When a family uses a consulting professional to assist them to make their agonizing decision, the selection process eventually contracts to an easily-misinterpreted juncture – at the moment families need clarity, consultants (and web directories) want to provide multiple options for the family’s final decision.
Any unease around this selection process may arise from the family’s expectation for authoritative assurance – “choose B and everything will become settled”; even though guidance and experience is what they were promised, the family is now, still, required to choose from the reduced list of appropriate placements. Add to the options the further stressors that psychotherapy treatment is simultaneously expensive, anxiety-inducing and may be urgently needed and it is understandable that families would want the best choice from the experts.
Based on the dynamics in the systems and the obligatory requirement of a decision without endless consideration, experts do not dare provide “the best choice”. And so with all the information that can be made available and weighed with the experts’ judgments, families must make that final evaluation and decide.
As with all decisions in life, gratefully, the world immediately starts to realign around the commitment from the players “with skin in the game”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Patrick Logan, MS is a former wilderness therapy program manager and IT consults with programs and websites.