Five characteristics of human service professionals

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

· • Write a description of the five commonly accepted human service values.

· • List four characteristics or qualities of helpers.

· • Distinguish among the three categories of helpers.

· • Identify the other helping professionals with whom a human service professional may interact.

· • List the three areas of job responsibilities for human service professionals.

· • Provide examples of the roles included in each of the three areas of professional responsibilities.

Helping means assisting other people to understand, overcome, or cope with problems. The helper is the person who offers this assistance. This chapter’s discussion of the motivations for choosing a helping profession, the values and philosophies of helpers, and the special characteristics and traits helpers have assists in establishing an identity for the helper. We also define helpers as human service professionals, as well as introduce other professionals with whom they may interact. An important key to understanding human service professionals is an awareness of the many roles they engage in as they work with their clients and with other professionals.

In this chapter you will meet two human service professionals, Beth Bruce and Carmen Rodriguez. Beth is a counselor at a mental health center and has previous experience working with the elderly and adolescents. Carmen is a case manager at a state human service agency. She has varied responsibilities related to preparing clients for and finding gainful employment.

WHO IS THE HELPER?

In human services, the helper is an individual who assists others. This very broad definition includes professional helpers with extensive training, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as those who have little or no training, such as volunteers and other nonprofessional helpers . Regardless of the length or intensity of the helper’s training, his or her basic focus is to assist clients with their problems and help them help themselves (Chang, Scott, & Decker, 2013; Okun & Kantrowitz, 2008).

The human service professional is a helper who can be described in many different ways. For example, effective helpers are people whose thinking, emotions, and behaviors are integrated (Cochran & Cochran, 2006). Such a helper, believing that each client is a unique individual different from all other clients, will greet each one by name, with a handshake and a smile. Others view a helping person as an individual whose life experiences most closely match those of the person to be helped. The recovering alcoholic working with substance abusers is an example of this perspective. Still another view of the helper, and the one with which you are most familiar from your reading of this text, is the generalist human service professional who brings together knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines to work with the client as a whole person.

Your understanding of the human service professional will become clearer as this section examines the reasons why individuals choose this type of work, the traits and characteristics they share, and the different categories of their actual job functions.

MOTIVATIONS FOR CHOOSING A HELPING PROFESSION

Work is an important part of life in the United States. It is a valued activity that provides many individuals with a sense of identity as well as a livelihood. It is also a means for individuals to experience satisfying relationships with others, under agreeable conditions.

Understanding vocational choice is as complex and difficult a process as actually choosing a vocation. Factors that have been found to influence career choice include individuals’ needs, their aptitudes and interests, and their self-concepts. Special personal or social experiences also influence the choice of a career. There have been attempts to establish a relationship between vocational choice and certain factors such as interests, values, and attitudes, but it is generally agreed that no one factor can explain or predict a person’s vocational choice. Donald Super, a leader in vocational development theory, believes that the vocational development process is one of implementing a self-concept. This occurs through the interaction of social and individual factors, the opportunity to try various roles, and the perceived amount of approval from peers and supervisors for the roles assumed. There are many other views of this process, but most theorists agree that vocational choice is a developmental process.

How do people choose helping professions as careers? Among the factors that influence career choice are direct work experience, college courses and instructors, and the involvement of friends, acquaintances, or relatives in helping professions. Money or salary is a small concern compared with the goals and functions of the work itself. In other words, for individuals who choose helping as their life’s work, the kind of work they will do is more important than the pay they will receive.

There are several reasons why people choose the helping professions. It is important to be aware of these motivations because each may have positive and negative aspects. One primary reason why individuals choose helping professions (and the reason that most will admit) is the desire to help others. To feel worthwhile as a result of contributing to another’s growth is exciting; however, helpers must also ask themselves the following questions: To what extent am I meeting my own needs? Even more important, do my needs to feel worthwhile and to be a caring person take precedence over the client’s needs?

Related to this primary motivation is the desire for self-exploration. The wish to find out more about themselves as thinking, feeling individuals leads some people to major in psychology, sociology, or human services. This is a positive factor, because these people will most likely be concerned with gaining insights into their own behaviors and improving their knowledge and skills. After employment, it may become a negative factor if the helper’s needs for self-exploration or self-development take precedence over the clients’ needs. When this happens, either the helper becomes the client and the client the helper, or there are two clients, neither of whose needs are met. This situation can be avoided when the helper is aware that self-exploration is a personal motivation and can be fulfilled more appropriately outside the helping relationship.

Another strong motivation for pursuing a career in helping is the desire to exert control. For those who admit to this motivation, administrative or managerial positions in helping professions are the goal. This desire may become a problem, however, if helpers seek to control or dominate clients with the intent of making them dependent or having them conform to an external standard.

