Custody Evaluation: The Search for a New Metric of Help-Giving Success

I had, and still am having, a difficult time trying to convince my dad about my degree of choice. As an engineer himself, my dad believes strongly in the superiority of reading a professional degree because it equips one with specialized skills that non-professionals do not have, and will hence be willing (or forced) to pay for. Though psychology and social work are actually professional degrees, my dad cannot seem to wrap his head around why they are. He definitely belongs to the group mentioned in my About Me page who believes that help-giving is so intuitive and ingrained in daily life that it surely does not need to be taught at the university level. I would concede that in some ways, my dad is right – help-giving is an accessible skill that many, if not most people possess. However, these four-and-a-half years spent actually learning about “professional” help-giving has proved to me that the intuitive nature of help-giving can often both a blessing and curse. In fact, I find that some of the most important lessons I’ve learnt regarding help-giving have required the confrontation and unlearning of everyday, intuitive notions of help that I had unknowingly internalized whilst growing up.

The process of unravelling one such notion started during my recent internship with *, over the course of 2018’s summer. * is a VWO that offers a wide range of psychological services for the community. As an intern in the Psychological Services Department, I was exposed to the provision of Custody Evaluation (CE) services, where psychologists are sanctioned by the court to conduct a range of assessments to advise decisions in child custody proceedings for divorce cases. The work centers largely around fact-finding, observation and cross-checking through interviews conducted with each parent – in order to synthesise an assessment of their parenting capabilities and ability to provide a safe and healthy environment for the child’s development.

When I first learnt about the function of CE services, themes such as the prioritization of the child’s interests and wellbeing really resonated with me. Unfortunately, my experiences over the course of the first month deviated wildly from my expectations. I was aware that I often felt drained and unfulfilled after a day of CE cases, but had difficulty putting my finger on the reasons why. Yet the presence of these feelings was very disconcerting. They stood in stark contrast to my prior positive help-giving experiences, and perhaps more disturbingly, contradicted with my self-image as a help-giver who loved and felt most alive in the process of helping. In my attempts to process and make sense of my experiences in CE, I often resorted to blogging on my personal site. The following excerpt of my personal blog illustrates my inner tension poignantly.

During my internship in *, I often wrote similar posts as in effort to better understand the difficulties I was facing in conducting CE. As I revisit this blog post presently, I realize that it seems to strangely illuminate the undercurrents of my struggles. On multiple occasions in the post, I notice that I fail to recognize my actions in CE as “help” provision – evident in my inability to answer the question of whether “I was truly a help to X and her family”, and the difficulty I faced in defining “the “help” in the help I am supposedly giving”.
This tension between my actions and my implicit notions of “successful” help-giving seems to translate to the perception that my actions in CE were futile. This is evident in parts of my post where I lamented that I was “lying to myself”, and pose questions such as “Is help still meaningful”.

There was a pervasive sentiment of purposelessness in my blog post as I did not perceive the help I was providing in CE to be “successful”. When devoid of meaning, the actions became laborious and gradually led to disillusionment and tiredness. Yet, as I probe deeper about my personal conceptualization of “successful” help, I realize, in the process of drafting this reflection piece, that I have difficulty composing an immediate response. In fact, my notion of successful help-giving seems to be largely implicit – while the presence of an inner metric of success is evident, I cannot quite word it.

Since I believed my current metric of help-giving “success” to be implicit, it is likely to have existed even before I even started learning about professional help-giving. Therefore, I decided to examine situations before the start of my undergraduate career where I’ve been made to discuss my passion for help-giving – such as my undergraduate scholarship applications.

This is an excerpt of the personal statement I submitted for my NCSS scholarship application. The highlights and annotations are made as part of the current reflection exercise. In both experiences that I raised as anchors for my personal statement, I find it interesting that the same theme emerges –for me, the hallmark of a meaningful help-giving experience seems to be largely contingent on the happiness of my helpee.

A re-examination of my slightly embarrassing personal statement reveals traces of the implicit metric I have used to evaluate my help-giving attempts – whether my helpee has emerged from my help-provision feeling happier about him or herself, or his or her predicament. Since these notions were present even before I ever gave help-giving critical thought, it is slightly worrying that I failed to recognize it explicitly during my internship with *, and in fact, throughout these four-and-a-half of undergraduate education. Still, the more troubling issue lies in the problematic nature of this very instinctive conceptualization, especially when considered in light of my experience with providing CE services.

