What You Pay Attention to Grows

the importance of strengths based language in helping work

I am disheartened by how often I hear helping professionals negatively label the people they work with; difficult, lazy, attention seeking, service resistant, the list goes on and on.  This work is hard, and approaching it with a negative lens only makes it harder.

I find myself wondering how the landscape of helping work might change if we recognize how our words affect the way we view and interact with people, even if the things we say are uttered behind closed doors.  I wonder how much deeper and more hopeful we might feel if we chose to honor people’s strengths and individuality rather than writing them off as “hard to work with” and “unwilling to change”.

There is an intense power dynamic at play here; when someone walks into a therapist's office, social service agency, or drop-in center, they make themselves very vulnerable.  They put trust in the helpers, often allowing them access to the most hurt parts of themselves.  This is a courageous act, an act of love towards the self that is especially scary for people who have experienced trauma; it deserves to be taken seriously and handled delicately.  

For those of us that spend countless hours with vulnerable people, it’s easy to lose sight of that.  We become desensitized and tired, caught up in checking things off the list.  The pressure put on us to chart measurable progress, increase productivity, and push clients through the People Helping Machine™ clouds our vision and leaves us more focused on outcomes than individuals.  It’s so easy to slip into a place of judgment and frustration towards our clients; the focus on outcomes positions them as getting in the way of us accomplishing Very Important Tasks.

Our systems ask people to conform- get yourself together, get a job, be a productive member of society- and any action that challenges that conformity is labeled negatively.  In my experience, that pressure is where a great deal of the judgmental language about clients comes from.  When we’re at the mercy of systems who hang a narrow idea of “success” and “progress” over our heads, it makes sense that we would, in turn, pass that pressure onto our clients.

I believe that it’s our job as supporters and helpers to push back against that idea.

The first step to pushing back is changing the way we talk about people.

If someone is experiencing addiction and is unable to hold a job they may be labeled lazy.  If someone moves into housing after being homeless and accumulates an excess of household items they may be labeled a hoarder.  If someone expresses their feelings by yelling they may be labeled as attention seeking.  When we assign negative labels to people for doing things that are deeply, uniquely human and often a result of trauma, we begin to decenter and judge them in an experience that is supposed to be about love and care.

When we choose to see people through a lens of strength and love we have the opportunity not only to help them have the life they want, but to help support their self-esteem, self-efficacy, and heal their hurts by tending to them with care.

Instead of calling someone lazy for using drugs and struggling to work, what if we describe them as a person utilizing an effective coping skill to live with their hurt?  What if we applaud their desire to work towards getting a job?  What if we acknowledge their ability to protect their emotional safety? 

The person we label as a hoarder?  What if we instead view them as someone who learned how to get their needs met, someone who is incredible at accessing resources and taking care of themselves?

Or the person being called an attention seeker; what if we see them as a person who wants to be heard and who values human connection?  What if we pull them closer with our love instead of keeping them at an arm's length?

All of this might feel very unfamiliar- the tendency to judge and control is deeply baked into this work- but I urge you to give it a try.  When a negative label pops into your head or you have the urge to complain about how a client is “making things harder”, take a moment to reframe.  Observe how you feel afterward.  Check in with how it impacts your sense of hope and fulfillment.  See if you feel differently about challenging situations.

What you pay attention to grows.  When we decide to focus on the strengths people have rather than their deficits, we create more room for connection and for everyone to thrive.