Running Head: PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING

CSP 555: Philosophy of Helping Katie Mey Western Illinois University

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When I think about a philosophy of something, I tend to think of a cogent theory. I think of something that makes sense in itself, meaning it contains as essential no contrary or contradictory elements. A philosophy of something is like the smooth line of the infinity symbol. It continues endlessly within itself elegantly and seamlessly. It flows from end to end without any sharp edges or disjunctions. As a result, when put into practice a philosophy provides a smooth, elegant guide to how one should be- in feeling, thought, word, and deed in the world related to a topic. This is not how my thoughts on helping, particularly when formulated and expressed in relation to the questions posed for this assignment, unfold. This is perhaps even the farthest possible shape from the one in which my thoughts on helping unfold. It seems like I cannot make it through a single sentence on this topic without coming across some contradiction in my thinking or disjunction between a combination of my thinking, feeling, and experience. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could synthesize and express my thoughts on helping as at least a coherent whole and respond adequately to the prompts included to guide our thinking. I came up with very little for my efforts. It occurred to me that this in and of itself is something that I need to consider about helping. Do I think that it is amenable to this idea of a philosophy? Is it a cogent thing? Even on this topic I came up with mixed results. It is, and it is not. Helping is one basic set of principles that make sense, but it is also a myriad of other things that could contradict. It is the smooth line of the infinity symbol and the sharp dividing edge defined by that line (and maybe everything is). The problem that I ran into is that I do not really know how to describe the edges and the line at the same time, even if they are different parts of the same thing. If I am going to include all of the things that I think about helping I cannot chose to describe just one of these parts in order to make it more coherent, though. In the same way that I could not always pick a side in our Sarah games that aligned

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING really coherently with all the other sides I picked, I am not able to do so fully in describing helping. So, rather than try to make it work out as one cohesive philosophy, I have chosen to

write my philosophy paper as a series of responses to the prompts provided. I am not sure if this disqualifies my thoughts from actually being the kind of philosophy of helping you are looking for, but I am going to go with it, as it was the best way I could make sense of things to move forward. What Does It Mean To Be A Helper? To me, right now, being a helper means participating in your interactions with others in a way that helps both you and them figure out the game they are playing and then doing your best to be on their team. Trying to be on someones team requires that you put the effort in to figure out how to be on their team. You cannot know how to be on someones team in a game unless you know how to help them achieve the end of the game. In order to know how to achieve the end of the game, you have got to know what kind of field they are on, what rules they are playing by, and what they are bringing to the table in terms of strengths and weaknesses at the least, otherwise you cannot effectively work with them towards the goal. The thing about all of this is you cannot know what game someone is playing until you shut up and listen long enough for them to tell you [oh, hey Brew and Kottler (2007) fancy seeing you and your attending and helping skills in this analogy]. And even if you do listen to a detailed description of the dimensions and characteristics of the field, the entire rule book read aloud and the game play and strategy described, its really hard to understand unless you have some kind of experience of what the game would be like, [hi there, Zull (2002) I see you brought the learning cycle along to this increasingly corny yet useful description] so you have to- eventually spend some time on the field with them. This is a necessary part of the team building process, as in order to really be on

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING someones team, you have to be able to consider things related to current and previous game

experience and perspectives on performance [of course, last but not least, we find a way to invite Baxter Magolda (2004) and the learning partnerships model to join us]. What Do You Believe Helping Means In Student Affairs? In student affairs, helping means pretty much the same thing as it does everywhere else. The principle characteristics of helping do not change just because of a job title. There are differences in how you approach helping and when you employ which helping skills depending on who you are hoping to help. In student affairs one may be trying to be in helping relationships, which share the same underlying structure, with a multitude of different individuals. The desired relationship and broad goal of that relationship, I think, is the same for all of them: to participate in your interactions with them in ways that help both of you figure out which game they are playing and how to be on their team. In order to partake effectively in this relationship, then, you start out with the fundamentals of figuring out the game with them. This involves relying on different individual helping skills at different times and in different contexts, assuredly. That is why we spend time studying the trends in shared characteristics of various student populations and the current thought on making sense of those trends. To help in student affairs, we have to be prepared not just with an index of these facts and figures, but with a real understanding of the basic principles of difference and some practice as to how we can go about understanding others who are necessarily different from ourselves. We also have to be equipped with some understanding of which differences may be significant, for whom, when, and how, which is why we need to study not just multiple theories but also multiple stories. We have gotten many opportunities to begin learning these things in Theory II, History, Student Characteristics, many other classes, and now Counseling via authors like Zinn who compile

