Relating to others

To be an individual with a helper’s heart is something that not everyone is born with. I am truly blessed to have been born with a servant’s mentality. To me, helping is using your abilities to better the quality of another individual’s life. Not only that, but I also believe that it is being present and available for anyone who may need it, even if the need is not immediate. Helping can be a wide variety of definitions, and it is not always performing a service; sometimes it is merely being there for someone to sit with them. Yet, helping others is not always easy, in fact, often, it is very difficult, especially in the field of psychology. As a counselor, the environment you work in may require you to assist people whom are there against

I found that I need to make improvements in many respects. First, I need to improve my opening statement to make it more clearly and smoothly and give my client an open question to encourage her to talk about her issue. Moreover, I need to make an improvement on identifying specific emotions that clients are feeling. In this session, I failed to use “feeling” vocabulary to reflect her feelings and create an empathic environment. In addition, I need to learn not to let my own experience and judgement influence the helping process. For example, when my client was talking about how smoking habit took away her studying time, I was thinking, “exactly, bad habits always influence many students’ academic performance in a negative way.” Although I did not say it, I wanted to say this to help her feel accepted and understood. This may not what she was thinking, but I was thinking it because I have experienced it before. To effectively help people explore themselves, I should make an improvement in these

Relational abilities will take me so far in life in the event that I know how to convey successfully and in an expert way. Individuals need to understand that in the business world knowing how to impart in an expert way is the thing that they need to see. Nobody needs to contract somebody that is ghetto or doesn't know how to converse with each other. Keeping in mind the end goal to take care of business, we will dependably need to impart in some sort of way. When somebody interacts with me, I need their initial introduction to wow them. I need them to realize that I recognize what I am doing and will deal with them to the best of my capacity, all while keeping them up on what is going ahead in an expert way.

In the past chapters, the focus has been on understanding clients and helping them clarify their concerns, however there is more to helping than just that. Egan and Schroeder (2009) focused mainly on challenging in chapters seven and eight in The Skilled Helper (2009). These two chapters focused mainly on challenging and how it benefits the session, as well as the shadow side of challenging. Egan and Schroeder (2009) stated that “good helpers also help their clients test reality” (p. 169). Testing reality is the definition of challenging, and is important in the helping process.

When after reading the assignment, I reflected how can I help my clients. How can I a helper create a therapeutic relationship? This question led me back to page 57 and what I already know, that some person normally asks me for advice. They see that I am a person who listens to others. The book says that it is important to recognize that creating a therapeutic relationship is a skill that must be learned.

system is a relatively recent phenomenon, the concept itself is at least as old as Freud. Freud

At a young age, I had an inconsistent relationship with my biological mother, at times she was nurturing and attuned and at other times she was emotionally unavailable, and at times even insensitive to my emotions. It later caused me to be confused, it was going back and forth in the state of being dependent/attached, when she decided to be nurturing and then being angry at the rejection I was receiving from her. Due to the unreliable and inconsistent attitudes I was receiving from my mother, I became very self-critical and insecure. I began to seek approval from outsiders (romantic partners/relationships). It caused me to have unbalanced feelings towards myself as my mother was giving me unbalanced feelings. I began looking for my worth in other things such as partners and even through intimacy. These were ways for me to get reassurance due to my lack of self-esteem. At times my relationship with my mother caused me to avoid any other relationship. It made me question everyone’s role in my life and when I found myself getting too close to someone it would scare me and the thought of rejection would reoccur and I slowly begin to avoid them. Although I have grown from this experience, I still find myself wanting to remain emotionally independent and try to keep myself from ending up with a romantic partner, if I ever seek interest in someone I keep my distance and

Every day, we learn something new, whether it is about ourselves, our clients, family or friends. Learning is an everyday process of life. We have to learn in order to explore, to teach, but most importantly to help others. We as human service professionals must decide which technique in which we can help others best, then decide what it is about ourselves and our clients that needs the most attention, therefore proper help can be done to improve our client as a person, onto bigger and better things. By helping others, we are not only rewarding them with great things, but it’s a reward for ourselves knowing we have done something positive for someone else. Depending on what particular skills a

Interactions with other people occur countless time throughout our daily life. Perhaps these interactions go well and have a positive outcome and perhaps the interactions do not go so well and end negatively for one or both of the individuals involved in the interaction. Doane and Varco (2005) discusses how being in relation is the medium to relationships with clients, through bringing the whole person to the relationship (Doane & Varcoe, 2005). The first step is the various techniques of being and communicating. These relationships are with us daily; at work, school, with friends and, family or less formal interactions with strangers. In this paper, I will deconstruct an interaction I had with a family member using several communication skills and relational Capacities. I will also review and discuss relational capacities and communication skills that were not successful or applied and how I could have communicated better.

“How Can I Help” could be a useful tool for many helpers. It would aid a helper in asking the necessary questions surrounding the act of helping. Strength and power are gained once the helper can identify and confront his or her own questions, fears, and resistance. In fact, one can see that the so called obstacles are really just opportunities to activate the caring nature that is in each of us. This is not an easy task and takes time and practice to be fully implemented. However, the benefits to society will far outweigh the

Outside the course, we all have some helping experience. For myself, I have lots of experience trying to help my friends through talk, which is like an unofficial way of counseling. While reading through the book, I start to reflect on my ‘natural helping experience’ which is also a starting point to develop my professional counseling skills. I realize one of my previous mistakes during those talk is that I paid too much attention on proposing solutions instead of helping itself.

Becoming a helper is a longstanding ambition of mine, formulated by my desire to help others. My experiences over the last twenty-five years, have taught me that I am sometimes over analytical in my thoughts, overly concerned about others, I can end up neglecting myself. Throughout this journey I have had chronic ups and downs life can harbor. I continue to develop my own sense of self, and pursue the opportunity to guide others through their own dialogue.

One of the main implications of Freud’s work was the development of psychoanalysis, which was considered unscientific as any evidence supporting its success was based on self-report data and not on scientific evidence. In addition, any evidence that did regard psychoanalysis as a successful treatment of mental illness did not suggest that it was any more successful than other treatments.

One of the biggest topics in today’s society is mental health. There are many pressing issues with mental issues. However, maybe we should look more at the helpers to see if they are competent and efficient with helping clients. Helpers should be actively looking to see if they are self –aware of their surrounds and their biases. If they are not, this could lead to conflict with the client. In this paper we will discuss what is self-awareness, personal factors influencing helping, diversity factors influencing helping, and strategies to improve self-awareness. Through these topics I hope to promote self-awareness regarding the personal and diversity factors that might influence the helping skills process as a helper.

To take another person’s perspective, one must have the attentional resources availa-ble to do so. One of the hallmarks of self-actualization is the ability to feel empathy and compassion to others. Self-actualized people may have the attentional resources to allocate to a situation that calls for helping behavior. Non-self-actualized people, on the other hand, may not have the attentional capabilities to notice when others need help. Self-actualized people are capable of directing attention outside of the self. Since self-actualized people have their lower level needs met, they have the attentional resources available to help.