When I run into old friends and tell them about my current job, the reaction is often along the lines of, "that must be a hard job". What they mean by "hard" is that I must encounter situations and people that are abusive, and thus hard to deal with, understand, and respond to in a compassionate way.
I don't find that part hard.
First and foremost, the abuse and neglect with which I come into contact in the course of my daily interactions is probably a lot more minimal than the average person imagines. I've posted before about how I mostly experience poverty, and the long term, even intergenerational impacts that causes on families. But for the most part, the "abuse" I see is self-inflicted, as in parents abuse drugs and alcohol as a coping technique.
Secondly, I am a master at considering multiple hypotheses for any child protection report. I can see so many different possible explanations, or alternative situations that might fit the fact pattern, should the information turn out to be distorted. I can thus discard those other possibilities once I've been able to talk with everyone involved.
Third, I can empathise with people. Compassion comes naturally to me.
In fact, the other day I had to tell a man about his own history of harming his child. He was in a car accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury, and he did not recall his past. When I disclosed this information to him, he was horrified, and called himself a monster. I suggested that a monster would not feel remorse, and that he was demonstrating his humanity with that statement. We debriefed for awhile and talked about counselling options, current coping strategies for stress, frustration and anger, and community supports. We talked about healing. We talked about residential schools and how that has devastated Aboriginal families, including his. We talked about how his brain injury is a relief in that he doesn't remember abusing his child, nor does he remember the abuse he suffered as a child.
That was not hard for me. I was inspired by that conversation, about the possibilities for healing, not just for that man, but for Aboriginal men in general. I was inspired by his connection to Elders he honours within his community and by his transformation of his own anger.
So the awful things people do to themselves and one another are not hard for me. What's hard is trying to cope with not having enough time to respond to everyone. I can't be compassionate if I don't have the time to connect with all of my clients. Things get put off for more immediate concerns every day. I get tired of saying "sorry I haven't called you back yet". I get upset and anxious and I work for free. I spend hours lying in bed, trying to go to sleep, trying to turn my thoughts off.
Creating structure and boundaries around this is hard to do. I am lucky that I have a seasoned team leader who reinforces those boundaries even when the team members are willing to sacrifice them for the sake of the workload and the clients.
After all, I am not a superhero. It is not my job to keep everyone safe, and happy and secure. It is my job to assist families and communities to keep one another safe and happy and secure. It is my job to work myself out of a job, to have clients get to the point where I don't need to be in their lives.
And that is why I do this job. All the stress and anxiety are worth it when kids get to go back to their families (whether that be the parents or a grandparent being granted FRA custody by the courts), when I get to close a case, when moms come into the office to share how well they've been doing since their case closed.
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