When you do a job for years, you develop your own set of ideals and expectations.  These become your own over time.  They shift and take form like a bad science fiction movie—The Matrix or X-Men.  Taking on the adaptive nature of a professional work environment, this shifting microcosm represents the old way while it attempts to integrate the new expectations, creating a more developed, better adapted individual, equipped and ready for anything the job will send its way.  This, though gross in its attempt to satisfy the intricacies of internal as well as external adaptations, is an attempt to depict a professional adaptation. 

I would never reach so far as to say my professional development resembles something from a science fiction movie; I’m not that cool.  Too bad, it would make this blog easier to write.  I have only been a part of social work for going on two years, and only in a limited way to this point, additionally.  My experiences have been minimal and I still feel like I am learning new things all the time.  In some ways, I feel like an adapted professional only experiences these “new’s” occasionally—maybe someday soon. 

My professional interests have done more changing like the ones described than I have.  Early in high school, I wanted to be a physical therapist.  I never really made the choice that I did not want to do that anymore, the interest just sort of faded.  During high school I then wanted to be a speech pathologist.  I was following a medical trend at that point.  I did some shadowing for both of those potential fields of study before I graduated and really enjoyed both.  Again, I did not discount speech pathology before a new interest arose.  I had a really good psychology course that challenged me and opened my eyes to mental health.  I had ideas of being a professional counselor or psychologist.

As I was looking for schools and checking out the programs they offered, I was also interested in playing soccer.  I went on some college visits and played soccer with some different programs.  But, in the end, I decided to go to Manhattan Christian College to play soccer.  The degree that most resembled psychology at MCC was family ministry with an emphasis in counseling.  This seemed to fit both my interests pretty well, even though it was not exactly what I thought I wanted coming into it.  I trusted that God had a plan for my life that was bigger than me.  He is a lot smarter than me, too, so it wasn’t hard to trust Him. 

Taking a brief look back before moving on, throughout high school and through college, the only jobs I held were temporary summer jobs.  I did sports camps and kid’s camps at a local YMCA and tennis club.  In college, the trend continued.  I did an internship at a church in Wichita where I was an intern in the sports camp ministry and with the elementary aged kids.  I have coached a soccer team of 10-11 year old boys for the last three seasons.  And, I work at Family Service and Guidance Center where I spend my mornings at Capital City High School with high schoolers with psychosocial and behavioral disorders and my afternoons at the agency where I co-lead a group of 6-10 year olds in psychosocial group therapy.  In summary:  kids are all I know. 

I applied for my clinical practicum to be either at Stormont Vail, Valeo, or the VA.  Stormont Vail called and I was encouraged to talk to a lady at Stormont Vail West, the mental health side of Stormont Vail hospital.  In talking with her, I realized that my skills would best be utilized and challenged with a placement at Stormont West vs. Stormont Vail in general.  Again, God is smarter than me.  I had attempted to satisfy the life-long interest in working in a medical facility, but as it appears, my plans would not have led me down a very satisfying internship.  I will start my placement in August, so I do not know exactly how it will turn out, but I can count on God being with me, regardless of the challenges.

Through my time in the various camps and programs in which I have worked, I have learned lots of things along the way.  The main thing a broken child is looking for—love and attention.  It is unfortunate that attention is sought in ways which are counterproductive to the bigger goal of love for most of these kids.  They have know so little positive reinforcement and affection from those who should be caring that they have resorted to acting out in one way or another in order to gain my time and my greatest resource-attention.  It is such a basic goal to want met, but one that I know my colleagues and I and adults throughout the community frequently overlook.  The challenge for me as I head into my internship will be to take what I have learned and figure out how to apply it to working with adults.  I have never worked with an adult population and these are about as severe of cases as they come.  They are acute situations and the people for whom I will be caring are fragile people-usually physically as well as psychologically.  

I am somewhat fearful of what this placement is going to be like.  As I have repeated throughout this blog, I know that God has a purpose in putting me in this situation and I am guaranteed to learn a lot from working at Stormont Vail West.  However, I am human and realize there will be bumps along the way.  But, if the path I’ve taken to get here is any example, there is more than one way to reach your potential.  I know that if God has gotten me this far, He will continue to guide my steps and reach people through my work, not because of me, but in spite of me.

