Sexual Dilemmas For The Helping Professional

Revised and Expanded Edition

Jerry Edelwich, Archie Brodsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780876306284
• eBook ISBN: 9781134853090
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume speaks directly to the issues that underlie sexual dynamics between clinicians and clients. Substantially updated and enlarged, this second edition addresses head-on the heightened openness and awareness of the contemporary consulting room.

1

Troubled Waters

Sidney Simon, the humanistic educator known for his work in values clarification, tells the following story as part of an exercise designed to help one clarify one's values and perceptions concerning sexual choices in a world of conflicting interests and desires (cf. Simon, Howe, & Kirschenbaum, 1972).

The survivors of a shipwreck are marooned on two small, otherwise uninhabited islands separated by a narrow strait. The strait is full of the hungriest, most ferocious sharks imaginable. It is impossible to swim safely from one island to another.

A young couple engaged to be married are lucky enough to survive the wreck, but in the tumult and confusion they are separated. Alice ends up on Island I, Bob on Island II. Alice loves Bob in the old-fashioned way—the kind of love celebrated in romantic songs and poetry. She feels that she cannot stand another day without him. But how can she cross the shark-infested strait?

She goes over to Charlie, another survivor who has landed on Island I.“ Charlie,” she says,“ would you build me a raft so I can get over to the other island and be with Bob?”

Charlie looks her up and down.“ Sure, baby, I'll build you a raft, but first you have to go to the sand with me.”

“Go to the sand?”

“Well, there are no beds here, so we'll have to do it on the sand.”

Alice is outraged.“ You disgusting, despicable, obnoxious man. I've never heard anything so reprehensible. I wouldn't go to the sand with you if you were the last man left on the earth.”

“Have it your own way,“ says Charlie,“ but if you change your mind, I'm in the Yellow Pages.”

Alice paces around. What should she do?

Then she hears banging noises coming from the northern end of the island. She walks in that direction and finds Donald, an industrious-looking fellow who is busy with a construction project.“ Donald,” she asks,“ would you please build me a raft so I can go join. …”

He stops her in mid-sentence.“ Don't bother me,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand.“ I'm not interested in your personal problems. I have no time for such frivolity. I'm busy here building my own raft so I can get off this godforsaken island myself So why don't you just take an about-face and go down the road.”

“But, but, look, excuse me. …”

“I'm sorry, I told you I have no time. I'm not interested, so just hit the highway. Take 1-95 South and make a left.”

But that would bring her back to Charlie. She ponders her alternatives. Is it better to do something or nothing? Does the end justify the means?

To make a long story short, she goes back to see Charlie. Here, so as not to be too graphic, the camera discreetly pans the sky as we report that Charlie does indeed build the raft.

Alice wastes no time in getting across to Island II.“ Bob, Bob,” she cries out as she runs toward him,” oh, honey, am I glad to see you! You don't know what I had to do. …”

Bob's expression makes Donald's look warm and inviting by comparison.“ I do know what you did,” he says in a low but firm voice.“ I saw the whole thing, and I don't approve. That's it, Alice. We're finished. I'm through with you. Give me back my ring.”

“But I did it for you-—for us!”

“You didn't do it for me; you did it for you. I didn't make you do anything. That's it. I'm not going to compromise. It's all over between us. See you around sometime.”

Alice walks around on the beach.“ Those sharks would be more hospitable than these pigs,” she says to herself. Again she is left to ponder her choices, only now she has even fewer and less palatable choices than before.

Suddenly a man comes out from behind the bushes. It is Ernie, who has been observing everything. He runs over to Alice, gushing with emotion.“ Alice, I saw what happened, and I don't care. I love you. Will you marry me?”

* * *

What is going on in this story? What aspects of sexuality and sexual relationships do these characters embody? How does their behavior reflect our society's mores and its beliefs about people? Which characters strike us as“ good,“ which ones as“ bad”? Do these moral judgments have any validity? Can we think of better ways to cope with the situation depicted?

The answers to these questions lie as much in the way we hear or read the story as in the way it is told. Today, many of us would read the story as sexist—that is, as being based on arbitrary, but nonetheless ingrained assumptions about how men and women differ. On the other hand, the sequence of events narrated here might well have seemed reasonable and even inevitable to readers a generation ago as well as to some readers today. If we accept certain unstated assumptions about how men and women act, the whole story falls into place. If we question those assumptions, many other possibilities open up.

In the first place, why didn't Alice build her own raft? Nothing was said about her being unable to use her arms and legs—or her mind. If she didn't know how to build a raft, she might have asked Charlie to help her build one rather than do it for her. Of course, Charlie might have exacted the same price for the smaller favor as he did for the larger one. Alice might then have gone to Donald and asked him if he would take her over to Island II when he had finished building his own raft. Had he been unwilling to do that, he might have let her watch him build his raft so that she could learn to build one for herself. It is true that Donald didn't simply refuse to build a raft for Alice; he told her to get lost. Would he have responded differently if Alice had merely asked if she could stand around and watch? If she had offered to help him? We don't know because she didn't ask or offer. And even if he had still chased her away, couldn't she have found a bush or tree behind which to watch Donald as Ernie would later watch her and Bob?

If Alice was the victim in this story, she had learned to be a victim. She had learned not to be able to build a raft. Her inability to take care of her own needs can be characterized as learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975). Learned helplessness can sometimes be an effective way to gain one's ends, as when a woman stands by the highway waving at passing cars instead of changing her flat tire herself, or when a man fidgets with a loose button on his vest until someone takes pity and sews it on for him. And speaking of men, why didn't Bob build a raft and go over to Island I to rejoin Alice? Was he helpless, too? Or was it simply not as important to him as it was to her?

All five characters in the story had learned to be the people they were and the men or women they were. Acting according to expectations they had formed about others and that others had formed about them, they exhibited restricted, predictable patterns of behavior. Each of these one-dimensional characters, in playing a stereotyped role, illustrates an aspect of human sexuality.

To begin with Alice, the narrative does not specify that she flashes her eyes and wiggles her hips when she asks Charlie and Donald to build her a raft. Nor does it say that she does not. Her indignant reply to Charlie's proposition, although in part a reaction to his crudeness, suggests that she has no conscious intention of seducing him. Yet a request accompanied by a mere friendly smile from a woman is enough to make many men sense a sexual overture. Throughout the story Alice is the prime object of attention; the energy that is released revolves around her. If only by virtue of the way she is viewed by the male characters, Alice represents seduction, defined for our purposes as the use of one's wiles to obtain a desired end. Men and women both engage in seduction—but only on desert islands, of course. Here in the civilized world we helping professionals expect female clients to blink their eyes and shift in their seats; we expect male clients to put their hands on their hips and strike Brando-like poses. But we ourselves would never stoop so low!

Charlie's behavior seems outrageous to most readers, as it does to Alice. Note, though, that Charlie does not pull a gun on Alice and say,“ If you don't have sex with me I'm going to blow your brains out.” Rather, he operates on the time-honored principle of quid pro quo— something for something. And he does in fact fulfill his end of the bargain. He could, after all, walk off saying,“ Take me to the Better Business Bureau. See you in Small Claims Court.” By specifying his terms and living up to them, Charlie acts within the requirements of business ethics. Most of us, however strongly motivated to help people, would not go to work if we were not paid. To that extent we are like Charlie. What we find objectionable about him is his extension of business ethics to sexual relationships, which we think of as being governed by mutual affection and desire. By making sex part of a bargain, Charlie engages in an exercise of power. What he does overtly often occurs in subtler forms in the various contexts of everyday life, particularly the work environment.

Donald's absorption in productive activity can be seen as an extreme form of task-orientation. He might be a useful person to employ to do certain types of jobs. But his complete indifference to everything going on around him also bespeaks his self-interest. Donald evaluates Alice's request strictly in terms of how it affects his interest as he defines it (which differs from the way Charlie defines his interest).“ What's in it for me?” he asks himself. If there is nothing in it for him, then he doesn't care to get involved. He would rather just keep on“ doing his own thing.” We are acting like Donald when we don't stop to help someone whose car is stalled at the side of the road.

Bob is perhaps the most unsympathetic character of the lot. In his response to Alice's plight he shows himself to be rigid, narrow-minded, judgmental, unsupportive, unloving. He makes no allowance for extenuating circumstances or for his own role in motivating Alice's actions. In the same extreme, overdrawn way that each of the other characters symbolizes a particular attitude or orientation, Bob stands for morality. Many of us would think of him as moralistic rather than moral. We, in his place, would be more understanding. If we didn't like the sight of Alice“ going to the sand” with Charlie on the opposite shore, we would just turn the other way and watch the sunset. Or would we? In any case, before we condemn Bob for his intolerance of infidelity, we should consider whether there are not some other issues that we would refuse to negotiate. Almost everyone has had occasion to say,“ I don't care what anybody else does; I just won't go along with that.” Unfortunately, we tend to label as immoral those who compromise on our high-priority issues, and to label as moralistic those who refuse to make the same compromises we do. We can well imagine situations in which Bob's refusal to compromise his principles, like Donald's concentration and dedication, would be regarded as laudable.

As for Ernie, we may speculate on the sincerity with which he says,“ I love you,” to a woman he doesn't even know. If Donald is like the person who drives right past someone who is stranded and waving for help, Ernie is like the driver who does stop—if the person at the side of the road looks like a movie idol. Who among us has never felt like picking up an attractive hitchhiker? When we do that, we are, like Ernie, seizing an opportunity to take advantage of someone else's vulnerability.

These characters may seem unappealing, but it is less easy to condemn them once we have taken a good look in the mirror. The currents of sexual energy which they dramatize are potentially present, in varying degrees of intensity, whenever a client walks into a helping professional's office. They walk in with the client, and they sit behind the desk with the therapist. Moreover, even after two decades of feminist consciousness-raising, they all too often take the stereotypically sexist forms illustrated in our story.

As helping professionals we cannot eliminate these dynamics. But we can become more conscious of them. We can more readily tell when we are seducing or being seduced, when we are exercising power or being subjected to its exercise, when we or our clients are taking advantage of opportunities or acting out of self-interest. Informed by this awareness, we can make choices about what is moral and what is moralistic and in so doing become better able to teach others to make such choices.

As an aid in this learning process, the chapters that follow will explore the five dimensions of sexuality we have highlighted—seduction, power, opportunity, self-interest, morality—as they apply to interpersonal relationships in the helping professions. The five categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, Charlie's behavior illustrates“ opportunity” and“ self-interest” as much as it does“ power.” Similar overlaps inevitably occur in the interview reports and case studies cited throughout this book. Nonetheless, the chapter divisions provide a convenient focus for clarifying the salient issues. In identifying these, our purpose is to get beyond conventional, unthinking habits of response and to consider more useful ways to handle troublesome situations on the job. The solutions that elude us in the heat of day-to-day work may be the very ones that can serve as rafts for negotiating safely the shark-infested waters of client-therapist as well as peer relationships in the human services.

2

Seduction

In our desert island fable, seduction appears in the person of Alice, who unwittingly arouses passions ranging from lust to moral indignation in the men around her. But what if Alice were not the self-respecting woman and devoted fiancée that she has been depicted to be? Let us imagine her instead as a young woman who had been referred to a social worker by her welfare caseworker because of her inability to hold a job. Although there is some suspicion of a drug or alcohol problem, no evidence of substance abuse emerges during her first several visits to the social worker. The woman does, on the other hand, allude to numerous personal problems both in her weekly therapy sessions and in frequent after-hours calls to a crisis line.

The social worker she is seeing is Larry N., who is in his twenties. Larry is intelligent and conscientious, but has been on the job for less than six months. He observes that his client is withdrawn and defensive. As the weeks go by she begins to open up, but when confronted with issues that she does not want to discuss she either retreats to tears and confused utterances or flirts. She begins by moving her eyes and establishing eye contact, then rearranges herself so as to expose more of her breasts or her legs. Thinking that this behavior is deliberate Larry confronts her about it. She denies any conscious intent, explaining that“ it just happens” when she feels defensive. She admits that when people have their attention drawn from her face to some other part of her body, they tend to lose track of the conversation and (in Larry's paraphrase)“ everything goes to hell in a handbasket.”

Larry, worried that he may be losing his objectivity concerning this woman, consults with his supervisor, who advises him to be alert for the escalation of physical overtures into verbal ones. Sure enough, at his next session with this client, she says,“ You know, you've really been able to help me a lot in just a short time. Your life seems squared away; you don't have problems like I do. You seem so confident in everything you do.” She then tells him that she finds him physically attractive and would like to make love with him.

Lacking any experience in handling such a situation, Larry manages to state feebly that the professional relationship does not allow for what she is suggesting. Neither he nor she pursues the issue any further. But Larry does have some other thoughts about it.“ She's God's gift to counselors,” he silently exclaims. He runs through his mind the possibility of taking up her offer.“ If you want something on the side,“ he tells himself,“ here's your prime opportunity.“ But he realizes that if he acted on this fantasy, it could mean the end of his career and possibly the end of his marriage. He goes back to his supervisor, who explores with him his susceptibility to flattery from a client. (“I have to admit,” he says in retrospect,“ it was a big blowup for my ego.”) He and his supervisor also review whether the client has made enough progress with him to justify continuing the therapy. They decide to continue the sessions, but with stricter guidelines, including the elimination of after-hours calls and the insistence on a clear agenda for each session.

This textbook case of seduction in the client-therapist relationship highlights several patterns that will appear frequently in our accounts. First, the client's behavior is not thought out in advance. Rather, it appears as an unconscious mechanism aimed at relieving the pressure of having to deal with difficult personal issues. The client's approach is a characteristic one:“ You Tarzan, me Jane.” For his part, the therapist is only too happy to imagine himself as Tarzan. There are two people here who are feeling and contributing to the sexual energy being generated.

The magnitude of that energy is considerable. When Larry was interviewed months after this encounter, he still felt uncomfortable about it. As he recounted the incident, he shifted in his chair. So did the interviewer, who sat up, suddenly alert, at the mention of an explicit sexual offer. With so much body language evident upon mere recollection, one can imagine the intensity in the air when it actually happened.

Alice appears in other guises as well. She shows up at a seminar in a university classroom as an exceptionally beautiful student wearing a see-through blouse. As seen through the eyes of the 35-year-old professor, Richard J., this student comes to the seminar each week with“ all but bare breasts.” There is no inadvertence about this; it is“ a flagrant display, with walk, eye play, and verbal style to go with it.“ Richard can only guess at her motives, since neither he nor she makes any direct ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Sexual Dilemmas for the Helping Professional
• Broad Acclaim for the First Edition
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Troubled Waters
• 2 Seduction
• 3 Power
• 4 Opportunity
• 5 Self-interest
• 6 Morality
• 7 The Question of Personal Regard
• 8 Like Client, Like Clinician
• 9 Relationships Among Staff Members
• 10 Liabilities
• 11 Guidelines
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS