The profile of good relaters
The Relational Worker
The ability to relate is not always prized by the helping professions. Significant efforts have gone into training, techniques, and skills, sometimes pushing aside human and personal qualities.
Over the years, I met a dozen of workers whose role has been ‘simply’ to relate to those in difficulty. These workers do not fix problems, they connect (to people and people to others) in order for them to resolve their own difficulties. Sue was amongst the first people I interviewed. Listening to, and watching her, gave me the idea of the relational worker, a role that Hilary Cottam says does not exist in the current welfare system.
Sue was, still is, working, for a social sector organisation in the U.K. helping young people without a home.
She organised a group of them to meet me. When I entered the room, the young people were sitting in a semicircle, waiting and watching carefully. Sue sat at the back. She was very calm. She didn’t say much during my conversation with the young people. Maybe nothing at all. She did not have to say much. The young people were close to her; every time they were about to share something personal, they looked at her. When they laughed, she laughed with them.
A year or so later, Sue told me about an incident with a young person. (This eventually went into a book I co-authored with my colleagues Michael Little and Beth Truesdale.) She was driving him to an appointment. While in the car, he started verbally abuse her. When this persisted, she stopped the car. She said to the young person to ‘get out’. She was not going to accept his behaviour. He stopped, reflected, and then apologised. The ride resumed.
There is a lot in this example that would worry experts, some may think safeguarding. Others might tacitly understand, maybe something they have done themselves but not spoken about publicly.
And then there are those who want to know more. How does Sue relate to the young people she helps? What are her qualities? Where do we find more people like Sue?
Close observation reveals three sets of qualities, each serving a different function.
Qualities that open up people’s emotions
Healthy relationships open up people’s emotions. The helped begin to feel good, that they matter. In time, they start sharing all kinds of emotions, including the upsetting type.
At the beginning, a lot of time is spent disproving past experiences. It involves a lot of persistence on the part of helpers. When they cannot reach the people they help, they reach out again.
For the past two months or however long it’s been, I’ve been the one who’s calling, calling, calling, going to his house, going to his house, going to his house, calling him, trying to help him figure out a way.
When behaviour of the one being helped is chaotic, the relational worker is consistent. When progress stalls, the relational worker sticks to the task. It is not easy for workers. They have feelings, too. They have to manage themselves, their feelings. A relation worker explains.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m good at it. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m good at it. There are some days that are better than most. It’s showing up. You’ve just got to keep showing up. Some days are better than most.
Relational workers accept people, even when people cannot accept themselves. They do not judge the circumstances of those they help. They treat them in the same way they would treat others, with respect and dignity. A young person talks about acceptance:
She does accept me for me because she sees that even though I may have good qualities, I do have bad qualities and she accepts them all. She never judges you on any of them, so I do feel like she has a lot of acceptance for me.
Workers who are relational see beyond the disadvantage. They show interest in the person. They acknowledge the dramatic background circumstances but hold them at bay and concentre on the present, and on the person. They are intentional about not reading past information, the piles of records accumulated thanks to the habit of the system to write everything down, everything except a sense of who the person is.
I’ve not had the time, I’ve not read all their records. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when you first meet them so that’s one of the things. Actually meet people at that point. You can read the stuff afterwards and you need to know if it’s safe to be in their property, risk assessment things, but actually as a practitioner, you don’t need to see all the parenting assessments necessarily because that’s not how you’re working with them. You need to meet them as them and not have all these preconceived ideas.
Instead of reading, the relational worker asks questions, ‘What do you like to read?’, ‘What do you like doing?’, ‘What do you think about the world?’.
Then they listen. The relational worker has to be able to listen well. They spend a lot of time hanging around the people they help. They may appear to be doing very little. But they are listening. And they are open to learning. To using what they hear to change their ideas about how to help.
People in difficulty are looking for other people, not roles. Relational workers talk about the quality of being genuine, being oneself. This means revealing aspects of their own past and current life, admitting to vulnerability, and being honest about their limitations, about how much they can help.
Through listening, showing interest, and being genuine, a common ground is built between the helper and helped, the platform for people to start sharing their emotions.
