We want to shelter clients from defeat. We think that a client's failure at a job or an educational goal will also be seen as a black mark against the system that tried to help. Yet as Kushner said, pain is an unavoidable part of a normal life. Risk-taking and failures are normal for both individuals and organizations. And that brings us to another painful change.
Labels isolate and segregate.
But the truth is that much of our professional lives revolve around labels. And most of us have had good experiences with them. We like to be called doctors and administrators and executives. There's an institutional logic to categorizing clients. There's a feeling of belonging among people who know the insider's language of the disability community.