The Helping Relationship: Process and Skills

The Helping Relationship is a text for learning and teaching basic philosophy, helping skills, and processes that are essential grounding for most professions and for all human-contact occupations.

The Helping Relationship presents and illustrates skills in the order in which they are used in the helping process. The primary emphasis in the helping process is to promote self-help, such as coping competence, to solve one’s own problems and draw on one’s own inner strengths.

Counseling is not just a specialized profession reserved for a few trained individuals. All people are called upon at certain points in their lives to serve as counselors, listeners, or helpers in some way. Basic counseling skills are a necessity for every single individual, whether one is a parent listening to his teenager, a family member helping another cope with the loss of a loved one, a doctor counseling a patient about a terminal illness, a friend providing support for another friend, or even a business professional engaging in active listening at a meeting or interview. Counseling requires leadership and compassion, and it is a skill that all must possess in order to live with others in the world. This book describes in non-technical language the human helping process and provides training for anyone interested in becoming a helper. Filled with examples and step-by-step outlines on how to develop basic counseling skills, this book focuses on helping people learn to help themselves and each other. Providing a systematic approach to acquiring helping skills, this book cuts through psychological jargon and reaches across various professions and settings. Readers are asked to consider important personal issues of being a helper as they enter professional or paraprofessional roles as helpers. Social workers, counselors, human service professionals, business professionals, law professionals, medical professionals, and anyone interested in becoming a helper.