The Assignment (4 pages): 1. Conduct a SWOT analysis for the United Nations Environmental Protection Program. This analysis focuses on assessing the present state or condition of the organization and determining where the organization would like to be. Th

Factors Impacting Change

Program Transcript

NARRATOR: Whether or not a change effort is successful depends on a variety

of factors. In this video program, Dr. Judy Lewis describes two of these factors,

systems and diversity, and explains how they impact change efforts.

JUDY LEWIS: You really can't even think about change without thinking about

the concept of systems. Whether you're talking about a family system, a

community system, an organization, systems have their way of operating. They

like to keep things at a steady state. When an individual tries to cha

nge

something, you're going to come up against the system trying to maintain itself in

the usual customary way. No matter what kind of change you're trying to bring

about, you really have to be analyzing what's happening with the systems that

impact the individual.

It's an interesting thing about family counseling. Family counselors understand

systems to their core. One of the basic things that every family counselor knows

is that an individual is affected by the family system, and that it's very difficult

to

change anything about an individual's behavior without coming up against the

need to get adjustments in the system as a whole.

But even though family counselors understand about family systems, they don't

always necessarily look beyond the family to the larger system. When you have a

family system, that family system is impacted by culture, by diversity in the

population, by community norms, by societal norms.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have the coincidence of having the same kinds of things

happen in fa

mily after family. The distant father, what's seen as the over-involved

mother, the differences in gender roles. You wouldn't have that in family after

family if that weren't something that people have learned, not just from within

their family, but from the culture as a whole.

Suppose that a counselor is working with a family. And that family, you have a

situation where the woman is battered. Now, you could look at that from within

the family, and you could think about what is the psychopathology of the m

ale

batterer? What is the psychopathology of the female victim?

Or you could look beyond that, not to excuse the behavior of a batterer, but to

ask, what is it that this man learned about the role of men? What did he learn

about that from his culture, from society? What did this woman learn about the

role of women? What did she learn about gender, as a person growing up in this

society?

If you look beyond what's happening in the individual family to the larger

systems, it gives you so much more understanding of what's happening. And it

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Laureate Education, Inc.

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Factors Impacting Change

also makes you realize that you need to look beyond just your clients in order to

make any big changes, and in order to prevent more families from going through

this same thing.

I think as a counselor/educator in particular, this is a great opportunity for

teaching. Because students will come up against clients like this. They'll come up

against families like this. And the way that they're going to learn to have that

broader picture comes from the questions that the counselor/educator or

supervisor asks.

What are you seeing here? What might you ask this woman about what she

thinks about the meaning of being a woman in this society?

What if you were to ask this man about what he learned growing up about the

role of a man in a family?

As long as you, as the educator or supervisor are asking these questions, you're

going to broaden the outlook of the counselors, and that's going to make all the

difference.

When we're talking about working with systems, we need to make sure that our

counselor/education students understand this and are able to work with it.

Now, of course, you need to begin with explaining how systems work. They need

to understand how it works theoretically. Especially because sometimes it seems

counter-intuiti

ve. Sometimes it looks like an individual person in a family is

sabotaging the recovery of another person in the family. But you have to change

your point of view to understand that it's just the system reasserting itself, and

trying to protect itself from change.

So there has to be a general understanding of systems and how they work. But

there's no substitute for particular examples, real people questioning what's

happening in a particular family, or with a particular individual in a systems

context.

So part of what needs to happen is that educators and supervisors need to be

alert to opportunities to teach about systems whenever their students are talking

about particular cases.

As long as we keep asking questions and broadening the context within whic

h

our students see what's happening, I think we're going to have a lot of impact.

The most important thing for a counselor to understand about diversity, or multi

-

culturalism, is that it isn't just a list of the characteristics of particular populations.

It really starts with looking internally at oneself, and the assumptions that one

makes, just as a person, rather than as a professional. What are the assumptions

© 2016

Laureate Education, Inc.

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Factors Impacting Change

that we make about, what is good mental health? What is a healthy family? What

is an effective way to live in the world?

Our own assumptions that come from our culture may have an impact on the way

we work with clients in a way that may be damaging. If we assume that our own

assumptions are universal, then we might try to impose those without eve

n

realizing what we're doing. And we might be imposing a version of mental health

that doesn't fit maybe a different, more traditional culture.

So the counselor has to begin by a lot of self-interrogation. Am I sure that I am

being careful not to impose my own views on the client?

Now, that goes up another level to the counselor/educator or supervisor. We

really need, as counselor/educators and supervisors, to be careful to do some of

that internal searching ourselves, because it's going to be our respons

ibility to

help counselors in training learn to ask themselves these questions.

Now, you can talk about multi-culturalism and diversity in general terms. But

when you look at actual clients, when a student is working with a case, it's the

supervisor or the educator who's going to be asking the question, what made you

ask about that? Or, had you thought about asking the family what they thought

about whether people should be independent at a particular age? Have you

asked these questions?

I think that that's an important thing for educators and supervisors to be able to

do. It means that, in order to have our students start to develop a broad point of

view about what the community does to enhance mental health, we need to have

that in our own hearts and minds first.

Factors Impacting Change

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