Unpacking the helping relationship within the therapeutic context and beyond

Our field employs a small army of people dedicated to helping young people find a healthy life trajectory. The needs of young people are immense, and their would-be helpers are motivated and have a lot offer. So why is it such... [ view full abstract ]

Our field employs a small army of people dedicated to helping young people find a healthy life trajectory. The needs of young people are immense, and their would-be helpers are motivated and have a lot offer. So why is it such a challenge for practitioners to engage these consumers in an effective relationship and to keep them engaged for long enough to really help them? Some of the more tangible barriers are easy to see and we can at least conceive of how to address them (e.g., logistic issues like scheduling, transportation, and cost or programmatic issues like matching the content with a clients’ priorities and needs). However, the most difficult and elusive barriers are often relational (i.e., patterns of reciprocal interaction and the meanings and feelings each member attaches to those social experiences).

The key to unlocking the full potential of our youth services system lies partly in honing our ability to activate vital and engaged helping relationships. The recent explosion of findings from across the social sciences offers valuable lessons for understanding (or re-understanding) the task of “meeting the clients where they are”.

The current presentation assembles research findings from both scientific and practice literature in order to:
(1) highlight key pieces of current knowledge about the relational and interactional factors that influence how individuals are likely to respond and engage within the context of a helping relationship; (2) propose some informed, working hypotheses about why these factors are influential and the processes by which they operate.

We will reframe the issue of “client engagement” (i.e., getting the client to engage actively participate in a discrete service so they may gain the knowledge and skills the helper has to offer) and “working alliance” (i.e., a strong relational bond in which there is agreement on the tasks and goals of the relationship) into a broader understanding of social engagement as an intrinsically vital aspect of human adaptation and development, regardless of the structural context within which it plays out.

We conclude by proposing a set of evidence-informed strategies designed to optimize helping relationships across a wide range of social contexts.