THE WELL BEING OF THE MISSIONARY UNDERSTANDING THE MISSIONARYINENVIRONMENT

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THE WELL BEING OF THE MISSIONARYUNDERSTANDING
THE MISSIONARY-IN-ENVIRONMENT

• Timothy A. Boyd Psy.D. CSWProfessor of Social
  Work and PsychologyRoberts Wesleyan College

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An Ecological Approach

• An ecological approach the challenge is to
  understand the person-in-environment
  (missionary-in-environment)
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• Ecological theory explores all 3 of the systems
  that encompass a persons life

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An Ecological Approach Cont.

• Microsystem the intrapsychic world and
  relationships with those in the immediate setting
  (family)

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An Ecological Approach Cont.

• Mesosystem the interactions with major settings
  and systems in an individuals life (team Field
  Immediate organization Sending churches)

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An Ecological Approach Cont.

• Macrosystem the broader cultural and subcultural
  patterns and structures (denomination Broader
  organizational systems Political and legal
  systems)

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We must move beyond the individual, family, and
agency approaches to develop a more systematic,
global, and corporate approach to providing
member care. We must develop a macro-model of
member care. Kelly ODonnell
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When we visit a house or a building and see
several rooms, only the mind can connect their
simultaneous existence by some sort of inner
imagery. So it is with living systems in dynamic
interaction. Only by some inner imagery, some
image of the senses, like the hearing of an
orchestracan we capture the idea of living
systems! Thus living systems are like a moving
hologram.., constantly shifting planes and
fields, there, but not there. The only
comprehension we can have of living, human
systems is metaphoric, analogic, organismic,
synesthetic. Bunny Dahl From the Inside Out
and Other Metaphors
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• Many systems are involved in the life of the
  missionary. We need to visit the many rooms of
  their life in order holistically and effectively
  plan with them.
• We need to assess the goodness-of-fit between
  the missionary and their environmental context.

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• The inter-connections between systems have a
  significant impact on the individual missionarys
  well-being, functioning, and development.
• Our sense of self is dependent in part on our
  involvement with others.
• When we view the individual in a context we look
  at how change might occur not just in an
  individual but also in their social system.

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• We look not only at the personality of the
  individual but also at the personalities of
  their family systems, team systems, church
  systems, field systems, and organizational
  systems (ethos, cultures, rules, boundaries,
  functioning).
• These influences are reciprocal (for example the
  experiences at home influence the team and the
  team influences the home life).
• The involvement of the broader organization is
  essential to facilitate the missionarys well
  being, their efforts to adapt and grow, and their
  effectiveness in overall functioning
  (personal/family/job).

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• The challenge to those of us who are member
  care/mental health specialists is to get out of
  our limiting perspectives and to learn about the
  contexts that people live in.
• We must alter our view about how help is
  delivered.
• Our assessments need (within reason) to gather
  data from as many sources as possible. This data
  should not just be individually-focused
  (intrapsychic), but also systemic (how the
  individual relates to their environment and how
  the environment relates to them).

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• Not only is it important that our assessments are
  ecological but we can use this broader (holistic)
  perspective to shape maximally effective
  interventions.
• Ecological assessments lead to ecological
  interventions. These kinds of interventions have
  a broader impact on the person.
• These kinds of interventions also require
  organizational responsiveness. They may result
  in a implied mandate for organizational change.

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Some Basic Assumptions

• Missionaries need to be at the center of their
  own growth and development.
• Mission organizations need to provide resources
  and support to help maintain the well-being of
  their people.
• Both are true, yet the total responsibility does
  not lie with either.

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Basic Assumptions Cont.

• Who, then, is responsible for what?
•  What are the expectations of this next
  generation that is entering missions?
• Do they expect their organization to provide
  certain ingredients, or environments?
• What happens to their morale or to their
  functioning when these conditions are not met?

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• If you talk to most mission executives about
• this issue you will not get any great conflict
• regarding their desire that their missionaries
• are contented, healthy, and effective. Where
• you may get the greatest difference is in what
• those characteristics might look like, how to
• measure them, and how to
• Implement them. This
• Combination is the essence
• Of member care.

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Organizational Goals

• There are generally 2 kinds of organizational
  goals
• Production Goals What is the manifest purpose of
  this organization? What are we trying to
  accomplish?
• Satisfaction Goals How satisfying is the work to
  the members (which is likely more important than
  we acknowledge at times).
• Both are important, but it may be easy for the
  organization to place a premium on the production
  goals.

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• Prevention is value driven.
• Because it utilizes significant resources of the
  organization it must be prioritized in order to
  be resourced.
• The pool of resources is always limited.
• The manner in which the organization goes about
  addressing this issue says volumes about
  organizational ethos.
• This issue may surface ideological competitions.
• We often must confront our history to create new
  models. We cannot bypass these questions.

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• Is there a goodness-of-fit between what the
  network is capable and willing to provide and
  what the clients
• needs and desires are?

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• Missionaries are in the ongoing process of
  adapting.
• The adaptive capacity of people can be limited by
  how the organization responds to (blocks or
  facilitates) access to resources.
• Problems require adaptation on the part of both
  the individual and their organization.
• This tension creates the opportunity to make
  both short-term and long-term changes.
• This is a challenge of growth for both.

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Empowering Missionaries

• How can we empower the missionary
• (help them define their world, problems,
  adaptations, and strengths to create
• more satisfying lives)?

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Empowering Missionaries

• In order to empower we need a client/professional
• partnership with
• As little intrusion as possible
• Clear limits of confidentiality
• A direct and honest explanation of our mandate
• Communication of possible consequences of
  noncompliance (including a definition of
  noncompliance)

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Empowering Missionaries Cont.

• In order to institute change not only must the
  person develop new competencies, but the social
  system must also support their exercise of them.
• One of our tasks is to mobilize community
  resources to influence the quality of life of the
  persons in the community.
• We cannot do one-time/forever effective
  interventions (it is an ongoing process).

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Three Factors in Building Healthy Community

• Power to generate alternatives and opportunities
• Knowledge of where and how to obtain resources of
  all kinds
• Self-esteem in the form of pride, motivation, and
  optimism
• Iscoe (Community Psychology and the
• Competent Community, 1974

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• What are the persons help-seeking behaviors?
  (cultural issues enter in here).
• Are their factors that would lead a person to
  believe that their help seeking may have negative
  impact?
• When there is a negative social comparison a
  sense of inferiority and failure may surface.

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• What is the organizational ethos regarding people
  with problems.those with significant needs?
• Is there a cultural emphasis on individualism and
  self-reliance?
• The kinds of life stressors that people may
  experience may conflict with the networks value
  system (may be a deterrent to getting help).

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• Loosely knit networks may be unaware of members
  stress (invisibility).
• Authority may be too flexible and when this
  happens individuals may have inappropriate
  discretionary power with minimal accountability.
  The individual can then be vulnerable to whims,
  prejudices, and narrow interpretations.

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• Rigid authority structures reward conformity,
  discourage innovation, block horizontal and
  vertical communication. Layers of authority may
  be numerous.
• Individuals can become held hostage to
  bureaucratic structures.
• When resources are stretched the organization may
  fear taking on more responsibility.

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• If we give people more choices will the
  organization be positively effected?
• It can feel like a loss of power to some.
• Organizations can experience criticism as being
  ego-dystonic, just as individuals do. Our
  feedback can be difficult to understand, to
  assimilate and to utilize.

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• There is an unfortunate tendency on the part of
  many organizations to blame the individual when
  things go wrong, and the locus of the problem
  is seen as residing in the individual.
• Many individuals will blame themselves too, but
  individuals also engage in the blame game and
  place the onus or responsibility on the
  organization when things go bad.

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• It is easy as a counselor who has been working in
  an assessment and/or consultation role with
  individual missionaries in distress to
  over-identify with the individual or to
  under-identify with the organization.
• An important question to keep asking ourselves is
  Who is my client?
• Our goal must be two-pronged to help both the
  individual as well as the organization.
• Our job is to be bridge-builders.

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• Lack of linkages (effective referral and
  services) can make a person feel lost.
• What are the kinds of assessments, then, are
  beneficial to both the individual missionary and
  the larger organization?
• We tend to focus a great deal on the pathology
  end of the continuum and neglect the strengths
  end.

