The Safe Enough Podcast
Ep 21 - Where Does That Leave You?
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, Executive Director of the It Begins To Move studio, where we support your safe and gentle embodied healing. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.
This is the second of three episodes in a series on how working with professional providers during a healing is a tricky thing. In the previous episode I talked about expertise and evaluation. In this episode I’ll talk about the serious impact an inaccurate evaluation during a healing process can have. And in the next and final episode in this series, I’ll talk about the critical ingredient in a successful healing partnership, but is often missing.
The very nature of expertise in a professional relationship - that’s the kind of relationship where there’s an exchange of money for knowledge - is that the You Must Be Right dynamic is always present. Where the power to evaluate what’s going on within YOU, the client, the person who has the situation that needs some help from someone who knows a lot about what you need help with, when the power to evaluate lies solely within the other person, then there’s a chance that they’ll get it wrong. Okay, humans make errors. But this is the crux of the point I’d like to make. What if their evaluation and assessment are totally accurate, given the data that experts are trained on. Data collection, assessment and diagnostic criteria, treatment plans, approaches, tools and interventions for fixing problems is CONSTANTLY changing! What works changes all the time, because humans, our environment and our technology is constantly changing and evolving over time. So firstly, what worked at one point in time for most humans in your situation might not work anymore because a better solution is evolving. That’s firstly. However, there’s another point I want to make about data and the scientific method. When treatment strategies and interventions are assessed in research, it’s done with a sample population. That means that scientists take a small group of humans - because it would be absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to ask every single human on the face of the earth, or even every single human who has the problem that they’re testing possible solutions for. So the first thing to keep in mind is that when researchers come up with an evidence based solution, something that’s been tested and re-tested and seems to be valid, or even becomes what’s called a “gold standard” of treatment-basically that just means that it’s the main solution that’s used-more often than not that solution was successful for most folks who participated in that study. Nearly never is the solution successful for each participant. But a new solution gains traction in the community of providers who work with folks with a particular condition when a solution is considered LIKELY to bring successful results to most folks it’s used on. LIKELY. Likely is statistically calculated. Again, it almost never brings successful outcomes to all participants. I’d like to say this in a different way. Tested solutions and solutions that work for others NEVER work for all folks. Never. Not even in the testing research. But there’s this funny thing that happens in the community of professionals who are “expert” providers. Even though they almost never work for all research participants, experts often take the solutions that are only LIKELY to work, and EXPECT that they will. It’s such a reasonable thing to do. Professionals want solutions for clients, especially healthcare providers, and other helping professionals because if the solutions work, their clients’ lives will improve! But there’s sort of this forgetting that research is representative of potential success. Not guaranteed success. And what I mean by that is that YOU, as a client, as a patient, as a person who is suffering and seeks support and relief, may or may not benefit from a potentially successful solution. Or a likely successful solution. That potential always means equally that you may, and that you may not. And that concept isn’t really important when a solution is suggested by an expert, you try it, and it works. But it is super important when a solution is suggested, you try it, and it DOESN’T work. Because when a professional insists that the solution should work, even when it doesn’t, where does that leave you? …That’s what I’ll be talking about in the next episode in this 3 part series. And also in next MONTH’s series I’ll be talking all about the best, safest and gentlest process for connecting with your inner wisdom, and finding that just right solution, that I’ve ever come across, and how you can experience it firsthand. Stay tuned. I’ll see you in the next episode. Take care, kind soul.
