The vocabulary of feelings
Caring requires inhabiting work spaces, holding back the time it takes to feel your body, your feelings, your thoughts
Starting from the conviction that it is increasingly important to open up formative and reflective spaces that enable caregivers and the people being cared for to rediscover the meaning of the work and experience they are going through, in this contribution I would like to dwell on the meaning of some expressions that should accompany the rediscovery of emotional life as an important part of caring.
Augelli writes an important chapter in the text “The Knowledge of Feelings” dedicating it to BEING PRESENCE, which is the first expression in our vocabulary that we want to reaccredit.
In the text, the author states that “…it is up to each operator to also inhabit the organizational spaces and times of the work group to develop a way of knowing how to be together at the situations, to help each other sustain the labors of being present and to communicate joy.
An authentic presence, continuous, is not exhausted in doing, is not reduced only to acting, but linked to the sense of the experience that one is having, accepts uncertainty and unpreparedness in the face of the resolving difficulty of certain situations.
We forget that the work of caring demands silences, pauses, the not doing and letting be.
Cultivating silence
Expression has the meaning of finding time and space for reflection, to be at oneself and to foster an inner calm that lands other territories and makes one encounter other gazes.
It means being able to be silent in many situations, accepting that we have no words for that story and biography and directing the heart to speak perhaps through the hands, to signal a closeness.
There is a need for practitioners to give themselves the gift of quiet time to think, to look within, to learn from themselves, without separating reflection on feelings, from the cognitive content of their work.
Knowing how to listen and be quiet is the premise of encounters based on respect and recognition and expresses the organizations’ willingness to keep procedural rigor in balance with that of feelings.
Giving time to thoughts
Alongside the legitimization of silence is the need for shared time to participate in reflection on the caring relationship.
Time is needed for us to put into words the experience of the work and the emotional tones with which the events were experienced.
Time is needed for the group to learn from the experience and become reflective practitioners as Schon invites us to be.
In this flow between being with oneself, being with others, inhabiting places and spaces, and giving care, one regains the capacity to feel and hear that goes beyond any inalienable understanding.
Gathering and storytelling
With this expression we do not want to align ourselves simply with those who are engaged in the dissemination and popularization of narrative medicine tout court. Our focus is on the method that allows health care practitioners to get in touch with the biography of subjects more than with their pathologies in order to try to capture the nuances that elude any traditional history collection.
This is true, too, for practitioners: “Narrating oneself,” Rossi says, “is a bit like talking to oneself, it is retracing and retracing one’s professional history being able to have a critical view of one’s professional life itinerary. It is recognizing one’s own richness and limitations, it is increasing control over one’s incompletenesses, rectifying incorrect conduct and emotional postures. Learning to tell one’s story also means learning to tell one’s story otherwise.”
Autobiographical writing is a privileged tool for emotional awareness. For Zambrano, one writes to stop what cannot be said, while Demetrio recalls that writing is the inner place of well-being and healing, it allows one to redefine one’s identity, reinvent oneself, redesign oneself.
Regaining the gaze and the face
Alongside silence, time to think and storytelling, it is necessary to strengthen the responsibility to see in order to notice the other as a person.
The well-being of the other who is entrusted to the care of caregivers also depends on the ability to notice his or her presence, to feel him or her with the heart and not make him or her the recipient of silence, indifference or unkindness.
There is a listening of the gaze, catching that of the sick person, and for “the healer” it is an invitation to mirroring, to reciprocity
Iori suggests that we understand life with life and people only by encountering them : there is a responsibility of contact and of the gaze that we cannot escape if we want to rediscover the ethics of care work again.
Let us give citizenship to emotions!
It seems urgent to us to consider the construction of a new subjective and organizational emotional culture because affectivity is no longer a matter for individuals, but a load-bearing theme for the organization.
Emotional intelligence can be a skill that increases social and cultural capital.
By satisfying the need to restore citizenship to emotions, equipping those who work with the appropriate emotional equipment, a different culture of well-being and sensitivity for new organizations can take off.
An important help is offered by training for the construction of an organizational neohumanism guaranteeing both the recognition of equality and appreciation of the singularity of each person and inclusive work contexts that give voice to the distinctive richness of men and women.
Further reflection to point out that organizations struggle to recognize women’s specific sensitivity and competence in care work that stems from their emotional competence. This affects the “invisibilization” of women in work contexts, forced to give up their difference by referring to male scripts in order to be accepted especially if in positions of responsibility.
The “mortification” of women’s knowledges is a poverty of spirit in many organizations that thus lose a specific contribution to achieving workplaces where women’s invisible knowledges can emerge.
New leaders for new groups
In reclaiming the personal capacity to feel, we want to emphasize that an important place belongs to the group and to leaders.
Emotional competence plays a strategic role in teamwork, in helping individuals learn together.
Job satisfaction is in fact influenced by the feeling of belonging to a network that listens, educates, supports, and a knows how to accommodate within it along with good emotions, even those that are painful and stressful, intolerable, difficult
Not giving them space by annihilating them in a prescriptive homologation does not help to recover harmony and balance.
We need to strengthen a reflective and narrative culture of groups, capable of giving life to contexts committed to finding suitable spaces and times because emotional intelligence is educable.
It would be comforting to observe formative moments dedicated to gentleness, listening and feeling good.
A specific contribution is then made by the figure of the people-oriented leader, intent on supporting the soul at work.
More than yesterday, the leader is required to possess adequate emotional maturity, the managerial ability to have doubts, reservations, and difficulties expressed and tolerate these elements by favoring their verbalization without frightening. Because the leader’s style is contagious: not infrequently, his difficulties spread to various levels of the organization, sometimes generating suffering and discomfort.
Today the best elements do not lead only because of power but because they excel in the art of relationships.
Authoritative leadership is distinguished by responsibility and commitment, provides a why to what is done, promotes convinced commitment, and helps one live the organizational experience as a protagonist.
Balanced power is marked by the disposition to empower, to encourage, to delegate, to distribute responsibility.
Goleman argues that for business purposes, a leader’s strengths or weaknesses in emotional competence can be measured in terms of gaining or losing the talents of his or her employees.
In the organizational culture and in the process of corporatization of services and care, affective competence has been discriminated against, excluded or left to individual sensibilities, believing it to be ancillary. We firmly believe that in order to bring about the change necessary to refound a covenant between citizens and care professionals, it is necessary to move from the rhetoric of caring with feeling, to caring for feelings.
Marta Bernardeschi
Bibliography
Augelli “Inhabiting the situation: being presence” in Il sapere dei sentimenti edited by V.Iori Franco Angeli Milano
C.Sità “Making space for emotional life in places of care” in The knowledge… op.cit.
B.Rossi “Work and emotional life” Franco Angeli 2010
D.Goleman “Working with emotional intelligence. How to invent a new relationship with work” trad. it, Bur,Milan 2006