Caregiver Self-Reflection

As practitioners, it is important to locate and notice our own feelings and experience before providing care for others. An unexamined posture, particularly around specific topics like AI, can easily be projected onto the person in front of you, whether you mean it or not. A note in entering this practice: we are often much better at withholding judgement for others while being our own harshest critics. Stay curious and stay open to questions. We recommend you start by mapping where AI already touches your ministry, then note where you experience unsettling.

CHECK YOUR OWN BUTTONS

— What is my gut response toward AI right now: where do I locate fear, fascination, contempt, inevitability, feeling left behind, defending my own expertise?

— Am I rushing to fix, or rushing to judge the technology, before I have actually received the person?

— Is anything here touching my own history: job insecurity, loneliness, a strained relationship, my own use of these tools?

— Am I the right person for this conversation right now? If I’m activated, who can I hand this to, or call before I go in?

If your own AI use, or your own AI-related distress, mirrors the care-seeker’s, that does not necessarily disqualify you. It may be exactly why you’re here.

LOCATE ONE FEELING, FOUR LENSES

Name whatever you’re carrying right now, maybe it is dread, irritation, curiosity, grief, relief. Then look at it from narrow to wide as a grounding practice before you proceed into a care situation.

Using the following model of the 4 B’s, as an opportunity to take yourself from an intellectual or cognitive experience, into an embodied and grounded consideration. This is a tool to conduct an honest read of what is happening in you right now. The 4 B’s aren’t analysis. They’re a pause. You’re invited to use them in this order, and not to rush past any one of them:

Biology — notice first, before you interpret anything.
Don’t ask why yet. Just scan you: jaw, chest, breath, shoulders, hands. Are you bracing? Holding your breath? This step exists to get you out of your head and into your body, because everything after this is more accurate once you know what your body has already experienced.

Biography — trace the feeling to its source, listen for the origin.
The question isn’t “is this reaction justified by what’s in front of me” — it’s “where does this reaction come from.” Machines, change, being replaced, these often are not new feelings, they’re old ones wearing a current situation. Naming the earlier source robs the present moment of borrowed intensity.

Behavior — catch your pattern before you enact it.
This is the tell. Most people have one or two default moves under a feeling like this: fix it, deflect it, over-function, go quiet, withdraw. Naming your pattern before you do it is the difference between choosing a response and being run by a reflex.

Backstory — interrogate the meaning you’ve attached to the feeling.
This is the most important B and the easiest to skip. What story are you telling yourself about having this feeling at all? That it’s shameful? Righteous? Proof you were right to worry, or proof you’re failing? This story usually does more damage than the original feeling — and it’s almost always negotiable.

As you work through each B, they invite the next one to be more honest, hence the ordered approach. You cannot accurately trace biography if you’re still flooded (biology). It is more difficult to see your behavioral pattern clearly if you haven’t questioned the precipitating event that’s driving it. We encourage backstory last, because it’s the deepest layer and the one most likely to hide from you if you go looking too soon.

Only once you’ve moved through all four B’s are you actually ready to show up as fully present — because now you know which parts of your reaction are about the system in front of you, and which parts you brought with you. Skipping the check-in doesn’t make the self-location more objective; it just means your biography and your behavior pattern get smuggled into the analysis without you noticing.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

One breath in. One breath out. “I do not have to have a judgement or rightness around this technology/subject matter. I only have to be present to this person.”