UPR
Unconditional positive regard. Probably one of the most controversial ideas I usually share with people around me.
The concept was coined by Stanley Standal in 1954 and was popularised by Carl Rogers in 1956. It revolves around the basic acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does. Standal suggested that self and behaviour should be separated and hypothesised that the individual has the capacity to understand and take responsibility for themselves, correct their behaviour via this understanding and achieve personal growth.
This approach requires us to set aside our opinions and biases when we are interacting with someone else. Unconditional positive regard as a concept originated from psychotherapy, but it can be applied to all walks of life. It requires the notion that when we interact with one another, we understand that all of us have our own narrative and that narrative will indeed define how we see the world and how we react to it. It calls for empathy, kindness, an open mind and the ability to listen and comprehend other people’s lives without knowing them, It compels us to be curious despite being wired to take unpleasant behaviour personally.
Unconditional positive regard is especially useful in customer-facing work such as my own profession as a veterinarian. There is a common belief that veterinarians have a great job because they work with lovely animals all day and it is all happy and fluffy and their day is filled with puppies and kittens. This could not be further from the reality. Of course, we work with animals, they are our patients, but firstly, these patients are very often very sick, which is on its own emotionally demanding and secondly, we should not forget that these pets come with their two-legged parents with their own complex personalities that we have to navigate in order to be able to help the animals.
Veterinary professionals including the nurses, the animal care assistants and the front-of-house colleagues, are expected to understand and tend to not only the needs of the animals but to the needs of the people attached to these animals. Without structured education, we must be able to comprehend complex human behaviour and respond in a professional and empathetic manner in a very short period of time. Therapists have months and years to untangle someone’s intricate mental state, biases and motivations, but we need to do this within mere minutes and we need to do it well.
When pet parents attend a veterinary clinic, they are emotionally charged. They are often racked with health anxiety by proxy. Health anxiety is a fairly new psychiatric diagnosis first discussed by Peter Tyrer and his colleagues (2016). Following their footsteps, Elaine Lockhart (2016) postulated the term health anxiety by proxy when the worry is about someone else’s health. In their paper, Salama and colleagues (2023) presented a health anxiety by proxy case report and found that it was crucial that in these scenarios the patients feel that their concerns and worries are understood and not underestimated. Extrapolating these findings to the veterinary profession, it is paramount to empathise with pet parents and understand that the behaviours they exhibit when interacting with us are heavily influenced by their emotions. We should approach them with unconditional positive regard, acknowledge and thus validate their fears, worries or other emotions first and then guide them through a more conducive behaviour that will allow appropriate communication and caregiving in return. It is a common and understandable mistake to perceive a distressed client as ‘difficult’ or ‘high maintenance’ instead of making the effort to ask the ultimate question: why the client is behaving this way?
Once we master the ability not to take unpleasant behaviour personally, but become curious about the reasons behind such behaviour, we will be able to have more meaningful and effective interactions with our fellow humans.
References:
Tyrer, P., Eilenberg, T., Fink, P., Hedman, E. and Tyrer, H., 2016. Health anxiety: the silent, disabling epidemic. BMJ, 353.
Lockhart, E., 2016. Health anxiety in children and parents. Bmj, 353.
Salama, H.Z., Alnajjar, Y.A., AbuHeweila, M.O., Dukmak, O.N., Ikhmayyes, I., Saadeh, S., AbuHeweila, M. and Ikhmayyes Sr, I., 2023. Health Anxiety by Proxy Disorder: A Case Report. Cureus, 15(1).
