Why do people enter the helping professions? I don't know would be the humble and most accurate answer. However, I wanted to raise the issue of what do we the helper get out of the relationship of helping those labelled client or the people we presume to be less fortunate than us due to a cultural construct that tell us so. It is also helpful to know in our minds that there are people less foretunate than us, which is one thing that is dervied from the helping realtionship. That we are better, and therefore we can show you how to get better by being just like us. A bit egotistic or maybe more so, super-egotistic in the name of image making.
I believe that a significant number of helping relationships are based in a clinical manner on counter-transferenc. In other words, we often become dependent on those we serve and support to get our own needs met. There are many people in the helping profession who have significant unresolved personal issues like the general pubilc does. However, we need to resolve some of these issues or at least think and be aware of them so as we help others who may have simialr issues to resolve, we don't muddy the water with our own stuff.
Primarily the point I wanted to make is that it is nice to be needed and when we feel we are not needed in other apsects of our lives, we can turn to those we help so we can get our needs met by them allegedly needing us. I think their need of us is often over exaggerated and that we build this need by creating more dependency on us as helpers by reenforcing there helplessness.
So we need to always be questioning ourselves and our motivation for what we are doing in the name of service to help others. Is it helping us more and if so how can we reel that back and focus on the individual and what there real needs are. If we do this then we should help those we work for to need us less and less. Isn't that the best measure of our success?
Serve on.
JBG
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