The Power of Helping
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else – Booker T. Washington
“Here to Help.” The simple phrase is the motto and central theme of the QCFE. We chose this motto because it epitomizes our purpose and summarizes our organizational goal. Our various partners, certified therapists, related recovery groups, advisors, experts and friends are all, fundamentally, here to help. Although helping can sometimes be challenging, it is always beneficial to all those involved in the process. For clinical therapists, human service professionals and recovery supports the service they provide is perhaps unsurprisingly a source of good feeling—a form of payment which is a critical component in human happiness.
One of the subtler benefits is who we become by helping others. As we help, we are, relative to our sincerity and earnestness, transformed. This transformation often begins with the feeling mentioned earlier, but can extend to become knowledge, skill, purpose and even legacy. For example: the very process of engaging the issue of gambling disorder, from increasing awareness to providing services and working with clients in crisis can result in increased caring, thinking, studying, brainstorming, researching, learning… And as we exert these efforts we grow—even without the intention to do so.
For those individual who seek our help and who are willing to change the positive growth can mean a new life. A life free from compulsion, free from anxiety, depression and the many other negative consequences that problem gambling can bring to life. The power of helping the person experiencing the fallout of a gambling problem means that you support a process that restores wholeness, health and living again. As the “helper” you get to be part of a process that helps the individual who is struggling become financially, emotionally and socially well again.
Other benefits are less obvious. In dealing with the subject of problem gambling for example, we often mention that the gambler and his or her addiction do not live in a vacuum. Rather, with varying expression, each personal gambling problem affects not only the person, but also the family of the person, the community they reside in, the world they constitute. And so, when we help the individual our help ripples outward.
Revisiting both the hidden and overt benefits it becomes obvious that we owe gratitude to those we have helped. Therefore, I would like to thank all of the individuals who bring our motto to life each day. To all the QCFE therapists, partners and friends—thank you.