Interview by Nick Manning
Nick interviewed Steve, a street worker in western Sydney, about how an advocate might destroy trust.
Steve: Not keeping confidences. Sometimes a young person will get off side with a particular agency or a particular worker in a particular agency, and they don't want something to get back to them, don't want that worker to know about it or whatever. And so long as it is not harmful to anybody then we'd have to keep confidences and just build that trusting relationship with that young person. But if we went and talked about those private things with other workers from other agencies or other young people, then our relationship is shot and the young person wouldn't want to know about us.
We can also blow trust by being too up front. By coming in as if we were wearing sandwich boards saying "We're youth workers, how can we help you?". They'll say "Piss off dork, what do you think you're doing here?".
Being too full on, being too bureaucratic, not being welcoming in your appearance, in your attitude. If you walk into the pool room with a suit and tie, I would look stupid with a suit and tie on, they're just going to not relate because they're all wearing their baseball caps and their Nikes and their Adidas gear. You have to be relevant or you won't build a relationship at all, at least in the initial stages.
I suppose if there was an abuse of power, you would lose the trust in the relationship if you tried to push somebody in a direction that you thought they should go in and they didn't think they should go in. They would just be feeling like you were treating them like most people had treated them. That you know better than they do about what's best for them. So treating them with respect is probably the best way with any relationship, is the best way to gain trust is just to treat somebody with respect.
I personally like treating people as individuals not just as numbers or clients of the organisation. I like getting to know the person and getting to know their sense of humour and getting to know their likes and dislikes so that we can tailor our service to meet the needs of that particular young person in the best way possible for them. Without setting up structures that are going to be open to abuse by them, but not pushing them in areas that we in our great wisdom and knowledge know what's best. Because even in areas that they don't know what's best they have a right to choose. It's just letting them be individuals. You or I would want to be treated as somebody who has the right to choose their own destiny and even if that person's choice is not to get out of the situation that they might be in, a drug dependent or whatever, then if they make a conscious decision to choose that, that's their right to choose that. Even if that could result in their death they have the right to choose if they want to stay in drugs. If they want to get out of drugs then you might be able to advocate for them.
There was a young couple living around here and they were both heavily addicted to methadone and whatever prescription drugs they could get their hands on and we spent a lot of time just sitting down and having chats with them about their lifestyle. Because they both had Hepatitis C and who knows what else and they were in and out of jail, they were in and out of abusive situations. But they didn't want help, well they said they wanted help but they never followed it up so really what they were saying is "No I don't want help, drugs are better".
And so in the end we would go around there and give them food. In the end it became a support to keep them alive rather than a support to get them out of their lifestyle. Even though that would have been great, they didn't choose to do that. In the end she overdosed, he went to jail and while he was inside, she overdosed. Because he went to jail he lost his housing commission flat. One of the biggest reasons he didn't want to get off the drugs was because he'd have to go on detox and if he went on detox, he'd have to give up his flat which he waited a long time for. And so there are a lot of decisions in the process of getting off drugs that you wouldn't realise, especially if someone comes from a street background, they've never had a home of their own, the government now gives them a three bedroom flat because they had two children until DoCS took them off them.
They would have had to give all that up to get off the drugs and so not being annoying to the point of distraction for them because then the relationship collapses. But simply giving them advice, it was pretty up front advice, killing yourself is pretty up front and in the end that's what she did, she killed herself and we haven't seen him for probably six months now and I wouldn't be surprised if he's dead too. He hasn't been around and since he got out of jail he lost his flat down here so I don't know where he's living now. But when he got out he was bingeing for a week on Normacin and he was all puffy and still shooting up methadone and what ever other drugs he could get his hands on. And that was his choice, that was his life even though it was really sad. I felt really sad especially for their two little girls who didn't have their mum. We nearly got them into a detox but she just walked away from it in the end, didn't want it. She actually went to ward 21 in Cumberland Hospital and stayed in there for a week and when she came out she was a bright eyed, friendly, happy, because she was off the prescription drugs, she was only on the methadone. But then after a week of being out she was back into it again, her eyes were hanging out of her head and she was on the nod. They would have written us off - they wrote a lot of other people in their lives off if they hassled them and hassled them and hassled them into getting into detox or whatever.
Nick: Because that would have been an abuse of power? Looking at your own need, not their need?
Steve: That's right. Like saying: "We know what's better for you than you know for yourself." They have the right to choose what they want to do with their lives like anybody does. Even if that ends in their death. And that's really hard especially because we had an ongoing relationship with them over a couple of years. And then in the end it just felt like all of our efforts went down the drain because she's dead. But you know it's not like that because all along that way we were encouraging them to change whereas nobody else would've done that and so any step along that process they could have actually made a choice to do something about it but they chose not to. So that's their choice, not ours.
It's easier to ruin relationships than to establish them. You can ruin a healthy relationship with one act. A trusting relationship relies on a hundred thousand acts.
Nick: So could that one act be you saying you can't help someone when they ask you for help? Could saying "No" ruin a relationship?
Steve: Not generally, unless it's in the situation where you've had enough of them and you don't want to help them any more. But if you're just genuinely too busy or you just genuinely can't do whatever they would like you to do, it shouldn't ruin the relationship. More often than not the people we've dealt with might have been a bit pooey at the time because they had an urgent need which you couldn't do and so, they ra, ra, ra but if you've had an ongoing relationship up until then, it's a hiccup, it's not a destroying thing. So then next time they'll come in and ask you for help and then you'll give it to them. And it's all smoothed out again.
The needs always exceed the ability to meet the need, always. There's always more needs than you can meet and you just have to do what you can do and so long as you're doing it to the best of your ability, a lot of juggling goes on but so long as you're doing what you can do, that's as much as anyone can do. And if you start doing more than that, that's when your life expectancy as a worker comes to an end because you're just going to burn yourself out.
Related articles
Notes
Opinions: are the author's and not necessarily YAPA's.
© Nick Manning 2002. You can:
- quote small amounts of text if you acknowledge the author, publisher, web address & date
- print out multiple copies of this web page but only if you print the whole web page
No other use permitted without prior consent. Do not put large amounts or all of the text in any other document, including:
- a policy & procedure manual
- a presentation (eg. Powerpoint)
- a training/learning resource book (eg. for TAFE)
- a web page.
Copyright and training enquiries: nmanning@pnc.com.au
