Change the Context
A few days ago, I bought a second-hand wetsuit for almost nothing.
I want to swim in natural lakes more often this autumn. Before then, I needed to know whether the suit fit.
It was the middle of summer. The temperature outside had reached about thirty-four degrees Celsius. I live in an old wooden house that traps heat on days like this.
The plan was simple. Put the wetsuit on. Check the fit. Take it off.
Getting into it was surprisingly easy.
Getting out was not.
The suit gripped my shoulders so tightly that I became stuck. I pulled harder. I twisted my arms. I tried one movement after another.
Nothing worked.
The thick neoprene trapped my body heat. Each minute made the room feel hotter.
My daughter was not with me. Almost everyone in the house and the surrounding neighbourhood had gone away for the holidays. No one nearby could simply come over and help.
If I failed to get out of the suit, I had only one realistic option. I would have to walk out into the street, trapped in a wetsuit, and ask a complete stranger to pull me free.
I could still breathe. I was not in immediate danger.
But I noticed something else.
I was losing my calm.
The heat made it harder to think. The harder I tried to escape, the more urgent the situation felt. Panic began to rise.
In one corner of the house stood an old portable air conditioner. I had bought it second-hand years earlier for fifty francs. I almost never used it.
That day, I switched it on.
The machine could not remove the wetsuit.
But it could remove the panic.
I stood in front of the cold air. My body slowly cooled. As my temperature fell, the pressure to act at once began to disappear.
I could think again.
Then I thought about snakes.
A snake does not remove its old skin by pulling harder. It finds a branch, a stone, or another rough surface. It loosens one small section. Once that first point gives way, the rest follows.
I looked around the room.
Next to me stood a door frame.
I pressed my shoulder against its edge and pushed the neoprene across it, centimetre by centimetre. The fabric shifted. My shoulder came free.
Seconds later, I stood outside the wetsuit.
I still think about that moment.
Not because of the wetsuit.
Because it taught me something about solving problems.
We often assume that a problem demands a direct attack. We pull harder. We fight longer. We force ourselves to think more intensely.
But the real obstacle may not be the problem itself.
The obstacle may be the conditions in which we are trying to solve it.
I did not find the solution while I was hot and frightened. First, I changed the temperature. That reduced the panic. Once the panic faded, I could observe the room. Only then did I notice the door frame.
Perhaps social work follows the same pattern.
People arrive with unemployment, debt, addiction, loneliness, violence, family conflict, or trouble at school.
Our first question often sounds like this:
How do we solve the problem?
A better first question may be:
Under what conditions is this person trying to solve it?
Fear changes thought.
Shame changes thought.
Noise changes thought.
Poverty changes thought.
Heat changes thought.
Changing the context will not remove every problem.
But many problems become solvable only after the context changes.
Professional help may therefore require more than advice. Sometimes the first task is to create conditions in which a person can think clearly again.
Only then does the real work begin.