Your Client Is More Tired Than You Are
by Molly Skawski, MSW
Maybe you have read the title and your fingers are pulsing, anxious to fly across the keyboard and unleash your righteous fury. You are ready to scroll down directly to the comments section of the online version of this article and let me have it. You are ready to tell me, like the good social worker you are, that hardship is relative, that it is damaging to use “us” versus “them” statements, and that we must give ourselves permission to feel what we feel. And what do we feel? Exhaustion. Secondary trauma. Spinning wheels. To you, I say—I know.
I know, and thank you. I know, and thank you, but....
Your client is more tired than you are. She is probably hurting more than you are, and he probably has more to be angry about than you do (even if what he has to be angry about is the terrible situation that he caused himself).
I do not mean to dismiss or minimize your feelings. I know that the tired is real—the grief, the crippling imposter syndrome, the ever pouring out, the can-I-be-burnt-out-in-my-twenties(?!). I feel it. I just want us to remember that our clients are really, really tired, too. Maybe greater perspective can be a precursor to greater gratitude, and greater gratitude can be a precursor to sticking it out in this field on the days when we are absolutely certain that we cannot.
As social workers, we have learned that we should not (no, never) use the phrase: “I know exactly how you feel.” Okay, well, can I just...maybe...just this once?
I know exactly how you feel.
Even as I write those words, social work student sirens are going off in my head, because yes, we all have our individual professional and personal struggles. Total empathy is totally impossible. And yet, as important as it is to remember that our struggles are deeply individual, maybe it is equally important—freeing even—to remember that our struggles as helping professionals are also deeply universal.
In fact, in full disclosure (I know, we’re not really supposed to do that either), last night I was hurting. The clients I thought I was cheering on toward the finish line dropped out of the race, every case review and court report needed my attention all at once, and another foster family had put in another 14-day notice asking for the removal of one of my teens (his seventh in four months). I was bone, body, and soul tired.
Maybe you have no idea of the struggle of another disrupted foster home. Instead, maybe you are all too familiar with the agonizingly slow pace of improved race relations in the United States. Maybe you are utterly overwhelmed by the manifestations of generational trauma in your community. My daily struggles are not the same as yours, but you are a social worker. That is all I need to know to know that you, too, have been bone, body, and soul tired. It is the mark of the tribe.
Last night, I wondered aloud if any of what I was doing mattered. Had anyone’s life been improved by my presence in it? Was change even possible? With more patience than I deserved, my husband lovingly talked me down from the edge of that cliff. But then a calendar notification alerting me to a missed deadline lit up my phone, and I actually wondered if it would be better to never show up to the office again, because I was that behind and that exhausted, and so there I was, off of the cliff, hurtling toward an inevitable burnout splat.
This morning, the sun rose and so did I. I did show up to the office, and I rounded the corner to my cubicle to be greeted by the photographs of my children and families tacked haphazardly around my space. Those beautiful, tired clients of mine. And do you know what I wished in that moment? Not for five more minutes of sleep or an extended vacation. I wished that their hurts were the size of mine.
Few of my clients have the luxury of crying into a loved one’s arms about their hurts. Most of my clients are in places of hurt that even my best empathy cannot get me to. Often, they are utterly alone in those places. For some of my clients, I am asking them to stay away from the people who have given them a sense of belonging—gangs or abusive relationships or drug buddies. Is it for their best interest? Yes, I think so. But I do not dare forget that it must also be terribly lonely.
And if the adults I work with are tired, just think about my children. They had no choice in taking on the title of foster children, and yet they ask me what they did wrong and how they can fix it. I am frequently asking my foster children to process their trauma in therapy, to open up all of their deepest wounds before a stranger. Once raw, I send them back to their unfamiliar homes, where their parents are not waiting to bandage them back up like they are supposed to. I dare not forget that their vulnerability is bravery. I dare not forget that it must also be terribly lonely.
More difficult to empathize with are the clients that you love but most often do not like. For me, it is a client who is piss drunk at noon. He has screwed over seemingly every loved one in his path when, inevitably, it came down to the wife or the booze, the friend or the booze, the freedom or the booze. After spending a 10-hour day working to clean up the mess that he and his addiction have made in his family, I have to actively remind myself that he is tired, too.
When I quiet myself to listen to my clients, they become my teachers. This lesson, about the tiredness of clients, I learned from them, too. I will never forget a client’s response to why she had missed so many visiting opportunities with her infant, who was taken into foster care upon being born substance exposed. Up until that conversation, I had questioned her maternal instincts and pathologized her in my reports. “Insecure attachment,” “parental apathy,” “poor prognosis.”
She came for a visit after the previous half dozen were no call no shows. I confronted her. There was no defensiveness in her response, only defeat. Only bone, body, soul tired.
“Every time I leave the visit, I want to kill myself,” she said quietly, eyes sweeping the dirt on the visit room floor. When she drew her pinprick eyes up to meet mine, she asked, “Do you have any idea how that feels?” This time, there could be no I know exactly how you feel.
To those social workers who have been slugging it out—whether energized or tired-—for decades, thank you for your example. I have met so many of you who take seriously that difficult call to show up every day, no matter how you feel, because you know that you may be the only one who shows up. You know that you are a psychological first responder and that you are needed. Even on your tired days, I hope that you know there are young practitioners like myself who see you wearing your invisible cape with great beauty and grace, and I hope you know that we draw strength from you.
To those, like me, just getting started in this field, wondering a little or a lot what the hell we got ourselves into—hang in there. We are tired because we are paying attention. We have a hard gift that allows us to see the injustices and the hurt around us that others miss. And we don’t just see the places of hurt. We move toward them. On our best days, we run toward others in their pain. On other days, we are tired and we are hobbling there, but we are hobbling there, in the direction of the need, nonetheless. We know that we must go because we know that although we hurt, our clients are hurting more, and they need us.
From one tired practitioner to another—I applaud you. Hobble on.
Molly Skawski, MSW, is a foster care caseworker and writer drawn to human struggle and grit. She lives her life among, and tells the stories of, the almost-out-of-hope families yearning for something more. She lives in Illinois with her husband.