A Non-Judgemental Stance by Alison Ball
This
paper was for a seminar Alison was asked to give on the topic in 2004 for a
group of
Aboriginal nurses in their University course in Geelong.
Alison began the Seminar with an Exercise for the class.
“This exercise is just for your own information. You don’t have to share it. I’d like you to write down three things you have already noticed about me since I came in here. Leave a bit of space to add some more writing against each thing. And I am going to write down three things I have noticed about you as a group.”
After a minute they were asked to then write down a one sentence continuation of each of those things. For example I had written. “You are mostly quite young”, and continuing on from that I wrote “so they will probably think I’m an old fuddie/duddie with nothing useful to say.”
They were then asked to add another short sentence against each thing. “Thinking that makes me feel…….” EG My next sentence was… “Thinking that makes me feel a bit anxious though actually saying it has eased that anxiety a bit.”
Regarding Observations
So what are these things that we have written? We have all made some observations about each other. In such a short time knowing each other, we have not got a lot to go on although, maybe even before you saw me, if you had heard that I was coming to speak to you on this topic then you may already have had some fantasies about me. And I had some fantasies about this group. What would you be like? I’d heard that you were nurses in training and were indigenous people from all over Australia.
And with those thoughts and the actual observations when we come together, we quickly start forming opinions about each other. Some of our initial thoughts may be validated or changed the more we get to know each other.
The move from Observations to Judgements
And our observations and opinions of each other may very quickly or sometimes slowly slide over into some sorts of judgements about each other.
How do we do this? Why do we do it?And what are our opinions, judgements and even some of our observations based upon? And what does it mean to have a non-judgemental stance?
This is the meat of what I want to talk to you about today. To try in some way to answer these questions.
One thing to make clear from the start is that it is impossible not to make judgements about other people. We must do it. It is in our human nature and at base level it is a survival mechanism. First and foremost we want to keep ourselves safe in this world. When we meet the other say, in a dark street at night when we are all alone, we want to be able to quickly observe, listen, form opinions and sum up whether or not we judge this other person to be safe for us and what action we must take if we judge them not to be safe.
And, at an every day level as we go about the business of living we extend that need for safety to all our surroundings and the people around us. We generally feel most safe when we are in familiar territory and amongst familiar people. Even if we don’t particularly like the person or people around us, if they are familiar to us at the very least it is usually possible for us to predict how they might be and how we ourselves need to be to continue to feel safe. Mostly at the very least, we want our lives to be safe and predictable. In short, “The devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know”. The stranger is always to be treated with caution. Of course there are exceptions to this but generally we move in the direction of safety or move toward the unknown only because we become willing or able to take the risks involved in meeting the unfamiliar.
So making judgements about people is essential and we all do it constantly. When we speak of a “Non-Judgemental Stance we can only mean an approximation to an ideal of acceptance of the reality of the other. Or, in other words, striving for a respect for the individual’s right to be themselves. As with judgements of course, none of us can ever be totally accepting. It is rather the degree of acceptance as opposed to rejection that is the issue. And we will think about acceptance from two angles; acceptance of ourselves and acceptance of others. This is what we must work at.
Acceptance of Ourselves.
Acceptance of ourselves must come first. That is, loving or respecting ourselves warts and all. Many of us have been raised in the tradition that says loving ourselves equals selfishness and that we should always put others before ourselves. But, assuming we are not totally narcissistic then it really is not possible to love and accept others unless we first love and accept ourselves as the ordinary (and sometimes, extraordinary) human being we are, though all the while accepting that we are not a super being who should be able to do anything.
At this point Alison referred toa handout on Self Esteem.Good self-esteem is based on acceptance of ourselves. It is the value we place on ourselves and is influenced by our self image. And that self image consists of the feelings we have about ourselves and the judgements, evaluations and ideas we have about ourselves. Spend a few moments writing in there some of the feelings and some of the judgements, evaluations and ideas that you have about yourself.
Acceptance of Others.
This acceptance of our selves and a certain degree of self-esteem gives us the capacity to be accepting of others and as much as possible to take a non-judgemental stance in our work. The extent that we feel at home with ourselves, confident, sure of who we are and what we believe in gives us a solidity within ourselves that means we have more of a chance to be able to accept difference in others…. A different “other”.
