Clients taught me how to be human
This article appeared as the "Student Focus" column in the Dec. 4, 2002, edition of "Counseling Today," a publication of the American Counseling Association (45/6, 20,24).By Stephen Snow
It was supposed to be a simple practicum assignment: work with men at a local homeless shelter. Instead, it became a wide-open nontraditional counseling assignment that had me providing counseling throughout the city of Charlotte, NC. The incredible experience gave me amazing new insights to myself as a person and a counselor. It also taught me the core value of listening.A little background is in order. I'm a "returning" student, a mid-career shifter, moving from telecommunications to counseling, with an even earlier career of about 25 years as a journalist and editor. You could say I've been around the block, but little of my previous training prepared me for the ride I ended up taking in the Spring of 2002.
A placement in a homeless shelter was just what I needed. Coming from a highly intellectual family, the academic parts of counseling were fairly easy to navigate. Whenever I didn't feel comfortable in the world, I could always retreat to my "head" to make sense of the world and what I needed to do. Far more difficult was the "heart" part of counseling, which is of course, the core of counseling.
The men's shelter would be comfortable since I knew the executive director through other work. I had also volunteered there before, serving meals occasionally to the 140 men who stayed there. I was looking forward to being in an environment I knew, around people I knew.
Then the telephone rang. A week before I was to start my practicum, the shelter's program director, who was to be my onsite supervisor, told me she was changing jobs and moving to A Child's Place. It was an organization that focuses on children and families who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Okay I thought, I'll just move with her. It didn't turn out to be that simple.
Problems started when my supervisor and I recognized that she didn't know the staff or the people who would need counseling in her new position. It would take her a month or more before she could make any referrals. Then there was the additional problem that I would not really have an office or a place where I could do counseling at A Child's Place. In effect, I would be a counselor without a home, counseling people who are homeless or nearly so.
It was starting to get interesting. We began to shake the bushes for clients, but weeks passed with no leads. We tapped other sources including the Salvation Army Women's Shelter, the YWCA's Women in Transition program, the Urban Ministries Soup Kitchen and I even returned to the men's shelter to pick up some referrals there.
I limped into Spring Break with three contact hours out of the 60 needed! Anxiety was rising and supervisors were hinting that we should pull the plug and find something else fast.
Things began to pick up after the break. A collection of clients was coming together, but it meant I was counseling at a half-dozen places instead of just one. Many of the places were not where you would expect to do counseling: library conference rooms, a Pizza Hut restaurant, school nursing offices, people's homes, as well as meeting clients at the YWCA and the men's and women's shelters. It was grueling, confusing and difficult just working out the schedule.
My naïve thinking was that even at this early stage I had a view of myself as being a real helper. I was going to go out and help people get better! My charge of course was to apply the listening skills learned in techniques classes. The first few sessions were uneventful as I struggled with reflections like, "you feel frustrated because you don't have a place to live." Clients would look at me blankly and say, essentially, "yup." I was getting nowhere. Those were looooong hours.
I was finding that Carkhuff's techniques only went so far with people who had little education, limited self-awareness, and were very slow to trust. The big change came before a session with one particularly taciturn client. I spent some time preparing myself beforehand thinking about how what I was doing really was not getting anywhere. I was thinking too hard, trying to solve problems, instead of just being present. I decided just to be myself.
Pay dirt! The process of relaxing, opening myself up, really listening hard to what people were trying to say, encouraging them to share their stories and, most of all, accepting them as they were with no pretense of trying to change them, began to have magical results. I was connecting because I had allowed myself to connect. They could let me begin to see them when I let them see me.
I tend to be a naturally creative person, so when people began presenting real issues, my response was to let some of my creative self out. One client had great difficulty talking in a group of men if they were doing something like watching TV in the evening. We worked together developing a short list of scripted sentences that could be used in a variety of group settings. He memorized the list and made real strides in speaking out. He was not comfortable, but he was improving and were both amazed and pleased.
A pair of clients was another unique success. I counseled two sisters in their home because they could not afford the bus fare to make regular trips to a public meeting place. They were both morbidly obese and suffering from a life of extreme poverty for more than two decades. We developed an abbreviated cognitive therapy workbook for them, and part of each session was spent looking at cognitive distortions they identified with from Beck's list (over generalizing, all-or-nothing thinking, etc.).
Lights started to go on in their heads. They began restructuring and changing the way they interacted with others, beginning to take walks and make plans for school and work. They were excited about getting off welfare and invigorated by their new awareness. I could only shake my head in amazement.
The clients had learned a lot, but I was the greatest beneficiary. Opening myself to their experiences of the world touched me and made it clear who they were as people. Rather than see their down-and-out lifestyle, I began to marvel at their survival skills, their resilience, and their desire to live more fully. The more I allowed myself to be touched, the more accepting and respectful I became. Here I was, a total stranger, and they were trusting me with intimate personal details of their difficult lives.
Now I began to feel a sense of honor being with the clients. Their willingness to trust and be open was mind-boggling. These were people discarded by society with little education, few social or work skills, and often with mental or physical illnesses. They have been ignored, rejected, forgotten with no reason to trust just one more middle-aged white guy.
It was to my surprise that as I accepted them, genuinely listened and cared, they did trust. I learned that being truly present to another person is far more important than any technique or theory. Hearing the unheard was liberating for them and for me. It was a humbling, spiritual experience. Instead of giving them answers, I began to give them myself. They were astounded that anyone would actually care, and I was given this great gift of acceptance from them. In that space of mutual acceptance and respect, great things happened to us both.
The clients were dumbfounded when at the end of practicum I thanked them for helping me. "What did I do?" one asked. "I didn't do anything."
"By allowing me into your life, you helped me be a better me," I answered. "You have given me a great gift."
I think sometimes, especially for new counselors, we are tempted to wear the "therapist's mask." We hide ourselves behind admittedly clever new techniques and swing our knowledge like a kind of sword, believing we can slice our way to success with clients.
In the final analysis, I learned that was not true at all. The truth was far simpler, and much more risky: I took the risk of being human.
Stephen Snow is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.