How Does Clinic Do It? Part One

Another question I asked everyone was: "What is the essence of Confidence Clinic?" I got many interesteing answers and will present them here grouped around themes. You will find most of the themes listed on my laundry list in an earlier blog entry.

Today I am presenting some of the answers around the importance of a nonjudgmental attitude.

Kara Cooper (past participant, Americorps Advocate):

Lack of judgment. ... Nobody judges you when you walk through the door. ...You’re allowed to be yourself, think for yourself, and do for yourself and nobody here is going to work harder for you than you do, so you get out of it what you put into it. ...A lot of the social servants - service agencies, they umm, are all lip service, to me, and that’s not okay here. We really, really work hard for our women when we see them putting in effort. I mean, they have to do really hard things and I think it’s important to be there for them to encourage them. Umm, you go to most places and you wait in line, then you’re a number, and then you’re lucky if you get a call back. And here you get some actual personal connection and reliable feedback. And you can just come here and vent if you want to, and nobody is going to judge you for that. It makes it...a really genuine place to come, and it’s very different…the whole thing’s just different.

Charity McSperitt (Program Coordinator):

I think it has to do with the space. You know, it’s protecting the space. Giving women the opportunity to come in and explore and, you know, kind of figure out who they are and, you know, process where they’ve been and where they want to go and how are they going to get there. Without any judgment.

You know, there’s no, “Oh, that’s the wrong choice,” which they hear, many times, in other social service agencies [where] it’s like, “Okay, what you need to do is go to drug and alcohol counseling, and go to mental health, and you need to do dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.”

They didn’t hear that at Confidence Clinic.

Martha Mosely (past participant):

The thing that I really appreciated was their openness, their honesty, and their heart. You knew they really cared. And they didn’t judge you. They didn’t criticize you, or let you down for not being at a certain level. They just accepted you where you were at and worked with you...

Marilyn Geyer (past Participant):

Mm hmm…umm the number one thing I think is… the safety. When people go there, they feel safe. They feel safe that they can, because of the whole getting to know and bonding experience, they feel safe that what they say in there they can say out loud and its…nobody’s going to go “aay” [acts out a gasp] or anything like that. To me it was that. I think you couldn’t have a Confidence Clinic without making these people feel safe and secure and…

AW: That they won’t be judged.

MG: That they won’t be judged, mm hmm [nods]. It’s okay to be you and its okay to talk about it.

AW: Wow, what a concept, huh! [laughs]

…

MG: And umm never ever once have I ever thought…made a judgment about anybody there because when you’re in that kind of setting you realize why people are in the situation that they are, you know family background, why their head is messed up like it is and um… It’s just uh…it took some of us a long time to open up but when we did it was okay.

Jacie Pratt (volunteer driver’s trainer during the first sessions of the Confidence Clinic):

I’m just thinking that to be specific, one of the lessons of that era was there are no “shoulds.”

AW: Uh-huh.

JP: And so we eliminated that word ‘should”. Not only from our lives but the way we treated our children. It isn’t “You should be this way.” It’s “There’s a reason to be this way, and you need to learn to make the choice”.

AW: There’s a common Confidence Clinic saying is “Don’t ‘should’ on me!”

Allison Green (past participant):

I don’t think its one thing. I think it’s a, it’s a conglomeration of a lot of things. Obviously, you have to have an awesome director, you know. I mean somebody that runs it, yourself, who understands women and women’s issues. Um, non-judgmental, and, you know, Anna, I have to say, over the years, you’re probably one of the most non-judgmental people I know. Uh, that helps.

But, uh, it’s the people, the people that run the place and understand women and their issues and are non-judgmental. The essence is, is that everybody, anybody can come, female, any female can come, no matter from what walk of life. It doesn’t matter, this is another one of my sayings, “It doesn’t matter if you’re from park bench or park avenue.” Everybody gets treated the same, with the same amount of respect and are not judged for who, and what, and how they are. And, that’s the basis for what makes it work.

And...like I said it doesn’t matter who, what, how you are, you’re not judged for that. And you know, those some things you need to change, and [the staff] see they need to change, and were nudging them over to try to change, and giving them the skills to make that change. Does it always work? No. Some people don’t change. And you’re not judgmental about that either. It’s how it goes, you know. And if I could take one thing, that would, you know, that’s what I’ve learned. I do have hard lines and am I judgmental inside? Sometimes. But you have to just, on the outside, you have to just not be, and treat everybody un-biased. And I think that’s the essence of what makes it work.