Challenges of staying focused on helpees’ needs

The challenges of staying focused on helpees’ needs and issues is the desire of helper himself/herself. If helper is not able to put aside his/her own emotions, then helper may not able to stay focus on helpees’ needs but to run the session using helper’s own agenda. I talked to a helper last week to share my worry about my mum’s critical illness. At the beginning of the session, helper asked me some questions to understand what’s happened and what’s my feelings. After I shared a bit background information, helper started to move to another stage, trying to ask what’s my plan in the next few months. During that part, I can feel that helper dominated the session and was trying to guide me to the direction that she prefer. I feel stressed and found that it’s difficult to share further. In addition, I don’t have enough time and space to share my emotions underneath. At the end of the session, the helper admitted that her action was driven by the emotions of what’s happened to her mother, thus she can’t resist to direct me. I think the above experience is a good reminder to me. It’s common that helper always have own personal experience and those issues may heavily disturb their emotion. It’s impossible for helper to give up those feeling, but what helper can do is to maintain the professional helping role during the session and deal with those emotions triggered after the session. Moreover, I think it’s critical to work in partnership with helpee. Given that helpee have their own autonomy, helper should bare in mind not to manipulate neither helpee nor the helping session. 

In the next paragraph, I’d like to further discuss the above experience and talk about how I’d maintain boundaries if I am the helper during the helping session. When helpee talk about illness of his mother, it’s understandable that the emotion of helper maybe triggered and I may think of my own parents. The first thing I’d do is to focus on understanding the emotions of the helpee and trying to understand what’s helpee’s thoughts about the incident. Since helpee is the focus on the helping session, I’ve to put aside my emotions and deal with them afterwards but not to let it affect the helping session. On the other hand, it’s a temptation for helper to provide advice to helpee to respond to helpee’s situation, such as how to cure the disease, etc. However, this attempt is violating helpee’s autonomy and prohibit helper to provide unbiased support. To maintain a proper boundary, I will use various listening skills and keep unconditional positive regard, so that helpee can feel the effort I put to understand his situation. Moreover, I have to keep working under the BACP framework and consider helpee’s needs as my primary concern, so that I can fully respect helpee as a independent individual and thus work in a professional capacity. Helpee may wish to further elaborate his feeling or he may wish to talk about his worry about what to do in the future. What I should do is to assist helpee to focus on the topic that he wished to deal with during the helping session and guide him to express what’s in his mind. I believe this is the best way to respect his own autonomy and keep proper boundaries between helper and helpee.