I recently spoke at a conference called “Managing the Complexities of Self Directed Supports” (more on those ‘complexities’ in my next article).

The audience was largely service providers and so I was super-keen to get them thinking about the potential of their influence in supporting people with self-direction.

One of the strongest messages from my family’s experiences is to encourage service providers and professionals to SEE BEYOND and ASK NEW QUESTIONS in order that increasing numbers can grasp the opportunity of self direction.

Our self-directed journey began about 20 years ago with what I see in hindsight now was the beginning of a family conversation about what was wrong in my brother’s life and situation. From what was wrong, with the help of others, we worked out what could be right. NOTE – THAT’S ‘WITH THE HELP OF OTHERS’.

My brother moved from our family home into a large hostel when he was 9 years old. He lived in this hostel and then group homes until he was 26 when he moved into his own home.

His life now is very different. Not just his life but actually his identity, how he sees himself and how we and the world see him. Through changing his circumstances and through being able to work on the areas of his life that we deemed most important to his well-being, we have quite successfully enabled him. We have not done it alone.

When Matthew was living away from us, we might only see him on weekends and some holidays. His weekly life was not something I really knew much about nor had any real involvement in. As a teenager and into my early adulthood I remember starting to form some opinions about this. I remember yearly processes of being asked questions about Matthew but they always seemed to be the same questions and rarely do I remember us being asked to create this process or contribute to it. Sometimes people would come who knew nothing about Matthew and we would spend most of the meeting saying how we didn’t think their ideas would work.  Sometimes we didn’t participate I think because we couldn’t really see anything changing from year to year.  I remember thinking I’d just love him as much as I could when I saw him and hopefully that would be enough to last him.

It’s true that my mother was and is a leader in the advocacy movement. But isn’t that interesting? It can be quite a different story to take a leap forward into the unknown of your own life (even when the known is completely unsatisfactory and perhaps even abusive). It is also really hard to know what to do differently and HOW to do it.

So I think SEEING CANNOT BE BELIEVING. The contexts that we see people in can drive our perceptions of what they are capable of achieving. This was both the case for Matthew and for us. I know now that you could have thought us a number of things: an uninterested family, or a distant family, a family who didn’t have the goods, and therefore a family who might be incapable of  figuring out what was needed and then creating the means to achieve that.

It turns out we are and were none of those things.

The skills needed are

1. SEEING BEYOND PEOPLE’S CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES

2. BELIEVING IN BETTER (even if they are struggling with this)

3. ASKING NEW QUESTIONS.