselves and the people whom they are trying to support and influence. The literature on relationship building has been fairly extensive over the past eight years and there is nothing we do that is more important than using our relationship to create change.
In many articles and books the worker is urged to examine his “trustworthiness" and there are lots of suggestions for workers to use certain behaviors, verbal introductions and respectful approaches to acknowledge the people we serve and to allow them to challenge us to demonstrate our safeness. There is a whole body of literature directing the worker to treat the family/youth/parent as the expert who has many more answers about what needs to happen and how to create it than the worker does.
We know that attachment ability is often low in these families and youth and that there is a justifiable suspicion of the system and the professionals who keep it operating. Skilled workers expect to be challenged regularly to demonstrate their commitment to the youth/family as they push the worker away or appear helpless to create any change.
As they engage in relationship building, most Child and Youth Care interventions are relatively intrusive, and the worker must appear to desire the relationship much more than the other person does. Youth and families have lots of evidence to believe that the worker merely wants to tell them how to live, and doesn’t really have any interest in listening to them. The youth and families may experience us as trying to use relationships to control them, not engage them. Unfortunately, Child and Youth Care workers use external control in their interactions in order to develop safe places for people, but we can tend to overdo the need for control. Child and Youth Care professionals are constantly balancing external control and motivation interventions with supporting internal self-control and hope in the people we serve. Experienced workers constantly need to monitor their pessimism and hopelessness about change so that they don’t create negative messages for youth and families.
The influence exerted by Child and Youth Care practitioners is regularly proven in the research to be a direct function of the power of the relationship dynamics between the worker and the person being helped. Every Child and Youth Care professional can relate countless stories about youths who spent enormous energy and time trying to prove to themselves that the worker didn’t really care about them. These youths would create intricate roadblocks and barriers to connection that had to be painstakingly dismantled over relatively long periods of time before genuine trust and relationship closeness was established.
Typically, Child and Youth Care training supports workers to de-personalize these attacks or avoidance behaviors and to see the developmental need underneath the behavior.
I would like to have us look at another ingredient in this relationship connection, which is the worker’s ability to trust the youth/family’s trustworthiness. We have become so accustomed to viewing these relationships as one-way, non reciprocal interactions, that we don’t challenge our own ability to let go of total responsibility for what happens. I believe that unless we increase our trusting of the other person to do what is best for the relationship, we will have limited success.
What does this mean in real terms? Should I abdicate my responsibility to protect myself and the other person from self-defeating behavior patterns? Should I stop using my good judgment and clinical skills to assess the strength of the youth/family’s ability to handle responsibility? Can I allow people to fail when I am sure that they won’t be able to succeed in a given situation?
One definition of a competent Child and Youth Care practitioner is that he/she will not give a person enough rope to hang himself when he/she is sure that he will hang himself. I hope that in all our relationships we continue to make judgments about how much we should rely on the other person. Yet in order to establish a safe relationship with the people we are trying to help, we must be aware of our own need to have a healthy balance of trust over mistrust in the other person, not just in our own ability to handle whatever happens. This challenge to our need to be in control of the relationship dynamics is often overlooked/ ignored.
So, we know that there has to be a safe relationship before the change work can occur, we also know that both people need to balance trust over mistrust. Our job is to be honest about our willingness to give up the fear of trusting the other person and allow trust to be established at both ends of the equation.
