Five Things Social Workers Say That Are Almost Always Wrong

Real, professional social workers say the wrong things because they are social workers. That is to say, they are trained and required to work as part of a system that doesn't help the people it's supposed to help. But anybody can learn to say the things social workers say--perhaps from watching a TV program where someone says these things and does help somebody, or hearing a teacher or church worker say these things and at least sound very "professional"--and be surprised and hurt by the reaction they get in real life. Let's consider a few specific things people often say, with the intention of helping others, and analyze some of the reasons why they don't work.

1. It's All About You

Here's one that popped up in the Twitter feed of someone I visited this morning. We know this Twit was feeling successful, because he retweeted:

"

God didn’t create you 2b a failure or to just get by in life, your decisions did that. He did bless you will free will, that free will allows you to make the changes necessary 2 become successful! So remember U have nobody to blame for your failures or successes except yourself.

"

Wow. Considering this thought from the perspective of someone who feels like a failure, can you see why this kind of tweet might be considered to violate Twitter's rule against encouraging suicide?

(Twitter wanted me to paste in the whole tweets and give credit to the people who posted this tweet and the one below. I prefer to spare them from blame.)

Why would anybody ever say this? Because in the context of a long-term counselling relationship with a "life coach," where there's time to work out what changes may be necessary for the person to feel that he has become successful, it might encourage the person to ask for more advice. This is possible since the person has already entered this relationship of his own free will, so presumably he has more faith in the counsellor than it would be prudent for anybody to place in human beings generally. 

Where does this one break down in reality? In real life, our actions have consequences. So do the actions of other people. One thing leads to another, but sometimes those other things intersect and interact. Everyone, whether they feel like successes or failures, acts in ways that succeed and in ways that fail every day. 

When the general balance of the immediate consequences of our actions seems to be successful, we tend to overlook our "little" failures. Most of us are good at focussing on the aspects of our lives where most evidence that "we are successful" can be found. 

When the general balance of the immediate consequences of our actions seems to be unsuccessful, we tend to feel discouraged and overlook our "little" successes. Most of us don't stay in this kind of deeply discouraged mood for very long. People who get stuck in discouragement are likely, these days, to be labelled "depressed" whether they have that physical condition (which is a symptom of a physical disease, often an easily cured one) or not. If they talk to someone who is being encouraged to hand out certain popular medications, they can add dependency on an expensive drug with nasty side effects to the list of things that make it less likely that they'll succeed. 

In hope of speeding up the progress of a long-term counselling relationship, many counsellors were taught what turned out to be a very antisocial attitude towards "blame," or recognizing the way the consequences of different people's actions interact. The general idea the counsellors absorbed was "Ignore the effect all external circumstances have on your patient's life and focus on whatever effect her voluntary actions have. After all, as her counsellor you can only recommend voluntary actions to her." The effect on those who listened to them was more like "Counsellors think we should all agree to pretend that everything everyone does is 'okay.' They think we should just blithely 'accept' our cars being stolen or our children being molested." This was part of a widespread backlash Against Therapy.

What can we say instead? Even for the Twit who finds it encouraging to think that he is solely responsible for his current success, it may be useful to balance his self-encouragement with a few humbling reflections. No doubt he did make good decisions that contributed to his current success. He is right to encourage himself to make good decisions but he should be aware that events outside of his control not only may, but will, eventually outweigh the effect his good decisions have on his life: No matter how good he is at his business, old age and ill health will eventually remove him from the business world. 

If he wants to help someone who might want his advice because she is failing to emulate his success, he should avoid generalizing. She may be doing something wrong. A change from one valid business decision to another might be the cause of her current lack of success or her future success. (I used to know a restaurant that served a chicken dish that became famous all over the city, but they employed one preachy vegan and several vegetarians who insisted on switching to vegetarian meals only. I wonder why their traffic slowed down?) 

Or her difficulties might come from real competition or opposition from other people. Nothing useful can be generalized about that; we have to know the situation. Someone else may in fact be supplying the demand for a certain kind of product or service, and her best move might be to try a different line of business or a different city. Someone else may in fact be sabotaging her business, or may just be draining her energy ("relationship problems" are the biggest drain on women's productivity). In real life it is probably more useful to acknowledge the difference between blameworthy and merely inconvenient things other people do to us, rather than try to sweep them all under the rug. Someone who actually stalks and threatens your customers (I had an enemy who did that) deserves blame; someone who merely drains your energy, as it might be by being your parent and having Alzheimer's Disease, does not. Either one can interfere with your ability to succeed. It's saner to admit that obstacles in the road to success may exist, while working around them, than to pretend that we're building our own road through a solipsistic world in which others exist only to reflect our energy back to us. We're not. They don't. 

