DEAR YOGESHREE - inside out in chid and youth care work

DEAR YOGESHREE

 You must be very pleased that everything is going so well for you. The work that you have accepted at the drop-in facility is an ideal place to get first hand child and youth care experience, whist your part-time lecturing position will give you a place to real experiences with young people into you the theoretical component of your teaching materials.

 I cant remember where I read this, but I know it came from an African source. Roughly the quotation is something like this: We do not learn most effectively from logic or rational argument, but rather from being exposed to sensitive images. This is clearly African but probably universally helpful. In our profession these sensitive images are most likely stories that tell of life-space encounters with children and young people which talk to us and others about the human condition.The most powerful moments and the most helpful stories are those that change our and other's view of life.

 When I reflect over what must be a thousand incidents, a few stand out as life changing. Used reflectively, those incidents become milestones, light-houses, beacons in making me who I am and how I have learnt to respond to children and youth.

I want to share these moments, these stories with you.I have a hope that you will be able to use them in your lecturing material if they are relevant and useful. I am also hoping that they may help to give you "aha" moments and they did for me.

But first I want to pick-up again on the theme of motivation and self-awareness.

Some scholars in the field of motivation  the caring professions go time and time again to the idea that many care-workers have a need to care for others because they are unconsciously hoping that being in a caring environment may  help them with some of the issues of their own hurt.

These people would come in for interview and say, " I've been where these children have been and and I can help them because it is my experience also..

It was my worry that living through the incidents of hurt in the lives of the children would trigger again their unfinished business , open old wounds and make them too introspective to be useful to the child.

 I always liked to think that the care workers doing the best work with children and young people were not doing it from this level of motivation.

But that was not always the case.

There are carers who had experienced 'the valley of tears' and somehow really come to terms with their hurts and somehow risen above their personal suffering and come to terms with it.. These people worked in child and youth care at another level of motivation and skill. These care givers knew who they were, what to expect when they encountered the pain of others and were able to be truly empathetic. and they did this at a depth of empathy that allowed them to grasp the experience of the child through the child's world view. These care workers were really able to walk a journey with the child because they have an uncanny way of getting under the child's skin and working with the child from what I call . the inside out'. They say things and do things in their interaction that reflect to the child that they are right there in the centre of the child's being and walking his journey with him.

 I am sure that the care workers have to come to a point where they know, and yet be at some kind of peace with their own feelings, and in the moment to allow that energy to be useful to children and to others.

My next letter will tell a story of such a moment.

Love

Barrie