# The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble/Chapter 13

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. (Matthew vii, 25.)
Scudder Middleton
Powerful though motivation is in stimulating men to action there are other forces that are even stronger. The marshalling of an individual's desires is in a sense a preliminary process. It starts him upon a given course of conduct. It is a means of focusing his initiative upon a specific and frequently an instant occasion,—helping him to decide to consult a physician, to enter an institution, to apply for a job, or to embark upon some other definite task. Usually its chief value is in its immediacy.
There are sources of strength that are more lasting, sources of power within the man himself ​and in the world about him, dynamics which are continually being used by people to raise the level of their energies and to cause them to flow surely and steadily through the channels into which they have been directed.
What is more familiar than such testimony as that of Mrs. Hearne who had been obliged to make the adjustment to widowhood under circumstances of peculiar difficulty.
"I could not have gone through with it," she said, "if it had not been for my faith."
Commonplace, also, are experiences like that of Herbert Worth, who, without family or kin to help him with affection and sympathy, found in his religion the courage to face the slow advance of cancer, or that of Wilson Kirk, who having given himself over to dissipation was converted at a gospel mission and completely reorganized his life, devoting the remainder of it to his church and to his family.
Here was a force that not only provided an initial impulse but also continued for many years to be a source of renewal and strength. In each of these persons it manifested itself differently but in all it was an inspiring and sustaining power.
Centuries of human experience have given ​similar testimony to the dynamic qualities of religion. Again and again it is the decisive factor in enabling an individual to overcome his difficulties. Religion shows itself differently in different persons. To one it appears suddenly as in conversion; to another it comes as the growth of a slowly developing conviction. One man receives it through one form of faith, another through another form. This complicates the problem of using it, for the person who is in need of help may require an interpretation of religion different from that offered by the person who desires to help him. Yet so personal a thing is religion that one can express it only as he perceives it. He can give only his own interpretation of religion. This may, indeed, be the wisest thing to do. Often, however, it will happen that the man in trouble already has an approach to religion, one which perhaps may have been little used but which if developed might mean much to him. The best procedure with such a person is to bring him into touch with some one who has this same approach and who may be able to confirm him in it.
There is a valuable suggestion in the practice of social case workers in non-sectarian organizations. Their effort always is to strengthen what​ever relationship may exist between a man and the institutionalized expression of the faith which he professes. While this practice is partially the result of a desire not to break denominational bounds it also rests upon the sound principle that in a time of distress an individual will be most likely to want to turn to the spiritual bases upon which in the past, even though remote, he may have begun to build.
This means more than merely telling a man that he ought to attend church or synagogue. It means bringing him into touch with some other human being, whether priest, social worker, or layman, who understands how best to ta his faith in him.
This principle was put into ideal practice by the social case worker who opened the way to a more intimate relationship of a man with his church by helping him to move his family into a house next to one occupied by a devoted and active member of the same denomination. Telling him that he ought to go to church would have had little effect. It was through the life with his neighbor that he was brought to see the value of religion so that he once more attended services and experienced a quickening of his faith. The ​social worker who was instrumental in bringing this about subscribed to a creed that was different in many respects from that of her client, but she believed in the dynamic qualities of religion and therefore helped to strengthen him in those spiritual beliefs which seemed to make the greatest appeal to him. However religion expresses itself, it is the most vital thing in the life of the individual in whom it exists, the primary source of inspiration and anchorage, the influence that sustains and steadies him in every adjustment that he must make.
Wholly different in influence and character from religion was the dynamic utilized in arousing Margaret Seip, a woman of fifty, from the introspective state into which she had fallen. Miss Seip and her mother had been living together in two rooms with so little to do and such a barrenness of happenings that for lack of a better occupation they spent their days in telling each other about the miserable condition of their health. What they needed was a new subject for thought, something that would break the monotony with which they were surrounded. This was supplied when the daughter was placed at work in an arts and crafts shop. The comings and goings of the ​customers, the sight of new things, the conversation of the other employees gave the woman an excitement and an interest that she carried home with her at the end of the day for the vicarious enjoyment of her mother. "I didn't know people could talk about such cheerful things," she said in appreciation of what her work meant to her.
She had profited by what might be called the dynamic of adventure. Adventure, change, variety, new experience help to maintain an individual's alertness and to quicken his zest for living. It is frequently as much this as the physical advantage of climate that physicians have in mind when they prescribe the mountains or the seashore for a convalescing patient. It is what many people derive from travel. The woman who mastered a fit of depression by rearranging her furniture and giving a fresh aspect to her home was making excellent use of this dynamic of adventure and change.