For many people, the experience of being helped provides a strong demonstration of the value of helping. Such people often wish to be like those who helped them when they were clients. This appears to be especially true for the fields of teaching and medicine. Unfortunately, this noble motivation may create unrealistic expectations of what being a helper will be like. For example, unsuccessful clients do not become helpers; rather, those who have had positive helping experiences are the ones who will choose this type of profession. Because they were cooperative and motivated clients, they may expect all clients to be like they were, and they may also expect all helpers to be as competent and caring as their helpers were. Such expectations of both the helper and the client are unrealistic and may leave the helper frustrated and angry.

When asked about making the choices, many helpers describe the process as a journey. Regardless of their primary or secondary motivation, they see individuals and experiences in their lives leading them to become helpers. For some the journey begins early in their lives while others appear to have discovered the field as adults. Consider your own journey to becoming a helper; think about your motivations and the people and experiences that led to your study of the human services. See Table 6.1 .

TABLE 6.1: SUMMARY POINTS: WHY INDIVIDUALS CHOOSE TO WORK INHELPING PROFESSIONS

Help others

Contribute to another’s growth

Self-exploration

Discover more about self

Exert control

Good in administration and organization

Positive role models

Inspired by help from others

Copyright © Cengage Learning®

VALUES AND HELPING

Values are important to the practice of human services because they are the criteria by which helpers and clients make choices. Every individual has a set of values. Both human service professionals and clients have sets of values. Sometimes they are similar, but often they differ; in some situations, they conflict. Human service professionals should know something about values and how they influence the relationship between the helper and the client.

Where do our values originate? Culture helps establish some values and standards of behavior. As we grow and learn through our different experiences, general guides to behavior emerge. These guides are values , and they give direction to our behavior. As different experiences lead to different values, individuals do not have the same value systems. Also, as individuals have more life experiences, their values may change. What exactly are values? Values are statements of what is desirable—of the way we would like the world to be. They are not statements of fact.

Values provide a basis for choice. It is important for human service professionals to know what their own values are and how they influence relationships with coworkers and the delivery of services to clients. For example, professionals who value truth will give the client as much feedback as possible from the results of an employment check or a home-visitation report. Because human service delivery is a team effort in many agencies and communities, there have to be some common values that will assist helpers in working together effectively. The following are the most commonly held values in human services: acceptance, tolerance, individuality, self-determination, and confidentiality.

The next paragraph introduces Beth Bruce, a human service professional with a variety of experiences. In this section, her experiences are used to illustrate the values that are important to the human service profession.

Beth Bruce is a human service professional at the Estes Mental Health Center, a comprehensive center serving seven counties. She has been a counselor at Estes for the past eight months and has really enjoyed her first year’s work in mental health. Her first job was as a social service provider in a local nursing home, where she worked for two years. She then worked with adolescents as a teacher and counselor at a local mental health institution before joining the Estes staff.

Let’s see how human service values relate to Beth Bruce’s experience as a human service professional.

Acceptance is the ability of the helper to be receptive to another person regardless of dress or behavior. Professionals act on the value of acceptance when they are able to maintain an attitude of goodwill toward clients and others and to refrain from judging them by factors such as the way they live, or whether they have likable personalities. Being accepting also means learning to appreciate a person’s culture and family background.

One of the most important values that Beth Bruce holds is accepting her clients for who they are. She has worked with the elderly, teenagers, and now people with mental illness. These populations are different, but they retain one important quality for her: They are all human beings. Her acceptance of others was put to the test at the nursing home when she encountered a staff who were mainly from Kenya, Ruanda, and Tanzania, all places unfamiliar to her. Sometimes it was difficult for her to understand their lilting accents. What she learned though was that these women were gentle, patient, and natural caretakers who were beloved by the patients.

The second value of human service work is tolerance : the helper’s ability to be patient and fair toward each client rather than judging, blaming, or punishing the client for prior behavior. A helper who embodies this value will work with the client to plan for the future, rather than continually focusing on the client’s past mistakes.

· Beth works with a friend and coworker who is not very tolerant of people with mental illness. Several times, this coworker’s intolerance of client behavior has caused problems for the client. Just yesterday, a problem arose with Ms. Mendoza, a 26-year-old woman with schizophrenia who is currently receiving day treatment and lives in a group home. She refused to see her parents when they came to see her at the day treatment center. Mr. Martin, Beth’s coworker, forced Ms. Mendoza to see them because he believes that family is very important and that parents have a right to see their children. Now the parents are upset because Ms. Mendoza threw a chair at them.

Ms. Mendoza is upset with Mr. Martin for making her see her parents, and Mr. Martin is angry with his client because he feels he was right to insist that she see them.

