The three telephone counseling programs take over 30,000 calls per year, and some of those calls are bound to be difficult. What makes a call difficult? A high intensity crisis, a caller who is very dependent or helpless, a caller whose problems are too close to our own, a caller who needs services from a different type of agency?
Challenging calls (deeds) are sometimes referred to as difficult callers (do-ers). There’s no denying that, when working with the public, there are bound to be some “customers” who are “difficult.” But crisis centers strive to understand and assist callers who may have problems which test the usual helping responses that we are trained to offer. Sometimes these callers are referred to as repeat callers, consistent callers, chronic callers, or line abusers.
As one experienced staff member stated, “The difficult part of chronicity, is trying to determine if the caller has some form of mental illness and whether frequent contacts with the Center help to keep him or her stabilized, or, if the caller is using us as a “stop-gap” measure instead of getting the therapy or help he or she really needs…Our challenge is to “determine if the repetitive call is productive or harmful to the caller.”
It is important that we as skilled helpers assume the burden of appropriate helping with an “untrained caller.” The caller may have no idea that he or she is inappropriate or mismatched to our services. He or she may have little success with social skills and discernment and is doing the best he or she can when deciding to call the center. We hope that people are able to function as well as possible in the “real world” but when they cannot, we also cannot expect them to screen and refer themselves to more appropriate agencies or helpers. That is part of the thrill of serving a crisis line: one never knows who or what type of problem will be at the end of the line! It is important that we respect the caller, the “do-er”, even if we are struggling with the way he or she uses or abuses (the deed) the line.
We are urged to provide the same core conditions of helping to each and every caller, no matter how he or she “makes us feel”. Challenging callers arouse our feelings of frustration, irritation, anger, revulsion, inadequate, confused, abused and exhausted. Our challenge (or responsibility) is to extend unconditional positive regard, warmth, empathy, and congruence to each caller, even when we have these types of feelings during the call.
