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First Posted on July 22, 2010 by alisonball

Another theme that comes to mind is that I give quite a lot of thought to the values, theories and experiences that influence me moment by moment when I am working. The theories are, I’ve decided, many and varied and gathered over many years now. But the values have remained quite steadfast over the years.

Here I am thinking about the very earliest influences in my working life. And they were the ethos and values of social work that I studied in the late 70′s. Those  values chrystallized for me a way of being toward others that had come from the influence of my mother when she took in children and families in crisis to be part of our family. They are still important to me. Principally, as it states in one of my old social work texts ” (Bartlett H. 1970)- “the widely held value in social work that asserts the worth and dignity of every human being” . And added to that was the importance of being there to facilitate the realization of every person’s “potential for growth” to the fullest possible extent. For me that has been the underlying stance that I have wanted to hold to. Then just after graduating from social work at Monash University I read Carl Rogers book- “On Becoming a Person”. That book became like a bible to me for much of my early working life. He gave ways of being with a person that were true to those social work values and helped to define what worked in the therapeutic encounter. His concepts of empathy and genuiness for instance, seemed to take away the anxiety of having to “have all the answers”. As my social work mentor said to me at the time: “For a starting point, just being there and being yourself is enough.” That was indeed a very strange idea for me but a great relief as well. My next big learning was lots of reading and a couple of weekends of Transactional Analysis (T.A.) mixed with some Gestalt thinking and experience. Yes, the old “I’m OK, You’re OK” stuff. I will talk more about that another time but even today those couple of weekends gave me some really useful ways of thinking about what might be going on in the mind of the person before me – ideas about how the child under stress makes “decisions” in their early years about what life is all about, who they are, how they see other people and how they must be in the world in order to survive. I still find these very seemingly simple ideas shed a great deal of light on very complex dynamics. I’ve learned a lot since those days- more courses, many more books and many more theories but still that early learning has enduring value and again and again serves me well in being with and thinking together with the people in my room.