I was told that my MSW program would provide me with everything I needed to be a confident practitioner from my first day out of school. While I did complete the equivalent of five practicums during my graduate program, each of which was essential to my professional development, as long as I was still attending school I was heavily involved in writing long, scholarly papers filled with fancy, seventy-five cent words in order to earn high grades. My specific audience consisted of professors, many of them PhD’s that hadn’t worked directly with clients in years, if not decades. I have, if not a disdain, a healthy skepticism of tenured professors with doctorates that spend all of their professional lives in the proverbial ivory towers. My favorite teachers were usually adjunct professors that were still very active practitioners and, therefore, had real-time, real-world experiences to bring to the table. My in-classroom academic career thus led me to a place far away from the populations with whom I would later find myself working.
My first post-graduate school job was in community mental health working exclusively with children and families that either had Illinois Medicaid or no health insurance at all. The majority of my clients came from single-parent homes and were, like their parents before them, academic underachievers. Their emotional and behavioral concerns were paramount and they usually lacked enthusiasm and motivation to change. The last thing they needed was one more person with whom they could not relate lecturing to them. As can be the case with new graduates, I was armed to the teeth with magical tools bestowed upon me by the Keepers of the Knowledge (i.e., the aforementioned professors) that would enable me to quickly bring about miraculous change in the lives of my clients. I didn’t realize that, as vast as your repertoire may be (and mine was not nearly as impressive as I thought at the time), none of it means anything if you don’t know how to effectively communicate with people on their level. No therapeutic connection will be made under those circumstances.
While I saw many of the theories I had learned at work in people’s lives, I couldn’t very well use terms like “system equilibrium” or “anticipatory grief” with my clients. In short, the concepts I had learned would prove to be both vital and useful, but the language I had used to make a pretty package of those same concepts in order to impress my teachers was not only ineffective, but counterproductive when trying to explain things to the people that came to see me on a daily basis. I had to learn to listen in order to assess each person’s ability to communicate. To accomplish this I had to ditch all preconceived notions I may have had regarding the ability of each client to actively engage in and understand the therapeutic process. Once I committed to making this a part of my everyday practice, I noticed how I came to understand my clients more clearly. It turned out that listening closely to determine their level of engagement had the added benefit of giving me a much clearer all around picture of the things that were greatly affecting them.
Do not assume that, just because you have a store room of fancy terms for which you paid quite a bit of tuition, your clients will be able to grasp what you are saying. You just may be alienating them and making it more difficult to build trust and rapport. It’s not about our fancy educations, but how we can take our knowledge and experience and translate those into effective tools to meet our clients wherever they may be on any given day.
Peace,
Christopher