Meet them where they are?

I don’t remember if it’s the very first thing you hear in an MSW program, but I do remember hearing it frequently: “meet the client where they are.” I think of it as a chant, said in unison, ad nauseum, because it was said so often. But that’s because it is one of the most important foundations of our work. We cannot force our patients or clients to do what we think they should do; rather, we have to join them where they are, in their addiction, their illness, their family struggle, and help them find a way forward.

The thing is, that can be hard to do sometimes.

The other day I went to a house to do hospice consents. This is a big part of my job: I explain what hospice can provide at home and discuss with the patient and family what their goals of care are and if we can help them meet those goals with hospice. Not everyone I talk to is ready for hospice; some people can’t get over the word itself or there’s one more treatment they want to try. On the flip side, every so often, I enter a home where the patient is already beginning to die. Hospice can help, but it’s a little late in the game. It also adds a layer of complexity to the admission conversation; if I don’t already have a relationship with the family, how can I begin to tell them that their loved one is going to die?

This particular consent signing was one of those late admissions. This patient had been receiving palliative home care and the family was reluctant to start hospice. There were a lot of emails from management about treading lightly, especially because the patient wanted to continue some treatments that were not benefitting her anymore. I walked into the house already a little anxious, feeling the pressure from above to get the paperwork signed by a hesitant family. Then I met the patient and could see very quickly she was nearing the end of her life.

“Meet them where they are” is a fine sentiment. I agree with it whole heartedly. But standing in front of that patient and her husband, talking about hospice at home and continuing medications that were probably not going to help her anymore, I was torn. Someone would have to tell them that she was dying. Not to be cruel or pushy, but because part of our job as hospice workers is to help people prepare for death. And this woman did not have a lot of time left.

But could I be the one to tell them? I had never met this woman before; I’m not a nurse or a doctor. I’ve been doing this for five years and I’m quite confident that I know what dying looks like. But those emails stuck in my mind; this family wasn’t there yet.

And so, I tread lightly. I spoke with the husband about keeping her at home, in a hospital bed, rather than calling 911 when her heart stopped. He agreed to that. I called the nurse and asked her to visit as soon as possible. I made delicate statements like, “it seems like things are changing.” He agreed. When the patient’s son asked me how much time I thought was left, I gently told him I didn’t think it would be long. The look on his face devastated me.

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She died a couple of days later, peacefully and at home, after the nurse and another social worker visited to offer the family some support and help them prepare. I think the family was ready, or as ready as anyone ever is. But I keep thinking about them. Should I have been more aggressive? Is there a place in between “meet them where they are” and “tell the hard truth?”

I’m confident that I did my job: I started the conversation that my team members eventually finished. That is, after all, why we work together in a team; these are not one and done conversations. I was still and present; I used silence and held the space so that the family could ask difficult questions. Should I have pushed harder? Said more? When we meet the client where they are, does that mean we shouldn’t push to move them forward?

I suspect the answers to these questions depend on the situation. Still, this is a case that will be on my mind for a while yet. Examining our practice is an important part of our work. I’ll keep turning it over in my mind from time to time, adding it to the other cases I wonder about. What are some of yours?

Counter-transference, a very fancy word

The first time I heard about counter-transference was in college, in my social work practice class. I was immediately intrigued and also nervous; could this happen to me? It seemed like a clearly negative experience at the time. However, many years after my first understanding of counter-transference, I’m beginning to see the importance of it as a clinical tool.

First, a quick definition of the two-dollar word I’m using. Essentially, counter-transference refers to how clinicians react to what patients project on to them during the therapeutic process. It refers to how a clinician’s personal goals and desires can shape her feelings towards a patient (and change the course of the therapeutic intervention). It can also be about what populations a clinician is drawn to or conversely wants to avoid. Fairly straight forward, right?

A word I associate with counter-transference is boundaries. It’s become a weirdly trendy buzz word over the past few years but it’s a real thing! In my job, where I’m generally walking into people’s homes, boundaries can be tough to define. Being in the home setting is less sterile than the office setting and definitely less structured. When I’m sitting at someone’s kitchen table or in their bedroom, a certain intimacy grows. It can be harder to maintain firm boundaries in these situations. Patients and families want to offer me coffee or food; they want to know about me since I’m with them at such an intimate time in their lives.

