Case Study 2 — Amara: The Caretaker's Vocation

The Question She Had Been Carrying

There is a question Amara has been carrying since before the MSW program, since before the applications and the deliberation about graduate school and the naming of her values in Chapter 11. It preceded, in some sense, all of the psychological work she has done.

The question: Is this a calling — or is this just what caretakers do?

When she tells people she is becoming a clinical social worker, they say: "That's so you." They mean it as a compliment. They can see the fit — her warmth, her attentiveness, her capacity to sit with difficulty. And they are not wrong. The fit is real.

But Amara knows something they don't know: she has been caring for people her entire life, not because she chose it, but because someone had to. Grace needed a manager as much as a daughter. Nana Rose needed a companion. The caretaking role was assigned before she was old enough to audition for it.

So the question: is this vocation? Or is this simply the only identity she knows how to inhabit, pursuing credentials to justify the role she was given involuntarily?

She has been working on this question in supervision, in therapy, in conversations with Kemi, in her own journal. She has not fully resolved it. She is not sure it is fully resolvable. But the resolution — or the closest she has come — arrives in her second year.

What the Work Actually Feels Like

Amara is now ninety-four clinical hours in. She has seven regular clients. The field placement at a community mental health clinic is unlike anything she imagined when she applied.

The unglamorous version: paperwork, insurance authorizations, assessment forms, documentation, notes. The clinic runs on thin resources and a staff that is stretched. Amara spends more time than she'd like on administrative processes that feel disconnected from the actual therapeutic work.

The significant version: she is present with people in their hardest moments.

She has sat with a man who hadn't told anyone about his son's suicide until he told her. She has watched a woman recognize, in session, that what she had been calling "fine" was not fine — had not been fine for years. She has seen a teenager who had refused to speak in two previous placements sit down, cross his arms, stare at the floor, and then, twenty minutes in, begin talking.

Amara runs the work orientation exercise on herself, honestly.

Job orientation: low — the paperwork is not why she's here.

Career orientation: moderate — she cares about competence development, about becoming a genuinely skilled clinician, about where she will eventually practice. But she is not primarily motivated by advancement.

Calling orientation: high — and this is where the question lives. The calling scores are high. But she has learned enough, in the program and in herself, to know that high calling scores are not diagnostic. They could reflect genuine vocation. They could reflect an internalized caretaker role so deep that it is indistinguishable from a calling.

She brings this to supervision.

Marcus on the Difference Between Compulsion and Vocation

Marcus had been her supervisor for almost a year. He had seen her grow. He had also seen, in her earliest sessions, what she described as the "pre-emptive regulation" — the management of her own experience to be available for others — and the specific quality of anxiety that came when she lost track of a client or felt she hadn't done enough.

She put the question to him directly: "How do you tell the difference between a calling and a compulsion?"

Marcus was quiet for a long moment. Then: "What does it feel like at the end of a good session?"

Amara thought. She had had a good session that week — the man who had described his son. The session had been difficult. She had cried, briefly, after it ended. She had felt — what was the word — used. In the right way. Like something had been asked of her that was genuinely hard and she had been adequate to it.

She said: "Depleted. But in a way that feels like something was used that was supposed to be used."

Marcus: "And at the end of a bad one?"

Bad session: the teenager who stonewalled, the form she'd filled out wrong twice, the client who cancelled and she'd spent the hour wondering if she'd damaged the relationship.

"Depleted in a different way," she said. "Like I used myself up and got nothing back."

Marcus: "That distinction — used in a way that feels right versus used up — is one of the closest things I know to the diagnostic difference between vocation and compulsion. In compulsion, the work extracts from you and you give because you can't refuse. In vocation, the work draws from you and you give because something in the giving is also receiving."

He paused. "It's not a clean line. They can coexist. But you know the difference in your body, if you pay attention."

The Authorship Check

Amara had identified "authorship checks" — asking whether her care was chosen or required — in Chapter 8. She returns to this framework, more fully, in the meaning chapter.

She designs a private experiment: for two weeks, at the end of each day, she notes what she did and whether it felt chosen.

At the end of two weeks, the pattern is clear.

The chosen acts: sitting with the man who hadn't told anyone. Holding the teenager's silence without filling it. The creative externalization with T., which had required her to try something outside the established toolkit. The peer processing group. The supervision conversations where she pushed back on Marcus's framing.

The unchosen acts: saying yes to the administrative tasks when she could have asked for clarity about their necessity. Absorbing a client's frustration in session without noting her own response. Staying late not because the work required it but because she wasn't sure she'd done enough.

