As part of celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Risking Connection® (RC) training program, we are sharing short RC Sampler Sessions this fall, covering some of its most essential concepts. One central concept in the Risking Connection Change Model is that the path to healing is through the acronym "R.I.C.H. relationships" – those that embody Respect, Information, Connection and Hope. Over time in our work with client agencies, we have collected many inspiring examples of how staff demonstrate R.I.C.H. with their clients and with each other – but it isn’t easy. Let's explore what is hard about R.I.C.H. in this series of posts.
These are the areas where we struggle, stumble, and sometimes become less than helpful to our clients and each other. Let’s look at each part of R.I.C.H. and discover what is hard about it and how we can overcome the challenges.
To me Respect carries some aspect of admire. So if we truly respect our clients, we actually deeply honor the way that they have survived all the pain life has handed them. We look up to them and we are in awe of them for having come through alive and kicking. We actually let ourselves feel how profound the pain was, how deep the losses, how scary the world. And we respect what these clients had to do to survive.
Of course anyone who is caring for someone with difficult behaviors – whether it be a client or your aging parent – knows that it is easier to maintain these lofty attitudes when you are away from the person and their demands. When some kid is yelling at you, or trying to hit you, or refusing to comply with a simplest request, it is hard to see their behavior as an admirable attempt to survive. That is why we all need down time; a moment to step back and think about the work, often with the help of a supervisor. We can then let ourselves remember the painful truths of our clients’ histories and respect the creativity of their adaptive behaviors.
Here's one example of how a client might feel disrespected:
Martha, a therapist in a special ed school, says that when she asked Tyquan what led up to his throwing several chairs and then leaving the classroom, Tyquan told her that his teacher, Miss Mitchell, was disrespecting him. Miss Mitchell reports that she just asked Tyquan to end his conversation with his friend Marvin and take out his math book. Martha tells me that feeling disrespected is a common complaint of the youth in the school. While it's possible, of course, that some staff may at times speak in a sarcastic or belittling way to the kids, Martha's experience of Miss Mitchell's approach is that she is relational and respectful. Let’s assume this is how Miss Mitchell interacted with Tyquan this time. What went wrong here?
Here are some maybe's to consider:
So when Miss Mitchell says, “Tyquan, time to end your conversation with Marvin and take out your math book,” what Tyquan may hear is, “Tyquan, time to stop doing something pleasant that you enjoy and to do something you can’t do – although everyone else can – and to show the world how stupid you are.” This feels deliberate and personal to Tyquan; he may think she is trying to humiliate him, so naturally he'd feel disrespected.
Does that make sense to you? If anything like that is going on, what does Tyquan need? How can he AND Miss Mitchell feel respected in this situation?
One thing we do know is that the more fragile a person’s sense of self is, the more frantically they protect their image from external threat. If you feel fine and happy about yourself, and someone teases you, it’s relatively easy to let it go. If you are already feeling pretty lousy and fairly sure you are doing everything wrong, the teasing arouses such panicky feelings in you that you attack with all the ammunition you can find. And then others say you are “over-reacting”.
Let's change the focus now to the concept of “respect” as what staff/caregivers feel they need from clients or kids.
The first thing that comes across in all this is that the staff/caregivers seem to be focused on their own needs. What the clients/kids are doing is not primarily about the staff/caregiver. Of course, how a given client or kid feels about a certain staff/caregiver does affect their actions – there's nothing more powerful than relationships to influence behavior – but a lot of times, other factors are driving behavior.
Some possibilities in these scenarios, from the client/kid perspective:
How can we support our staff in feeling grounded and confident in themselves, so they don’t rely on clients or kids behaving a certain way in order to feel respected?