Agency: I Can
The Relational Worker
Most of the services to which people being helped have been exposed are about what others can do for you. I can get you back in school. I can get you a job. I can treat your mental health.
The relationships with the workers I am describing bring the onus for change back to the helped. They ask what the helped can do for themselves. How they can help themselves. Again, they create a context. A context in which, to use the technical term, the person can recover agency.
The context gives permission:
I can have a conversation with someone. I can get a bus pass. I can say what upsets me. I can see that things could be different, and that I have a role to play in this.
They don’t describe it as such but the workers follow a three-step process: exposure to opportunities, trying things out, and experiencing the result. The magnitude of the goal is unimportant.
Trivial or major, what counts is the repetition of the chance to try something, finding out, and asking oneself ‘how did that feel’.
Workers do not have a recovery agenda, they ask the person what they are interested in. These frame opportunities. People in difficulty use terms such as ‘pushing’, ‘being on my back’, ‘motivating’, to describe this exposure. It implies the worker’s relentlessness to get the person hooked on something, to give it a try.
The trying is a process in its own right. The workers are fighting against a lifetime of failing. As one worker put it:
These people, they are losers. I am not being demeaning to them. They are losers in the classical term of the word, they lose things. They have lost things, they have lost family, they have lost partners, they have lost unity, they have lost money, they’ve lost their house, their homes. You get them a dustpan and they lose it. You get them a phone, they lose it. They lose things. They are losers.
The workers hold people to account for their engagement. They monitor how things are going, check in with them, validate their progress. The idea is to accompany, not leave people on their own.
At the other end of trying, there is a sense of a result. Success is not judged by the outcome of the goal, but by having worked towards achieving the goal.