BOX 6.1: AMANDA NALLS—EXPERIENCING IRAQ AS A MILITARY OFFICER

Inshallah. Throughout my two tours in Baghdad, Iraq as an Army officer, I heard this Arabic expression more times than I can count from native Iraqi citizens, Arabic contractors, and, eventually, from Army soldiers. Literally translated as “as god wills,” it is used to suggest that something in the future is uncertain, which, in retrospect aptly described the situation in Iraq for both its citizens and the American military forces.

My experiences in Iraq were not unlike those of many of the American soldiers: we spent long hours working (sometimes 18 hours a day) and looked forward to the occasional call home and letters from friends and family. The long months of staff work were often punctuated by memorial services for fellow soldiers who were unlucky enough to encounter enemy fire, improvised explosive devises, or suicide bombers while conducting their daily missions in the field. The daily routine for many officers in my situation was alternately boring, thrilling, and mentally exhausting.

Amidst the daily grind of paperwork, mission tracking, and planning for casualty evacuation, there were moments that I will not soon forget. As my unit’s public affairs officer, I was able to help plan several “special” events for our soldiers. Each month, for example, a handful of soldiers were able to take a much-needed rest from missions and tour the palaces located in the Baghdad International Airport Complex where we were stationed. The highlight of the trip was a stop at the Al-Faw Palace, one of the eight presidential palaces used for hunting and recreation by the Baathist Party members, as well as by Saddam Hussein and his family. The tours provided an opportunity to teach the soldiers about Iraq’s history and its culture, which, hopefully, allowed them to better identify with the Iraqi people that they were there to help.

Medical Capability Missions, or MEDCAPs, were another event that provided me with an opportunity to see Iraq and its citizens in a different light. During my time in Iraq, MEDCAP missions were conducted in conjunction with the Iraqi Army; both American and Iraqi medics and doctors spend a day at a particular site treating local citizens and providing much-needed antibiotics and medical advice. During one such mission, I had the opportunity to serve as a “patient administrator;” my job entailed meeting Iraqi citizens at the entrance to the site, determining (with the help of a translator) their ailment, and assigning them to one of the medical professionals for treatment. I met a wide variety of individuals that day. One woman brought her two-year-old son and requested help on how to get him to stop eating rocks. Families came seeking treatment for shrapnel and gunshot wounds, and children wandered in off the street hoping for a piece of candy from the medics. One family in particular stood out as being particularly unique; both teenage daughters spoke fluent English and were looking forward to attending school in Alaska the following month. Each individual I met helped put a face on the effort we were making to help Iraqi citizens achieve a free and peaceful nation.

Although my experiences in Iraq were often frustrating and exhausting, they were also incredibly rewarding. Few other times in my life have I gotten to be a part of something truly worthwhile and make a lasting impact on the world. The opportunities I had to meet with and work alongside Iraqi citizens helped me to better understand a culture vastly different from my own, and allowed me to use my helping skills in ways that most helping professionals do not have the chance to. Although the future of Iraq and its people truly is inshallah, I look back on my time in the Army and my contributions to the Iraqi people with pride and with the hope that one day they too will enjoy many of the freedoms that Americans experience on a daily basis.

Source: Amanda Nalls (2010). Used with permission.

Individuality is expressed in the qualities or characteristics that make each person unique, distinctive from all other people. Lifestyle, assets, problems, previous life experiences, and feelings are some areas that make this person different. Recognizing and treating each person individually rather than stereotypically is how helpers put this value into practice.

When Beth first started working with the elderly, she had had little contact with older individuals. What she knew about them she had learned from her grandparents. She thought of the elderly as lively and quick-witted like her grandmother or quiet and shy, living in the past, like her grandfather. During her first months at the nursing home, the clients she encountered continually surprised her. They represented a broad range of human attitudes, behaviors, and experiences. She learned to distinguish between the generalizations she had made about the elderly and the information she now possessed based on her experiences at the nursing home.

Deciding for oneself on a course of action or the resolution to a problem is self-determination . The helper allows clients to make up their own minds regarding a decision to be made or an action to be taken. The helper facilitates this action by objectively assisting clients to investigate alternatives and by remembering that the decision is theirs. In some cases, clients are limited by their situations or their choices. For example, a prison inmate may have restricted alternatives from which to choose recreational activities; however, it is the inmate’s right to choose from the available alternatives.

When Beth worked with teenagers, she was constantly aware that their use of social media was important to them. Even though she frequently cautioned them about its abuses, she realized they needed to take responsibility for their sites and their postings.

The last human service value is confidentiality . This is the helper’s assurance to clients that the helper will not discuss their cases with other people—that what they discuss between them will not be the subject of conversation with the helper’s friends, family, or other clients. The exception to this is the sharing of information with supervisors or in staff meetings where the client’s best interests are being served.