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Guidelines for Strengths Assessment

• Assess- do not diagnose
• Avoid cause-effect thinking
• Avoid blame
• Reach mutual agreement on the assessment
• Make assessment a joint activity
• Use language client can understand
• Use assessment to discover uniqueness

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Guidelines for Strengths Assessment Cont.

• Make assessment of strengths multi-dimensional
• Move toward assessment of personal and
  environmental strengths
• Give preeminence to clients understanding of the
  facts
• Discover what client wants
• Charles Cowger Social Work,Vol. 39, No. 3, May
  1994)

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• At the very least, the strengths perspective
  obligates workers to understand that, however
  downtrodden and sick, individuals have survived
  (and in some cases even thrived). They have taken
  steps, summoned up resources, and coped. We need
  to know what they have done, how they have done
  it, what resources (inner and outer) were
  available in their struggle to surmount their
  troubles. People are always working on their
  situations, even if just deciding to be resigned
  to them as helpers we must tap into that work,
  elucidate it, find and build on its possibilities
  (Saleeby, 1992).

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• Recent research (Families in Society Jan-Feb.
  98) found that practitioners who emphasized
  personal deficits of the client were more likely
  to select a counseling-oriented case plan and
  practitioners who emphasize client strengths were
  more likely to choose a care plan that focused on
  assisting the client with additional services.
• When we use a strengths perspective new and
  often unexpected patterns and resources open up.
  Our job is to help foster client links to the
  contexts where their strengths can flourish.
• This kind of approach is designed to mobilize the
  missionarys personal resources and energy.

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Principles of Strengths Assessment

• Principles for a Holistic, Developmentally-Oriente
  d, Comprehensive, and Strengths-affirming
  Assessments for Missionaries.
• Assessment is a process, not just something that
  is done once and for all.
• Most problems have complex etiologies (they are
  affected by many different variables over time),
  so we have to be multi-faceted in our approaches.

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Principles of Strengths Assessment Cont.

• Assess both the individual and their role
  functioning as well as the environment and its
  potential impact on the missionary.
• There is no Holy Spirit Scale on the MMPI. Most
  of our measures are not very good at measuring
  movement and growth. We are often looking at a
  half-finished painting and drawing conclusions.

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Principles of Strengths Assessment Cont.

• Include different kinds of measures that
  highlight the adaptiveness, creativity, and
  strengths of the missionary.
• Do effective cross-cultural communication
  (translate terms and concepts from our profession
  into language that a mission executive and/or
  missionary can understand). Will our insights and
  conclusions be communicated in a way that both
  can assimilate and utilize?

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Principles of Strengths Assessment Cont.

• The person being assessed needs to have some
  voice in the finished product.
• Our assessments need to build bridges from
  assessment to intervention. We tend to be much
  more proficient in assessing than we are in
  developing intervention strategies.

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• Social service agencies are being challenged
• more and more to provide outcome
• measurement, and to do it in a variety
• of forms. Mission organizations
• (and mental health consultants)
• would be wise to carry out
• exit interviews and to do
• follow-ups as a way of
• doing outcome measurement.

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• Is what we thought was effective really effective
  (or vice versa)?
• Whose voice is not being heard?
• What would it look like to do our missionary
  assessments in a fashion that would equip both
  the individual missionary and their organization
  with a measure of potential resiliency?
• Life planning can be universal (everybody in the
  organization does it) or targeted (those who are
  going through times of stress and transition or
  those who are having problems).

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Force Field Analysis

• Help client brainstorm all the restraining forces
  (persons, places, and things) that might make
  them fail to follow through on an action.
• Help them list all the forces that might help
  them persevere.
• Underline the forces in each list which are most
  critical in respect to carrying out the action
  plan.
• Goal is to increase facilitating forces and
  decrease restraining forces.
• Identify coping strategies or mobilization
  strategies.

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Psychosocial Risk Factors

• Resiliency Assessment
• Psychosocial Risk Factors Protective Factors
• Psychosocial Risk Factors
• identifying potential sources of risk

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• Who is at risk? We all are.
• Risk and protective factors are complex (all
  factors are not of equal importance).
• Most problems are associated with more than one
  risk factor and most risk factors are associated
  with more than one problem.