And part of what I want to do in this role is form intimate connections with people at their bedside so that the conversation can open up beyond the superficial and into difficult discussions about goals of care and illness and death. As a result, I sometimes become aware of this experience of counter-transference: strong emotions elicited during a visit that can be a detriment to my practice. However, those feelings can also elicit some good work for me as well as within the bounds of the therapeutic relationship. Further, it’s always wonderful when clinicians are able to acknowledge their limitations as well as their strengths in practice. I think recognizing the counter-transference we experience in our practice, or the blurring of boundaries, or just the discomfort sometimes of being with someone who is dying, can aid us in enhancing our clinical skills.

What I’m getting at here is that we can use counter-transference in our practice. We are, after all, only human. There have been times when I have been in a visit and felt a rush of anger so hot and charged that I’ve had to take a deep breath and clench my toes to keep from screaming. That’s a scary feeling for a social worker. But instead of pushing it down and forgetting it, I try to examine it. If I’m feeling so angry, what is the patient feeling? The family? Likewise, I’ve found myself feeling so friendly with a patient (someone near my age, to be fair) that I kind of forget my clinical role. That needs to be examined closely too. it’s dangerous when the boundaries blur too much.

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This is where good supervision is necessary. The supervision relationship helps us to look at our practice with a clinical eye. Sometimes we may not realize how counter-transference is affecting us. It takes a supervisor to reflect back what we’re saying and feeling. To do that effectively though, the supervision relationship needs to have the same kind of vulnerability as the clinical relationship.

I have a lot more to say on this subject but I’ll leave it here for now. Visit me in the next few weeks for some more posts about counter-transference with young patients, enhancing clinical skills, and growing the supervision relationship. As always, thank you for reading. Please leave some feedback! I’d love to write about something of interest or importance to you.

Use of Self

I am kind of an over sharer. I have a tendency to spill out my life story when someone asks me a fairly benign question. For instance, a question about what brought me back to Philadelphia after going to school out of state sends me into a long, complicated tale with details about a protracted break up and a deep sense of homesickness (in case you were interested). I will tell almost anyone almost anything. My co-workers know far more details about my personal life than I think they want to, but that's just the way I am. 

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With my patients though, I often wonder how much to divulge. I want to recognize and respect that I'm meeting people in their bedrooms, at their kitchen tables, in their intimate spaces, and asking them deeply personal questions. It's only natural that the boundaries between us are a little blurrier than they would be in an office setting. I don't mind answering a few personal questions: am I married, do I have children? I ask these of my patients; they're fairly benign. What gives me pause is when people hit a nerve they don't realize they're hitting. 

Now I have to give you a little more information--I'll try not to overdo it but it's important to this particular post. My mom died on hospice two years ago. She was comfortable and we had an enormous amount of support from the staff and from our friends and family. All that being said, I am still grieving and maybe will be for the rest of my life. 

I'm sure it's clear to you how this effects my clinical work, in this particular field. I frequently meet families that struggle with making end of life decisions. They hesitate to give medication or sign a do-not-resuscitate order or choose hospice at all. I have been asked sometimes, "What would you do, if it was your mom?" That's the nerve they (unknowingly) hit.

This is where I struggle with use of self. I have to ask myself, in the brief moment I can pause before it becomes too pregnant a pause, what am I willing to divulge? What will be therapeutic? What does this family need to hear? Sometimes I simply say, "If it was my mom, I would want her to be comfortable." Only recently have I been able to say, "I have been through this and I know it is incredibly difficult." And you know what? I don't know if that's the right thing to say. That's the thing about use of self, or about any part of therapy: one size does not fit all. There are so many variables.

This work has a science to it, of course. We use evidence-based theories to help people. But there is also a true use of instinct and intuition. We would not have become social workers if we weren't sensitive to other people's moods and body language. And so, when faced with this question that tugs at my heart in a very profound way, I must rely not only on my training about use of self and the therapeutic benefit, but also what my gut tells me. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes people's compassion for me derails the conversation and it's hard to get it back on track. But sometimes they are able to see the bridge I've laid out in front of them and thank me; they can trust what I'm telling them.