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING broad counter narratives and many others who are simply brave enough to figure out how to share their unique narratives. You have to be prepared as well as possible to understand, truly, that no one else is playing the same game as you. Though there may be similarities, in order to learn their game you are going to have to not only notice but figure out a way to understand the difference. If not, you are going to be trying to be on their football team when they are playing

rugby. It is not helpful to try to be the wider receiver when they are playing scrum half- forward laterals are a penalty in rugby. I do think that all helpers need to have similar knowledge that they can relate to individuals they work with, regardless of who they are or what their title is. What Did Your Background Directly Or Indirectly Teach You About Helping Others? My background taught me, in many ways, that helping is always correcting, doing for, taking care of. Helping is always preforming a perfect intervention of some sort based on your adept expert analysis of the person or thing that you are fixing with your help. I learned this in most of my family experiences with helping, which are the ones that dominate my memory. I also recall experiencing helping this way in many instances at school. I do not know if it was a Catholic School thing, but all grown-ups seemed to thing that this was the way to help and that, furthermore, if was their-and my- God given duty to carry out this form of helping with all others. I also learned a definition of helping that was similar to this in my first radical social justice course in college where it was put on display as the wrong thing to do. The thing is, though, as far as I could tell, those who were in and those who were leading the course still seemed to be doing just that. I do think, though, that I probably had and continue to have other experiences of helping that teach me different things. I just think that since they did not fit the definition I already had for helping, I did not notice them and include them in this category. I

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING think that I am starting to see helping in other ways now, and that perhaps I can learn things about helping from my experiences besides that I do not like that particular view of helping.

How Have Three Personal Values That Currently Shape Your Life Influenced Your Views On Professional Helping In Student Affairs? Honesty, clarity, and respect are the three values that I am trying to use to shape my life. The main way, so far, that these values influence my views on helping is that they provide kind of a checks and balances system to use to evaluate how I am applying the helping skills I am learning. I feel pretty strongly about these three values, so I am trying to learn to use helping skills in ways that align with them. This means that when I am unsure about whether I should confront someone with what I really believe is a snag in the way they are thinking or behaving, or if it is better to hold back to maintain rapport and unconditional positive regard, I have another set of concepts that I feel more adept at wielding to apply as a kind of cross reference. I may not be sure which course of action is most in line with my kind of shaky philosophy of helping or which one will be the most helpful to the other person, but I feel like I can be pretty sure which course is the most honest and clear while maintaining respect. Though it might seem like something like honesty might come into conflict with tools of the helping trade such as portraying yourself as confident in your ability to help or maintaining unconditional positive regard, I do not find that this is the case when I really spend some time thinking about the concepts or instances of their interaction. Rather, I think I just need to get more practice in doing these kinds of cross references so that they become more automatic and useful in the moment. What Aspects Of What You Learned In This Course Will You Draw From In Your Work? A new understanding of what listening is and some skills to work on in order to get better at listening is definitely something I will draw from. I think that I thought I was listening when I

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING was problem solving for a long time. Then, sometime in the last few years, I figured out that these were not one in the same, which is an improvement. The big problem that remained after this epiphany, though I did not know it for a while, is that I fell into the trap of thinking that as long as I could kind of keep myself from jumping in to problem solving right away, I was listening. Neither of these are the case, as I think I realized after reviewing my final helping session feedback. Listening is not trying to figure out how you would solve someone elses concerns or live their life. It is also not trying to figure out how they should go about solving

their problems given what you know about them. That I got a little while back, I think. But I did not realize until we went through almost this entire course that I was still defining listening as a lack of problem solving rather than a thing in and of itself that required effort besides selfcensorship. I talked about how hard it was to listen in class and papers, but I am not sure I was ever even close to trying to listen. I think that most of the time I was just trying to make sense on my own of what others were saying and avoid taking that to some kind of logical conclusion. Listening is not just being present while someone else talks and not problem solving. I am not sure of all of what listening is, but now at least I know that and I can practice listening skills with this in mind. I am hoping that this will lead me to a better understanding of what I am actually trying to do in my work as a helper. What are significant helping experiences you have had and how have those experiences shaped your view of helping? My prior experience of helping is definitely dominated by memories of my father. One that stands out amongst the rest is our interaction around a homework assignment to build a bridge out of a certain amount of balsawood that demonstrates basics concepts of physics in my freshman year of high school. I was really excited to undertake the assignment, as it was

