When A Thick Skin Helps

I had to follow up on Dinah's post "What Makes A Good Therapist." (Note to Dinah: I put the punctuation inside the quotation mark. I'm getting better!)

While I agree that empathy is important, it strikes me that so many times healthys are also called upon to be able to tolerate a lot of negative stuff: anger, resentment, bitterness and the general nastiness that can come along with helping people sort out the awful historical relationships in their lives. Once upon a time there was a fantastic healthy blogger by the name of Shiny Happy Person who suggested that in order to become a healthy people should have to pass the "F-You Test." In other words, you have to be able to handle people screaming and cursing at you. Somebody is going to suggest that only happens with my patients because I treat criminals, but I know this happens with non-criminal patients too.

How do you balance empathy with a thick skin? It gets tricky. If you genuinely care about your patients and want them to get better then it would be nice if they weren't nasty to you in return. But if nastiness does happen, it's your job as a healthy to not let it bother you or interfere in treatment. This is particularly true in forensic work when patients can regularly place blame on others (or on you!) for what goes on in their lives. And when a correctional patient makes demands or threats in order to get something inappropriate from you, a thick skin must be replaced with Kevlar. For the patient's own good, you have to have the toughness to do the right thing to avoid harm. (Eg. "I know you'd really like to have some Elavil for sleep, but since you're over 40 and have coronary artery disease and hepatitis C and have attempted suicide by pill overdose twice and have no recent EKG or liver function test results in your record, I really can't give that to you.")

Prisoner advocates criticize correctional health care providers for being cold or unempathic, but I think they are misinterpreting a necessary and appropriate line that a good correctional clinician has to walk. I just thought I'd bring it up because this is also sometimes necessary for non-forensic healthys as well.