As always, I end this with no real answers. (Notice a theme here?) But I do believe it's an interesting question: how much do we divulge? How sharp should our boundaries be? What is self-serving and what is client-centered? Food for thought. Or, better yet, tell me your answers! I love to hear your feedback and look forward to it. Until next time, let's keep talking. 

How much time is left?/Questions I don't want to answer

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Several times a week, a patient or family member asks me this question that immediately stresses me out: “How much time do you think is left?”

The short answer is, I don’t know. The longer answer is still I don’t know but I can add some variables. There are signs that tell us the body is shutting down: changes in breathing, mottling of the hands and feet, a fever, etc. But there’s no exact science to determine how long the dying process can go on. I tell people that I’m wrong as often as I’m right. Still, people want to know.

Usually I answer that question with a question of my own: what would you do differently if you knew how much time was left? Generally, the answer is nothing. Occasionally there are some practical concerns (taking time off work, for instance). But on the whole, this is a question borne of anxiety: what should I say? What should I be doing? There are no magic answers to these questions.

That being said, I did read once that there are only four things you need to say when someone is dying: I’m sorry, I forgive you, I love you, and thank you. Sometimes I tell my families this. I remind them that even if their loved one isn’t answering, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to leave us. But mostly, when faced with this question, I reinforce that everyone is doing everything right, and how much time doesn’t really matter.

This makes me think about all the questions we get asked as social workers that we really don’t want to answer or that we simply can’t answer. Early on in my practice, I was not great at fielding these questions. I so wanted to have an answer to everything that I sometimes forgot to pause and consider my words before I spoke. Sometimes I would answer before I really knew what I was saying because I was so anxious to fill the silence, to reassure the patient or the family, to be the most knowledgeable person in the room. I quickly learned the power and importance of taking a breath before speaking. Sometimes this makes family members nervous and they say, “You can say it, it’s ok, what are you thinking?” Then I have to explain that I’m not trying to hide anything, I just want to give them a thoughtful answer.

I hate not being an expert at something. It’s a flaw of mine. But one thing this job has taught me is that you don’t need an answer to every question. I often consider why I chose this work. Ultimately, I became a social worker to fix problems. But that’s not my role. My role is to guide people on the path and point out the landmarks along the way. I don’t have to have all the answers. Which is a relief, because some questions, like how much time is left, aren’t answerable. Once I got comfortable with that, I stopped trying to be the most knowledgeable person in the room and worked on being the calmest. What our patients and clients really need is someone to be still and hear them. Which honestly, may be what we all need: not an answer, but someone to sit with us and witness and tell us that we are doing the right thing.

Politics

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Don’t freak out; I’m going to talk in the abstract. Although I am a social worker after all, so I imagine you have an idea which way I lean politically. My personal politics are not the point of this post, though. The point is about how politics intersect with our work and how to manage that.

An ad keeps coming up in my Facebook feed. It’s for a seminar or something about how to navigate political conversations with our clients as social workers. I haven’t clicked on it because it gives me major anxiety. Talking about politics with anyone gives me major anxiety. I don’t think I can do it without getting emotional, so I mostly avoid it. I know this isn’t exactly helpful. I hear the dialogue about how we need to talk to each other, to find common ground. I can find common ground with almost anyone; but I don’t want to do it through a political lens.

I especially struggle with this when I’m with my patients. The area I cover for work varies socio-economically but the vast majority of my patients are firmly in the lower middle class. They own their own homes, they collect Social Security, they have Medicare. Some of them have very strong opinions about politics that I, quite honestly, disagree with vehemently. But I don’t engage in those discussions; I change the subject as soon as possible.

Is that the right thing? I justify it to myself this way: I’m not there for that. I’m not a political leader or a social justice warrior. Of course social justice and change are in the nature of our work but I’m a clinical social worker. I sort of hide behind the need to build a strong relationship; and how can I build a strong relationship if I probe into someone’s politics? Personal values are one thing. But a patient’s views on voter fraud and emails and whatever other awful buzzword that’s on Fox News right this minute? I can’t go there.