Professional Writing... and so much left to learn

Over the past 16 weeks, I have learned more about professional writing as it relates to social work than I have in the previous 23 plus years of my life combined.  I cannot say that it was the most glamorous 16 weeks of my life or that I even enjoyed it, per se.  But, I have to say that there were some take aways that I think will stick with me for quite a while.  Some of those things were basic writing style things.  Others were more social work focused type things. 

Some of the basic writing style elements that I took away from learning about professional writing were: using hyphens and semicolons, as well as writing with a purpose.  Before I learned how to use hyphens, I used a pseudo ellipsis in its place.  The ellipsis-like thing was designed to draw attention the previous word or statement while also putting space between the conjoined phrases.  I did not understand the art of the hyphen and probably had never really used one in a way that was accurate or effective.  Semicolons were always a mystery to me.  With both of these forms of punctuation, I would tend to use commas inappropriately as an alternative to using hyphens or semicolons.  I was mostly ignorant, but also, I loved my commas.  

I most likely would have claimed to know how to write with a purpose before now.  I have written some incredibly long and detailed papers in the past.  However, length does not ever necessarily mean that the paper has purpose or much in the way of quality about it.  The papers I wrote would meet all necessary requirements, but would not be focused or necessarily meet any goals.  I have never been a concise person.  I love written word and have for a long time.  I like for things to sound good—sometimes at the expense of the reader’s understanding.  That never bothered me.  Social work writing has a different feel to it.  It is in its own dimension, in a way.  Clarity and concise communication are paramount to effective note taking and memo writing in social work.  Neither of these things are anything I am good at.  I have already admitted to the way that I see and describe things in writing.  I would rather what I write or say to have an edge to it, or that it would force the reader to re-read it in order to catch the under tones.  I know; I am not the easiest guy to track via written word. 

I have a lot to learn about writing with brevity.  It has never been my forte.  I have always been one to speak my mind; which, unfortunately for people like my sister, the devil is in the details.  Exhaustive with recount and meticulous by nature, I leave no stone unturned when it comes to describing a scenario.  I have a hard time getting my notes done on time due to this, though.  I “burn” through each of the “important” details, which seems like all of them, and before I know it, I have run out of inspiration to keep writing.  Or, I have run out of time in which to write the notes and I am off the clock.  It is a vicious cycle.

My boss tells me to write only the parts that matter.  Unfortunately for my personality, I am meticulous and obsess over things being correct and exact.  I imagine that some detail, left out, would result in the picture being painted incompletely.  However, this could bode well for me because I know that when it comes to recalling the day, the session, or the interaction, my short term memory does not do me any favors and I have to rely on my written account to re-Picasso my ability to remember.  This causes me to conclude that the best policy for documentation is detail in addition to being concise.  This is where I will attempt to land on the airstrip of professional documentation.

The more specific elements of professional writing that I learned about this semester have to do with assessments and treatment plans.  Both of these things I have interacted with on some level, but this is the first time I have seen them up close and personal and have been given a format of how they are filled out, what is expected to be found in them, and how to perform the necessary interview or assessment with which to fill out the form.  I found that in addition to having a lot still to learn before I am ready to be the one doing the assessing, I have a better appreciation for the therapists who do these well.  I feel like so many things slip through the cracks already with the clients with whom I work, that adding an assessment, evaluation form, and other details to the case file would only succeed in making me lose track of everything.  I also realized how important it is going to be to stay on top of things and to learn a lot from Assessment and Diagnosis; a class I am taking this summer.  But, back to the still have a lot to learn thing.  I have felt that way in a couple of my classes this semester.  I know there will always be some amount of anxiety and trepidation surrounding a transition and especially when it is your first real, major job out of school, like mine will be once I graduate.  But, I can’t help but think about what I still have yet to prove to myself, teachers, and hiring corporations and agencies.  When will this question be answered?  What will it take before I am satisfactorily “prepared”?  I heard a statistic in one of my classes that it takes five to seven years of doing a job before you are absolutely comfortable with it, or something like that.  I would like to think I will make it that long, but only time will tell.

