David
David had been challenging to work with.
He had been using methamphetamine regularly, his housing situation was unstable, and his physical health appeared to be getting worse. He often arrived for appointments looking disheveled, and the deterioration of his teeth had become increasingly noticeable. His case manager worried about him.
She was also becoming frustrated.
David frequently missed appointments or failed to follow through on things they had discussed. When they did meet, there was often an immediate need. Sometimes he needed food. Sometimes he needed help paying for something. Increasingly, he simply asked her for money.
She wanted to help, but she had begun to question whether meeting these immediate needs was actually helping David. When he asked for money, she wondered where it would go. At times, she wondered whether he was manipulating her.
She had been doing this work long enough to have seen situations like this before. She had worked with other people whose substance use had become a significant concern. Some had eventually made significant changes in their lives. Many had not. She had watched people cycle in and out of treatment, lose housing, reconnect with services, return to substance use, and disappear for long periods of time.
Those experiences were difficult to forget.
Increasingly, when she looked at David, she didn’t just see what was happening in his life today. She saw a familiar trajectory. His continued methamphetamine use, deteriorating health, missed appointments, and repeated requests for money all seemed to point in the same direction.
A thought had begun creeping in.
Maybe David is never going to get better.
She didn’t say this to David. She might not even have fully acknowledged it to herself. Yet the thought was beginning to influence their relationship.
When David called, she found herself wondering what he needed this time. When they met, she anticipated the request for money. Their conversations increasingly revolved around his meth use, housing, health, missed appointments, and whatever immediate problem needed attention that day.
She knew a lot about David.
She knew about his meth use. She knew about his declining health. She knew where he had been staying. She knew about the appointments he had missed, the services he had been offered, and the plans they had made that hadn’t worked out.
She knew a great deal about David’s problems.
But how well did she actually know David?
How is it possible to know so much about someone’s problems and still barely know the person?
How We Can Gradually Lose Sight of the Person
It would be easy to look at David’s case manager and conclude that she has become too negative or has lost sight of the principles of strengths-based practice. That would miss something important. Her reactions are understandable.
People working in behavioral health and human services are repeatedly exposed to difficult circumstances. They work alongside people whose lives may include substance use, mental health challenges, homelessness, poverty, isolation, and other difficult circumstances. They respond to crises, help some people find housing only to see it lost again, arrange services people do not use, and develop plans that sometimes fall apart. They invest time, energy, and hope in people whose lives may continue to move in troubling directions.
Over time, those experiences teach us things. We begin to recognize patterns. Experience can help us anticipate problems, identify risks, and avoid repeating approaches that have not worked. In many ways, this is part of becoming an experienced practitioner.
The danger comes when patterns become expectations.
David begins to remind his case manager of other people she has worked with. His circumstances fit a pattern she recognizes. Without intending to, she begins using the past to predict David’s future.
We can begin to mistake someone’s probable trajectory for their inevitable future.
Once that happens, something subtle can change in the relationship. We may still care deeply about the person. We may continue working hard on their behalf. Yet we may become less curious. We stop wondering what might be possible and begin preparing ourselves for what we have come to expect.
This is one of the quiet ways we can lose sight of someone’s humanity. We stop encountering the person in front of us and begin responding to the story we have already written about who they are and where their life is headed.
The challenge for David’s case manager is not simply whether she can identify his strengths. It is whether she can remain open to possibilities for David that neither of them may be able to see yet.
Human Service Systems Can Reinforce This Narrowing
This narrowing of our view does not happen only because of our individual experiences. The systems we work in can reinforce it.
Behavioral health systems need information about the problems affecting people’s lives to establish eligibility for services and justify ongoing support. We assess symptoms, risks, substance use, housing instability, treatment needs, and other immediate concerns. We document what happened during our contacts and the interventions we provided. When a crisis occurs, we understandably focus our attention on resolving it.
All of this serves a purpose. The problem is not that we pay attention to these things. The problem arises when they become the primary way we come to know a person.
Consider what David’s chart might contain. There may be considerable information about his methamphetamine use, mental and physical health, housing history, past trauma, missed appointments, requests for assistance, and previous services. There may be assessments describing his needs and progress notes documenting the problems addressed during each encounter.
To be fair, many behavioral health programs also make an intentional effort to identify people’s strengths. Assessments and service plans may include sections devoted specifically to strengths and resources. Yet what gets recorded as a strength is often fairly general: resilient, determined, motivated, or resourceful. We may also identify resources available to the person: supportive family, friends, a phone, transportation, previous work experience, or connections to services.
This information can be useful. Yet even a fairly complete list of strengths and resources may tell us surprisingly little about the person. Knowing that David is “resilient” is different from knowing how he has demonstrated resilience throughout his life. Knowing that he has family support is different from knowing who those people are, what those relationships mean to him, and how they have shaped his life. Knowing that he has previous work experience is different from discovering what he enjoyed about working, what he was good at, or what made him feel proud.
There is still much about David that we may not know. Who and what has mattered to him throughout his life? What is he proud of? What does he enjoy doing? What has he learned from everything he has lived through? What does he still hope for? What kind of life would feel meaningful to him?
Over time, the language of the system can become the language through which we see people. David can become “a person with meth addiction,” “difficult to engage,” someone with “poor follow-through,” or the person who is “always asking for money.” These descriptions may communicate something about what is happening in his life. None of them completely captures David.
What the system needs to know about a person can gradually become what we believe there is to know about the person.
The challenge is not to stop paying attention to problems, risks, or needs. It is to make sure that our attention to them does not make the rest of the person disappear.
Seeing Humanity Does Not Mean Ignoring Reality
Seeing David as more than his problems does not require his case manager to minimize what is happening in his life. His methamphetamine use may be having serious consequences. His physical health is deteriorating. She may have legitimate concerns about his safety, and she may need to establish boundaries around requests for money.
Strengths-based practice is not positive thinking. It does not ask us to reinterpret every difficult circumstance as something positive or to ignore information that concerns us.
The challenge is to hold two realities at the same time:
David is experiencing serious problems. And David is more than those problems.
His case manager can be deeply concerned about his methamphetamine use without allowing it to become the defining feature of who he is. She can establish boundaries without withdrawing her respect for him. She can acknowledge the seriousness of his circumstances while remaining curious about the parts of David’s life that have become less visible.
Seeing someone’s humanity does not require us to see their circumstances differently. It requires us to remember that their circumstances are never the whole person.
Strengths Model Practice Begins with How We See People
There is something fundamental that occurs before we ever start trying to use Strengths Model tools, interventions, and approaches: how we see and regard the person in front of us. The effectiveness of tools such as the Strengths Assessment and Personal Empowerment Plan depends largely on whether we, as workers, begin with a mindset that people are more than their actions, behaviors, choices, or life challenges.
One aspect of this stance is unconditional positive regard. David does not have to stop using methamphetamine, keep every appointment, follow his case manager’s recommendations, stop asking for money, or demonstrate that he is “motivated” to be worthy of her respect, interest, and attention. His worth as a person is not contingent upon his progress.
Unconditional positive regard does not mean unconditional approval. It does not require David’s case manager to view every choice he makes positively or to ignore the potential consequences of his actions. She can be concerned about his substance use, establish boundaries, and talk openly with him about things that worry her. What she does not have to do is allow those concerns to determine how she regards David as a person.
That distinction becomes especially important when someone’s behavior repeatedly frustrates or worries us. It is relatively easy to communicate hope and respect when someone is making changes we recognize as progress. The more difficult test of our stance comes when they are not.
This is also where hope becomes important in Strengths Model practice. Hope does not require the case manager to convince herself that David will stop using methamphetamine or that everything will eventually work out. She cannot know how his story will unfold.
What she can resist is the certainty that she already knows how it will end.
She can continue to believe that possibilities exist in David’s life that neither of them can see yet. She can remain interested in who he is, what matters to him, and what he might still want for his life.
Perhaps this is one of the most important things we can offer another person: not certainty that their life will change, but a relationship in which their current circumstances are never treated as the final word on who they are or what might still be possible.
Curiosity Helps Us Rediscover the Person
If David’s case manager wants to see more than the problems that have come to dominate their relationship, one place to begin is with curiosity.
Perhaps during one of their encounters, she stops trying to accomplish something for a few minutes. She isn’t trying to get David to agree to treatment, solve his housing situation, address his health, or follow through on a plan. She simply becomes curious about him.
She might ask where he grew up or what he was like as a kid. She might learn about people who have mattered to him, places he has lived, jobs he has had, things he used to enjoy, experiences he is proud of, or times in his life he remembers fondly. A conversation might wander into places that have little apparent connection to the problems that brought David into services.
None of these conversations requires David to reveal some remarkable strength or hidden talent. Their importance is much more basic. They create opportunities for his case manager to encounter parts of David that the urgency of his problems has obscured.
Curiosity changes the nature of the interaction. Instead of approaching David primarily through what needs to be assessed, addressed, or changed, his case manager begins approaching him as someone worth knowing.