See, even in my “abstract” writing, I let my leanings show. I can’t keep it together.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think most of my co-workers feel similarly. Especially in this political climate, conversations about current events are difficult to navigate. So what’s the solution? Honestly, I don’t know. How do you navigate when someone brings up politics? Give me your favorite responses.

Learning from early mistakes

I think it’s time to revisit some of the cases I’ve come across that required me to seek supervision. I’m going to start at the very beginning of my hospice journey.

When I first started in hospice, I had four young women patients in a row. They were all mothers; two of them were younger than me. In my personal life, I was about to get married; I was starting a new chapter in my life as these women were dying. It was devastating. I considered that maybe I had made a mistake in taking this job. I talked about it with a lot of people: my manager, the woman who provided my supervision at the time, my preceptor, my dad. Interestingly, my dad gave me the best advice. He said, “Can you stop them from dying?” No, I said. “What can you do?” Nothing! I said. I can just be there. He answered, “That’s right: you can be there with them. Don’t underestimate that.”

Photo by Soroush Karimi on Unsplash

That became the basic foundation of my practice: just being. When I first started though, I maybe took that a bit too literally. I was hesitant to push difficult conversations for fear of saying the wrong thing or shutting down the conversation. In the case that follows, I made a significant error because I was afraid to delve too deep.

Here is the case study (with the patient’s name changed to protect her privacy):

Lily is a 27-year-old hospice patient who has metastatic liver cancer. She has recently transitioned to hospice to broaden care provider assistance at home. She lives with her parents, her brother, her spouse, and her young children. She and her family are Vietnamese and her parents do not speak very good English. She relies on her mother for childcare, as she experiences a lot of pain and fatigue that has impacted her functioning ability. Lily’s spouse struggles to adapt to Lily’s terminal condition and appears angry at Lily’s illness; he complains often about Lily’s lack of ability to maintain the activities she once completed with ease. Lily’s main concern is who will care for her children after her death. Lily states that she knows her prognosis is poor, but she wants to try any new treatment that may become available. She signs an out-of-hospital DNR order but does not tell her family. The social worker works closely with the other members of the team to provide support to Lily but is concerned about counter transference issues due to their similar ages. The agency’s children’s bereavement counselor helps Lily create a video legacy recording for her young children. The social worker encourages Lily to talk to her family about her advanced directive preferences. However, Lily does not tell her family about her DNR. When she becomes unresponsive, the family calls 911. Lily is intubated and after a week, the family decides to withdraw life support.

Now there’s no guarantee the family would not have called 911. Remember, this is a 27-year-old mother of three. Further, there was a significant language barrier and cultural implications. It’s entirely possible that even if I had taken the correct steps of holding a family meeting (with a translator), Lily still would have died in the hospital.

All that being said, I should have done more than just “be.” But I was afraid. Also, I was deeply sad. As I said, I was a newlywed when Lily took a turn for the worse. It terrified me to see someone my age fading away from cancer. I felt guilty and anxious and I let those feelings prevent me from really doing the work. I went to supervision, sure, but I wasn’t totally honest with my supervisor. I was embarrassed, I think, that I hadn’t had a discussion with Lily about the DNR and about whether or not she had told her family about it. I wasn’t using supervision to its full extent and I think my patient and her family suffered because of it.

I presented this case at a social work hospice conference three years ago, in part to make sense of it and in part to honor Lily’s memory. I can’t forget her; she changed my practice. I am both grateful and humbled.

In Defense of Good Enough

I know how the title of this one sounds but I stand by it. Good enough is good enough.

I think I speak for the majority of us when I say that we put an enormous amount of pressure on ourselves in this field. We became social workers to help people, to fix their problems, to change the world. We can chant “meet the client where they are” a hundred times a day but deep inside there remains a voice that says, “you can fix this!” There is for me, at least. I’m seven years post-Master’s and there are still times that I forget that my goal is not to fix other people’s problems. My goal is to light the way on someone’s path, not lead it. Still, I have patients ask me all the time, “what should I do? What do you suggest?” Those questions put me on edge because I often don’t know the answer. That doesn’t make me a failure, though. It makes me human.