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING designed as a competition- the person whos bridge held the most weight would be the only one to receive a 100% grade. I drew up some plans, got myself some balsa wood, and set about figuring out what the best way to construct my magnificent creation would be. Since I wanted the cuts to be as clean and the angles to be as similar as possible, I decided to ask my dad if I

could use some of his power tools. When I did so, he agreed on the condition that I take a lesson in using some of them from him. This seemingly reasonable and responsible condition on my request for help in the form of access to resources quickly got ugly. Before my safety lesson even got started, my dad saw my designs and, without even consulting the assignment or me, he ripped them apart verbally and began pretty much sketching out what I should do. When I told him that this was not really the point and that I had to be able to explain why I made the design choices I did using my knowledge of the principles of physics, he got annoyed. He took this as an initial rebuff of the help he was offering and said as much. I had to apologize profusely to get him to agree to just drop that topic and go back to the original plan of a safety lesson. He did, but only for a little while. As soon as it was time for me to make a couple of cuts and demonstrate that I could avoid losing fingers, he went back to criticizing everything I was doing. He tried to dictate not just parts of the design, but how I was going to go about executing them. When I asked him to hold off on that and stick to what I had asked for help with, which was the tools, he blew up about how this was a perfect example of my unacceptable behavior pattern of asking for help and then not doing what I was told. Within ten minutes of marking off my first measurements he revoked permission to use any of his tools, verbally ripped apart not just my bridge design but my intelligence, work ethic, and overall ability to be successful, and finished things off with a flourish- his dramatic exit statement that he would talk to me again when I

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING would start acting like he raised me to and stop questioning him. This may sound flamboyant, but it is a pretty good example of my dominant experience of helping.

From this and other similar interactions I learned that help was not something I wanted to ask for, ever. I viewed helping as a quasi-benevolent hostile takeover. Someone offering help was a serious threat to my autonomy. Asking for help was basically inviting a hostile coup in which I would not only be deposed as leader of my own life, but kept shackled in the square for derision and ridicule long after. These experiences taught me that if I was going to be involved in helping, I wanted to be the one giving help, because it had to be more pleasant than the one receiving it. They taught me that if I was giving help, even if it was unpleasant, at least I got to wield power, have knowledge, set the rules, and maintain control of the helm of myself. I know that these experiences do not correlate to the current ideal philosophy about helping, however, I think they significantly shaped and continue to shape my view such that they distort my views on helping in practice. I am very aware that there is a significant gap between what I currently think helping is, in the ideal, and my ability to apply this philosophy in practice. Prior to this course I thought that this gap was more significant when it came to accepting true help for me, or that this difference only affected my view of helping from one side of helping relationships. It hit me while I was working on my reflective journaling assignment, though, that there is only one gap. The idea that there are two dichotomous sides to the gap is false, as in helping relationships you are always, at least in part, on both of these sides. As a whole person, you are never purely helper or helped, in the same way that you are never purely oppressor or oppressed. This has shaped my current views in that it changed my metaphor of help from one in which my role as helper is to participate in interactions with others in ways that teach them how to play the game to one that has to acknowledge that we are both learning something about a game and how to

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play it. If I am truly engaged in figuring out how to play a game with someone else, I am going to have to depend on the person I am helping to share what they know an figure out about the lay of the field and the rules. If I feel like someone else is really trying to do the same for me, I am going to have to let them do so, including helping them too by sharing my knowledge of the game with them. What Did You Learn from Your Taped Sessions and Personal Reflections That Shapes Your Approach to Helping? From the series of helping sessions, I learned that I cannot perform listening or engage in helping without being invested in the person and the relationship, not the role of helper. After reflecting on all of my own comments and the feedback I received I realized that even when I was analyzing those interactions I was totally focused on whether or not I was, or how I was, portraying the various characteristics of the role of helper. I do not know if I am better at helping off camera than I was in those sessions, but I know that I was not very good at it during them and I think it has a lot to do with my preoccupation with how I was doing and all the things that were or were not getting in the way of me doing it right. This pretty clearly ties a lot to my need to master things to feel intelligent and worthy, which is getting in the way of helping. When I make helping about preforming the role masterfully I am making it about me. When I make a helping relationship all about me, that relationship can only include me, which means that this kind of relationship will only be helpful in figuring out what game I am playing and how to be on my own team. This is something that I need to spend more time on, for sure, but at appropriate times. If I allow it to take over my time with others, it will continue to prevent me from participating in an interaction with them at all, in some ways, because really I will just be interacting with myself through them. If I cannot interact with them at, I have very little hope of

