Karius and Associates Blog

 by Amber Stromberg

     When faced with a burnout rate of five years for people in some helping professions, it hardly seems worth the four years of school and all the late nights that go along with it.

      We are told that we must leave our work at work, and to let people go once they walk out the door.  But the reason so many of us go into the helping professions is that we care.  I have numerous friends who can not comprehend why I would want to stress myself out over someone problems.  They believe that everyone should just sort out things on their own, just like everyone else.  But what they don’t see are the people who do not have friends to talk to or family to support them when they are in need.

     I am still new to this so when a client tells a sad story, they are usually not the only ones reaching for a tissue.  So how do people who have been at this for years, make it?

Do they cease to care? Is it just another sad story?  Just another case? Or are they too struggling to find their place between empathy and apathy?

I’ve just finished re-reading Black Like Me. I read it when I was young but it’s had a very different effect on me this time around. It’s the story of John Howard Griffin, who, in 1959, changed the pigment of his skin and went into the South as a black man.

I believe that so much of the racism and prejudice still remains. In Saskatchewan, we see it primarily towards First Nations people, but the concept is the same in many races and cultures. When we believe a stereotype, we engage in the behaviors that follow. Mr. Griffin talks about the “hate stare”; a concious or concious look of hate thrown at people with different skin colors. He talks about the sets of beliefs that frame people’s perceptions, disallowing them from seeing others as they are.

Most poignantly for me, Mr. Griffin talks about seeing the people who hate, in other contexts; sitting down for dinner with their families, talking to their grandparents. When someone is hating us, for whatever reason, if we can see them as human, then there’s a chance that they might see us as human too.

Heroes small and large overcome racism. A smile, a handshake, finding out the answer to “What’s life like for you?”, without assumptions and regardless of color will help to disintegrate these stereotypes.

Please share your own stories of yourself or people you know making strides, large and small, to know people as they are - rather than as they might be perceived to be.

Have a thoughtful Friday!

A son is telling his mother what a bad new driver his sister is, carrying on about near misses, highway swerves and spin outs on gravel roads. His mother looks at him with terror and replies ‘Kid - don’t tell me about your driving lives, and I won’t ask about your sex lives.”

Questions:
Do we need to know EVERYTHING about our kids lives? Is this statement good parenting or bad parenting.
Does this idea transfer over into business? Does the boss need to know everything about what employees are doing in parts of their lives that don’t apply to business?
Are there parellels between parenting and supervising employees?

Have fun with this!
Kelly