Adventure has a contribution to make to the life of every human being. Depending as it does, however, upon variety and change it has not the substantial qualities of some of the other dynamics. It is a relish that usually needs to be accompanied or followed by meat. It was this ​sort of sequence that enabled Tony Patrello successfully to make the adjustment to adolescence. In the years that immediately succeeded his father's death he had been drifting farther and farther away from the influence of his home. At thirteen years of age he preferred the manners and habits of the street to those which his mother urged upon him. He was a frequent truant from school and a leader of a group of boys whose deviltries in the neighborhood threatened soon to bring them before the juvenile court. No appeal seemed to have any effect upon him.
One morning a social case worker happened to see Tony take his father's violin down from the wall. She asked him whether he would like to learn to play upon it. He thought that perhaps he would. Lessons at a neighboring settlement were arranged for immediately. It was a new experience and for nearly a month Tony was engrossed in it. He spent all his spare moments in practice and measured time by the intervals between his lessons. His attendance at school became regular, for the social worker had conditioned his instruction in music upon this, and he began to devote to his violin the leisure that had been wasted on the street. The dynamic of adventure possessed him ​and became the means of turning the stream of his energy into useful channels.
Then came a period when the newness wore off. Tony showed signs of slipping back to the old life. It now required all the ingenuity of the social worker to stimulate his desire to master the violin. Every conceivable motive was utilized until finally the boy reached the point of being able to make music, not by any means the music of a master but music that was appreciated as such by the other members of the family and of course by Tony, himself. The satisfaction that he derived from this accomplishment had a profound effect upon him. It took him altogether away from the street. His music began to develop in him new habits of behavior. It brought him new friends, and it strengthened the whole tone of his life. The sense of achievement he derived from being able to play upon the violin filled him with the ambition for achievement in other directions, and first in education and later in work he attained to one success after another. What the sense of adventure had begun the sense of achievement carried on.
Achievement is one of the most stimulating of life's experiences. The sense of power and of confidence which it brings strengthens one for ​further accomplishment. Look to the man who is listless or timorous or in despair and one is likely to find that he has nothing from which he can win for himself the feeling of success. And yet the opportunity for achievement is neither remote nor unusually difficult to find. It is often to be derived from the simplest and the homeliest things. To most bookkeepers there is no thrill like that which follows the striking of a balance at the first trial, unless it be that of eliminating the discrepant penny after hours of search. One woman enjoys a great sense of achievement as she looks at the garden she has just cleared of weeds. Another woman finds nothing that quite equals the satisfaction of a triple row of glasses of preserves, the product of a morning over the stove. One person obtains a sense of achievement from a piece of carpentry; another in polishing the household brass; a third in a well-played game of bridge. To reach the office and clear the desk of mail before the rest of the staff arrive is an exhilaration to many a business man who finds his whole day made more effective by this initial accomplishment. The sense of achievement may lie in the writing of a letter, or the making of a speech, or the vicarious success that is had through the ​accomplishment of a son or a daughter or a pupil. It may come in as many different ways as there are people. Always it is an influence for strength. Achievement begets achievement. The consciousness of success charges a man's energies to higher levels of effort and often what otherwise would have been impossible is attained.
While frequently the finding of the means by which an individual can derive a sense of achievement is a process of trial and error, involving the suggesting of this and then that until the appropriate medium has been discovered, it is obvious that the more intimately one knows a man the more likely will one be to select the thing that will attract him. Usually to learn what has given him a feeling of accomplishment in the past is to find what will satisfy him in his present difficulty.
A woman who was friendless, unhappy, and unstable consulted a social case worker. She had no pleasure in her work asseamstress. She was asked whether she had ever tried anything else. Yes, she had. She had been a cook, a lady's maid, a clerk in a store, and an operator in a factory. In none of these employments had she remained longer than a few months. Before her experience ​with them she had been a teacher of Spanish. For the first time during the conversation she showed enthusiasm. Evidently this was an occupation in which she had found self-expression. It developed that she had been an able teacher but that she was not the sort of person to work coöperatively with other people in an organization. She had been obliged to leave several schools and had thought that teaching was closed to her. The social worker found some private pupils for the woman. The experiment was successful. At the end of a year the teacher's clients had increased in number, and she was a more stable person than she had ever been.
