Week 9 Care Lab: Boundaries Under Pressure

Practising Week 8 — an interaction where being caring, validating, agreeing and obeying are not all the same response

5 May 2027

Before your Care Lab#

Released Mon 26 Apr 2027 · due Wed 5 May 2027, 08:30, ahead of the earliest timetabled group.

Take a concrete interaction involving your designated human cat where being caring, validating, agreeing, and obeying would each produce a different response. Work through it in four moves: name what the human cat actually asked for; name what, honestly, can be validated in what they are feeling; name where judgement is still required, even once you have validated the feeling; name which of your remembered preferences for this human cat are genuinely relevant here, and which are being reached for out of habit.

Write the response you would actually give, and be able to say what it preserves from your care model without simply doing whatever was asked.

In the Care Lab#

In your timetabled group, compare where you each drew the line between validating and agreeing, and between caring and obeying. The useful disagreements are the ones where two people validated the same feeling and still produced different responses — trace exactly which piece of judgement diverged, and whether it was a difference in what you knew about the human cat or a difference in how you weighed it.

Afterwards#

This week’s lecture, The Bad Response, is about a related failure: a response that looks caring and is not actually built for this human cat. What you practised here — separating what was asked from what judgement still requires — is the same discipline that catches that failure before it ships. Next week’s Care Lab, Response Autopsy, asks you to find it after the fact.