Social Work Practice

I wouldn’t say that social work, in and of itself, has ever REALLY appealed to me.  It isn’t about not wanting to help others; that has actually always been a part of my personality.  No, my initial disinterest probably stemmed from the repetition of “paper work” and overload of others’ issues that I heard from several people who had been or were in the social work field.  The bias I created towards it was hard for me to get over.  

Back to the beginning, I grew up the middle child of seven; three brothers and three sisters, nine years older and nine years younger—directly in the middle.  There is something to be said about growing up in close proximity home—sharing space, things, and only having time alone when you are using the restroom.  So, that could be a little dramatic, but the reality of the situation is that this sort of upbringing, at least for me, caused me to do a lot of soul searching and I found that I cared for people.  I cared about their hurts, wants, and needs.  This was not limited to my family, though it may have been early on.  My parents placed a value on putting others first.  We went to each other’s games, concerts, and activities.  We ate dinner together and learned what it meant to invest in people outside of ourselves.  It’s striking, when set in that backdrop, that social work was the way that I ended p choosing.  For some, an upbringing like that may have burnt them out… for me, I think of it as having a lot of experience with it—it’s what I know, so I keep doing it.

Social workers are a special breed.  This breed is a group of people who have a special, vested interest in the lives of others.  This interest often supersedes their own interests.  Good social workers understand how to balance their lives between their work and meeting the needs of those with whom they work.  Some social workers will struggle early on while they try to learn that balance through trial and error. 

Social work practice covers a broad range of professional arenas.  Social workers can work within big business, corporate consulting, education system, judicial system, your more obvious “social work” agencies, or in many other professional settings.  The benefit of having an MSW or greater is the potential to work in a wide range of organizations at a wide variety of capacities.  This flexibility makes the degree much more viable and one to be achieved.  There are definitely still struggles to find jobs for those who have recently graduated or who have recently been let go from their previous job. 

There are some personality qualities that seem to be a recurring feature of social workers.  Empathy, optimism, and flexibility are these recurring qualities.  In order to discuss them thoroughly, I will talk about each individually before tying them all together.  Empathy is a term commonly used in social work classes and amongst social work practitioners.  A common theme associated with this term is, “Meet the client where they are at.”  The theme has to do with the client coming first.  The client’s needs, desires and overall goals should be the most important thing to the one providing service.  Meeting a client where they are at demonstrates that they are more important to you as a person than they are as a time slot to be filled in the schedule or a financial means to an end.  Empathy takes a person’s story an allows the provider, who is otherwise uninvolved in the situation, to join with the client in problem solving and goal setting if that is what they desire.  Otherwise, maybe the client would rather just talk or not talk.  “Meeting the client where they are at” is a state of mind for the provider; it requires setting aside their own agenda and working towards selective solution.  The other thing about empathy is that a client has the right to disclose as much or little as they want.  Unfortunately, they also reserve the right to withhold information which could have helped the provider find resources for the struggling client.  The point of this is that a provider can only be as helpful as the client allows them to be based on the amount and type of information the client provides.

Optimism is the glass half full mentality.  Optimism allows social workers to overlook much of the craziness of work, clients, providers in order to start finding solutions instead of dwelling on the problems.  I believe that optimism and “hope” are interchangeable in a lot of ways.  A provider who is hopeful is going to be more likely to have a positive relationship with their clients.  The clients with whom the provider works will feed off of the optimism a lot of times and will see their situation with a renewed energy and level of positivity they would likely not have enjoyed without the optimism and hope of their case worker.  Hope is a little bit deeper than optimism, in my opinion and surpasses understanding in terms of sensing hope in situations where it would be so much easier to doubt.

Flexibility is the final character quality that I see exuding from  many of the social workers with whom I am in contact.  Social work schedules are often chaotic.  Whether they are fully booked with appointments or, through cancellations, meetings and trainings, their schedule is strangely open.  

Flexibility also means that the provider gets from place to place when they need to be there.  They will take off their treatment team “hat” when they leave the workplace, and will put on their resource officer when at the school where they also work, then put on their homeowner and family man hat once with their families.  There will always be a significant amount of stress to which social workers will be subject.  Managing these stressors will likely be the difference between a good practitioner and one who is not very good.

Social workers have tough jobs, but many of the good social workers exude empathy, optimism, and flexibility.  These qualities have shown, over time, to be helpful to providers and clients in a therapeutic setting.