Introduction to Helping

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Chapter 3

COMMIT YOURSELF TO THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP AND THE VALUES THAT DRIVE IT

It is important for you to take initiative in determining the kinds of values you want to pervade the helping process and relationship. Too often, such values are taken for granted. The position taken in Chapter 3 of The Skilled Helper is that values should provide guidance for everything you do in your interactions with clients.

As indicated in the text, the values that should permeate your helping relationships and practice must be owned by you. Learning about values from others is very important, but mindless adoption of the values promoted by the helping professions without reflection inhibits your owning and practicing them. You need to wrestle with your values a bit to make them your own. In addition, your values must actually make a difference in your interactions with clients. That is, they must be values-in-use and not merely espoused values. Your clients will get a feeling for your values, not from what you say, but from what you do.

EXERCISE 3.1: IDENTIFY THE KEY MESSAGES FOR YOU

There’s a lot to absorb in Chapter 3, especially if you are training to become a therapist. It is easy to get buried in the avalanche of messages cascading from theory and research in the helping professions. One of your tasks is to organize and simplify all of this at the service of your clients.

1. Therefore, read the chapter and make notes, but then write down four messages or “takeaways” that strike you as key. These are messages that you can embed within yourself and take with you into your encounters with clients.

Message #1:

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Message #2:

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Message #3:

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Message #4:

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2. Share your takeaways with a learning partner. What was the same? What was different?

EXERCISE 3.2: PUT YOURSELF IN THE ROLE OF THE CLIENT

1. With a learning partner, watch a video or movie segment of a counseling session. For instance, one possibility that you will find on YouTube is a video of the late Albert Ellis counseling the client, Gloria. Carefully observe the counselor and how he or she works with the client. Imagine you are the client depicted and answer the following questions. Jot down words, phrases, or simple sentences in response.

a. What did you like about the counselor? What did he or she do well?

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b. What would you want to change about the counselor?

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c. If you were the client, how would you have interacted with the counselor?

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2. Share your thoughts with your learning partner. Discuss both the similarities and the differences between your responses.

EXERCISE 3.3: EVALUATE YOUR ABILITY TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN RELATIONSHIPS

It goes without saying that the relationship between helper and client is important. Your job is to build the kind of relationship with each client that contributes to problem-managing and opportunity-developing outcomes. This exercise asks you to look at your strengths and weaknesses in establishing and maintaining relationships in your everyday life.

1. Identify your best and your worst (or at least one that has been difficult) relationships. Briefly describe your relationship with each person.

Best relationship:

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Worst/Difficult relationship:

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2. What did you do best in establishing and trying to maintain these relationships? Best relationship:

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Worst/Difficult relationship:

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3. What mistakes have you made in each relationship?

Best relationship:

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Worst/Difficult relationship:

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4. What have you done to recover from mistakes in each relationship? How are these different in each relationship?

Best relationship:

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Worst/Difficult relationship:

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5. What do you need to do to become better at establishing and maintaining good working relationships with others?

Best relationship:

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Worst/Difficult relationship:

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6. Discuss your responses with a learning partner.

EXERCISE 3.4: IDENTIFY YOUR PRELIMINARY VALUES

1. On a separate piece of paper, write a preliminary statement of values based on what you learned from the previous exercise. Write it in such a way that you could give it to a client, saying, “These are the values that underlie and permeate the helping process.”

2. The values we have as helpers are certainly shaped by our education and training, but they are also shaped by other things such as our families, religion, culture, society, and other life experiences. Consider and briefly note a couple of experiences and sociocultural factors that have influenced your statement of values.

3. Share your statement with a learning partner. Note both the similarities and the differences. In the light of your statements, tell each other what your hopes and fears would be were you to be your learning partner’s client.

4. Finally, read Chapter 3 in The Skilled Helper. That chapter deals with the importance of the relationship between the client and helper together with a discussion of values that should permeate that relationship. In the light of what you learn, revise your value statement and share it with your learning partner.

EXERCISE 3.5: IDENTIFY YOUR FIVE KEY VALUES

The five values highlighted in Chapter 3 are respect, empathy, proactive appreciation of diversity, client empowerment (together with self-responsibility), and a bias toward action. After reading the section in the book on each value, make a personal statement as to the place this value presently has in your life. How do you put each value into action in your life? Are there times when you have put any of them “on hold”? If so, what was going in your life to cause you to deviate from any given value?

Respect:

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Empathy:

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Proactive Appreciation of Diversity:

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Client Empowerment and Self-Responsibility:

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A Bias toward Action:

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EXERCISE 3.6: APPRAISE YOUR ABILITY TO WORK WITH DIVERSITY

As a helper, you will meet clients who differ from you in many ways: abilities, accent, age, attractiveness, color, developmental stage, disabilities, economic status, education, ethnicity, fitness, gender, group culture, health, national origin, occupation, personal culture, personality variables, politics, problem type, religion, sexual orientation, social status, and values—to name some of the major categories. These differences come with inherent advantages and disadvantages. Your ability to work with clients who are different, and sometimes quite different, from you is one of the major requirements for being an effective helper. On a scale of 1-7 (with 7 a very high score), rate yourself on the following statements. Try to be as honest as possible in your self-appraisal. We all have room for growth when it comes to being aware and positively embracing diversity. Just look around the world.

• I enjoy meeting and interacting with people who are different from me.

• I would not like to live (don’t like living) in a homogeneous culture.

• Even when my initial reactions to people are negative, I try to understand rather than judge them.

• I fully understand that people (including myself) are not perfect and I make reasonable allowances for this.

• I probably have blind spots when it comes to the way I treat people, but I’d like to know what they are so that I can deal with them.

• I see culture as a two-way street: I want to understand and respect the cultural differences of others, but I also expect them to do the same for me.

• I realize that my understanding of other people’s cultures will always be partial and fallible.

• I want to understand others in the key diversity and cultural contexts of their lives.

• Because of the richness of human diversity, when I meet and deal with others I am always a learner.

• I think that it is important for me to understand whatever diversity and cultural biases (such as racism, anti-Arabism, anti-Semitism, and the like) I have and to deal with them.

• Although I realize that differences can be a cause of conflict, I believe that differences can also be a source of human enrichment.

Consider your high scores and your low scores. Share key insights about yourself with a friend or learning partner.

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