Don't say anything to her but she thinks you don't like her.

I got this in an email this morning. One of the services the program I work for provides is a disability-related adjustment counseling. Pretty much the goal of it is to help participants who may be newly disabled learn ways to adjust to their life post-TBI. This email came from a staff member who provides this service to my client.


This one lady will on occasion get super angry and perseverate. It usually gets to the point where I have to tell her I will call her back at another time because she is not able to listen to anything I say to her because she is unable to calm herself down and at that point, she is screaming, cursing and basically blaming me for everything that went wrong in her life since birth (I've only been working with her a few months ha ha).

Anyways, this lady had an encounter with me a couple weeks ago where she got pissed off because her primary aide who drives her everywhere was not working, and the aide filling in did not have access to a car. She was unable to accept this and felt that she was told that she would always have an aide available to drive her places if she needed one and I WAS NOT DOING MY JOB BECAUSE I HADN'T GOTTEN AN AIDE OVER THERE TO DRIVE HER IF SHE NEEDED "TO POSSIBLY" GO SOMEWHERE. (she had no plans but I know that's another issue).

In any event, she did not like my response when I told her that is not the case, I personally would never promise a client this because we cannot guarantee that----especially because we are there to help our clients become INDEPENDENT and not DEPENDENT on staff to get to where they need to go.

I told her I would be more than happy to arrange Medicaid transportation to take her to her appointments, but I was not going to again, "promise" her a staff member who would drive her. As an aside, I don't do this myself due to the insurance liability, so I certainly don't expect it from others (although I know some workers do transport clients in their vehicles and I am sure in their shoes if they are getting reimbursed it may be helpful for their own sanity if they are spending a 12 hour shift with a client who perseverates).

Anyways..........So I can only assume that the reason my client thinks "I don't like her" is because I didn't give in to her demand. We are having a team meeting with her next week to discuss reducing some of her 1:1 staff hours (right now she has 24 hour coverage) which she has been asking about forever. As a team we are going to discuss her needing to become less dependent on staff if she wants this to become a reality. Because right now she has more than dependence going on----she is totally manipulating if you ask me.