In a moment I’ll say more about accepting difference but let’s think for a bit about difference itself. It is a fact that we are all different. We have different backgrounds, different schooling, different families and life experiences to which we have responded in our own particular way. From all that we have developed different traits and habits and we will have formed our own personal set of values and beliefs; we have our own set of cultural and spiritual values and beliefs and values and beliefs about ourselves, other people, about life, about how to behave, about what is right and wrong or acceptable or not acceptable. Someone else- any other person- will have developed quite differently even if they have grown up very close to us.
Given all this, then maybe very simplistically, a useful attitude to bring to our work is one that warns us to RESPOND BEFORE WE REACT. The theory sounds easy, but in practice we are all vulnerable especially when we come across some person or behavior that offends our values and beliefs. So we must be patient with ourselves in this development of acceptance and a non-judgemental stance.
Accepting of difference- what does it take?
Already we have said that it is not possible without a certain degree of self esteem and an acceptance of ourselves. Then next we have to find ways to build bridges. Bridges between ourselves and other individuals or groups and sometimes between whole groups of us and other groups. For me today it is between you and me. Or it could be between me and a group of noisy teenager neighbours, between me and a group of drug addict young parents at the hospital I used to work at, or between me and the patients I used to work with who had Huntington’s Disease. In a moment I will ask you to think of some groups you may have had to build bridges with.
We do sometimes wonder why some people seem to be at ease with total strangers, why some love to go to different countries where the culture is totally different from what they know? We see some people who seem to treat anyone they meet in whatever circumstances with a respect and acceptance that gives to that other the human being the dignity they would want for themselves? On the other hand some of us can hardly come near a stranger or become extremely anxious when we venture away from our familiar territory or familiar people. But this acceptance of the different other is very difficult and often it is not easy to build a bridge.
I have learned a lot about this from a couple of sources in recent times. One is a book that I will give you as a reference and the other is a Jewish Rabbi who I heard speak in 2001. His name is Rabbi Dr. David Rosen and he heads up the International Council of Christians and Jews. As far as I understand he was the person most responsible for negotiating the normalization of relationships between Israel and the Vatican. In a crucial practical and symbolic move he brought the Pope to Israel. Dr. Rosen mostly talks about building bridges between faiths but I think the same applies to building bridges between different races, different cultures and groups of very disparate people. And we can think of many such differing groups.
As quoted in the Age of May 19th 2001, Dr. Rosen says that the first step in building bridges is to accept difference, not to try to minimize it. “The beliefs”, he says and I might add, the values, the life experience and the history of each one of us give us our “sense of meaning and purpose in life and forms our identity”. “Tolerance”, he adds, “means nothing if it does not at least mean acknowledging and respecting the differences that make others who they are”. Dr. Rosen goes on to say that when our identities are in conflict it is difficult to build the bridges and the reason is that “people fear that in recognizing the other’s identity they will undermine their own. Their refusal to acknowledge others is a reflection of their insecurity, and that is what they need to overcome.” We need to be strong enough within ourselves and in our own beliefs and values so that we can empathetically put ourselves in the shoes of the other “without fearing that we will lose our own .. (identity)”.
Before going on to talk more about the extreme end of non-acceptance, judgementalism and the concept of stigma, Alison took a few more minutes with a short exercise not for publication., but just for their own information.
They were asked to write down up to three things they liked and three things they disliked about one of the following: a sibling, parent, partner, teacher, boss.
Now they were asked to do the same thing about themselves.
They then were asked if they were OK with it to turn to the person next to you and talk to them about experiences you may have had with building bridges with strangers or strange people. Think about who that stranger was, how they felt and how they coped in that situation. And secondly to think about situations they have been in where they had not liked the way someone else has dealt with someone or some group who is different.
The concept of STIGMA- The Stigmatized, the Stigmatizers and the By-Standers.
And now I want to talk a little about the more extreme end of damaging judgementalism and the stigmatizing of certain people or groups. To stigmatise is defined in my Concise Oxford dictionary as to “use opprobrious terms against, describe opprobriously”. And opprobrious is defined as “to convey approach; abusive; vituperative”. I think this is particularly pertinent when it is the likes of me talking to you today. I could be thought of as a representative of the dominant white culture in this country. My forbears are the very same people who actively perpetrated or stood by and allowed the carrying off of aboriginal children and who held or went along with, the racist and genocidal views that assumed the native population of this country would either die out or be bred out of existence. And because of this you know all about what it is to be thought of amongst us white fellas as “the strange other”.
