In Monday’s blog post, Wulf introduced you to Rhoda Emlyn-Jones from Cardiff and provided a link to her People page that was launched that day. This page contains links to the 11 main films edited from their December 2023 conversation, along with written summaries. In yesterday’s blog post, I described how we create Theme clips, Playlists and Films (collections of Theme clips) for Recovery Voices.
Today, Wulf and I provide details of the 30 film clips which comprise the YouTube Theme Clip Playlist for Rhoda. It was such a pleasure editing these clips, as the conversation between Rhoda and Wulf was so rich and contained discussion of many issues which have concerned me over the years.
1. Therapeutic Practices: Lessons From My Childhood [2’57”]
‘So, just at the very beginning of my experience, we had that understanding that we needed to see people for the challenges and the problems they faced, not the challenges and problems they caused.’ Rhoda Emlyn-Jones OBE is Director of Achieving Sustainable Change (ASC Ltd.)
2. The Therapeutic Conversation [1’58”]
‘And I think when you focus just on that therapeutic conversation you learn so much… and then you translate that into how that therapeutic conversation works within a setting where you are advocating, you are building support, you are doing so many proactive things.’
3. Problems With the Commissioning Process [2’06”]
‘When commissioning began, it really did scupper some of the most powerful growth from the ground up, because it began with a rather arrogant stance. And it still works that way. You don’t listen to the people closest, there isn’t a collaboration as much as there needs to be, or shared learning.’
4. 80% Reduction in Recidivism [2’22”]
‘We measured, as every service I ever developed, we had measures of impact. I had to do that on my own because the Social Services’s bigger machine didn’t really have that. It kept data about process and timings, but not impact. So, our impact measures there were showing after two years 80% reduction in recidivism.’
5. Views on Personal Responsibility [2’10”]
‘My view on personal responsibility is you start with the most meaningful things for people. Help them understand and articulate their own hopes for the future. And together, unpick the difficult things that are going to get them to that outcome.’
6. It’s Understanding, Not Judgment [2’22”]
Gaining a sense of belonging and feelings of self-worth, and being seen as someone who contributes: ’All of that psychology is part of that journey…That’s where we all need to work together.’
7. Leaving Nothing In Its Place [1’22”]
Wulf Livingston says: ’Well, stop taking the drugs and alcohol and everything will be alright. But, we all knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, if that’s all we did to people, we’d actually make them worse because we’d be taking the coping mechanism away without actually changing anything else at all for them.’
8. Services Are A Means To An End [2’26”]
‘Services are a means to an end. Not an end in themselves. And the meaning in the “means to an end” comes from the person’s sense of their value for them.’
9. The Sequential Means To An End [1’34”]
’But how often does the commissioner want to know successful completion of treatment? To what end? What is actually happening after that? Where’s the sustainability?’
10. There Is Another Option [2’26”]
‘So the idea of the title Option 2 was saying to colleagues, “At the point that you are about to remove children, there is another option. And come to us and then we’ll do some intensive work.’
11. Option 2 [3’02”]
Option 2 team members work one family at a time, 24/7, for four weeks. At 12 months, year-on-year for ten years, 75% of families were holding their outcome behaviours and functioning.
12. Problems in the System [3’11”]
’There was a lot of the evidence that the system was the problem. Not the workers within the system, and not the families within the system, but the system itself was the problem.’
13. Generational Change [2’20”]
‘… because it had been a generational change. That sustainability that comes from people taking hold of their own issues and finding their own meanings.’
14. Integrated Family Support Services (IFSS) [3’10”]
When the Welsh government set about trying to integrate all professional groups concerned with health and social problems, with an emphasis on families and reducing the number of children in care (which were extremely high in the country), they found Rhoda’s Option 2 research and asked her if this could be the basis of their proposed Integration Model.
15. Consultation, Empathy & Rippling Out [1’23”]
‘When any professional rang into the team, they had a truly skilled consultation around what’s going on for the family, the strengths in the family, the priority risks in the family, what they hoped for in terms of an outcome. So we wouldn’t start the work until we were sure that the worker referring wasn’t just working on the deficits…’
16. True Fidelity [1’52”]
‘Two of them came to me after the workshop and said, “I am so thrilled to be in the IFSS because I had a placement there, it took me five years to get in because there were no vacancies.” The reason there’s no vacancies, people are doing their best work.’
17. What Helps Families Create Sustained Change? Part 1 [2’56”]
‘Where is our wellbeing tied up? It’s tied up in our own sense of self, our own contribution, but it’s also a sense of belonging and who is around us, and loving and being loved.’
18. What Helps Families Create Sustained Change? Part 2 [1’59”]
‘So, holistic, inclusive, really skilled staff who understand the psychology of all of that. And that doesn’t mean being trained in anything in particular, it means just being open to those concepts.’
19. What Helps Families Create Sustained Change? Part 3 [0’59”]
‘Healthy organisations, healthy public services, should be learning and changing all the time.’
20. What Helps Families Create Sustained Change? Part 4 [2’28”]
‘It’s enormously challenging. But once you’ve heard someone’s articulated outcome you’re alongside them deeply, and respectful of how tough it is.’
21. How Big You Are as a Problem [2’19”]
‘So the conversation is all about the deficits and the problems, and sometimes they’re even escalated in order to push someone to crash through into the referral criteria of the service the worker wants.’
22. Strength-Based, Outcome-Focused Conversations [1’06”]
Rhoda’s work now involves supporting whole organisations shift their approach into being outcome-focused, not service-focused. ‘And focused on strengths, but not just a list of positives, but the strengths that could be utilised to address the risks.’
23. What Can We Discover? [0’51”]
Rhoda’s approach to local authorities and other wider organisations, the third sector etc, is ‘build a relationship in an expectation that your staff are going to discover something, not deliver something.’
24. Unpicking Unhelpful Systems [2’12”]
‘You can’t grow roses in concrete, and we have poured concrete all over our public services, so our workers can’t flourish.’
25. Why Recovery Communities Work [1’42”]
Third, they don’t have any of the ‘concrete’ that has been poured into treatment and other services constraining their ability to genuinely help people.
26. Collaborative Communication [2’28”]
The approach ‘is a way of really understanding what helps, and if we build more of that, more people have the opportunities to step into environments that feed them in their huge challenges to make changes around their alcohol and drugs.’
27. What You Focus On Grows [1’22”]
If we have a world where our public services focus on the problem, define the problem, and then decide whether it’s going to release resources to meet that problem, that is a lens that just grows a sense of problems and difficulties, and fears and anxieties, and risk.
28. Supporting the Professional [3’00”]
‘So it is really important every time we grow anything to see ourselves seeing the other professional as a potential person who might feel better after our conversation, less fearful, more open and considerate, and so we sort of treat them as the system who is our main focus in that moment.’
29. Disaggregating Families [1’53”]
‘We have disaggregated [separated into its parts] family members in our public services consistently for decades, so that holistic thing just gets lost…’
30. What Helped Most? [3’02”]
‘Give people no more, no less than they need to take that journey through to an outcome they’ve been able to articulate with you, that they’ve never been able to articulate with anyone else because no one’s listening. So we really need to create that momentum, don’t we, for all of our services.’