The Helping Questions: Notes from the Future

4 months ago

The Helping Questions: Notes from the Future

[originally posted on Medium Nov 19, 2022]

The Helping Questions: Notes from the Future

As you may or may not know I have been suffering from severe symptoms stemming from several illnesses including cfs/me, POTS, gastroparesis and more. It’s devastating. As I sit in bed (bedridden) I often journal and dream about my life and a future that I hope for. As I was scrolling through LinkedIn one day I saw Nissens questions for the future of social work.

Nissens graph shows the future of social work profession with arrows pointing outwards and circles with words in them signifying future directions. Includes questions: what are we celebrating! What are we inventing? What are we researching? What are we wasting time on? What are we resisting? What are we exploring ? What are we completely missing? What are we complicating ?

I must admit that I’m not the most optimistic about the future of social work. To put it plainly I actually prefer for it to cease to exist as we know it. To this end I think there are so many ways to shift our work so that many of the great people within the profession can actually do the work they envision being done. To help make the world a better place.

The beginning of the end of social work as we know it could take so many forms. Personally, I’ve constantly pondered the power of social workers to practice mass refusal. Strikes, new ethical commitments, effforts to abandon much of what we were taught in our programs. Refusal to adhere to the practices of devastation that are often inherent to the systems that many of us work within. I think about how we could transform our yearning to help people. I think about restructuring how we approach help in the first place. Changing this would dramatically alter the systems we encounter and the people we partner with.

Here are some images from my journaling about that, from the perspective of a person in the future. Enjoy and pardon the illustrations, I’m practicing drawing!

My reflective questions for helpers includes: is your help tied to surveillance or policing or that which functions to criminalize those asking for help? Is anyone asking for your help or is your help mandated or otherwise forced? Were you invited into the space by those asking for help? What were the asks or stipulations? What do they envision help as? Do you have the means to help in this way? What is the goal of your role? What value systems are you brining in to the space? What ethical commitments are we adhering to? Do they prevent us from showing up in the ways asked? Will they cause harm? What are the tensions in your presence? What decisions are you being asked to make in the space? How do you co create space? How do you take less space? Are there processes for open communication and accountability when harm occurs?