I've Been a Bad, Bad Girl...

Yep... I've gone and done it now...

Quite a bit of my schooling is done on message boards... The professor presents a discussion question, and everyone responds with their input and furthers the conversation throughout the week. For those of you who don't know, I'm majoring in Human Services Management. The "helping" profession, for crying out loud! And I swear, this group of people in this class have to be the most judgmental, biased group of individuals who have ever walked the planet!

Source

WHY ON EARTH would someone ever enter into this field when they have such strong negative opinions about everyone different from them?!? One of the discussion questions this week was, "Would you ever agree to work with a sexual deviant?" Out of 20 people, only three of us said that we'd be willing to try! Most of these women were like, "Oh HELLLLLL NO! They should be be strung up and publically flogged and castrated and killed!" (Which I don't entirely disagree with, but it's not my place to do that. Personally, I think if there is even a chance that rehabilitation could work, we should at least try. These people are going to be out there regardless of whether or not we try to rehabilitate them. I'd rather know that someone was trying, rather than just letting them loose and hoping for the best.) Half of these chicks went on to talk about all of the immigrants needing to go back to their own countries (apparently all sexual deviants are immigrants in their minds), about abusive mothers (apparently they are all prostitutes), and about "those alternative lifestyle people". These conversations carried on all week. And tonight, I'd had enough! I decided to stir the pot a little bit and say something about it. Bad, Tammy!

I just said that I was curious to see what everyone's opinion was on the importance of tolerance and acceptance in the human services field. I told them that I've always felt that people choosing to enter this field should be more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, cultural, religious, economic, ethnic differences, etc. in order to provide unbiased, non-judgmental, unconditional positive regard. I asked if it is even possible to do an effective job of counseling someone if you've gone into the session already condemning the client for their lifestyles, beliefs, or even their past crimes? I asked, if you refer all of your clients to other counselors because you don't think you could work with them, why go into this field in the first place? Then I said that I might be wrong, but I've always thought that people who have chosen to spend their lives in a "helping" profession would naturally be more accepting than society as a whole. And THEN... Bad, Tammy! I said that I was really surprised, and rather disappointed by most of the responses I'd seen up to this point, and really hoped someone could clarify their opinions for me because I just didn't understand how someone in this field could be that unmoving in their opinions. I can't wait to see what everyone has to say about that!!!

I'm SOOO bad! I can't wait to see what all of those chick-a-dees have to say for themselves!