 |
A mutual exchange. Mutuality and self-help as new directions for the helping professions. Listening is a way toward community
|
|
|
|
A mutual exchange
Listening is mutual. It is not just one person doing something for the other, which gets to be a drain on the one doing-for and keeps the one being done-for in a child-like, taking role. Each of us needs to feel we are valuable to those that are of value to us. This is especially important when we are not feeling valuable ourselves. In co-listening I learn that I can be confused, upset, afraid, anxious, and also attentive, understanding, caring, and thoughtful. My troubling feelings do not define me as an immature neurotic, just as my helpful feelings do not make me a superhuman expert. Both persons in the listening exchange experience themselves and the other as giver and taker, as needful and helpful. This process enables the participants to transcend roles, rather than remain locked in them. By reversing roles, the personhood of each is more readily apparent.
The co-listening structure discourages each person from identifying with a particular role, whether it be that of helper or of being helped.
Mutuality and self-help as new directions for the helping professions
The old way of the therapist helping the patient, with never a chance for the patient to help the therapist, is bad for the therapist as well as the patient. It serves the professional needs of the therapist for status and income, but it does not meet his need to be the patient. Once we are locked into a role we more and more need to maintain our counterparts in their roles. For a while the old way was justified because the knowledge of helping methods needed to be developed. But now there is that knowledge. We now know how to set up self-help relationships and groups. We know how to teach self-help skills. Professionals are now needed as resource and teaching persons and not as expensive helpers or guardians of our psyches.
The new role of the professional as a teacher of helping skills is a natural consequence of both the huge social need for such skills and the overwhelming failure of our educational systems to teach them. This social and educational failure extends to all age levels - children, adolescents, young adults, adults, and the aged - as well as to all social levels and occupations. This failure is so profound and far-reaching that professions that do not work actively to promote the learning of self-help skills bring into serious question their commitment to the public welfare and their ethical stance. The commitment to teaching helping skills to persons and groups needs to be explicitly stated in the ethical and practical objectives of the helping professions.
Professional therapists can find out about mutual selfhelp skills firsthand, use them in their own lives, and learn how they can be taught to others. They can encourage their clients to try self-help programs, evaluate their benefits and drawbacks, and find ways to support them and make them more effective for more people.
|
|
|
Listening is a way toward community
While persons can learn and teach self-help skills in oneto-one relationships, it is more often done in groups. The self-help group is a natural outgrowth of the realization that these skills may be widely learned and applied. The group serves as a teaching medium, as a setting for co-counseling and as a resource for co-counselors to get to know each other. An essential element in self-help efforts is the wider availability of helpers. In a group, a person can be helped by and help a number of different people. There is not just one therapist, not just one person whose schedule and cost usually do not permit the necessary amount and kind of therapy work that a client needs, and whose personality in any case limits the scope of help she or he can offer. The professional image of only one therapist for a patient, and a prohibition against any other individual therapy at the same time, may serve the needs of the therapist, but there is now ample experience in co-counseling that when many helpers are available the person in need makes good use of as many of them as he can manage, sometimes, for example, 10 per week for several weeks. The amount of support and growth experienced during such " intensives" are very rare and difficult to come by in professional therapy arrangements, which reflect the fragmentation in the lives of both the patient and the " doctor" and do not really meet the needs of either one.
After being in self-help groups for a while most people gradually overcome their hesitancy and disbelief and learn that they can ask for and get effective help from a wide range of different persons, and that they can do the same thing for others. When people are able to do this, when they are able to ask for and give help to a number of others, and when there are others available who can do the same for them, then they have taken a large and crucial step out of their loneliness, frustration, and alienation. Now " society" is no longer experienced in the usual impersonal and uncaring way. Now there is hope that one's life can be righted.
The self-help community is the natural context for self-help groups. As groups develop effective skills and methods, the word spreads and more groups form. The groups share and interchange members, ideas, and services such as training programs, hot lines, teams for people in heavy places, and special skills. Effective methods for running meetings and getting things done are developed. When the level of a self-help community has been reached, with a range of supportive resources for the members, workable organizational norms and practices, and training programs for new members, then the concept of a therapeutic community has become a reality.
|
|
|
