CARE Assessment
C.A.R.E. helps us notice patterns in how we connect; not to grade relationships, (or ourselves) but to better understand where connection is growing and where it may need attention.
What is the CARE Assessment?
The C.A.R.E. Assessment evaluates the health of your relationships in general as well as with specificity through four areas: Calm, Acceptance, Resonance, and Energy.
Applications in therapy
- Completing the CARE assessment together can offer specific insights about client's capacity.
- Map relational resources: help your client find sources of safety and support outside of therapy.
- Support thoughtful vulnerability: the CARE assessment helps identify safe relationships for practicing vulnerability.
Applications in community
- Use CARE qualities to identify ways to become a more responsive, inclusive, and growth-fostering group
- Pay attention to whether a community results in more energy, or more exhaustion.
- Notice what spaces invite which parts of the CARE program. What's missing?
Evolution of the CARE Assessment
Psychiatrist Amy Banks developed the CARE assessment as part of her work connecting Relational-Cultural Theory with emerging understandings of relationships and well-being. She created a framework for assessing the quality of human connection in people's lives.
Judith Jordan later included Banks’s CARE scale in Relational-Cultural Therapy, describing calm, acceptedness, resonance, and energy as a way to chart relational resources and explore which relationships might support greater openness and vulnerability.
CARE fits naturally within RCT because it shifts attention away from asking, “What is wrong with me?” and toward asking, “What happens to me in different relationships?” It gives us another way to notice the relational conditions in which people can bring more of themselves into connection.
Questions
- Around whom do you feel the most welcome?
- Where do you get a sense of deep acceptance?
- What relationships leave you with more energy?
Relational Challenge
Take the CARE assessment and notice which areas in your life could use a little more attention.
When a relationship changes, it quite literally changes the minds of everyone in that relationship. Your own transformation isn't limited to yourself alone, because you are not alone. We live within one another.