Listen to this"To care" immediately suggests caring for another. It does mean that, but it also means caring for yourself. The relationship is very close between the two kinds of caring. In fact, caring for yourself is a vital factor in how much and in what manner you can care for another. If you care little for yourself, you are less likely to be able to care for another. It would be reasonable then to discuss “caring for self" first. But “caring for another" provides our most vivid association of the word and we will look at this in this first part.
My very helpful editorial consultant has been admonishing me that I shift from second person to third person and back again throughout this book! In the remaining pages of the book where I am being very personal about caring, I am also being reckless. Don’t expect consistency at all! “You" means the reader, as a counselor or as a person; “we" means you and I, sometimes as counselors, sometimes just as people. So bear with me. I am talking to readers, not writing to them or about them. Most of all I value you, the reader, as a person more than you, the reader, as a counselor.
I – Caring for Others
In the middle of writing the first draft of these last chapters, I found that the time had arrived to fulfill a commitment to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. For a week I served there as seminar leader for a group of forty graduate students “counselors from various settings, nurses, teachers, probation officers, etc. They proved to be a delightful and responsive group, so I asked them for help in analyzing the nature of caring. From their forty short papers (two were in verse form!) and a lively group discussion, I have selected the following as the more commonly accepted definitions.
Caring is ...
Knowing enough about the environment and the process of learning to understand the client’s learning problems. In general, knowing is a form of caring.
Communicating that you care by saying so, by listening completely, by giving time completely. (One counselor defined caring by describing six hours of time that week with an alcoholic, three hours with a depressed father of five “voluntary time which she gave because she cared for these two lives.)
Reinforcing positively the other’s concept of himself as a worthwhile person.
Being available, all of you, when you say you will be available “caring enough to keep your promises.
Saying “no “firmly at times, but with a willingness to give reasons for the “no." If this is not done, then blanket permissiveness may be interpreted by the student (or by the child in relation to his parent) as not caring, not taking the trouble to consider the issue, to become involved.
Giving without expectation of return (an attribute of caring widely accepted by members of the seminar and one which I want to discuss later).
Supporting without directing, showing that you want the other to remain autonomous and self-directing.
Rejoicing with the other when he is happy as well as to be “with him" when he is troubled.
Effecting a change in the other’s feelings or behavior, not merely expressing or showing caring.
Empathizing, projecting yourself into the other’s world as much as you can while retaining your own self-awareness; being subjective yet objective; “being with" yet retaining autonomy.
A general caring for all, an attitude, a giving of your surplus of good will or time or money; a specific caring for an individual in a sense that you sacrifice some of yourself, becoming involved enough to risk yourself for that person's sake; that is, a caring at two levels.
Some quotes from the seminar papers are included because they cast intriguing even though individual highlights upon the topic:
The brightest blaze of intelligence is of less value than the feeling that some one cares for you.
To live is to care, else one merely exists.
My definition of caring approaches my definition of religion, which from its cognate religare (religo) means to bind together.
Caring to me, is also “to bind together."
To care means to constantly expand your own knowledge and resources so that the quality of your giving can grow with you.
To care means to pick him up after he has failed again and again and making him know that you still believe in him.
Caring means listening when you would rather be talking.
Caring means hearing what remains unsaid.
The essence of caring is contained in the story of the Japanese sculptor who confounded the curator of an American museum where his works were being shown. At the base of each statue the sculptor had placed a polite little sign. The signs all read, “Please Touch."
It is apparent that caring has various meanings for
different people. It would be a fruitless gesture to attempt to
summarize them. Your own perception of caring is a reflection of the
person that you are. But you change and so your perceptions of caring
can change. You can enrich your pattern of caring by seeing new facets
of expression, new dimensions of being.
Since I have shared these perceptions of seminar members with you “and
pondering them has enriched me “I can do no less than add to them some
persuasions of my own. Adding to them is all that I will do. I will not
urge any perception of mine as meaningful for all. Each reader must
select his own if the perception is to become related to behavior.
Kinds of love
I cannot distinguish between caring and love, and love without
expectation of return was stressed in the seminar. This is love in the
agape sense. Three kinds of love are frequently mentioned “erotic (sexual love), filial (brotherly, or family love), and
agape. Filial love is an expected love, a love within a
structured relationship. The counselor is often seen by others as
exhibiting this kind of love within a school setting. He is expected to
care, it is part of his duty, and in turn he at least hopes for some
response of appreciation from the students.
In “The Three Worlds of the Counselor" (Personnel and Guidance Journal, October 1970, pp. 9 1–96) I have said:
On the other hand, I interpret agape to mean a love for those to whom one does not have any structured responsibility. It is a concern for a person as a person, with no expectation of a return from the other individual. It is an open love, one which is a condition of life and is inherent in the nature of people and their relationships to each other. I think students suspect that a counselor’s love is filial, a kind of professional obligation of a counselor, while their whole being cries out for agape, love freely extended to them as a person. Edwin Markham’s famous couplet is pertinent here: “He drew a circle that shut me out “heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. / But Love and I had the wit to win “we drew a circle that took him in." This love has no professionalism in it.
Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) defines love in a manner that has come to have much meaning for me: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
Style and agape
Do we care for another because we “should" or because we cannot help
caring? The “should" is only a style, the fulfillment of a “professional
expectation" that a counselor care. Recently I have read expositions on “style" by Maxine Greene, a professor of English at Teachers College,
Columbia University, and by Seymour Halleck, a psychiatrist at the
University of Wisconsin. Both are analyzing style as many young people
think of it today “being modish, contemporary, expressing oneself
freely, dressing as one likes. These comprise style, but they are
shallow. Halleck says, “You can go to Hell with Style," your own
particular hell of trying constantly to be “hip" (a dated word no
doubt!). Greene goes back to S–ren Kierkegaard, who distinguished
between the aesthetic person and the moral person. Many youths, says
Greene, never get beyond the style, the art form of life” they have not
made a moral choice of that to which they are committed and which will
determine what they do. They have the clothes but not the commitment or
the sense of personal responsibility.
If counselors do not care beyond the style level, they are not seen as caring at all. To care is not a professional garment to be donned in one’s office “it is so very apparent there as a garment. Recently I wrote somewhere that it is an insult to a client to offer him a role rather than a person.
Can I continue to love when it is not returned? I fully believe in the principle of reinforcement, that one continues doing what he is rewarded in some way for doing. Does this concept conflict with agape? With no feedback, will I persist in caring? No, I would reply, but I will get feedback from some, from enough people “to keep me going." Caring (loving) is an attitude, an integral part of me, a way of living (Erich Fromm). If I care for the unlovable, those who return little or nothing at all, I will also care for those who return some or much. So I am rewarded “and can, occasionally at least, live agape.
I have not thought through whether it would be possible for me to continue loving only those who give no return. Perhaps a saint could, but I am not one. It would also be unrealistic to conceive of my world as not containing many returns (feedback of love) from others. It is immaterial that their appreciation of me often seems undeserved. My perception of myself is not always the image that I project to others and they give feedback to the image, not necessarily to me. It has taken me a long time to understand this. I can accept “undeserved" appreciation more gracefully now that I see that it is of their me, not of me as I perceive myself. So I can live agape to the limits possible within my personality, and the rest of my world will reinforce my caring. If my inferences are valid, this makes agape love possible “for anyone.
Moments
Caring for others means to me “moments of caring," sometimes hours of
caring but never days. Therapist Gerald Haigh once commented that
counselors had as their major function that of creating a relationship
in which clients experienced “moments of humanness." It may be only for
moments, said Haigh, that a client can feel entirely open to himself,
unguarded, freed of internal restraints. These are precious moments,
deeply rewarding ones, and the counselor who makes them possible for a
client is fulfilling a high mission. As I reflect upon these “moments,"
I am reminded of Maslow’s “peak experiences" and of C. S. Lewis’s transcendental moments in Surprised by Joy.
Loyalties
Caring also means an ordering of priorities. Where is your primary
loyalty? What will you risk in order to care? In a Time story
in 1970 a young psychiatrist drafted into the army asked to be restored
to civilian status because of his inability to reconcile the goals of
psychiatry with his function in the army. As a psychiatrist in the army,
he was a member of a “–mental hygiene team" on which he served merely as
a consultant, with the decisions made by his commanding officer. His
purpose, as defined by his commanding officer, was to serve the army,
not the individual.
This interesting commentary suggests a clear analogy with the dilemma of many counselors. The counselor, when employed by an institution, be it social agency, school, college, or hospital, is immediately faced with a question of the primacy of his loyalties. In his professional preparation, he has learned that he is to serve the interests of the individual, to keep the confidence of the individual, and to be more concerned with the individual than with the institution. If counseling is to have any specific meaning, it is that the counselor operates in the interests of the person with whom he is counseling, except under most stringent circumstances threatening the welfare of other individuals.
When a professional serves as the agent of an institution, and in the interests of the institution primarily, then I very much doubt that he can be called a counselor. This is not to mean that a counselor has no regard for the welfare of society or that he has no consideration for the institution that is paying his salary. In the counselor’s hierarchy of values, however, the individual ranks higher than the institution. There is simply no way around this. When a psychiatrist represents an institution, he always has problems because, although he has responsibility to the institution, he has even more responsibility to the patient. When this institution is war, then the institution or the nation becomes paramount, and the welfare of the individual is secondary to the good of the whole. This is why another psychiatrist recently said, “Military psychiatry is a contradiction in terms."
The theme of this book is that the contemporary counselor must know the world he lives in, its trends, and its moods, but that beyond this he must care for what happens to the client and care for him as a person. Knowing and caring are both in the interests of the client. Caring for his client is not to neglect or deny society but to serve it indirectly rather than directly. I am reasonably convinced that when the best interests of the individual living in a contemporary culture are served, then the best interests of that society are also served. The point is that the start must be made with the individual and his needs, rather than with the society and its needs.
Caring, then, means making some decisions, taking some risks. How much do you care? School people generally are loyal to order and follow consensus. They are likely to be suspicious of liberty which disturbs order. David Cook quotes a 1969 Massachusetts court decision, which says in part, “Order can be defined properly only in terms of the liberties for which it exists, as liberty can be defined properly only in terms of the ordered society in which it thrives. As Albert Camus implied in The Rebel, order and liberty must find their limits in each other." Does a counselor care enough for students to encourage the expression of liberty as well as the maintenance of order? Is a counselor to “help students' express themselves, even at some risk to himself? If helping shows caring, then look at your priorities “for whom and about what do you care most?
Wrenn, G.C. (1973) The World of the Contemporary Counsellor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Reprinted with permission in The Child Care Worker Vol.3 No.4 April 1985
