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Effective helping: Interviewing and counseling techniques
52 Helping Others: Ways of Listening, Sharing, and Counseling Robert J. Wicks Gardner Press, Inc., New York, 1982 How can such a good book be so bad? The fatal flaw of in its ambiguous location in the mental health literature. The author calls his work a “mental health first-aid book, ” an attempt to educate nonprofessionals in the use of counseling strategies, to make such strategies available for daily use in the “personal” or “friendly” counseling of one’s friends, neighbors, family members, and employees. Counseling, after all, is more art than science. The book is an effort to teach basic counseling skills such as listening, information gathering, exploring feelings, and clarifying issues to nonprofessionals. Leaving aside for the moment its purpose, it is here that the book succeeds. Wicks’s presentation of interviewing and communication techniques, if traditional and familiar, is clear, practical, free of jargon, and nontechnical. Moreover he demythologizes mental health services, communicating a respect for the intelligence and capability of the nonprofessional reader and the right to self-determination of the consumer. This is an introductory level book on basic interviewing and communication skills that would be useful to educators, students, and trainees from a variety of professional disciplines. Why then is it not equally useful for nonprofessionals? Certainly turf-conscious professionals have no comer on helpfulness. My question is not meant to imply that one must possess a particular degree to render help to another human being. In fact, if we were able to quantify helpfulness, we would undoubtedly discover that most counseling is carried out in informal ways in the everyday lifespace of people. We can assume also that the more knowledgeable about and sensitive to psychological issues we are, the more helpful we can be in supporting those whom we meet on the ordinary crossroads of life. In this sense, the enhancement of interpersonal communication skills is a worthy goal and this book can be useful. Teaching nonprofessionals to serve as mental health counselors for their friends and relatives is quite another matter, however, and unfortunately the author does not make adequate distinctions between professional and friendly helping or between relationships that are personal and those that are professional. These shortcomings have serious implications. Wicks does try to make a distinction between counseling and therapy, reserving the latter role for the professional helper, but the distinction is a spurious one. In effect he defines a friendly counseling role that requires mastery of some relatively sophisticated counseling techniques usually acquired only through considerable supervised experience, opportunities usually not available to the nonprofessional.
Helping Others lies in its purpose,
The fact is that friends, relatives, neighbors, and employers and employees are involved with each other in very special ways. While we may wish to be helpful to each other, our own issues and agendas are involved and the purposes for which we come together differ from those at stake in the professional helper-client relationship. For me to “counsel” or “work with” my mother, “pointing out her behavior” and “maintaining an investigative attitude, ” is to violate the history and terms of our relationship, to risk being triangulated, or to risk triangulating others. No matter how skilled I might be, I can never be sufficiently objective when it comes to my mother, the female partner in a couple close to me, my employee, or my nextdoor neighbor. I doubt that they would give me such power, nor would I want it. This book would teach one to intervene in the lives of others, presumably for their benefit, but a way of objectifying the contract between helper and helpee is never openly clarified. Just as Wicks fails to deal with the relationship context and the boundary dilemmas, he also communicates a sense of accountability and responsibility for the mental health of others that is too great a burden for the nonprofessional, who lacks the supervision, consultation, and supportive helping environment of the professional. This helper, in fact, may lack any feedback or self-correcting opportunities. To whom is the friendly counselor to turn when his or her advice seems to fall on deaf ears, when the strategies seem not to be working, or when the helpee becomes increasingly depressed? While most self-help books (which Wicks for the most part denigrates) are clear concerning the issue of responsibility, this book avoids the issue. Joan Laird, A.C.S.W. Eastern Michigan University
Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques Barbara F. Okun Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Monterey, California, 198 1 (second edition) In the second edition of Effective Helping, Barbara Okun has expanded the content on theory, added a chapter on crisis intervention, and increased the number of practice exercises. Her work presents a human relations counseling model that she describes as eclectic, although some theoretical perspectives are more heavily represented than others. Okun drawns primarily on the phenomenological, problem-solving model of Carkhuff and Truax, on behavioral methods, and to some extent on the client-centered work of Carl Rogers. Her presentation is extraordinarily clear and well organized,
PATIENT EDUCATION AND COUNSELING
53 containing an excellent overview of the skills, helping stages, and issues involved in counseling. She views ineffective or faulty communication as the central problem in most interpersonal difficulties and a warm, empathic helping relationship as the primary medium for change, the essential foundation for any helping process. Strategies, in her model, are secondary to the efficacy of the helping relationship itself, a relationship that encourages the client’s exploration, understanding, and full disclosure of his or her feelings, thoughts, and actions. Cognitive, affective, and behavioral strategies are drawn upon. The strengths of this book include Okun’s clear presentation of basic interviewing techniques and communication issues and a concise summary of some of the essential commonalities and differences in selecting helping strategies. She includes a large number of practical case examples and creative learning exercises, which can be completed alone or in groups. In my view, however, Okun’s work has some serious limitations, the most central of which is the enormous emphasis given to the helping relationship at the expense of other cru-