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working with them to figure out what game they are playing and thus getting on their team as a helper, not the idiot waiting for a pass twenty yards past the scrum. What Do You Consider To Be Your Strengths As A Helper At This Point In Time and Why? I actually think that my analytical ability can be of use as a helper and since I am already so invested in it and ok with using it, it could be my best strength. I think that adept analysis is something that I saw employed in the techniques and example vignette things in Brew and Kottler (2007), as well as the videos from class, quite often. I could see that their methods of helping were connected to a way of analyzing a broad set of data that the helper was taking in. I could also see, though, that this system of analysis was different in significant ways from mine and being applied, at least in part, to a different set of data than I have previously gathered. Though I do not yet see how exactly to get to a way of seeing this data for myself all the time or be able to adopt the perspective on making meaning of it that they were using, I can see it. This course and others have helped me see that the data is there and given me the tools to use the data, so now I guess what I have to do is kind of work backwards from the tools and data to gain my own understanding of the perspective. I think that the major difference between my current analytical skills is not so much which data set I am looking at, it is how I would go about using that data set. I can also see that the whole ethic of helping that is being presented so far involves a different way of seeing the data than I currently have. I get that there have been a lot of suggestions along the way about what this new how, so to speak, might be not just in this class but in others. I get that I am supposed to do things for different reasons and am realizing that there are a whole bunch of things about the way I currently behave that are holding me back. What I do not get yet, though, is how to make that happen in a way that I think I can do.

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For instance, I know that the Kegan and Lahey (2001) chart we have been completing for internship class has shed some light on me needing to work on challenging some foundational assumptions I am making that seriously affect my self-esteem. I also get that the tools they provide as well as many concepts and tools I have access to can be combined somehow to effectively produce the desired change. I see that this process is very similar to the ideas that we learned from Kegan (1995) about how to provide support for someone as they learn and develop. This is a new project- the idea of helping myself to make meaning of all of these things- and I have been given some tools that are useful in approaching this challenge. I also see that I am not being given a set of instructions on how to use these tools. Instead, I am being asked to apply what I know about learning from Baxter Magolda (2004) and Zull (2002) to all the tools I have access to in order to learn how I can use them for myself. I just do not see how I can believe I will be able to use them the right way in order to actually use them to change what I believe about myself, it that makes sense. What Do You Consider To Be Your Weaknesses As A Helper At This Point In Time and Why? Patience. The whole idea of not being able to immediately pick up whatever gear goes with the game of the day really frustrates me. I feel like if I am good at something it should come easily and quickly and I should be able to demonstrate my mastery to all. That is not exactly how helping works, which makes me very frustrated. In order to be good at helping I have to do the opposite of what currently makes me feel like I am good at something. Given my current guiding thoughts about these things, attempting to be good at helping creates a paradox worse than the Kardashians fame. Thus far, trying to go head on with my beliefs about what it means to be good at something has not been very successful very quickly, which kind of just puts

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING me back in the paradox. On top of this, my self-esteem is pretty highly correlated with my intelligence, which is pretty highly correlated to my being good at everything. (Smart people figure out how to be good at everything by cleverly outwitting the reality that everyone has to

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learn things as they go, right?) As a result of all of this, I run out of patience with trying to learn things that I am not immediately good at quite quickly, including the process of learning helping in general as well as the work of trying to actually help someone. For instance, take my attempts at trying to learn to help myself through learn to write more clearly about my feelings. Over the summer I began earnestly to make serious attempts to continue writing about my feelings through a variety of means, the primary three being; spend more time explicitly being aware of my feelings as a foundation, attempt to share my feelings with others more often to get feedback on clarity of thought, and attempt to journal about my feelings to practice writing about them. I made a loose plan for when and how I might do this through ought the summer and felt somewhat confident that given an increased amount of time to spend relaxing and reflecting I could achieve my goal of making some progress in this area. After three weeks of attempting to make and record effort in this area I had not yet mastered the skill of writing beautiful prose about my innermost workings or putting pen to paper in a way I felt had advanced beyond my start point. I became nearly debilitatingly despondent and spent a weekend in almost total isolation doing mind numbing things like watching alien specials on the History Channel in order to medicate my shame and disappointment at proving myself incapable and unintelligent. Though I convinced myself, over that weekend, to try my project again the next week, this resolve only lasted two more weeks. When, after a mere five weeks, my effort had not produced miraculous results I went for a five hour run just to prove I could do something

