05-21-2013, 11:28 PM
joseph Wrote:i dont now wade. i have staff who help me and who i lvie with beacase we have learning disabilities . i hope they do it job becase them care about us .the staff think its bad if peple with learning disabilities dont go a good life and there job to help it. if my staff wasnt i wouldent want them. some peple hate if pople with learning disabilitys have a badlife and they wont to help. my staff is good becuse they think ii matter and my life
I don't doubt that your staff wants the best and cares for you in the slightest. Conditions for that type of work are probably better than in the UK than they are here and may therefore attract a better breed of humans. I live in a very small little corner of the world and my experience in no way is representative of the whole.
I cared very much for the folks I worked with and grew to like most of them very much, and remain in contact with some. But I did not seek that job in order to help anyone. That's brutal honesty for ya! But I am one person. A selfish horrible person clearly. And my motives in no way indicate what is true for everyone.
I witnessed emotional and psychological abuse perpetrated by my boss onto developmentally disabled people, the people that she supposedly worked for. She developed a relationship with clients and then subjected them to unnecessary guilt and shaming and treated them in such a way that she would never dare treat people outside of her sphere of control. She was Nurse Ratched to a T (tee?). Over the four years that I worked there I repeatedly went to her superior to describe what I had witnessed and nothing was ever done about it. Not once.
I felt guilty about leaving because I (egotistically) felt that I was in some unhealthy way a buffer between her and them. I still feel some guilt for leaving. That's one of the reasons I stayed so long, even though I was miserable working because of my boss. But again, did I want to do the right thing, or was just guilt? Are those two things the same?
But nothing was ever going to change, and I wasn't helping, so I quit. I also wanted to go back to school; another act of selfishness.
And as much as I go on about what horrible people the folks I saw working were, there were also some great people. Sometimes I think that true compassion is not something that you can advertise or is plainly visible. I, and others, developed a an empathy towards the individuals I worked with by getting to know them and I did care for their welfare, just as I'm certain that your staff does for you. But I witnessed some unsavory things that made me a little cynical, or at least skeptical when I hear about someone doing something "charitable."