Alison Pugh

You can still convey to someone that they are a human being and that they deserve to be heard and listened to.

without that.

Yeah, that sounds very difficult because whatever opinions the family members, or we could call them more generically the recipients or the students, the patients, et cetera, might have about the professionals, you have to kind of mediate that.

And that does sound difficult.

At the risk of sounding like I have a hammer and everything's a nail, my opinion is that if that person

actively sees the family members, that can actually go a long way in that mediation process.

For example, I spoke to someone who was a home healthcare aide, and she was known by her employer, her employing agency, as a hard cases specialist, because she was really good at seeing the other and just

That can really calm down the outrage if people are dissatisfied in any way.

Sometimes the family members are probably not dissatisfied, but when you're kind of handling that mediating role, it's really good.

I think actually probably both of them need seeing labor, need connective work.

I agree.

And actually, I bet, I think there are many different occupations that have this kind of mediating role, for sure.

Seeing those individual sides doesn't sound that hard to me.

What sounds hard to me is if you have to make them agree.

And I think there are professions where you have to somehow bring those parties together.

Assuming there is distance between them, that's the hard part, because especially since they aren't doing the work of seeing each other.

So yeah, I think probably professional mediators have this role, for example.

And, yeah, I think they would say, you know, given these, I think they would say something like, given these two parties that disagree, how do we get the, you know, get to a point where each of them, you know, feels like they have won or something like that.

It's my experience that

it's not painful to see people who disagree with each other.