2. Go, go, go! 

Another "motivational" tweet popped up in the same stream, right beside the one above: 

"

NEVER STOP LEARNING. Determine the skill you need to acquire to get to the next step in your journey. Successful people have figured out how to reach their goals through trial & error. Never let up, go go go!

"

Why do people say this? In its original context of athletic training, this kind of thing was said by and to people who were physically fit to push themselves to the limits of their strength. When everyone present routinely runs a mile in four and a half minutes, there seems to be no harm in pushing themselves toward a time below four minutes. 

A little "go, go, go" won't hurt us as long as our "going" feels good, overall. A habit of pushing ourselves, "go, go, hurry, push it, now, faster, never stop," becomes fast-moving cardiovascular disease. Go, go, go! Have that heart attack before age forty!

Why is this one false to reality? Life is not the Roman Arena. While I personally see more people who look undertrained than people who look overtrained, in terms of physical athletics, I still see the stereotype that may be most dangerous of all playing itself out in real life. That's the pattern where people abandon all physical training and just apply all those pre-game pep talks to business, personal time, even family life. "Win that conversation! Make that person buy one thing more than he came in to buy! The best never rest--shop till you drop! Bag those bargains! Get the best cabin at the lake! Push that kid through that math course!" They lose the ability to feel their blood pressure rise. Before long it just stays high all the time. 

What can we say instead? In real life, good coaches and trainers tell athletes when to stop pushing themselves and relax. A well exercised heart actually achieves a slower, steadier resting rhythm sooner than an underexercised one. In real life, unfortunately, few adults could find a competent coach to tell us when to push the working, studying, or whatever, and when to rest. We have to learn to do that for ourselves. 

One tool that works for some people is a home blood pressure kit. You can learn to use a traditional cuff and stethoscope, which never wear out, or buy a cute little electronic gadget that will do all the work for you until it wears out. When your resting or morning blood pressure reading is high, it's time to back off and pinpoint the source of stress. For that purpose, eliminating all "go, go, go!" thinking can help.

3. Focus on the Feelings 

Last night I felt sick. I was sick. I still am sicker and more tired than my younger self, or most young people, could imagine its being possible to be. I don't like to endorse any general slogan for everyone, because mine is probably as susceptible to misuse as anyone else's, but the thought that's worked for me in all of my hard times has consistently been, "FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW." 

After long hard thought I decided to post exactly what I was feeling, what was going through my mind, because I think people need that information. When you disappoint someone who is ill and/or disabled, you physically aggravate their disease. You trigger emotional moods that make it more likely that they'll become sicker than they already were. Not all elders or people with disabilities want company all the time, but whenever one of them wants and expects your company, there is no alternative. Go ahead and tell the White House social secretary that you're not available because you promised to spend that day with your grandmother. I don't know about some Presidents, but the good ones have publicly commended people who did that. Rock stars and supermodels have been known to fall in love with people who made them wait, too, for good reasons.

But as I typed the post before this one I was mentally bracing for somebody to spew out the TV movie approach to anyone who says anything like "I feel too tired to get up and eat if someone brought me my favorite food." That is a physical symptom--a fact. TV movies and social workers have unfortunately conditioned some of us to treat it as an emotional feeling.

Which leads to messes like, "Ohhh, dear, but you have so much to live for (I don't know what that might be, exactly, and I don't care, but it's what I'm supposed to say)! Let's get you some help to FEEL better! Try some nice pills...they cause intense pain in about one of three patients and violent insanity in one of twenty patients, but ANYthing's better than FEELing that you don't CARE about staying alive!" 

In real life I got up this morning, nibbled at a little healthy food, and felt better. That's NOT because I am saner than someone who might have felt the same way, been older and sicker with less ground to lose, and actually let perself die of dehydration (with water in the house, which the person was too weak to get up and drink). It's because I started out stronger than that person was, physically. You never know how strong people are, so you never know whether their feeling too weak to eat and drink is just a passing symptom or a permanent condition. Their sanity and intelligence has nothing to do with it. Grandma Bonnie Peters was renowned for her sanity and intelligence, and part of that was that, toward the end of her life, she knew that the day would soon come when her body would not be able to digest food or water if she was able to swallow it. You never know when that day is going to come for any individual, but before it arrives, you need to know that it is a physical condition, not a psychological one.

Why people say this: They are scared. They have no real reason to suspect that other people have suicidal depression as a disease, but they may have it, or have had it, themselves, or known someone who did. Sometimes they've learned the lines they repeat from someone at the hospital where one of their parents was treated for a drug overdose. Sometimes they're very, very young--not only too young to have anything useful to say, but too young to have the discipline to shut up and listen to what someone else is saying.

