The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble/Chapter 6
Sometimes we speak as if each of us were a single individual, standing solitary, existing alone; but nothing of the sort is true. The smallest conceivable personality is threefold,—father, mother, child. No one of us starts as an individual or can ever after become such, being essentially social, a member merely, a part of a larger whole. (George Herbert Palmer in his Life of Alice Freeman Palmer.)
No matter how fully and freely an individual may reveal his secrets, he is not likely to be able to present himself as he is. He may describe his thoughts and his feelings, but he can hardly hope accurately to evaluate his capacities and his characteristics, or to appreciate the force of the various influences that are playing upon him. He may consider himself to have certain abilities, while his employer would estimate his talents quite differently. His relations with his church or with his family might show him to be almost another person from the individual he thinks himself to be, while employer, clergyman, and family would differ from one another in the pictures they would draw of him.
To approach an understanding of an individual and his problems one must view him from as many as possible of the major relationships of his life. The chief of these is usually the home. It is here that again and again the answer will be found to many of the difficulties in which a person finds himself. It was in the home that the handicaps which were affecting the adjustment of Martha, the little girl who was silent in school (described in Chapter II), arose, and it was in the home that the solution of the trouble of Mark Sullivan lay.
He had been one of the first men to be discharged when, under the stress of an industrial depression, the F. & M. Company began reducing its force. At one time he had been a capable and an efficient workman, but during more than a year he had been steadily deteriorating. He was sluggish and dull in the performance of his tasks, and he was almost never prompt in arriving at the shop in the morning. It was not surprising that he should have been dismissed.
The social case worker whom Sullivan consulted called at his home. She found it in disarray and confusion. Mrs. Sullivan evidently was a poor housekeeper. It developed that the meals were seldom ready on time and that frequently her husband had been obliged to prepare his breakfast in the morning, pack his lunch, and assume the responsibility for the appearance of dinner on the table at night. No wonder his effectiveness as a workman had been impaired.
One source of difficulty seemed to be Mrs. Sullivan's health. A physician was consulted. His diagnosis pointed to the need of an operation. It was performed, but, although Mrs. Sullivan's general condition showed an improvement, she continued to be as listless and as delicate as before.
Then the social worker became acquainted with Mrs. Sullivan's mother who made her home there. She was an elderly woman, too feeble to be of any assistance in the housekeeping, but not too weak to have a most unfortunate influence upon Mrs. Sullivan. She was one of those people who delight in the discussion of symptoms and who take pleasure in anticipating the worst possible event when any crisis is at hand. It was this characteristic which, with the best of intentions, she had applied to her daughter's state of health. Did Mrs. Sullivan develop the slightest suggestion of a cold, her mother was sure to remark that this was just the most undesirable time of the year to have anything the matter with one; there was so much influenza, or there was so much pneumonia, or there was so much of some other kind of disease about. A slight loss of color, or quite as readily, a slight heightening of color, would remind the old lady of the way in which the woman next door had begun to go down hill the winter she died of tuberculosis. A stomach ache suggested cancer. A headache always contained the possibility of mastoiditis. There was scarcely any change in the bodily condition of Mrs. Sullivan which did not bring to her mother the message of serious illness.
In such an environment it would truly have been a strong will that could have resisted the temptation to be delicate. It was suggested, therefore, that a place in a home for the aged be found for Mrs. Sullivan's mother. This advice was followed, and Mrs. Sullivan, freed from the ever-present suggestion of ill-health, began to take an interest in other things. She regained her strength. Her housekeeping correspondingly improved, and her husband was able successfully to meet the requirements of the new job which he had obtained. Neither Mr. Sullivan nor Mrs. Sullivan had sensed the cause of their trouble, and the social worker herself had not discovered it until she had become intimately acquainted with the life of the family. The key to the problem lay there.
Many similar experiences might be cited as testimony to the importance of the home and the people living in it as a means of developing an understanding of an individual and his adjustments. It is toward the home and the family that the earliest steps—usually the first—should be taken in seeking an acquaintance with the person in trouble.
Our efforts should not end there. A man's other associates should be consulted. The importance of this is illustrated by the unsuccessful way in which at first the predicament of Esther Hansen was approached and the method by which later an understanding of her difficulty was obtained.
Miss Hansen had asked the father of one of her former schoolmates to lend her three hundred dollars. She was the only support of her parents, both well advanced in years, and of an invalid sister. At a time when houses were difficult to rent, she had been compelled to buy her home or lose it, and now the problem of meeting the interest upon the mortgage had become too great. She had no negotiable assets and no one among her immediate acquaintance to whom she could turn. Very shortly her salary would be increased and the margin which this would yield would enable her to clear her debt in two years.
The presence of the woman, her evident culture, and her anxiety impressed the man. He sent a representative to visit her at her home. Here Miss Hansen made a further explanation of her financial worries. Her parents and her sister and the appearance of the household seemed to substantiate her story, and the loan was made.
After two years Miss Hansen asked the man for a second loan, although she had repaid only a few dollars of the first. A social worker who was consulted decided to talk with those with whom Miss Hansen was associated. The woman was the breadwinner of her family. She had numerous relatives. She was the patient of a physician. She was a governess. She was a subscription agent for a periodical. She had borrowed money from a loan office.
