Head on the floor

Sometimes, I feel dumb about my decision to pursue M Social Work. I initially like the idea of an "organized helping process". I like systems. I like precision and hitting goals. And I think so far, the curriculum that I had gone through gave me the skills and competencies to do that. However, now that I am innovating a social work practice model and that things become academic and technical, I feel alienated from the discipline I fell inlove with. I wonder, in the data analysis, or even in plotting a flowchart of the so-called helping process, where can I show the human heart? Where can I put in the conceptual framework that I am doing right now, the "unscientific" concepts like compassion and forgiveness and hope?


Funny how much in paper, I try to create a system that needs to be followed in order to give a "better" therapeutic experience for the people that I am helping. It looks very neat, organized and simple. The matrices seems to explain all the necessary elements. But then, in real life, working with individuals or groups are nothing but neat and simple. The system is messy. And since I am dealing with people, the responses of people are dynamic. Helping process is never simple.

I just hope that as I continue to finish my graduate degree in Social Work, more than the technicalities and the higher skills, I will be able to have more love, concern, forgiveness, understanding, joy and even hope while working with people. Which by the way are very nonacademic terms, but are more important, I believe than systems and theories. These words are the reason why I am in the field of social service in the first place.

Dear God, help me to reconcile everything!