Sometimes it is impossible, perhaps even unnecessary, to arrange for a change in an individual's employment. The task is rather to help him to see that what he is doing is important and that he is doing it well. Every craftsman no matter how sure he may be of his art is dependent upon the appraisal of his work by those whom he regards ascompetent critics. It is not unusual for a person to have a feeling of failure changed to one of achievement when what he thought to be unsuccessful is received with appreciation. The admiration which a social worker expressed for ​the needlework of a woman who felt that her education was wasted in this occupation was the means of giving her a new sense of accomplishment. To realize that some one whose opinion she respected recognized something unusual in her product and brought other people to see this also was enough to develop in her a much needed satisfaction and content.
Quite as influential as achievement in developing an individual's energies is the purposeful effort he makes in order to attain to success. Few things are more effective in enabling a man to overcome his difficulties. To have a goal toward which to work both quickens and steadies him. The winning of the great war was a means of re-creating for a time at least thousands of unhappy lives. For four years they had a cause so vital and so important that it gave new meaning to existence and new strength to being. The determination to obtain an education or to recover one's health or to pay one's debts or to build a business or to develop an invention or to accomplish any other ambition has a buoying and sustaining influence upon an individual's energies. If it is but one of a number of factors in his life and is not allowed to remain single in his mind and to occupy him to the ​exclusion of all else it can make him more vigorous in everything he does.
What the having of a purpose can accomplish for an individual is illustrated by the story of Mrs. Quinn.
Mrs. Quinn presented a paradox in that she loved her children and at the same time neglected them. For that matter she neglected herself. Neither their clothing nor hers was ever clean, and she allowed the house to become as unkempt as its tenants. She was an evasive person. It was easier for her to lie than to tell the truth, and she was rapidly teaching her children, both directly and by example, this method of approaching life. Yet she was gentle and affectionate with them and it was evident—at least to the social case worker—that any better ordering of Mrs. Quinn's life would come about through her devotion to the children.
Every attempt to use their welfare as a means of influencing her failed. Then came a crisis in Mrs. Quinn's affairs. One morning she called to see the social worker with the news that she had given up her home and had rented two furnished rooms to which she intended to move the family. The truth was that she had equipped the house ​in which she had been living by purchases from an installment company. She had failed in her payments, and the company had removed every piece of furniture from her home. Hitherto she had always insisted that the furniture was her own.
Mrs. Quinn had expected that the social worker would come to the rescue as she had on many another occasion. The social worker, however, saw in the woman's predicament an opportunity to help her to make a change in her way of life. Instead of offering the financial assistance that would have removed the immediate difficulty she agreed to the plan that Mrs. Quinn had suggested. Obviously, a family of seven ought not to live in two furnished rooms and it would be necessary to make provision elsewhere—either in an institution or in a private home—for at least three of the children. Mrs. Quinn was heart-broken. To be separated from her children was more than she could bear. She was told that there was a way by which she could reunite her family. All she need do was to demonstrate that she was a fit mother for them. Let her prove her ability to take proper care of the remaining children. Let her endeavor to train them to be truthful instead of setting ​them an opposite example, and the social worker would help her to reunite her household.
The change which took place in Mrs. Quinn was almost immediate. In two weeks her clothes and person were clean and she had made a beginning of furbishing her rooms. The habit of lying was not so easily broken, but she now attempted to meet life squarely. At the end of three months, the social worker felt that enough progress had been made to justify her in reëstablishing Mrs. Quinn in a house, but instead of returning all the children to her immediately, she arranged to have them restored, one at a time. Thus each child which Mrs. Quinn won back was an incentive to her to work the harder to make of herself the sort of mother she ought to be, and by the time the family was reunited, Mrs. Quinn had begun to prefer cleanliness for its own sake and to see that it was possible to be happy and still tell the truth.
Undoubtedly, the personality and influence of the social worker had much to do with this change, but what started it and gave it impetus was Mrs. Quinn's determination to win back her children. The real skill of the social worker lay in her perception that out of the crisis that had come into Mrs. Quinn's life a goal for her activities might be ​devised. There is no better place to look for the fabric of a purpose than at the very heart of an individual's difficulties.
What gave additional strength to the ordinary powers of this dynamic was its genesis in Mrs. Quinn's affection for her children. That she was devoted to them made her purpose to regain them the greater, while the struggle to bring them back to her increased her love for them. They were the principle medium through which her emotional life expressed itself.
Emotional expression when it has, as here, a satisfactory channel can be one of the most steadying and inspiring of influences. It finds its outlets variously, through appreciation of nature and of art, and through every phase of human association, acquaintanceship, friendship, courtship, marriage, parenthood, family life. It isin human association that it reaches its highest values, for here there is the element of response, the possibility of that reciprocity of affection that can bring security and satisfaction. Such emotional expression is not a thing to be sought. It is suspicious of invitations and it comes unbidden. It is a mutual experience, a harmony of free and understanding personalities.
One can introduce the lonely individual to ​human association. One can take him where there are people who might become his friends, but unless he is clear of confining inhibitions and reservations his efforts at emotional expression will be fruitless and unsatisfying. While it is true that it is largely through emotional expression that personality finds its release, nevertheless, a measure of preparation for this experience is possible. Certainly this applied to the solution of Lydia Easton's difficulties.
Lydia had had an unsettled and an unsatisfactory childhood. Her father had died when she was a baby and her mother had moved about from place to place selling books and leaving her children to form what associates they could in her absence. It was a haphazard sort of life and the girl had always looked forward to the time when in a family of her own she might have that which hitherto she had lacked. Her desire for affection laid her open to seduction and she had scarcely reached twenty years of age when a baby was born to her whose father's previous marriage prevented him from becoming her husband. She left her mother and sisters taking the child with her.
She now began wearing a wedding ring and spoke of herself as a widow. She almost succeeded ​in convincing herself of the truth of her story. When, before two years had passed, she was about to be confined again, this time having become involved with another man, she insisted that she had been assaulted.
She gave the social case worker a most circumstantial account of her marriage and even went with her to call upon the clergyman who she said had performed the ceremony. She was willing to prosecute the man whom she accused of being the father of her second child, although she had been intimate with several other men.
The motive underlying all this was her desire for a normal family life. Rather than be wholly without it she preferred to imagine it. Thereby she was, of course, making impossible the attainment of the very thing she wanted. Realizing this the social worker tried to help the girl to face the facts of her situation so that she might ultimately free herself for the forming of a wholesome married life. The visit to the clergyman was only one of the measures taken to convince the young woman that she was not married and that it would be wiser for her to recognize this. When even the clergyman's denial of the ceremony did not cause her to face the facts, the social worker ​used for this purpose the prosecution of the father of the second child, the woman having entered suit upon the uninformed advice of a neighbor. The case might have been dropped but the social worker saw in it the one chance of clearing the unrealities from the girl's life. Nor until the young woman had admitted the truth on the witness stand did she appreciate the extent to which she had been living on a false basis and begin to face life squarely. An opportunity now offered itself for her to make her home with a family. Here as a mother's helper she spent a year that was happier than any other previous year in her history, the only shadow upon it being the death of her first child. She was made to feel that she had a genuine share in the family life, the nearest approach to a home that she had experienced. Then she met a man whose earlier career had been as unhappy as her own. In the marriage which followed she found the true realization of her desires, incidentally after the birth of their first child reëstablishing for her husband ties with his own relatives which had long been broken.
Undoubtedly it was in the having of a family of her own that the solution of the young woman's problem lay. In helping her to clear her life of un​reality the social worker prepared her for the happiness that she later experienced. And is one not justified even in a situation of this sort in taking into consideration the possibility of marriage? After all most people marry and it is in the family that the emotional values of life can find complete expression; for here they are all mingled—the love of man and woman, the being together, the sharing of experiences, the sense of personal relationship with tradition, of oneness with past generations; the satisfaction of the longing to belong somewhere, to have a place in the world, to have a refuge from storm, to feel the security of mutual confidence, of being emancipated from impersonality and of being personal, of being utterly and completely one's self and of being thus beloved.
Family life includes the whole cycle from childhood to parenthood, but there is opportunity for renewal and strength in its every phase. Even to approximate it, as two women in their late thirties did in establishing a home of their own and adopting two children, is to find a sure vehicle for emotional expression. That is why there runs through nearly every one of the personal histories that have appeared in these chapters the effort to safeguard and develop family life. Let a man ​have a happy family relationship and the making of all his adjustments is facilitated.
Where this is not possible the use of every other available dynamic becomes of supreme importance. Emotional expression through other channels—through friendship, through the appreciation and enjoyment of nature, and through the cultivation of any latent artistic abilities—should be encouraged. There should be a search for new goals, for new purposes. More mediums for the sense of achievement should be secured. The spiritual life of men becomes, if possible, of even greater importance. Just as the person who is blind develops a compensating alertness in his other senses, so must the individual who is blocked from one dynamic be helped to a larger and more varied use of the rest.
But to contemplate the absence of any dynamic is as difficult as to conceive the loss of any of the senses. All are essential. All must be cultivated. The more and the broader a man's contacts with them the stronger and the fuller will flow the stream of hisenergies. They are the very essence of life. Let him possess them and the mastery of the art of living will be his.