Am I Being Friendly Yet: Thoughts On Working A Warmline

The premise of a friendship line is basically this: A patient and compassionate consumer fields calls from other mental health consumers, or those troubled, lonely, or in need of a friend. This peer-to-peer relationship is hopefully therapeutic to the caller, and perhaps also to the person answering the call, but in the way self-help groups are therapeutic, and not in the way of a professional counselor-to-patient relationship. Crisis calls are referred to a local Hotline manned by professional counselors. The idea behind a Friendship Line, or warm line, is not to counsel or advise, but to empathize, relate, and share one’s experience, strength and hope.

All of which, of course, is easier said than done. As one of the people who answer the Empowerment Center Friendship Line, I am repeatedly faced with the awareness of my own foibles and weaknesses, of just how many buttons I still have, waiting to be pushed.
There are certain callers who, in their pain and neediness, and often, wanton anger (mad-ness), take and take and push the limits of my personal and work-related boundaries, so that I plummet from the heights of composure, kindness and ‘professionalism’, into resentment, into my own dis-ease. On a hard day, my first thought on returning home, is which of my support people I can call, to get myself right again.

Which brings me to a recent question I am asking myself, that is, at what point does a friend, a true friend, the kind who might enjoy answering a “friendship line’, switch from compassionate and empathetic listener, nodding and uh-huh-ing through litany after litany of complaints, gripes and whining, take a harder tack, and practice, as they say, ‘tough-love’, to confront the caller’s run-amok self-pity, negativism and narcissism, to go from passive listener, to calling a spade a spade? And if I do this, does this mean that I have over-stepped my boundaries as a peer, and not professional, counselor, or worse, that I am being un-friendly?

Well, I don’t think so, but as a ‘nice-guy’ and a bit of a people-pleaser, I am learning that perhaps practicing tough love with some of our callers is the right and moral thing to do. I recently began working the Friendship Line again, after an 18-month or-so absence, and was somewhat alarmed to find a few of our repeat callers still stuck in their anger and negativism, still run-aground by and with the sense of their own impotence. The path away from impotence requires generous doses of empowerment, and my goals, and my concern is, at-least, two-sided: it stems from an interest in what’s best for the emotional well being of the caller, as well as my own.
And I have found, to my relief, that, even though a chronic caller might be temporarily thrown by my new, more confrontational stance, that they often return after having some simmer-down time. The key is to remind them that I do, actually, still care, and to take them to task, when I do I do take them to task, as kindly as possible, to the best of my ability. The optimum result of this is that both myself, and the caller, are allowed to feel good about their inter-relationship, and not emotionally run-over, harboring a resentment that their friendship has been abused.