VOLUME 51NUMBER1
cial aspects of change. This work is nonsystemic; the client tends to be viewed as isolated from context and short shrift is given to the life-world forces that impinge on every person. Little attention is given to the client’s environment, to his or her family, or to other social systems that continuously and profoundly affect the feelings, behavior, and thinking and communicating, which the author does address. In fact clients never seem to be interviewed in pairs, families, or groups. The book is also deficient in the area of assessment, as the author moves from relationship to strategy or intervention without clear guidelines on how to assemble and interpret the information gathered. This book is more accurately seen as a book on interviewing than on “helping” in the broader sense of the word. While it should probably be used in conjunction with other readings that would broaden the perspective on helping, it should prove a useful tool in teaching and learning basic interviewing skills. Joan Laird, A.C.S.W. Eastern Michigan University
Helping Others lies in its purpose,
The fact is that friends, relatives, neighbors, and employers and employees are involved with each other in very special ways. While we may wish to be helpful to each other, our own issues and agendas are involved and the purposes for which we come together differ from those at stake in the professional helper-client relationship. For me to “counsel” or “work with” my mother, “pointing out her behavior” and “maintaining an investigative attitude, ” is to violate the history and terms of our relationship, to risk being triangulated, or to risk triangulating others. No matter how skilled I might be, I can never be sufficiently objective when it comes to my mother, the female partner in a couple close to me, my employee, or my nextdoor neighbor. I doubt that they would give me such power, nor would I want it. This book would teach one to intervene in the lives of others, presumably for their benefit, but a way of objectifying the contract between helper and helpee is never openly clarified. Just as Wicks fails to deal with the relationship context and the boundary dilemmas, he also communicates a sense of accountability and responsibility for the mental health of others that is too great a burden for the nonprofessional, who lacks the supervision, consultation, and supportive helping environment of the professional. This helper, in fact, may lack any feedback or self-correcting opportunities. To whom is the friendly counselor to turn when his or her advice seems to fall on deaf ears, when the strategies seem not to be working, or when the helpee becomes increasingly depressed? While most self-help books (which Wicks for the most part denigrates) are clear concerning the issue of responsibility, this book avoids the issue. Joan Laird, A.C.S.W. Eastern Michigan University
Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques Barbara F. Okun Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Monterey, California, 198 1 (second edition) In the second edition of Effective Helping, Barbara Okun has expanded the content on theory, added a chapter on crisis intervention, and increased the number of practice exercises. Her work presents a human relations counseling model that she describes as eclectic, although some theoretical perspectives are more heavily represented than others. Okun drawns primarily on the phenomenological, problem-solving model of Carkhuff and Truax, on behavioral methods, and to some extent on the client-centered work of Carl Rogers. Her presentation is extraordinarily clear and well organized,
PATIENT EDUCATION AND COUNSELING
53 containing an excellent overview of the skills, helping stages, and issues involved in counseling. She views ineffective or faulty communication as the central problem in most interpersonal difficulties and a warm, empathic helping relationship as the primary medium for change, the essential foundation for any helping process. Strategies, in her model, are secondary to the efficacy of the helping relationship itself, a relationship that encourages the client’s exploration, understanding, and full disclosure of his or her feelings, thoughts, and actions. Cognitive, affective, and behavioral strategies are drawn upon. The strengths of this book include Okun’s clear presentation of basic interviewing techniques and communication issues and a concise summary of some of the essential commonalities and differences in selecting helping strategies. She includes a large number of practical case examples and creative learning exercises, which can be completed alone or in groups. In my view, however, Okun’s work has some serious limitations, the most central of which is the enormous emphasis given to the helping relationship at the expense of other cru-
VOLUME 51NUMBER1
cial aspects of change. This work is nonsystemic; the client tends to be viewed as isolated from context and short shrift is given to the life-world forces that impinge on every person. Little attention is given to the client’s environment, to his or her family, or to other social systems that continuously and profoundly affect the feelings, behavior, and thinking and communicating, which the author does address. In fact clients never seem to be interviewed in pairs, families, or groups. The book is also deficient in the area of assessment, as the author moves from relationship to strategy or intervention without clear guidelines on how to assemble and interpret the information gathered. This book is more accurately seen as a book on interviewing than on “helping” in the broader sense of the word. While it should probably be used in conjunction with other readings that would broaden the perspective on helping, it should prove a useful tool in teaching and learning basic interviewing skills. Joan Laird, A.C.S.W. Eastern Michigan University