HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF SO YOU CAN CARE WELL FOR OTHERS

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HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF SO YOU CAN CARE WELL
FOR OTHERS

• Maintaining Professional Boundaries with Your
  Clients
• Beth Bollenbach, LCSW
• Lori Hedges, MS, APRN, BC

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Professional Boundaries

• Learn more about
• The difference between personal professional
  relationships
• Warning signs that boundaries have been crossed
• How boundaries and self care are related

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Professional Boundaries

• Recognize that your relationships with clients
  are professional, NOT personal
• Always put your clients needs before your own

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Personal Vs. Professional Relationships

• Personal
• Not paid
• May last a life time
• Can take place any time, any place
• Equal responsibility for the relationship
• No special training
• Choose how much time to spend

• Professional
• Paid
• Last only as long as necessary
• Take place within a healthcare setting
• Healthcare worker is responsible for relationship
• Special training
• Time spent determined by clients plan of care

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Essentials of a Helping Relationship

• Trust
• Truth
• Clear expectations, responsibilities, limits
• Caring
• Unidirectional

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Healthy Motivators

• Desire to help others
• Belief in others abilities
• Enjoys challenge and problem solving
• Interest in learning, mystery
• We only fill in where others cant do for
  themselves

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Troublesome Motivators

• Personal need for admiration, love
• Personal need to be needed
• Comfort with the helper role of detached
  contact
• Desire for control, power
• Personal need for ongoing gratification
  appreciation
• Work/personal life imbalance

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Relationship Guidelines

• Patients/families seek services at a time of
  need. The presenting situation dictates that the
  relationship is designed to address the
  patient/family needs and is fundamentally unequal
• The helping relationship seeks to develop and
  maintain patient/family autonomy and competence

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What is a Boundary?

• Limits that protect the space between the
  professionals power and the clients
  vulnerability
• Maintaining appropriate boundaries manages this
  power differential and allows for a safe
  connection between the professional and client
  based on the clients needs

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Boundary Violation Cycle

• Sense of specialness
• Sense of entitlement
• Justification
• Impaired judgment
• Projection of need onto client
• Apparent harm to client

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How to Establish Appropriate Boundaries

• Clarify where you stand in the relationship
• Understand your position, role and territory
• Give clear messages
• Say no when you need to
• Sort out the sources of your confusion, guilt,
  fear, lack of confidence or pity and seek
  solutions for them

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Professional Behavior

• If you feel you are getting too close, talk to
  your supervisor about it
• If it feels funny, it probably is
• It is human nature to feel closer to some than
  others. Make sure the time, care and concern
  shown is equal
• You are responsible for creating the professional
  relationship with each of your families

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Effective Boundaries Self CareHow are they
related?

• Where do I begin and end?
• Do I try to meet my needs through the
  appreciation of the patient/family?
• How much is too much?
• When do I need to say NO?

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Understanding Your Responses

• Change in health
• Are you becoming sick more often?
• What are your symptoms?
• Loss of morale
• Are you enthusiastic most days?
• Change in quality of your work
• Are you proud of what you do most days?

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Care for Yourself!

• Recognize your own limits
• Be kind to yourself
• Know what you need and make sure you meet those
  needs at work at home
• Utilize team relationship resources
• Respect choices of others
• Lighten up

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Care for Yourself!

• Check your perspective
• Not everyone is dying
• Reclaim the rewards of the work
• Why do you love what you do?
• Stay humble
• Be amazed
• Build a life that sustains you

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Bibliography

• Lattanza Licht, Marcia. Self Care and Effective
  Boundaries A Combination that Works. A telephone
  seminar presented December 12, 2002
• In The Know. Maintaining Professional Distance,
  2002.

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