How can I create a helping relationship? My thoughts and learnings from Carl Rogers guiding light.
Since 1983, when I was first introduced to the idea of helping another’s learning by doing my own inner work, I have relied on Carl Rogers 10 questions as my guide.
heres the link to the questions…
How can I create a helping relationship? Carl Rogers
Since 1983 ,Whenever I’ve got lost or can’t figure out my own dis-ease in relation to another, I have been freed by reflecting on these questions, and usually found my way back to my own inner knowing.
And the questions fit regardless of the relationship.Lest you think this only applies to therapeutic work, think again. The same basic truths of relating apply regardless – coaching, leading, teaching, counselling parenting and problem solving. I have had the delight of working with conflict resolution amongst many business client relationships using this same work as the tool for change.
30 full years on I look again and thrill at the insight, again…
Have a closer look. Your relationships can change. Your life can change.
It really is safe to be yourself…
Rogers Question6 ….Can I let myself enter the world of his feelings and personal meanings and see these as he does? Can I step into his private world so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it?’
I am always excited as I begin to work with someone, and where there is a doubt in me I am reassured in my task. The task I must engage in is to immerse myself in the meanings and experiences of that person so that I may begin to know it as if through their lenses on the world.
Many people in the people business get themselves muddled about Empathy. Somewhere they get confused with sympathy. As my dear mentor said to me all those years ago they are as different as s…T and sugar!
And here in q6 Rogers gives it to us. So when I am free and open enough to myself then I can fully free myself to enter that persons world, to join the search with the person and so deeply hear and see and know that reality, AS IF it was mine.In this quest we are joined in together in seeking out the meaning held by the client.
In this there is no sympathetic quality or ‘there there’ . There is no ‘I know how you feel’. There is no need to comment or judge. In this present state we both know we are on the same task and we share the freedom from evaluation and judgment or a need to fix. In this relating it really is safe for me to be me, fully and completely, and this great gift then communicates to the client, SO they are also able to open themselves to all of their experiencing.
I’m so grateful for those years of therapeutic training where I learned the difference,and that learning is paying off now with the FasterEft tapping work. As I fully step into the world of the other I am able to pick up all the specific nuances, the threads, the tiny details that make up the full experience held in the memory. With Fastereft we are trying to figure out the structure of the other person, that is the way they have built up their habit of responses, the triggers, the way they do their personal pain.As we strive to figure out those roots then we are able to tap with precision, with great aim, that aim which then allows the ‘good-bad collapse’ that releases the traumatic memory for good!Indeed the very process of seeking has it all. Here is not just a cognitive intellectual pursuit but a sensitive weaving in and out of the clients world ,open to our responses in it and un afraid to fully unconditionally hold the other so they can hear themselves more clearly.
On the occasion that I don’t quite seem to get it I can be reassured, and so can the other person, because my task then is to free MYself more completely from my judgments and evaluations in whatever form they present. Because the wholehearted endeavour to know, to get inside their perspective, is in itself therapeutic, change making! Neither they nor me have to get it right all the time. But the client does give us all the clues, all the necessary data if we are open to receiving it.
When I am freely me so it follows they can also be fully themselves. In so doing we are together joined in the task of seeking out and aiming at the ‘worst of the worst’ in all it’s parts and pieces, without fear or prejudice.This other person then is reassured…it really is OK to be me exactly as I am. The affirmation then provided frees the unconscious to reveal more of the juice of the problem and to allow transformation.
So go on ‘ let yourself enter -your world and theirs.
Nuala White
2013