If the happiness of my client indeed forms my metric of “successful” helping, I am doomed to fall short of my standards in CE service provision due to its very nature. Since CE services are only requested by the court upon parents’ contradictory preferences for child custody arrangements, any recommendation proposed by the psychologist will be necessarily be met with disapproval from either or both parents. Therefore, regardless of the quality of help rendered, parents might still perceive the psychologist as an oppositional figure standing between themselves and their children, leading to inevitable unhappiness on their part. Yet, I would hesitate to shortchange the importance of the work that psychologists do for these families just because of this reality. Very evidently then, this current metric proves to be flawed.

Towards a New Metric of “Success” in Help Provision

Inherent in the “unlearning” of a flawed concept lies the re-learning of a right one. Although I do not believe there is one “right” metric against which all help-givers should judge their help provision against, I hope to spend the rest of my post exploring a personal metric that I would be comfortable owning.

Initially, I faced difficulty in finding a good starting point. Upon reviewing the psychology and social work modules that I have read across these four-and-a-half years, I realize that many focus on the “how(s)” of helping (i.e. helping skills, therapy modalities), but few discuss the outcomes of help (i.e. what does successful or unsuccessful help look like). Therefore, I turned instead to literature, and found counselling texts rather helpful in providing direction. Particularly, I referred to a renowned counselling book, “The Skilled Helper”, written by Professor Gerard Egan, a prominent psychologist and researcher in the field of counselling. The book was first introduced to me as the primary text in SW2105 Values and Skills of Helping Relationships, a social work core-module I read under Senior Lecturer Dr. Alexander Lee.

In his book, Egan spends the first chapter expounding on the ingredients of successful helping before spending the rest of the chapters on the elaboration of core helping skills. I found this chapter to be very helpful in guiding my thought process. The following excerpt of “The Skilled Helper” (p.8, 9) is critical in shaping my conceptualization of a possible new metric of “successful” help.

In this reflection exercise, I highlight portions that I find relevant to the discussion at hand, and annotate my questions next to Egan’s text. Though the heading suggests three goals of helping, I am only focusing on the first since the subsequent goals are elaborations of the first.

Egan’s perceives the main goal of helping to be “life-enhancing outcomes for the client”, where clients are empowered to develop and capitalize on their own resources and opportunities in effort to manage their problem situations. In comparing Egan’s conceptualization with my previous implicit metric, I realize that the main difference is that we base “success” on different aspects of the client – while I focused on my client’s subjective emotions, Egan pays attention to the (comparatively) objective life circumstances of the client. In some ways, I now agree that a more objective metric might prove useful, since the alleviation of problem situations is ultimately core to the work that helping professionals are called to do.

However, I do have two questions (annotated in red) regarding Egan’s conceptualization. The first is close to my heart because of the struggles I faced in CE. As exemplified in my CE experience, some clients may not welcome the “life-enhancing outcomes”  that helping professionals deem to be good for them. More broadly, who decides what constitutes a life-enhancing outcome for a particular client? This reaches the discussion of client self-determination and its limits (which would require a separate discussion of its own), but I believe these are important considerations in adopting “life-enhancing outcomes for the client” as a metric. Second, from my reading of the chapter, Egan seems to strongly advocate for client empowerment, as seen in his repeated calls for clients to “become agents of change in their own lives”. Thus, he raised that the success of a helper is dependent on “the degree to which their clients… see the need to manage specific problem situations and develop specific unused resources and opportunities more effectively” (green highlights). Here, my question is largely practical in nature – it concerns the viability of measuring the degree to which clients “see the need”, since this is oftentimes not immediately apparent.

In sum, I believe that a good starting place for my new metric of successful help-giving could be – to evaluate whether my clients’ lives are enhanced through their own stewardship, with facilitation and guidance on my part as a helping professional. However, there is definitely room for further refinement of this preliminary metric. I trust that as I begin my journey as a helping professional, there will be experiences and teachable moments that might provide the answers to the questions I have raised, or even spark further thought about my personal metric, and notions of help-giving in general.