I often supervise other practitioners in their work with people who present very complex challenges and are often people who manage their suffering by harming others. When I ask the practitioners how they are managing their own wellbeing in this work, I often get the response, ‘I can compartmentalise to keep work and my personal life separate’ or similar words to the effect of ‘it doesn’t affect me’.
What they’re really letting me know is that they don’t want to let it inside of them. And of course, we can all understand that; some of what these clients do is terrifying.
Practitioners tend towards a reliance on their theoretical knowledge base in order to make sense of what is going on for their clients. This is important, right? Having a sound knowledge base from which to work is absolutely crucial to being able to apply that knowledge to some kind of formulation or hypothesis to try and work out what we think is going on.
But, applying that without attending to what is going on in the room is the academic equivalent of putting on a suit of armour. It just serves to protect us from what’s really going on inside of someone. In psychodynamic terms, we might call it a ‘manic defence’. We’re defending ourselves against feeling what is there to be felt and all the discomfort, fear and hopelessness that that might bring.
The real key to working with people to effect change is to just be with them human to human, with empathy, kindness and understanding. Once you start to just put your knowledge to one side whilst you’re in the presence of someone with whom you’re working, you’ll find that this will shift things a bit.
This of course means that we have to allow ourselves to be a bit vulnerable and in many professions, this is very much not welcome. But if we’re really being effective, the work will get inside of us and that’s how it should be. Pretending it doesn’t is what leads to burnout; having good strategies in place, such as valuable supervision and therapy are what help to prevent burnout.
This othering that we do to the clients with whom we work just does both us and them a disservice. They are us and we are them and the more we realise that, the more we can really support people to change their harmful behaviour.