In that sense, genuine curiosity communicates something important even when it is never said directly:
Your life interests me. You are worth knowing.
The Strengths Assessment as a Way of Discovering the Person
This same curiosity is at the heart of the Strengths Assessment. Its value does not come from making sure that every box across the seven life domains contains information. Its value comes from the conversations and discoveries that occur as we explore a person’s life with them.
Done poorly, the Strengths Assessment can become just another assessment of David. The case manager asks questions, records his answers, and moves from one life domain to the next. She may finish with a completed Strengths Assessment and still not know David much better than she did before.
Done well, the process looks very different. The Strengths Assessment gives her opportunities to slow down and explore David’s life with him. Something he mentions about a previous job might lead to a conversation about what he enjoyed about the work or what he was good at. A reference to someone in his family might lead her to learn more about that relationship and why it matters to him. Something he remembers from earlier in his life might reveal an interest, aspiration, experience, or ability to explore further.
The goal isn’t simply to complete the Strengths Assessment. The goal is to discover the person.
And what we discover does not have to be extraordinary to matter. We are not searching for some impressive strength that suddenly changes the way we see David. We are trying to understand more of the life that belongs to the person sitting in front of us.
Seeing Humanity Changes What We Believe Is Possible
Earlier, David’s case manager had begun thinking, Maybe David is never going to get better.
She cannot know how David’s life will unfold. Neither can we. The point of seeing more of who David is isn’t that she now has evidence that everything will turn out differently.
What changes is her ability to believe that something different is still possible.
That belief matters because it influences what she is willing to keep doing. If she has already concluded that David’s future will look much like his past, it becomes difficult to sustain the slow, patient work of preserving the relationship, remaining curious, asking questions that expand their conversations, and continuing to invite David to explore what might matter to him.
Without a belief in possibility, the work can gradually narrow. We may focus primarily on stabilization and maintenance. We may repeatedly try to persuade the person to change what concerns us. We may even begin protecting ourselves from the disappointment of hoping for something that may never happen.
Believing in possibility asks something different of us. It asks us to hang in there. To remain interested. To gently ask different questions. To notice openings when they appear. To invite rather than push. And perhaps, at some point, the person may become interested in exploring something more or taking a step toward something that matters to them.
None of this guarantees what happens next.
Seeing more of the person does not tell us what their future will be. It expands the possibilities we are able to imagine and explore with them.
Humanity Is Often Revealed in Ordinary Moments
Seeing David’s humanity is not only about learning more information about him. It is also about his case manager’s ability to simply be with him.
Some of the most meaningful interactions in Strengths Model practice may happen while driving somewhere together, getting coffee, sitting in a park, walking through a neighborhood, laughing about something, or talking about something that seemingly has nothing to do with a service or treatment plan.
No obvious intervention may be happening in these moments. Nothing is being assessed. No goal is being developed. No problem is necessarily being solved. Yet something important may still be happening.
David gets an opportunity to simply be David. His case manager gets an opportunity to experience him outside of the problems and responsibilities that usually organize their time together. They may learn things about one another, laugh together, disagree about something unimportant, discover a shared interest, or simply become more comfortable being together.
These moments may barely register in the clinical record. Yet they may be some of the most important moments in the helping relationship, where shared humanity becomes visible.
Seeing David
We don’t know what happens next for David.
He may continue using methamphetamine. His health may continue to deteriorate. He may miss more appointments, ask his case manager for money again, and make choices that worry or frustrate her. Seeing his humanity does not make any of these things disappear.
What may be different is what his case manager sees when she looks at him.
She still sees the methamphetamine use, the health concerns, the unstable housing, and the other problems affecting his life. But she also sees David. She knows more about where he has come from, the people and experiences that have mattered to him, what he has cared about, and perhaps some things he still hopes might be possible.
She no longer knows only his problems. She knows more about who he is as a person, beyond the challenges he experiences.
Strengths Model practice asks us to learn about people’s strengths, aspirations, resources, and possibilities. Underneath all of those practices, however, is something even more fundamental: the commitment to see the person.
Not a diagnosis. Not a collection of needs. Not a problem to solve. Not a case to manage.
A human being whose life is larger than the circumstances that brought them to our door.
Interested in Learning More About Strengths Model Case Management?
Strengths Model Inc. works with organizations seeking to strengthen person-centered, strengths-based practice and deepen the way Strengths Model principles are brought to life in everyday work.
Have questions or want to connect? Contact Rick Goscha at rick@strengthsmodel.com
