The Wish to Help

In many training groups, I keep running into the same wish: wanting to help. The question that comes up for me is what kind of help we’re actually talking about, and what kind we’re not.

An example from a seminar

In one seminar group, we watched a video clip from a couples therapy session. I paused it after seven minutes, and one participant burst out that the therapist clearly had no experience with sexist people, that the way the man spoke simply wasn’t acceptable, and that he’d been thinking the whole time about how to make that clear to him. His focus had shifted away from the client’s concern and toward something that mattered to him personally.

We talked about that shift together. Mindful language mattered a great deal to him, a reasonable enough wish in itself. But in a counseling setting, we step outside our neutrality the moment we take that on without a mandate to do so. The group debated it lively: can I work with people whose sense of right and wrong is completely different from mine? By the end, the participant realized he wanted to look more closely at the parts in him that get triggered that way.

Something similar happened with another participant, who kept circling back to one theme in her questions, even as the client repeatedly pointed toward something else entirely. In reflecting on it, she noticed she’d fallen so in love with her own hypothesis that she badly wanted the client to discover it too.

It’s not about what we want

Both examples point to the same thing: it’s the wanting part of wanting to help that tends to cause trouble. Our work isn’t about what we believe is right. We support people in creating room for change, when that’s what’s wanted, even when clients choose paths that don’t match our idea of helpful, or decide not to take any path at all for now.

In one course, I offered a small mantra: less knowing, less wanting. I don’t actually know what the problem is, or what a helpful change would look like, but I can contribute to people gaining more clarity for themselves. The moment I step into that kind of wanting, I step into a position of knowing, which can create an imbalance. As the band Kettcar put it: the opposite of good is well-intentioned.