“Personal care requires understanding”
– by Eric Batten
“People who do personal care – personal carers – are people vulnerable to their own emotions. The more fortunate, all through their developing life experience, make mature and accept adjustments to how they relate to others. Those less fortunate remain trapped in an outlook largely determined by their earliest experience and remain ill-equipped to manage difficult emotional situations in an adequate and appropriate manner.
Most seriously perhaps, for those caring, there are occasions of abuse where people’s life experience may reduce them to be inadequate, that it results in manipulation of those who they are supposed to care for. In short, personal care requires understanding and understanding requires the management of emotions by intellect.
Everybody hurts, everybody seeks comfort and reconciliation for their experience. We’re often too content to make assumptions about others. The less the understanding the easier the conclusion. The more the emotions, positive perhaps, negative sometimes. The struggle is there in all of us.
But the commitment to the other person in personal care requires us to empathise. That is a serious and analytical approach, a skill that will help every person. The aim is to nurture and protect the individual self. This is a major personal challenge. That challenge is also heightened because very often value caring, which may be a commitment, is countered by the requirements of the organisation the people work in.”