Why it's false in reality: TV movies may have succeeded in teaching the young different speech patterns, but for baby-boomers and the older generation, nine times out of ten, "I feel tired of living" does not mean anything like "I have suicidal depression." It has meanings like "I feel overwhelming fatigue and/or weakness and/or pain and/or nausea." Not only do serotonin boosters not treat this symptom--they often aggravate it. Efforts to help someone "feel better" while living through the original disease process can compound the disease process and increase the odds that the person will commit suicide. A pattern associated with one kind of medication used for neurological pain creates an obsession with suicide. A pattern associated with serotonin boosters, specifically, can also create delusions that the pain actually caused by the drugs has been caused by other people's evil acts (y'know that teacher has beaten and tortured students in front of whole classes before!) and an obsession with killing other people before committing suicide. 

It was bad enough when chronically ill patients my age vented "I wish I could just end all of this," on the way into or out of another painful medical procedure, and were rolled into the psychologist's office for useless talk about their emotions and their early childhood. That discouraged them, but it didn't kill third parties. But the overprescription of antidepressants has killed hundreds of third parties, including children.

What to say instead: If you personally can offer the person more in the way of "something to live for," go ahead and make that commitment now; it may or may not be medically necessary, or even medically relevant, but you probably will outlive the person and you will feel better whenever that happens. If you can't, zip your lip. Even people who have suicidal depression do not need more lies and liars in their lives.

Focus on the facts. The facts won't be the same for one person as they are for another. The facts may include this fact: there's nothing you can do. Or they may include this fact: there's something you can do, and it involves your back and/or your pocket, but it does not involve your mouth. Face the facts, and act on the facts you have.

In this kind of situation the facts can be incredibly hard to face. Be honest with yourself about the emotional feelings that may be complicating your response--your feelings. If you need someone to talk to about the fact that your disabled parent needs for you to remodel your ground floor and help him or her to roll around your home in a wheelchair all day, do not feel ashamed of asking for the help you need.

People's ability to discuss and work with all of their disabilities varies depending on the kind of disability they have. I've been using a bedpan. I can talk about that because (1) I don't expect to use it much longer, and also (2) I'm still strong enough and well enough coordinated to be able to use it efficiently. Reasonable people who don't even feel discouraged about being able to use a bedpan efficiently during a few weeks of acute illness might reasonably feel that having to be lifted out of a filthy bed, regularly, was more than they wanted their children to have to live through with them. Or their wives. 

Between waking up in their Heavenly Home and waking up in a filthy bed, any reasonable person would choose the former. If the person of concern to you is unable to keep perself clean, the only useful thing you can say is that you, personally, don't mind cleaning the person's bed. Which may or may not even help.

4. Counting Someone Else's Blessings 

I found an instructive example of this yesterday. A fellow Blogspot blogger posted this:

https://grahamlesterpoetry.blogspot.com/2021/03/blessed-lives.html

Reading the first few lines, I had the thought, "Yes, he's reminding all of us in the English-speaking countries" (the poem's been linked to blogs in at least the big six, and India!) "of a blessing we tend to forget--most of us have never been on a real battlefield." For me those lines are enough to evoke the awareness that this is indeed a blessing.

Right below the poem, a typical well-off yuppie writer, from Australia I believe, complained that "So many [people] do not lead blessed lives." Well, she might have been thinking of the ones whose homes have become battlefields. It is also, however, totally typical of well-off writers in the big six English-speaking countries (US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ), all of whom are still filthily rich by global standards, to forget about the fact that we're not living in war zones and feel that, because our writing hasn't put us on the Forbes 500 list yet, because many of us have minor disabilities (or acute temporary ones like my current one), because those of us who married for money and/or extrovert charm have had miserable marriages and divorces, and so on, we do not lead blessed lives. Well, in some ways we don't. But we have had the blessing of not living in a war zone.

So some of us blather: "Oh, count your blessings! You're alive!" (This, at the moment, may not feel like a blessing. See above.) "The weather is nice! Flowers are blooming--well, somewhere. The world has puppies in it!" (And if the person was hoping to adopt a puppy and has just realized she's too ill, that thought might make her cry all day and long into the night.)

Why people say this: They sincerely believe that they are expressing their faith and gratitude for their Higher Power. Often they're whistling in the dark--trying to earn more blessings when, in fact, their own ratio of blessings to non-blessings is running low. It's easy, and if you have sadistic tendencies it's fun, to deflate their little emotional balloons. It's also cruel; in real life, as discussed in Bright-Sided, some of these people are cancer survivors desperately hoping that Positive Thinking will extend their remissions.