The loan office told a story of money advanced and not repaid. The circulation manager had been greatly annoyed by the complaints he was constantly receiving from persons who had subscribed through her for his magazine and then had received no copies. She had given him neither their money nor their names. The family where Miss Hansen had been employed as a governess reported that she had been away on sick-leave for nearly six months, and even when working she would often appear in the morning and then not return in the afternoon. She was frequently absent without giving any advance notification. The substitute governess said that she had been obliged to go over again with the children whatver ground Miss Hansen was supposed to have covered, for they had learned absolutely nothing. Her physician stated that he had felt justified in defining her trouble as "nervous exhaustion." From the first time he had seen her three years ago, she had been erratic and often irrational. He ascribed her condition to her personal difficulties. She was highly nervous and had a tendency toward hysteria and melancholia.
A visit to Miss Hansen's home had previously disclosed the fact that her mother had died a few months before without having had a physician called. The house had fallen into a state of the wildest disorder and filth. The family possessions were strewn about miscellaneously. Mr. Hansen was a refined but impractical sort of man, well advanced in years, who seemed to be utterly incapable of grappling with the situation. From what he said—and this was later confirmed by the relatives—Miss Hansen's mother had been of unsound mind. The invalid sister had never developed fully either physically or mentally.
The social worker now persuaded Miss Hansen to visit a psychiatrist, who reported that she was suffering from a manic-depressive form of mental disease in which in all likelihood heredity was a factor, and that probably her mental abnormality had been progressing slowly and steadily.
The relatives who were consulted said that they had been puzzled about Miss Hansen and were deeply interested in her. She had never taken them into her confidence, although she had often asked them for money and had always received what she requested. One of the relatives was a lawyer. He immediately offered to take charge of her legal affairs, which were exceedingly involved. He and the other members of the family were eager and willing to help her and her family
Each of the persons who had been associated with Miss Hansen knew only his or her part of the story and was ignorant of the other aspects of her life. Miss Hansen herself had never realized what her financial condition was. She said she had never had the courage to 'face herself.' Nobody, in short, knew the perplexed woman and her difficulties until the social worker, by talking to every one concerned, brought the isolated facts into a connected whole. Had this been done previously, Miss Hansen might have avoided much anxiety and a vast collection of petty debts. The children might have been spared her ineffective teaching, and the relatives might have been rallied immediately to the support and supervision of the household until the time when the two sisters could be admitted to an institution for chronic mental diseases.
The people who were consulted about Miss Hansen occupied a variety of relationships toward her. There were, for example, her physician and the psychiatrist who made possible a better understanding of her mental and nervous condition. Almost everybody has among his associates some one who stands in a professional relationship to him. Most of us if asked about our health could suggest a doctor who would answer this question better than we could. The same thing would be true of our legal affairs, of our relationship to the church, and, with children, of their relationship to school. As with Miss Hansen, so with many other people, it will be found helpful to turn for advice to one or more or all of those who occupy what might be called a professional relationship to the person in trouble.
Closely allied to them are his associates in business. With Miss Hansen this meant the woman who employed her as governess, the loan office, and the circulation manager of the magazine for which she had been selling subscriptions. With another person a different group of people might be consulted, but usually it will be wise to include those who can interpret the vocational and the economic sides of an individual's life.
Even more important are a man's personal relationships, not only his immediate family, but his relatives and his friends. The relatives of Miss Hansen helped both by contributing to the social worker's appreciation of the woman's problem and by assisting in its solution. Sometimes our friends know us more intimately than our kin and are better able to advise us.
There is another source of understanding which in this particular situation it was not necessary to use but which frequently becomes helpful, namely, documents—marriage certificates, burial permits, wills, birth records, deeds of sale. Again and again, when human beings have failed to supply the explanation, the written page has pointed the way to an understanding of an individual. The verification or the non-verification of a marriage may contain the explanation of much that before had not been appreciated, and many a human mystery has been revealed in the ponderous phraseology of a mortgage or the forgotten pages of a will.
It was Miss Hansen herself who told the social worker what persons were touching her life, and she did this in the first interviews that the two women had together. Obviously the earlier one learns about the professional, personal, and business relations of an individual in trouble, the sooner one will be able to help him. Miss Hansen eagerly assented to the suggestion that the social worker make the acquaintance of her associates and see what advice and help they might give. She had confidence in the social worker and understood the point of view from which her difficulty would be considered. Both of these things are important. We must always remember that we are acting for the person in trouble and that the task is far more delicate, far more complicated than a mere gathering of information. One consults other people in order to obtain their advice, in order to learn how they can be of help to the man in difficulty, in order to obtain their position upon the question which is moot, and in order to present the point of view of the individual in trouble. It is out of this manifold service, this entrance into the interplay of relationships that an understanding of the man, of the nature of his adjustment and the circumstances accompanying it is gradually obtained. Let the person in trouble appreciate this attitude in the person who is helping him and he will forward every effort toward communication with those with whom he has been associated.
The friend who seeks to advise a friend has at the outset the advantage of acquaintance and is spared many a step that the stranger must take, but whether friend or stranger, this method of learning to know a man through his family, and through those who stand in a personal, professional, or business relationship to him will be found to be applicable and essential. Sooner or later if one desires to help wisely he will want to consult those whose privilege and right it is to be consulted, and who may both aid in making a way out of difficulty—and in developing that understanding of the man in trouble—which, coupled with his own revelation of himself, is essential to the solution of his problems.