A different way of thinking

I'm doing a bit of work a the moment with a homeless man. I wasn't fully recovered from my recent illness perhaps (also why I've missed posting for the last 10 days), but yesterday things didn't run as smoothly as they did before.

There were two problems. Firstly he asked me to fill in a referral form, and I in turn asked him the questions I was being asked. These sorts of direct questions from someone else's referral form aren't the easiest of things to balance with an advocacy approach, and the half answers I was getting didn't seem to match very closely with the things I already half knew. I realised that I was straying into support worker territory, and it was strange, as an advocate, to try to fill in a referral form which was supposed to be from me, in my voice, when in fact I was trying to make this man's voice heard.

The second problem was that during the slightly bizarre form-filling exercise, someone from the Council called. Now we've been getting on quite well, and we appreciate the work we're each doing on this guy's behalf. But after a couple of minutes he starts telling me that the guy is not really credible. He tells me some information from a pre-sentencing report (I do have the authority to know this, and the guy's in the room with me consenting). The Council man is vaguely worried about our guy's credibility, and I can guess that his colleagues are more worried.

So the difficulty I'm having filling in this form is suddenly compounded by other people's vague worries, and I make the mistake of asking my guy directly: why are you being inconsistent and evasive (I didn't use those words, but that was the gist of it).

He then accuses me of accusing him of 'lying'. A hole has suddenly appeared in our relationship.

I don't think he's 'lying' as such. I think he's trying to communicate his need for somewhere to live. I think he's trying to navigate his way through a whole lot of confusing questions. I can see him rooting through scraps of paper that fall out of holes in his pockets or get wet and ruined or thrown away by mistake. These pieces of paper are so closely connected to his story in many ways: some of them contain concrete evidence to support his story, some of them just have phone numbers with no names or other random scraps of information that may or may not be useful or relevant. He tries to save them, to order them, to show some of them to people who might help him (while withholding others). On some wet nights he's lost the whole lot, and they can never be replaced.

The information in his head is very similar. I think he remembers different things at different times. He talks to all sorts of people and they all want different parts of the puzzle. They also interpret the information in all sorts of different ways. It's also true, though I don't want to stress this too much, that many of the people he talks to have a very different level of education, not to mention literacy. Maybe I should say that they think in different ways to him.

Then whenever his credibility or consistency is challenged, it's a challenge to him, to his sense of self. And when he is challenged in this way he defends himself, and he gets stressed and agitated, and then seems even less credible. It's a vicious circle.

At the end of the day this makes him even more vulnerable and in need of housing, but this very vulnerability is being misunderstood and used as an excuse not to offer him services.