Why it's false to reality: If God wanted you to feel blessed, you would feel blessed. Many of the basic facts of most of our lives--our homes are not in war zones, the weather in North America happens to be the kind most humans like best today, the world has puppies in it--probably are pleasant if we think about it. But a basic fact is not a special blessing. When people receive blessings, they'll tell the rest of the world. We cannot tell, before the fact, what anyone's blessings, even our own, may be.

What we can say instead: See "fix facts first," above. Most of the things people complain about are physical facts that exist in the physical world. They may or may not be subject to change. That change may or may not involve our backs or our pockets. It does not involve our mouths. If the only thing we believe we can do is to run our mouths, good things to say might include "Tell me more" or "I'm really grateful that you took the time to talk to me. I don't want to waste too much of your energy, so if you're feeling tired I'll go away." 

If you live with someone who read Winnie the Pooh as a child and took Eeyore as a role model in life, you might try just talking about the pleasant facts of life--the flowers, the scientific discoveries, the social breakthroughs, even (if the person has not just realized he is too ill to adopt a pet) the puppies. I'm all in favor of that. I'm actually launching a weekly e-newsletter full of pleasant things. (My original name for it was GAN: The Fluff, but for those who came in late, I'm calling it The Tuesday Revue.) Sometimes cheerful thoughts can boost the flow of serotonin for some people who have problems with that.

People should understand, however, that at a deep level some people believe that talking about the good things in our lives attracts evil, so when they want to receive more blessings they'll talk as if even their grandchildren were big disappointments. There may still be traditional Chinese elders whose idea of showing gratitude for being healthy and successful and having beautiful grandchildren is to growl, "Bah, useless girls and an empty-headed boy who'll never get anywhere in life." What they really mean is "Long may these blessings continue," but they'd never dare to say that.

5. Someone Else Is Worse Off 

While typing yesterday's post I dismissed a few thoughts that came to my mind. Thoughts like, "Have you forgotten how many people find time to read blogs because they are going through chemotherapy for cancer? While writing about the misery of food poisoning have you given any thought to how idiotic you sound to chemo survivors?" I chose to write what I did because chemo survivors are not strong enough to write about what they are feeling while they're feeling it, and nobody would have the fortitude to read it if they did. So, reading about food poisoning, which is something young people can imagine happening to them, may give them as much of a clue as they can possibly understand.

A lot of baby-boomers first heard the "Someone Else Is Worse Off" line of unhelpful talk when they didn't like something served at dinner. "Look at these pictures of hungry orphans in Europe or India who would be glad to have those carrots! Now eat your carrots and try to be grateful!" 

I even heard it when I was new to widowhood. "Otto Frank lost his wife and his children and his friends in the concentration camps! How can you feel discouraged when you've only lost your husband?" 

To that, the only reasonable reply is, "Worse than losing my husband, I find myself living in a world that has you in it." And if I were on the jury trying someone who had followed that reply by doing what antidepressants suggested to her mind, that person would...have to spend at least two actual fifty-minute hours talking to a therapist. About easing off the pills, mainly.

For most of us, it should be enough to note the logical fallacy of this line of babble. Anyone still spouting it should have to copy the entire Bible by hand before being allowed to talk to another human being.

Why people say this: They're badly scared, they're desperate for something to say (probably because they know it's time to shut up and activate the back or the pocket or both), and they're also stupid. They are not people in whom we should ever confide or to whom we should ever listen. 

It should be noted that in a few cases, like the carrot situation, this line was a badly distorted, useless, and counterproductive version of a valid appeal to some legitimate cause. To adults who can understand the situation it may still make sense to say "We've raised funds for a gala dinner with expensive food, and we're eating a local farmer's supermarket-reject carrots, in order to send more money to those hungry orphans. Let's eat our carrots and give thanks."

In the typical carrot situation, the carrots actually cost more than some of the junkfood the children would have preferred would have cost, and there may be baby-boomers who don't understand why anyone ever told a child "Eat those carrots because of those hungry orphans," to this day.

Why it's false in reality: If you care about someone who is worse off than you are, adding that person's pain to yours makes you feel worse. 

If your goal is to cheer and encourage someone, never be the first to mention those who are even worse off. Sometimes sick patients will do this. Sometimes they actually mean, not just "Go away and don't talk to me, idiot," but "The patient across the hall might really benefit from more company." But don't you be the one to mention it. Wait for them to bring up the subject of anyone being sicker than they are.

What to say instead: Anything. Nothing. Just don't ever say anything like this.