But for a moment let us think about those groups in this situation. There is the dominant culture group who in my example are the stigmatizing group, and there is the aboriginal population who were stigmatized. But there is a third group. I mentioned that there were the actual perpetrators amongst the white population- the politicians, the law makers, the magistrates, the bureaucrats and the police. But there was another group. A much, much larger group. Those who stood by and allowed it to happen… the by-standers. Perhaps in much the same way as most of us just stand by today and do not protest enough about the children and adults held in refugee detention camps or us white fellas- and well off black fellas maybe- stand by and watch as aboriginal people continue to suffer the repercussions of the impact of white settlement.
Tremlow and Sacco (2002) in the reference I have given you, present some useful ideas about what the experience means for these three groups? They are talking about the situation of the Palestinians- the stigmatized group in their instance- who they say “feel that they are restoring their honour by fighting the aggressor and not being helpless victims… Facing a well equipped army with stones and suicide bombers, reinforces Palestinians’ feelings of strength, courage, and defiance.” (p.105). So in their example the stigmatized group fight back as best they can. But sometimes people who are abused cannot fight back. Sometimes the most or the best they can do is conserve their actual physical life or their inner integrity. Some actually die.
Then there is the experience of the group who does the stigmatizing. The authors say that three primary functions are served through the demonizing of particular stigmatized groups. These functions are: “the control of self-esteem, the establishment of control over others and the buffering of anxiety.”(p.106) Again, you can see that these are all efforts to shore up a sense of self that is so sadly lacking that it must use and abuse the other to its own ends and to meet needs which should be met from an internal strength. And the other- the stranger- comes to represent parts of themselves about which they feel anxious and do not want to own as their own… “they the stranger are not us”..
And what of the by-standers? The bystanders are each one of us in certain circumstances. We stand by while we hear or see someone being mistreated or put down. And while we don’t actively participate we do not actively intervene or even comment. This community of bystanders, say the authors, delegate the perpetrator, the bully, the stigmatizer or the school shooter to act on their behalf. The bystanders abdicate their responsibility. The authors go on to suggest that in order to combat bullying and victimization “The focus of work is with the bystanders and the desired transformation is from bystander to involved and committed community member/witness.” (p.119)
To finish off I want to come back to you yourselves. I said earlier that it is likely that you have a fair idea of what it might be like to be stigmatized or marginalized. But, in a sense that is the easy part. The hard part is for all of us to look within ourselves and to see the terrorist in ourselves or the stigmatizing bully within ourselves. I can easily get riled up about John Howard and Phillip Ruddick and their parts in the Tampa incident and the locking up of children and asylum seekers. But what is necessary is for me to look at the racist or terrorist in myself and/ when I act as the bystander. And for you… you are all nurses. I would take a bet that in your communities you are the ones who are looked up to. You will frequently have the very lives of people in your hands. You are or may become the ones with some power. And you will often be in the position of listening to the life stories of sick people and perhaps forming opinions about how they got to the position they are in.
And I want to ask you, what attitudes, values and beliefs will you bring to your work? Will you be strong enough in your own sense of who you are to be able to listen with a relatively non-judgemental stance? Will you be able to approach your patients with acceptance of their differences and a curiousity about the life journey that has lead them to where they are today?
To finish off Alison asked if they would like to spend some time thinking together in small groups about the values and beliefs that inform their opinions and judgements and about what life values seemed important for them.
REFERENCES:
Rosen, Rabbi Dr. David. 2001. The Rabbi Ronald Lubofsky Memorial Oration jointly presented by the B’Nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission Inc. and the Council of Christians and Jews (Victoria) Inc.
Twemlow, Stuart W. & Sacco, Frank C. (2002) Reflections on the Making of a Terrorist, Chapter 7 in Terrorism and War- Unconscious Dynamics of Political Violence. Eds
Coline Covington, Paul Williams, Jean Arundale and Jean Knox. Karnac London.