If I case managed myself, what would I tell me?

A friend told me something today that made the bottom drop out of me.  She is quitting her job.  She is a social worker in a stable job at an established agency that serves children and she has loathed it from the start.  And it is sentiment I have been hearing from most of my fellow social worker friends and have been feeling myself.  This gig, helping people or whatever, is not what we thought we were getting into.

I think we all went into social work know it was a thankless--and oftentimes impossible--job with unrealistic expectations, but the realities of assessing and holding people's dysfunction with thin tools for treatment are beyond demoralizing.  I get the sense that you have to somehow fully give in to codependent inclinations to really feel that you are helping people, that the sheer act of trying to help actually has value.  Mostly I think social work is predicated on a social standard of "normal" that we as social workers impose upon clients.  Deviance is cause for diagnosis.

Social workers quickly gain a skewed notion of people.  As a child protective services worker without kids, I lost sense of what a normal child looks like, one without attachment issues, behavioral problems, developmental delays, and poor prognoses for success.  I learned to be quick to search for appropriate diagnoses too, because identification was supposed to lead to accurate and appropriate treatment and--presto!--solutions for the poor, messed-up client.

But it is not satisfying to me.  I've been trying to make my round peg fit in this square hole, especially since I landed my adoptions position.  I am coming on my one-year mark with this new job position, where I am removed from grappling with parents who have had their children removed because of abuse.  And while I don't miss the vicarious traumatization of working with impossible cases and difficult clients--what do you do with borderline personality disorder?--I miss the sense that what I did mattered.  And i simply miss being busy.

I've landed the cushy job where I could fall asleep and wake up forty years later with my vested retirement fund.  I don't have to learn a new thing ever again.  And now that I am removed from it, do I need domestic violence, mental health, and substance abuse in my work life to feel like I was accomplishing something everyday?  Or for that matter do I need to be "helping people" to feel satisfied and alive, as it somehow has not worked out that way.

I've carried such guilt, since I was in graduate school, that I do not feel more gratified by my work.  I've chastised  myself for not owning the pride of being a helper.  It could be that it never sat well with me that social work in practice actually translates into being a therapist.  While I've personally come to appreciate the value of psychodynamics in human relationships and in one's own sense of being--did I mention how I love therapy?--I don't want to be a therapist.  I cannot help but feel that I would impose my model of functionality on my client, pushing them towards what I think will help and feeling responsible for my client's successful return to normalcy.  And as much as my colleagues and supervisors remind me that therapy is helping a client to help herself, I can't separate out that unspoken assumption that a therapist guides the client along a certain socially accepted path.

For five years I have dance this dance.  And now, not only do my feet hurt, but I realized I'm not a good dancer.  And I don't like dancing.  Could it be that it is time to take off the ill-fitting shoes and go shopping?