Practical Guidelines
__________
4IT IS LESS COMPLICATED THAN YOU THINK
Even though a specific subject may be complicated, the dialogue concerning it does not need to be so. If it feels hard to communicate, it is not because the subject matter is difficult in itself but because there are aspects of it that you are trying to avoid.
Simple or easy
“Simple” does not necessarily mean “easy.” If it seems difficult for someone to help in a particular situation, then it is as difficult for him/her as it is experienced, and that should not be dismissed. However, it is important to be precise in stating what the difficulty is. When it is hard to carry on an existential dialogue, it is not because it is complicated. There is nothing complicated about agreeing with a patient that it is sad that he/she must die at an early age. Or, if there is, something may be done to make it less complicated. The task of agreeing with the obvious is in itself very simple, and it only comes to be “complicated” at the point where, for some reason, the helper wants to avoid part of what is obvious. It is, indeed, difficult to talk in a way that would diminish the sadness of an early death. A relevant program of training and supervision might help a helper to realize this and thus do away with the “complicated” part of carrying on a helping dialogue with someone in a painful state of circumstances and mind. A very different kind of difficulty, however, is the emotional burden of being with the other person in his/her distress and with the burden of your own inability to make the other person’s suffering disappear.
These burdens are inherent and unavoidable in the helping contact. They call for a kind of training and supervision that helps the helper not to be confluent (flowing together) with the person in need. It is important to be aware of who it is that suffers from what at this very moment and who it is that is responsible for doing what about it. However, it is not the purpose and, it is hoped, also not in the power of any training of helping professionals to turn the helping person into someone who doesn’t care at all. You do care, or you would have chosen another profession. In moderation, it might even be helpful that you share with the other person something about what you see and hear and something about your reaction to that. For instance, it would be simple (though not necessarily easy) to say, “I really wish I could help you with this, and right now I do not see how!”
If a helper thinks that it is “difficult” to inquire into what the helpee experiences, wants, and wants to do about it, it is often because there is some part of it that the helper him/herself fears or disagrees with (moralizes about). There is nothing complicated about that either, but it does become complicated when you try to disguise your discomfort, dislike, or disagreement from the one you are helping. Contact is based on the awareness of difference. It makes no one less lonely to talk to his/her own image in the mirror.
Helping is not always giving advice
If you think that the difficulty in addressing an issue comes from its complicated nature, it may be because you are confusing the existential/spiritual dialogue with giving advice. If you want to find advice for the other person, talking with him/her tends to be quite complicated. You do not know the other person’s values and you are not necessarily more clever than him/her. You also do not wield more power than him/her over life, death, love, loss, or guilt. Finally, you will often experience a frustrating resistance in the other person to following your advice, even when the other person has explicitly asked for it! This pattern is called “appeal and rejection,” and it has turned hairs gray on many a helper’s head. However, if you experience this kind of behavior in someone seeking help, you need not despair of your inabilities or powerlessness. And you need not be angry with the other person for putting you in that ego-shattering situation; rather, you may smile at your own obsession with trying to be clever (in the eye of the other) and with gaining power (over the other’s life). That is actually a form of megalomania. Perhaps you could tell the other person something about this insight, thus demonstrating a redeeming capacity for taking yourself seriously and not solemnly. Something like this, perhaps:
“I am aware that I have fallen into the temptation of offering advice, and I know that you can no more make use of other people’s experiences than I can, so I am going to stop it.”
This is in principle simple, although in practice it may be (emotionally) difficult for certain helpers at certain times, such as: when asking the helpee about primary emotions (joy, sorrow, anger, and fear); when asking the helpee, “What do you want (wish and hope for)?”; when asking the helpee, “What are you doing about it?”; when telling the helpee, in relevant amounts, what you feel and want as far as the present contact is concerned, and what you are actually doing in order to help him/her.
Personal and private
It should be noted that the useful information about the helper’s experience is that which applies directly to the present situation. Details of the helper’s own history outside of the present contact are, in contrast, usually disruptive. When this distinction is maintained, the dialogue may become personal without becoming private. The person who is being helped is unlikely to be interested for very long in the helper’s personal life or past. It also does not work for the helper to try to establish some sense of “solidarity” with the helpee by recounting his/her own problems and how he/she dealt with them. It may well be perceived as condescending by the sufferer and almost certainly as an interruption. So, beyond an occasional, brief, illustrative example for the sake of clarifying a point of communication, the helper should not steal the story and the time from the one seeking (and paying for) help.
5THE ESSENTIAL RESOURCES
The essential resources for overcoming a difficulty are in the person having the difficulty or in the field of interaction between the people in dialogue. The helper is the interpreter and facilitator of the helpee’s search for clarification and choice. You are not the one to make the choices or “fix” things for the other person.
What is essential?
Some of the resources to overcome a difficulty are within the helper, but the essential, decisive resources are within the person having the difficulty. The primary objective for the helping encounter is that the help seeker comes to be aware of the issues of his/her life and takes responsibility for them. In other words, what is decisive is that the person makes his/her own decisions about what to do or stop doing. At best, the helper may contribute to this process of awareness and choice with his/her empathy, focused questioning, and life experience. These contributions are, indeed, important resources for the helpee, but only his/her decision is decisive.
Other important features of the supporting process are often overlooked because they are in neither the helper nor the help seeker. They are in, or rather of, the field consisting of both of them and the interaction between them, an interaction in which both persons are at the same time and all of the time both cause and effect of what goes on. This field functions as a whole, all aspects of which touch upon (affect) one another, in which changing one part changes the entire field. In this field-theoretical perspective, both (all) the participants in the encounter are seen as active, in contrast to an understanding of the helping contact where one person—the helper—is seen as doing something to another—the person seeking help. The space between the partners in dialogue is active and not passive or empty. That is to say, the encounter creates new knowledge and new ideas that neither of the participants would have arrived at alone. It is in this way that you experience the valuable dialogue: it is the relationship, as the third entity between the partners, that enriches both (all) of them.
6GOOD HELP IS HELP TOWARDS SELF-HELP
All other help is intrusion. When you take responsibility for someone, you take responsibility from that person. It is better to teach the hungry to fish than to feed him or her a fish.
Help: an ambiguous commodity
It is a common view that help is always a good thing, which would mean the helpee would get as much of it as possible and the helper would give as much of it as possible. In that way, the helper easily gets stuck in a squeeze between perpetual bad conscience on one side and exhaustion on the other, and the helpee