By Catherine Hajnal and Seanna Quresette, Photo: from article, Career Wise Weekly, November 30, 2023
Do you ever wonder why you are drawn to a helping profession? As career professionals, we constantly help people through life transitions in wide-ranging ways. Along with our knowledge, skills and abilities, we bring to this work our personal perspectives and frameworks on what it means to “help” and who exactly needs helping.
When we look at what gets in the way of well-being for clients, when we think about things like Adverse Childhood Experiences and their consequences, we often focus on the individual. Looking at this diagram, it’s evident that there are many factors that are systemic and structural that work their way into the mix of what is going on for our clients and ourselves.
It is possible to see that the barriers clients face are built into the systems that we work within and that we work to change. In other words, the barrier is not the client’s; rather, the system and structures generate the barriers. “Helping” the clients invites us to be advocates, challenging those very systems that impact our clients.
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