The unchosen acts had caretaker-role texture. They were the old pattern, dressed up in professional clothing.

The chosen acts felt different. They felt like arriving at something she had actively decided to do, from a center that was genuinely hers.

The question had not fully resolved. But it had become smaller and more specific: not "is this a calling or a compulsion" as a totalizing judgment, but "in this moment, is this act chosen?" She could answer the smaller question. She could not yet fully answer the larger one. She suspected that was appropriate.

Nana Rose and the Meaning of Continuity

Amara's core values, named in Chapter 11, included "Continuity with Nana Rose" — the intention to extend what Nana Rose had offered her: the capacity to receive people fully, to be present with someone in difficulty without the presence being conditional.

In the second year of the program, this value finds a specific form.

Nana Rose had not been a therapist. She had been a woman with a kitchen and patience and the particular gift of not needing Amara to be anything other than what she was. She had provided, in Wallin's terms, a secure base — not as a deliberate intervention but as a habitual way of being with people.

Amara is learning to do this deliberately. The therapeutic relationship she is developing is, in some structural ways, what Nana Rose did naturally: a consistent, boundaried presence that allows a person to encounter themselves without the encounter being shaped by the clinician's needs.

She writes in her journal: I think this is what I am doing. I am learning to do on purpose what Nana Rose did because she couldn't help it. The vocation is not to repeat the role. It is to take the inheritance seriously enough to understand it.

This is not the resolution of the caretaker question. It is a different relationship to it: not "am I doing this because I was assigned to" but "what would it mean to do it from choice, with understanding, as a deliberate act of continuation?"

The Meaning Beneath the Question

Amara runs the five-why exercise in her journal.

I am training to be a clinical social worker.

Why does that matter? Because people in psychological pain need support that actually reaches them.

Why does that matter? Because without it, pain becomes chronic, and chronic psychological pain produces cascades — in families, in bodies, across generations.

Why does that matter? Because I have seen one of those cascades. I grew up inside one. And something in me wants to interrupt it — not just in my own line but in other people's lines.

Why does that matter? Because the cascade is not inevitable. The research says it's not. And if it's not inevitable, then the people doing the work of interrupting it matter.

Why does that matter? Because it is the closest thing I have to a reason.

She reads this back. The last line surprised her: it is the closest thing I have to a reason. Not "it is my reason" — she is too careful, too aware of the caretaker question, to claim certainty that easily. But the closest thing I have is honest. It is the nearest she can get to an answer, and it is enough to work from.

Kemi's Question

At the end of the second semester, Amara was on the phone with Kemi. Kemi was still in the city where they'd both started — working in policy now, finding her own meaning questions.

Amara described the caretaker-or-calling question. She described the authorship check results. She described the Nana Rose formulation.

Kemi was quiet. Then: "Can I say something that might be annoying?"

Amara said yes.

"You've been asking whether this is really yours for as long as I've known you. And the whole time you've been asking, you've been doing it. The asking doesn't stop the doing. What if that's the answer?"

Amara thought about this for a long time after the call.

The question "is this truly a calling?" was real and worth pursuing. But Kemi had named something: the asking and the doing were happening simultaneously, and the doing was not waiting for the asking to finish. Every session, every hour of supervision, every peer processing meeting — these were not held hostage by the unresolved question.

Amara was choosing the work, session by session, while the question remained open.

Maybe that was, as Kemi said, the answer.

Discussion Questions

1. The chapter distinguishes between calling and compulsion — both produce high scores on calling orientation measures. Marcus offers one diagnostic: "used in the right way" versus "used up." What other markers might distinguish genuine vocation from internalized obligation?

2. Amara's authorship check revealed that the unchosen acts had "caretaker-role texture." What is the practical significance of this finding? Does it invalidate the calling, complicate it, or neither?

3. Amara's formulation of "Continuity with Nana Rose" transforms what could be an inherited role (caretaker) into a deliberate vocation (the intentional extension of a relational gift). What is the difference, psychologically, between inheriting a role and choosing to continue it?

4. Kemi says: "the asking and the doing are happening simultaneously, and the doing is not waiting for the asking to finish." How does this connect to the chapter's argument that purpose is discovered through action rather than prior introspection?

5. Amara's five-why answer ends with: "it is the closest thing I have to a reason." She explicitly does not claim certainty. The chapter describes purpose as an emergent structure developed over time, not a predetermined destination. How much certainty about purpose is necessary before it can function as a motivational resource?