Is counselling about serving people or helping to fix people?

This article explores the question of whether counselling is about serving people or about helping to fix people. How do we help others, and how do we serve them? This writer believes there is an important difference between helping and serving in terms of the equality of the relationship between the people involved. In this case, it is in the relationship between counsellors and clients.

First, it's worth mentioning that a sense of mutuality can be present in the exchange between a counsellor and client. Feeling satisfied as a helper is different from feeling gratitude as a server. There are differences in the roles of serving and fixing. The issue of primary concern seems to be whether counsellors are viewing another person as broken or whole.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Are we creating distance, judgment, and disconnection because we believe we are broken and needing fixing?

• Are we equals who are collaborating in connection because we are whole and acceptable in our present state?

• Are we able to allow space for there to be mystery, wonder, awe, curiosity, and a sense of something greater than ourselves in life?

• Or is the person who is helping or fixing coming from a place of believing they are in the higher position?

There are implications for this that impact our values and ethics. In the relationship between a counsellor and client, an awareness of being engaged and motivated from the position of helping, fixing, or serving makes a difference. It's important for counsellors to ask if they are approaching the relationship and role from a part of the self that is attached to strengthening ego or nourishing the soul?

This writer recalls many past experiences where he felt drained and depleted by trying to fix and help others. Many professionals in helping or service roles are familiar with reaching a point of feeling burned out by struggling to try to help or fix others. There is something different with the internal experience of service that may be renewing and sustaining.

If life energy is interconnected and sacred, it flows within and all around us, exchanging between people in these roles. If we are part of the same flow of energy, then we are whole together, we experience joy together, we suffer together, and we heal together. This writer believes many people have the capacity to tap into their own healing power and source. This is an important value that relates to understanding the ethics of being in service to others.

Ideally, we serve others in a way that supports them on their own pathway to discovering and reconnecting to their own healing power and source. This is different than believing that we are a healer who is there as a powerful and wise expert to cure people of their ailments. Even as wounded healers, we may recognize, that despite our past wounds and the continued work-in-progress with our own healing, we can offer something of benefit in service to others on their healing journey. It's possible wounded healers are gifted with an unusual depth of insight into the nature of human suffering and the potential for healing. This is because of the years of lived experience of being deeply wounded and learning to listen to the calling in one's own soul to discover healing approaches that work.

When our values and ethics in counselling intersect with the common codes and themes of promoting welfare and protecting people, we can be more effective in practicing within our scope of confidence; doing no harm; treating each other with respect; encouraging and supporting independent decision making and responsibility; and acting with honesty and integrity.

Author Rachel Naomi Remen speaks about values and ethics in relationship to others in her article In the Service of Life. Whether we are acting as the helper and fixer, or as the helped and fixed, we may not be recognizing the wholeness in each other. We may be unintentionally and accidentally wounding each other. This leads into the next question about what these roles speak to and say to those of us who are in helping or serving roles.

Understanding the difference in these roles may deepen our knowledge about how we influence people in a therapeutic relationship. It may tell us to be more conscious and aware of our role and actions with respect to aiding in the growth of another person. We must consider our own needs and vulnerabilities, and our motivations for serving a person’s movement toward change and growth. We must pay attention to our own behavioral patterns and support others with boundaries and safety as they journey on their healing path.

Ethical or boundary violations happen all the time in our relationships with people, including in counselling and therapeutic relationships. Many of us experience boundary issues in our relationships with family, friends, colleagues, supervisors, and in professional relationships as a client. Even if we identify and express clear boundaries and discuss these with others, there is the potential and likelihood for violations to occur. We are living in a post-modern, multicultural world where there exists a plurality of self-described identities. It has become incredibly complex to navigate the variety of individual and personal, familial, community, cultural, societal, environmental, and systems perspectives and needs.

There is hope by trusting in and believing that most counsellors and professional helpers are caring and virtuous and concerned with doing what is right -- in the best interest of clients. However, there are still counsellors and therapists who get lost and mixed up in the language of helping and fixing versus serving. This writer acknowledges he has gotten mixed up with this during more than ten years of service in health care and social assistance roles. It's also possible to experience the judgment of counsellors and therapists who may have seen us as clients who are broken and fragmented, needing their help and fixing.

Even though we know people are autonomous and we wish to honor their individuality and right to choose, we may still fail to encourage growth because we slip into unconscious patterns or old roles from our family system. One of the old roles this writer learned as a child from his family system was the role of rescuer and pleaser with his parents. He learned to disregard his own feelings and needs and believed it was his responsibility to nurture his parents’ feelings and needs at the expense of his own. As an adult, there is a wounded and exiled child part of self that becomes activated at times and still tries to rescue others, believing they need to be fixed or helped. A continual awareness of this part of self is needed to notice the familiar thoughts, beliefs, emotions, behaviors, and sensations in the body that emerge when that part of self becomes active. This can easily lead to transference, countertransference, and projection issues in the counsellor-client relationship.

Doing no harm means not diagnosing or applying diagnostic labels to people based on patterns of behaviors, traits, or symptoms. This relates directly to the helper and fixer role. The American Psychiatric Association and the DSM were constructed and evolved from the perspective of the expert helper/fixer diagnostician and clinician whose role it is to diagnose the broken client who has psychopathology that requires treatment or cure. This is part of the medical model view, whereby the parts are greater than the whole and they can be broken down into simplistic criteria with cause-and-effect explanations. If we view people through the lens of pathologizing them, we are contributing to harming them, even if it’s unintentional. This is a role that is established from a position of hierarchy, power, and judgement.

Finally, in reflecting on the roles of serving versus fixing people, it's important to recognize when there is a part of ourselves which dislikes the power imbalance in the counsellor-client relationship. On the other hand, it's important to recognize the part of ourselves that may be attracted to a sense of power in it. We may value respecting peoples' dignity and promoting justice, but on the other hand, when we've experienced the indignity and injustice of being overpowered and oppressed by others (including counsellors) who did not do what was in my our best interest, we may have felt dishonored or disrespected. In short, we do ourselves a service by remembering to treat others the way we want to be treated. This is useful in approaching values and ethics in our roles as a counsellor or another type of therapeutic professional, whether we see ourselves as servants, helpers, or fixers of clients.