Availability is a prerequisite for offloading. Workers are there when people need them. They don’t work to a bureaucratic timetable.
The demeanour of the relational worker matters. They are constantly under scrutiny. They are being assessed. Smiling, being friendly, being warm, and giving off a good aura, incentivise connection.
They are ‘sensitive’ in the way attachment theorists use the word. A sensitive mother knows means knows from her child’s cry whether the need is for food, comfort, or warmth. The relational worker listens to the signals and uses accumulated knowledge to know how and when to respond.
A relational worker gives an example. It was just a lot of listening with him. Sometimes it was just being quiet because there were some empty conversations that we had where we just sat there, just being there. He saw that that was happening.
At other times it is about helping practically, as this young person reflects: For instance, my driving license is suspended. It was suspended for four years. Just hearing my worker talk to the judges about me and helping me get my license. Now I’ve got my license back. That was something that I really needed in my life. I can’t take public transportation. I can’t take the bus. I haven’t taken the bus or the train in years. Him coming in to support me made me really appreciate his help.
Availability, being approachable, sensitive, accepting people for who they are. These are among the skills of a relational worker. They help create a context for emotions to safely surface.
Qualities that disrupt people’s maladaptive patterns of thinking
Relational workers disrupt unhelpful ways of thinking, not like a therapist, identifying faulty cognition and its behavioural consequences. The relational worker is not trying to fix the mind, or fix anything.
They have conversations about the world as it is. These conversations cover a range of ways of thinking and engaging with the world. They represent new experiences for those being helped. They progressively open up new possibilities. They disrupt old ways of thinking.
A young person explains. I learnt a lot of stuff in aspects of him teaching me how to handle myself properly as a man, how to hold myself, and also have a plateau where I’m supposed to be at, and hold myself accountable for a lot of things that I’m supposed to hold myself accountable for, and how I’m supposed to treat others in aspects of different things, how to handle relationships in the right way, so to speak.
The relational worker makes agile assessments about when it is the right time to address dysfunctional behaviours head on. They use the quality of ‘sharp empathy’ described earlier. Now the disruption is sudden, direct, and uncomfortable.
Qualities that help restore the sense of ‘I can do’
The relational worker helps people recover their sense of agency, that they are the primary agents in deciding the course of their lives.
Workers contribute to this process through pushing but not enforcing, tracking progress, solving, advocating, and linking to other support sources or opportunities.
Relational workers continually push opportunities in the way of the people they help. They never enforce a change agenda. At the beginning, they ask, ‘What do you want to do in the next weeks?’ More often than not the responses are simple and clear. I want a bus pass. I would like to learn how to cook. I want to get a license so I can work in construction. I would like to know how to have a conversation. They start with these simple requests. They talk about how to achieve the objective. They wait until the helped come back and ask for more.
Once people sign up to do something, workers track their progress. They remind people about pending tasks. They validate efforts and encourage persistence when progress is slow. A young woman reflects:
When she sees I’m doing better, she tells me all the time, often before I notice it. She’ll come out of the blue and be like ‘You just got this’, ‘You just got that’. ‘You’re so close to getting this’. ‘Stay on it’. I’ll be like Okay. I didn’t even realize that. It wasn’t one big impact. She’s just been helping me along the way.
The system is meant to help. But often it gets in the way. The relational worker is the navigator. Sorting through a pile of papers from the job centre. Securing housing. Negotiating with child protection agencies to ensure access to children. Relational workers become advocates for the people they help, bridging the interaction between the helped and the outside world.
Workers are intentional about not containing the progress of the people they help within the one relationship. Part of good relating means linking people to new networks, with a focus on natural ties. One worker makes clear this distinction:
We are second best to real relationships, okay? All clients, like everybody else, crave normal relationships. They all crave some sort of normality. They want to have what you have, or me, or… Well, if we have it. I don’t know, I’m making an assumption we want to have a boyfriend, a girlfriend. A normal relationship, someone to care for them that is not paid because at the end they know I am paid. We are not a real leg, we are an orthopaedic leg. Do you know what I mean? It’s good enough to walk, but, you know, you really want your leg, is that fair to say?
