Love is simple. It is non-contingent. It is unconditional. It is given. It is healing, It honors and respects. It is hopeful and graceful. It is many things: Patient Kind Humility Honoring Truthful Protective Trusting Hopeful Persevering These virtues envelop the word love and when we understand it they glimmer and shine like the sun’s light and warmth casting itself on each of these aspects of love. These words give
Our first encounters with a marginalized person are often the most challenging because our mere presence can signal fear and terror, not because we are bad, but because we are simply one more caretaker in a long line of others. We are nothing more than someone just like all the rest—someone who bosses and orders around, grabs and pushes, ridicules and mocks, punishes and forbids, and where meanness replaces warmth.
How we come into contact with the most challenging individuals requires our total communication. For example, a man with schizophrenia who hears a wretched voice is like someone having a frequent nightmare while wide awake. This makes it harder to teach a person to feel safe and loved, but it also makes it more important that this be our central intention. His caregivers have to enter his space—softly, slowly, almost
As caregivers advocating for a culture of gentleness we need to simplify the culture in which we work. The ”modern” business approach might be to look at the high cost of 1:1 staffing for the most challenging children and adults. Or, sometimes an agency might place paper work and bureaucratic chores as more vital than the act of care giving. Our cultural intention and simplification of caregiving should be to
If the most marginalized children and adults are to be well served in loving settings with a full spectrum of human rights, new assumptions must be asserted. These are philosophical in nature and call for an evolving collective embrace that highlights unconditional love as the central care giving and cultural phenomenon in serving others; a movement away from individualism and toward the creation of companionship and community as initial care-giving
Here is what we have to ask of the caring community. What would a brief encounter with a challenging behavior look and feel like, as in the case of a young man with a life story filled with violence and abuse? How long might these momentary encounters last? How do we give them meaning? How do we create memories that become stronger and more meaningful than the old ones. This
How do we use our skills to let a persons know that he/she is safe and slowly and almost invisibly create a loving memory? What should we talk about? Should we touch? Look into his/her eyes? How close should we get? Should our conversations just focus on him/her or both if us. What should our tone and rhythm be? What do we do if he/she always stands in a corner
The caregiving tool that is used (or misused) all the time is our words. Too often we speak boring behavioral talk about “good job,” verbal reprimands, or psycho-babble. We have to re-learn that our words should represent feelings of the person’s goodness, his/her sorrow, fears, and love. There are times when a person becomes so terrified that he/she becomes hallucinatory. These are moments when a nightmarish character might crawl into
Our words must uplift—no corrections, no “You know better…,”simply uplifting narratives. We can use our words wrongly by sermonizing, giving a moral lesson, or having an attitude that reflects that you are judgmental and simply want to accuse the person of knowing better, manipulation, or attention getting. We too often try to respond to chaos with logic. The fact of the matter is that there is no logic in a
The most immovable impediments to a culture of gentleness rest in how an agency is managed—a business management model too often fails to have a sharp focus on those served. We have to find ways to take care of the economics of an agency without putting those served in a secondary position. Rarely does an agency deliberately put the folks served in a secondary status; however, today’s trend is to