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well if I put my mind to it and, in the meanwhile, decided that if I was as intelligent and capable as I wanted to believe then this whole feelings thing must really be a stupid endeavor. I am aware that there are a great many things going on in and behind that short narrative, including many huge assumptions about self-worth and the meaning and value of things like intelligence, mastery, progress, and patience, as well as many negative thought cycles that lead nowhere fast. What I have come to see throughout the course of this semester as potentially the key to addressing all of these, though, is patience. This idea was sparked by a conversation we had in Theory II class following a day of intense personal sharing in Counseling that continued related to Theory the next morning. At the end of the class, Dr. Adams summarized some of the repeated themes from the cohort by saying something to the following effect: Its all about staying in the room folks. The work of hearing someones truth, especially when it flies in the face of yours, is hard and it is unpleasant. It is not comfortable to be in that room when they speak. The question is, will you do what it takes- can you stay in the room? Simple and hard as that. (Personal Communication, October 2013) When I thought about what it is that keeps me from staying in the room with others I could pinpoint a number of different possible reasons that had to do with the whats of context. When I thought about it in relation to myself, it seemed unavoidably clear that it is due to a lack of patience, and though this is still only a what, I think that it provides a clear view to a how that is holding me back. I cannot make meaning of myself in a way that allows me to maintain a positive concept of myself given how slowly I am making sense of the world. I have not internalized the idea from Zull (2002) that fast learning does not necessarily mean good learning or superior intelligence. If I am being honest, I do not believe this let alone really understand it and let it shape my epistemology, otherwise I would not be stuck where I am with patience and learning and helping. I cannot tolerate being in a room with

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING myself. There are many different reasons I might trace this to, including the self-esteem connections I drew above, my big assumptions from our internship charts, or in relation to the

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idea from The Invitation (Oriah Mountain Dreamer, 1999) about simply not liking the company I keep. How Will You Go About Continuing Developing As A Helper Now That This Course Is Concluded? I am going to try to push myself to figure out what I am looking for from a helper in order to keep developing as a helper myself. I know that this is my leading edge, so to speak. I have yet to successfully push this boundary for myself and I know that it is what is holding me back in this regard. As I noted above, I am realizing that you are never simply being either the helper or the helped. The very nature of the helping relationship dictates that the parties involved must rely on each other to partake in it. So, I am trying to push myself back to a point where I am flirting with what I used to, and obviously still kind of do, see as the lesser role to the one being helped. I have started to do this by just asking for help in escalating circumstances. Thus far I have made the most head way in asking for help in private settings and within what I consider relatively close and safe personal relationships. I think the next step is to push one or both of those parameters and see how I deal with it. I see that this is similar to the strategies for change that Kegan and Lahey (2001) discuss for disputing our big assumptions, so I think I am going to start by making some new charts for next semester. I know that this is really keeping individual autonomy largely intact, though, by keeping me in what I see as the meta-role of the self-helper. So, though I know that I am going to hate it, I have already put in place a system of accountability that will help me push myself kicking and screaming back to some stranger to ask for help. I know it does not make a lot of sense, but I have a strong, irrational, long standing

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disdain for and dislike of counseling and anyone who assumes the role of my counselor. This has to be having ramifications on how I act as a counselor. I can see, for instance, that I often err on the side of assuming that others will see my attempts to build helping relationships as intrusive and condescending, because that is how I perceive it when others direct these attempts at me. I will not be able to change this view until I have new experiences that might build new ways of making sense of this aspect of helping, so the bigger plan is to bite the bullet on that one, even if it means asking others to help me do so. (Ug, I already feel gross and sappy.)

PHILOSOPHY OF HELPING References Brew, L., & Kottler, J. A. (2007). Applied helping skills: Transforming lives. Sage. Kegan, R. (1995). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Harvard University Press. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2001). How the way we talk can change the way we work: Seven languages for transformation. John Wiley & Sons.

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Magolda, M. B. B. (2004). Making their own way: Narratives for transforming higher education to promote self-development. Stylus Publishing, LLC. Zull, J. E. (2002). The art of changing the brain: Enriching teaching by exploring the biology of learning. Stylus Publishing, LLC.