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Title: THE WELL BEING OF THE MISSIONARY UNDERSTANDING THE MISSIONARYINENVIRONMENT


1
THE WELL BEING OF THE MISSIONARYUNDERSTANDING
THE MISSIONARY-IN-ENVIRONMENT
  • Timothy A. Boyd Psy.D. CSWProfessor of Social
    Work and PsychologyRoberts Wesleyan College

2
An Ecological Approach
  • An ecological approach the challenge is to
    understand the person-in-environment
    (missionary-in-environment)
  •  
  • Ecological theory explores all 3 of the systems
    that encompass a persons life

3
An Ecological Approach Cont.
  • Microsystem the intrapsychic world and
    relationships with those in the immediate setting
    (family)

4
An Ecological Approach Cont.
  • Mesosystem the interactions with major settings
    and systems in an individuals life (team Field
    Immediate organization Sending churches)

5
An Ecological Approach Cont.
  • Macrosystem the broader cultural and subcultural
    patterns and structures (denomination Broader
    organizational systems Political and legal
    systems)

6
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
7
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
8
  • 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.

9
  • 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.

10
  • 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).

11
  • 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).

12
  • 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.

13
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.

14
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?

15
  • 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.

16
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.

17
  • 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.

18
  • Is there a goodness-of-fit between what the
    network is capable and willing to provide and
    what the clients
  • needs and desires are?

19
  • 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.

20
Empowering Missionaries
  • How can we empower the missionary
  • (help them define their world, problems,
    adaptations, and strengths to create
  • more satisfying lives)?

21
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)

22
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).

23
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

24
  • 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.

25
  • 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).

26
  • 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.

27
  • 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.

28
  • 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.

29
  • 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.

30
  • 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.

31
  • 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.

32
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

33
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)

34
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35
  • 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).

36
  • 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.

37
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.

38
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.

39
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?

40
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.

41
  • 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.

42
  • 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).

43
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.

44
Psychosocial Risk Factors
  • Resiliency Assessment
  • Psychosocial Risk Factors Protective Factors
  • Psychosocial Risk Factors
  • identifying potential sources of risk

45
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.

46
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.

47
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?

48
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).

49
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.

50
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.

51
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.

52
Protective Factors
  • Competence building is a primary prevention
    strategy and includes things like
  • Interpersonal skills
  • Cognitive skills

53
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).

54
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

55
  • 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).

56
  • 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.

57
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58
  • 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

59
  • Social Networks Demonstrate 4 types of support
  • Instrumental (goods and services)
  • Emotional (nurture, empathy, encouragement)
  • Informational (advice, feedback)
  • Appraisal (information needed to
  • self-evaluate)

60
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

61
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.
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