Honest Dialogue

Presence, Common Sense, and Boundaries when You Want to Help Someone

Bent Falk

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781784506896
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Focusing on how someone in need can best be helped, the author identifies the skills and honesty of the person who wants to help as key to how effective this can be. Looking in detail at the nature of boundaries, willingness to speak from a place of authenticity and to be honestly present to the experience of the individual person, and the sensitive and economical use of language, the author shows how people in a state of deep personal crisis can be richly helped. Taking the view that no set response is always right or always wrong, he argues strongly for the importance of going with what is spontaneous and real in the moment, and responding thoughtfully and with integrity to the experience of the person in need.

The book is an inspiration to develop deep awareness about the practice of encounter. Focusing on experiences of crisis and anxiety, the author provides many in-depth case examples, and sample scripts with actual questions and answers included. This short and deceptively simple book will raise awareness of, and broaden the range of, possible interventions for the open-minded reader.

II

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Practical Guidelines

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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 gets stuck in the role of the appealing or injured victim. This is not good for any of the persons involved. In other words, help is not only a good thing, just as medication is not only a good thing. Both have side effects, and too much of either is poisonous. When you take responsibility for another person, you by the same token take responsibility from him/her, and that may provide some symptomatic relief, but in the long run it does not really help. If you support someone else in the habit of allowing others to take responsibility for things that he/she might be able to do, you undermine his/her initiative and life proficiency. You thereby end up increasing the other person’s existential anxiety, which in turn heightens his/her appeal for help, and thus a vicious circle is established.

It may turn out better if you help as little as possible and as much as necessary, which means only as much as it takes for the person in need to regain balance and orientation in his/her own life. This way the help will be a help to help oneself, i.e. an impetus to grow, rather than an invitation to regress, meaning the return to a less mature level of functioning. In an acute situation, “as little as possible” may in fact be quite a lot, but that does not take away from the principle that the helpee should, as soon as possible, take over as much responsibility as possible for his/her own life.

Helper syndrome or “burn-out”

It is important that the helper is aware of his/her own wants (“needs”) for succor and help, otherwise so-called “helper syndrome” might develop. That means that the helper transfers (projects) his/her longings and desires onto the helpee and tries to help him/herself by proxy through the other.

Neither person is helped by this. For the helper, it may lead to a one-sided and rigid encounter in which he/she insists on helping the other in precisely his/her own way and at his/her own pace and construes it as a personal failure (narcissistic injury) if he/she fails. This may in turn lead to a state of burn-out in the helper, which is characterized, among other things, by a sense of rejection, depression, and low self-esteem. Additionally, in the person being helped, it may cause a considerable amount of (hidden) resentment and therefore resistance to the situation. The overbearing attitude of the helper is perceived by the person in need as a denial of his/her autonomy: he/she is not seen, heard, or respected, with his/her own real issues and personality.

It may be difficult for the helper to change a habit of trying to help too much because the pattern is supported by idealized notions of kindness and love of humanity. The helper may get praise and prestige by doing as much good for the other person as possible, rather than doing as little as possible in order for the other person to be able to help him/herself. In reality, however, helping in order for the helper to look good is turning the other person into a means rather than an end. When the sufferer is being used by the rescuer to maintain for him/herself a certain (stereotype) self-image as The Good Helper, it is selfishness in disguise.

The best way for the helper to avoid this pattern is through self-awareness and a non-judgmental (non-moralistic) approach to his/her own wants. You might, for instance, choose to understand your fatigue merely as a need for rest (description), rather than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Introduction
• II. Practical Guidelines
• III. Examples
• References
• Bibliography
• Join our mailing list
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest