CERVUS AND LEADERSHIP: Tonight’s work at the pregnancy center made me realize I need to think more about the ways in which counseling is leadership. I tend to think–almost certainly over-dichotomizing–that there are at least two possible paradigms for what we do, leadership and social work, and I need to work in the former category.

There are ways in which that’s true. Leadership requires creation of an individual persona–the mask of command. It requires personal relationship and intimacy. Although I would never claim to be the friend of the women I counsel–I don’t risk nearly enough in our relationship to claim that title–I do give out my phone number a lot, for example, in part because I need to be available, open, personal rather than systematic.

Leadership involves me in complicity with the client and her choices. The social-work paradigm, to the limited extent to which I understand it, involves the counselor in complicity with “the system,” capitalism and the welfare state, and the pressures it imposes on the client. (“Client,” a social-work term.) Catholic charity and social justice work seems to me to swing wildly between these two complicities, in ways which sometimes make sense and/or are equalizing, and sometimes make no sense and/or are condescending.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which the social-work paradigm is necessary for what we do. To take an obvious example–a lot of boyfriends want to come and sit in on our counseling sessions with their possibly-pregnant girlfriends. These boyfriends are pretty evenly divided between awesome, supportive, loving guys… and controlling/drunk/generally-loserish schmucks. In order to persuade group #2 that we don’t see them as members of group #2, we lean heavily on language like, “I’m sorry, it’s our center’s policy that we always do the first part of the counseling one-on-one. Afterwards, you can come on back and we can all talk together.” That’s system-based, non-individualized, anti-leadership talk, and it really helps.

Still… I need to think about when each paradigm is appropriate, and how to play to my strengths, which–to the extent that I even have any–are all in the area of leadership, not social work, or not the construction I’m calling “social work.” I’m pretty sure one thing I can do is pray more often with our Christian clients, and pray in more traditional Christian, Catholic language–I think “may Christ our Lord shelter you in His wounds” is actually more appropriate to my leadership persona than the standard evangelical “I just thank Jesus for bringing us here today” stuff which makes me really self-conscious and fake.

Comments, questions, suggestions, howls of execration?