I notice that as a supervisor of people with a mild intellectual disability you have to deal with my chosen dilemma every week. I experience that when I visit different clients, the same contradictions always arise: where are my limits, as a person, as a human being and in my profession as a counselor? I see ambiguity in the client, as well as in the counselor.
Example:
Situation: home visit to client, young mother, child neglect problems. My supervisor is herself the mother of a 1-year-old son. This boy is being raised according to the norms and values that my supervisor and her husband consider important. When we visit our client, a young woman with a 6-month-old son, my chosen dilemma comes to the fore.
The contradiction, on the one hand, respect for the client’s own environment, therefore professional. And on the other hand, my supervisor and I as a person with my own norms and values. I have kept the subject limited , because you actually also have to deal with your obligations to society. From Frion, I should support someone in his or her desire to have children, but society must pay for the costs that arise from this. In a household like the one above, you see that there is a lot of smoking inside, and this is harmful to the child’s lungs.
The lady also has a tendency to become aggressive and take it out on the baby. In this situation it is very difficult to set boundaries . Your own norms and values as a human being say: smoking is bad, this is not possible. On the other hand, you must respect that the mother, your client, has no problem with this. She has different norms and values and does not find smoking in the house a problem.
At this time you must be able to let go of your own norms and values and have respect for the client, from the professional field: the client is central. I do not let the client know that I am having difficulty with it, I remain professional and do not judge the client. I do indicate that I do not smoke at home because it can cause harm to others. In this way you make the client understand the consequences of smoking indoors, but at the same time you respect the client and she can decide for herself what to do about it. You notice in this area that finding a solution is not feasible, but you can frame this dilemma and the difference in dealing with this contradiction.
In what ways could the dilemma be addressed?
- The gray area always remains a field of tension. But there are options to limit this area.
- coaching employees. Through intervision.
- training of employees. Knowledge of the target group, conversations and moving in potentially conflicting situations.
- read into the client’s file and keep track of changes properly.
Risks
Since the difficult thing about my dilemma topic is that it is highly dependent on the person himself, the supervisor. There are no fixed rules for this. The risk of the approach is related to this. Through intervision and consultation between employees, you may be confronted with the supervisors taking over too much from others. You learn the style of someone’s approach to work and you always take your own norms and values into account. You received this from home.
Some theoretical support about this: standards are concrete guidelines for action; they regulate daily social interactions. Norms form the connection between general values (such as freedom, justice) and concrete behaviour; they are beliefs about how one should or should not behave in concrete circumstances. Standards are therefore freely selectable. Values are ideals and motives that are considered worth pursuing in a society or group. Values are experienced personally.
If you share experiences and situations, you can get into long discussions and many opinions differ. The danger here is that someone lives and works according to certain rules they have learned for years, and then after an intervision session suddenly gets the idea that they have to do things completely differently. While you cannot ask this of someone else, and one approach works very well for one client, while another client is much more benefited from the norms and values of another counselor.
Advantages:
By scheduling a contact moment with colleagues once a month, employees feel heard. Experiences can be exchanged and any ambiguities can be discussed among each other and colleagues can indicate how they would act in similar situations.
The other approach: training, has the advantage that the knowledge of the target group is increased and is kept up to date if it has disappeared. This provides a little more guidance in situations arising from the dilemma. To clarify: a situation involving, for example, the piling up of garbage in a client’s home, your own norms and values may be that you find this very unhygienic, then you can use your knowledge of the target group and reading the client’s file to determine the decide whether you will help them with this or what other approach you will use.
Cons:
Every advantage has its disadvantage, this also applies to this. This is closely related to the risk. This also applies to the fact that you can cause and strengthen an employee’s doubts through consultation. as already indicated above.