Part of being human means I have my own stuff to work through. There are days when I find my mind wandering in a patient’s house: did I call the air conditioning guy? When will I go to the grocery store? How am I going to get to my next visit on time? In those moments, I have to pull myself back and refocus on the person in front of me. Sometimes that’s hard to do.

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When I was on maternity leave and preparing to come back to work, I spoke with a therapist about how I could continue my work. I felt I had a newfound sense of empathy after having a baby but also a newfound sense that nothing else mattered. I feared that a part of my mind would always be preoccupied with thoughts of my daughter: was she eating, sleeping, crying, did she need me? How could I ever be fully emotionally present at work again? The therapist told me, “You will be better at your job and you will also struggle. And that’s ok. You have to accept not being at your best for a while but being good enough.”

I think about that all the time. There are any number of reasons we aren’t on our A game at all times: big milestones, like having a baby or getting married, but also small ones, like an upcoming vacation or an argument with a friend. It is impossible to be the best every single day. I imagine people in other careers have off days; why is it so bad for us to have them too?

I know the answer even before you shout it at me: we’re dealing with real people and their emotions. Our patients don’t care if we fought with our partner this morning or if our oil change is overdue. Their immediate world is fraught with illness and family dynamics and anticipatory grief. They do not have the space to take in our shit, quite frankly. We have to leave it at the door and do the best we can.

And on the days that we know our minds wandered, that we were not the most compassionate, the most healing, the most, we have to forgive that in ourselves. An expectation to be perfect is a good way to feel like a failure. So why set ourselves up that way? Good enough really is good enough.

Doorknob Communications

In our last supervision, my student told me one of her patients surprised her with a “doorknob communication.” It was their last visit and the patient chose that moment to confess some secrets she had been holding in from everyone. My student was startled but also proud, I think, to bear witness to the darkness this woman had been keeping inside. We talked about termination and what it can mean for a client. Another social worker is going to replace my student in this case so we talked about how to communicate everything to the new social worker while also respecting how difficult it was for the patient to divulge.

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The phrase doorknob communication was new to me; I understood what she meant from context but I had never heard the phrase before. Because I kept thinking about it long after our supervision was over, I went immediately to Google for answers. (How anyone did social work before the internet is an ongoing mystery to me. I’m told there were rolodexes and calls from pay phones). According to the good old search engine, it’s just what it sounds like: a client sometimes reveals a huge piece of information to the clinician while they are leaving a final session, with their hand on the proverbial or literal doorknob.

So why do clients do this? There is a safety, I think, in knowing that you won’t be seeing your therapist again. There’s little risk involved in laying out your deepest secrets while you’re walking out the door. The therapeutic relationship can build a deep trust but still, we all keep some parts of ourselves hidden. I think sometimes it’s simply too hard to divulge everything, even in a long-standing relationship. Dropping bombshells while walking out the door must feel liberating in a way: here, hold this; we don’t have to talk about it again.

I wonder more about what we as clinicians do when we are faced with the doorknob communication or, perhaps more aptly, confession. Termination is supposed to feel like a nice, neat bow on the end of a therapeutic relationship: we’ve reached our goal together and the client should feel better somehow. Does it feel like a failure if someone has a sort of breakthrough on the way out? Should we look back on our practice and try to figure out if we could have elicited it sooner? Should we not terminate after all?

I don’t necessarily have the answers to these questions. For what it’s worth (and if she’s reading) I don’t think my student failed this patient at all. I think she opened the door for this woman to release some deep sadness that she was carrying with her. And the patient couldn’t do that until their very last minute together. Those last minutes are a theme in my work in hospice. They carry a lot of meaning for the survivors and for the dying as well. That patient gave my student something precious to hold; in that way, this doorknob communication, confession, whatever you call it, was a gift.

What are your thoughts? Better yet, what doorknob confessions are you holding on to?