Experts – Part 2

The Confidence Clinic was created to help women reclaim control over their own lives.  And the staff intentionally stepped back from any presumption of professionalism, any sense that they were part of that group of “expert” people who exercise control over others.

In the words of one of the program founders: “We thought the essence was, in kind of cliché terms, self-determination and empowerment.  It’s not somebody else telling you what’s good for you.  It’s you deciding for yourself what’s best for you.  And you don’t need somebody with fancy degrees and credentials and all that kind of thing to help you do that.  You have what you need to do that within yourself.  What you need is an environment where you can blossom, and that’s what we were trying to do.  And I think, for a lot of women, we did that.” 

That is exactly what the Confidence Clinic was about.  I call it the great “Or not!”

Everything we did was about making that “Or not!” possible.  And by the “Or not!” I mean it was the woman’s decision, the woman’s choice, the woman’s power.

Probably the hardest thing for a staff member to learn was to let go of the outcomes, to leave the decision-making to the woman, to trust her to know what was best for her right now, no matter how much that staff member may disagree with her choice.  When training staff, I typically used a scenario drawn from a real experience:

A woman is living with an abusive parent.  She tells us when she enters the program that her goal is to find a place of her own and move out.  We applaud her choice and ask what she needs from us.  We give her a list of low income apartments in the county and connect her to housing programs that provide rental assistance.  We help her fill out applications for these programs and make sure she gets first crack at the daily newspaper to search the apartment listings.  She has no car, so we drive her to appointments with landlords.

This goes on for several months, until she finally finds the perfect place.  It’s in a safe neighborhood and she can afford it.  It’s in good condition and is exactly what she’s told us she wanted.  The landlord checks her application and, on our recommendation, agrees to let her have the apartment.  She is scheduled to sign her lease.  Everybody is excited for her, cheering her on, pleased to be witnessing another success story.

And at the last minute, she decides not to take the apartment.  “I guess not,” she says.  “I think I’ll stay with Mom a little longer.”

And our job as staff is to be okay with her “Or not!”  And not just okay, but we have to applaud her for making a choice and support her decision, when she says, “Oh, I guess I don’t want to do that after all.”

We need to trust that she truly is the expert on her own life.   She’s the one who is going to end up living with the decision, not us.   And the women always know things that we don’t know.  Maybe she knows something about her finances that she hasn’t told us that makes the apartment not so affordable.  Maybe she senses that she is not ready yet to be completely on her own. Maybe she has just discovered that her ex-boyfriend lives in the next apartment with his wife and kids.  Maybe she believes that her presence at home is the only thing standing in the way of her mother being murdered by her father.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  Whatever maybe is ruling her “Or not!” we can be certain of one thing.  She just isn’t ready for that particular change yet.

Did we waste our time?  No.  When she is finally ready to move out, she will be much better prepared to do so.  Not only does she now have the experience of accessing community resources and of looking for and finding the ideal place, she has discovered some personal issues that need to be resolved before she can try again.    Furthermore, even though it might look on the surface as if her situation is unchanged, there is a significant difference.  Now she is staying home with Mom by her own choice, and sometimes that will be enough to make a situation that was unbearable before become workable.

So her “Or not!” is truly one of those small steps that needs to be celebrated and supported.  The fact that it is not the step we anticipated or the kind that looks good on an annual report is entirely irrelevant.

If we cannot accept and celebrate her “no”, then we are in fact joining the ranks of the controllers.   If she feels we need her to say “yes”, then her choice is not freely made.  We celebrate the “no” so that when she says “yes”, it is fully her choice, not a “They want me to do this, so maybe I’d better.”

At the Confidence Clinic, the power stayed with the women.  Not with the staff.  Not with the funders.  Not with the Advisory Board.  Not with the people who referred them to us, whether it was the Welfare Department, or the courts, or Parole and Probation, or their moms.  Not with anybody but the women.

The whole point of Confidence Clinic was to give the women access to their personal power, so that they could make their own choices, their own decisions about their own lives.  Nobody was going to tell them what was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.  And we needed to genuinely support them, whichever direction they choose.

Of course, the women typically made this hard for us.  They were so used to being told what to do, what to think, how to be, that they often did their best to sabotage us, to get us to tell them what to do.  Half-way into a ten minute break, a woman would ask a staff member, “Can I run to the store to buy a snack?”

It was so tempting to say, “Sure, why not? We’re just going to be working on our collages.” or “No! You’ll never make it back in time.”

But here was an opportunity for a small step towards self-empowerment and decision-making.  So a better response was, “What do you think?  Can you get there and back in five minutes?  Will you mind missing some class time?  How are you doing on attendance?  Can you afford to miss another ten minutes or so?  Did you check with the Coordinator to see what is scheduled next, and are you willing to miss the first part of it?”

These questions were a reminder that she knew everything she needed in order to make her own decision.  She alone knew how fast she could get to the store and back.  She knew, too, if she had an attendance issue – either striving for perfect attendance, or on the edge of failing.  If there was no attendance concern and she didn’t feel that the scheduled activity was crucial for her, then she was free to go and be marked down as absent.  The choice and the consequences were hers alone.

Almost forty years after the founding of the Confidence Clinic, a staff member described her job: “We tell them that they are the experts in their lives.  And reinforce that with, ‘Okay, this is your decision.  You get to make the choice, ‘cause you’re the expert here.’”

Anna Willman, board member of Focusing International, former director of the Confidence Clinic, and author of Creating Confidence: How to Do Social Work Without Destroying People’s Souls