Reflection Paper On Homelessness

710 Words2 Pages

I was raised in a middle to upper class family. Money has allowed me the ability to achieve an education, live in a safe neighborhood, and have more time to “enjoy” life. I have experienced a great amount of privilege in my life. In this paper, I attempt to address how my financial status has impacted my relationship to friends in the past, as well as how it will be an influential object of projection in the future. Often, I go on adventures and meet new friends. Throughout life I have spent time with travelers who don’t have a home and often live out of their car. I have glorified these individuals thinking to myself that they are freer, and have access to a more spacious world. Without realizing it I was generalizing the homeless incorrectly and judging their lives as simpler than they actually were. For some reason, I perceived my new friends had a choice in their homelessness. My experience of witnessing …show more content…

For example, if a client came in stressed out, and I offered them the advice to take a sabbatical, they may respond that they cant. In this case my bias and points or privilege would be embarrassing, and what I was offering as advice, may seem patronizing. “A more helpful way to think about bias is simply as a tendency to think, act, or feel in particular ways. In some cases, these tendencies may guide individuals toward some accurate hypotheses and a quicker understanding of someone. In other situations, they may lead individuals to embarrassingly wrong assumptions” (Hays, 2016, p. 23). In conclusion, I believe it is important to hold an awareness of my privilege and how it affects my relationships. Though it took me a while to recognize how my privilege has given me more access to freedom, now that I have recognized it, I will work with my own projections and assumptions and learn how to relate more empathetically and

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