That's no fair.

One of the most frustrating parts of my job is that I can’t “get mad”. They’ve trained us time and time again to not take things personally even when they are made personal. Today, for example, I attended training on helping people in stressful situations. We talked about what agitated behaviors look like and how to help deescalate an agitated person while still empowering the individual to make his or her own choice. I should have paid more attention.

I have a client who looked up his former Independent Living Staff person’s home phone number and continues to call her, ignoring the fact that she asked him repeatedly to refrain from calling on any number other than her work cell (He is no way a threat, just more of an invasion of her work-free home life). She informed me that this was going on (thank goodness my number is listed under Sherry’s name) and, of course, it became my job to discuss this little problem with my client. With every possible explanation I could come up with about the inappropriateness of calling a staff person on their home phone, especially after being asked not to, came a whimper of “that’s no fair” over and over and over again. I begin to take it personal. Now I understand that the phrase “that’s no fair” is no where near threatening or offensive, but after the twelfth time in 7 minutes, it starts to offend me that HE’S JUST NOT GETTING WHAT I AM SAYING. This situation, of course, was a few short hours after my training session on agitation and so I pondered how I could empower this person to make the right choice for himself and understand why choosing something that he sees as unfair is indeed his choice and the right decision. We talked in circles for the 2 hours I spent with him. Every time it seemed he understood (and could explain) why his staff would like to have a life away from work, he’d end his “lesson learned” with “that’s no fair”. Needless to say, by the time the little hand hit the 5, I was packing my things and checked out. My employer knows as well as I do that there is no way to avoid becoming emotionally involved in the lives of these people all the time, despite EBI’s efforts to train us otherwise. Sometimes I can remove myself enough to not be offended, frustrated or overwhelmed with personal attacks or my lack of ability to communicate to my client in a way that he gets it. Other times I can’t. Today was one of those can’t days.

I’m not sure if my client will ever completely grasp appropriate social behaviors and I strongly believe that it’s not his fault. He pushes to understand a world that he has never been a part of until recently; and, as frustrating as it is to me, that he was excluded from typical social relationships and that he doesn’t understand them now, I can’t get mad at him. Friday, he and I will start fresh and hope for a better outcome.