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• Risk is a function of events and circumstances as
  well as people.
• People can become in chains of events and
  functioning (can be moving in higher risk
  directions or into adaptive directions).
• We try to identify the vulnerable group (look at
  targeted risks, the problem factors, and the
  expected outcomes).
• Comprehensive Readiness For Ministry Profile.

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• There are two basic risk factors predisposing
  and precipitating. Predisposing tend to be more
  genetic and developmental in nature.
  Precipitating factors are more proximal
  (triggers). Do we focus more on predisposing than
  proximal?

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• A key factor in ones vulnerability relates to
  when one experienced the stressors (usually,
  early onset wounding experiences cause one to be
  more vulnerable).
• We are often dealing with the phenomena of
  critical mass (thresholds and cumulative risk
  exposure).

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• One can pinpoint an individual about to enter a
  period of heightened risk.
• Transitions bring change in status and new role
  demands.
• The exit from desired social status is a more
  potent stressor than entry into new status.
• The timing of the transition and life event
  effects our perceptions.

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Psychosocial Risk Factors Cont.

• We have to take into account recent and future
  stressors when planning (stressors change over
  the developmental life cycle).
• We seek to help people through these life
  transitions (to figure them out) so their
  adaptive capacities and strengths are supported
  and strengthened and environmental responsiveness
  is increased.

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Protective Factors

• Most successful prevention programs dont just
  attempt to teach people new skills and behaviors
  but also to alter their life trajectories (which
  requires changes in their life context).
• It is important to focus on the pressure points
  (when stressful events occur) and to create and
  position resources to help reduce vulnerability.

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Protective Factors

• Competence building is a primary prevention
  strategy and includes things like
• Interpersonal skills
• Cognitive skills

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Protective Factors Cont.

• Provide skills training with booster sessions.
• Give people training in how to apply and rehearse
  those skills in relevant situations.
• Will skills learned in a low state of arousal
  work in a state of high arousal? (add stress
  factors to role-plays).

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Protective Factors Cont.

• Social Support.
• Significant individuals within the missionarys
  social network can be utilized as change agents
  (especially for change maintenance).
• BAROMETER
• Stress HighModerateLow
• Social Support HighModerateLow

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• Clear evidence in recent research showing the
  link between social support and physical
  well-being. Ca. study showed that those who were
  least connected socially were twice as likely to
  die as those with the strongest social ties.
  Other studies show that once illness strikes
  social support affects our chances of staying
  alive. A good marriage offers significant health
  benefits (and marital conflict is corrosive on
  health).

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• Classic experiments by Levine at Stanford with
  monkeys subjected to stress (shock) paired with a
  flashing light. When light was flashed if the
  test monkey had another monkey for company the
  amount of blood cortisol was half as great. If
  monkey had 5 companions showed no increase in
  blood cortisol.

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• Network size has the strongest correlation of
  happiness for men
• Number of social encounters has strongest
  correlation of happiness for women
• Normal persons have about 25 ties in their
  primary network
• Schizophrenic populations have around 8-12, with
  low reciprocity and low affect
• When there is low diversity of support (such as
  reliance on a spouse) persons are vulnerable
• Stigmas will precipitate network deterioration

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• Social Networks Demonstrate 4 types of support
• Instrumental (goods and services)
• Emotional (nurture, empathy, encouragement)
• Informational (advice, feedback)
• Appraisal (information needed to
• self-evaluate)

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Social Network Map

• Level 1 (Inner circle) those who you have the
  most contact, and the most intense investments
• Level 2 those you value highly and interact with
  frequently
• Level 3 those who are important but you contact
  less frequently, or those you contact frequently
  but are important
• Level 4 those who are known but not as important
• Level 5 those who are known about or are linked
  with a significant other

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How can we implement change?

• First order change Change a portion of the
  system
• Second order change change the system itself
  
• The creation of something new implies some sort
  of criticism of the old.
•  It is best to work toward an attitude of mutual
  cooperation (This problem affects us all).
• It is vital to know and to develop rapport with
  the gatekeepers.