The Recovery Dynamo: Illustrating the Cycles of Help
By John Franz Strengthening the quality and consistency of help in modern communities is a challenge. Although true help occurs through reciprocal relationships, helpers are now usually paid for their time and are generally strangers to those who seek or are referred for assistance. Frequently there are economic, cultural, and power differentials between the participants.
Perhaps because of these differences, our teaching and writing about help tends to be split. Mostly we talk about help from the perspective of help-givers. We describe techniques for effective assistance, indicators of good outcomes, and the values underlying good practice. Recently, however, the recovery movement has begun to eloquently express the other side of the relationship by telling stories about what it means and how it feels to experience growth and change in the face of deep and complex needs.
The Recovery Dynamo is an attempt to blend these two perspectives by illustrating:
- The phases of the helping relationship;
- The benefit or feeling that a person or family might experience in each phase;
- The character or focus of the relationship during each phase; and
- The outputs generated at each phase and the outcomes produced by the entire cycle.
The engagement phase should produce a sense of being understood and generate sufficient trust to move to the planning stage. Planning together should result in a feeling of being supported and engender openness to cooperative problem solving during implementation . Implementing a shared action plan should first of all deliver the outcome of better formal and informal assistance. In addition, learning new ways to solve problems should also help the participants feel that they have more opportunities for growth and provide the motivation to enter into a transitional phase. Transition can either be to a deeper cycle of help in the context of the existing relationship or to increased independence and the development or expansion of naturally occurring relationships. Moving through either type of transition should generate a sense of empowerment and support the participants' emerging process of recovery. 
The nature of the combined relationship at the engagement phase is one of shared meaning-making as mutual understanding grows. The second phase introduces the component of social support as the participants agree to work together. Next the relationship incorporates mutual learning as the participants gain skills and insights. The transitional phase is characterized by increased efficacy as the participants acquire more confidence in themselves and one another.
Together these four phases constitute the dynamo of positive reinforcement illustrated in the diagram above.* The momentum generated by moving through repeated cycles of these phases helps produce both positive outcomes (from the helper's perspective) and recovery (from the participant's point of view). However, the most significant component of the dynamo is hope: the offered hope in the hearts of those facilitating the relationship reaching out to and joining with the guarded hope in the hearts of those being invited into the relationship.
* In developing this construct, I'm indebted to Patricia Miles, who was the first to define the four phases of help; to Janet Walker who combined the inputs and outputs of the helping process in a logic model for strength-based practice; and to Barbara Friesen who has begun the task of building a bridge between our practice models and the recovery movement.
John Franz is a national human services consultant from Madison, Wisconsin who has been active in the development of strength-based systems of care for many years. He can be reached at paperboat@tds.net , and some of his material can be viewed at his website, www.paperboat.com .
As always, we look forward to hearing from you!
Your thoughts…
Comments:
 I agree with most comments that John Franz has
created a clear and compelling model for
understanding the nature of help giving/getting in
a mental health context. In applying this to kids
and in understanding the subtleties of recovery in
children and adolescence, I feel it may need some
refinement. When dealing with younger people we
are often enabling the re-establishment of a
normative developmental process that is generated
from within the child with little or know cogitive
awareness or use of verbal tools to foster the
process. So the process of engagement for youth
may need to be coupled with an intrensic
develpmental force in a child creating a new
element in the diagram.
In response to the comment regarding a
practitioner's need to have clients "like their
(therapists) social workers" I would quickly respond
that with kids you are dead in the water if you fail
to engage them on their own terms and in a way
that is synchronous with their state of development.
One may have all the knowledge in the world and
have worked with hundreds of kids, but if you think
you can apply what you have learned to a particular
kid in a formularic way (as per many EBP's) you
don't have the kid for a client as they quickly write
you off. Engagement and empowerment is
everything when working with this age group. Posted Sunday, September 11, 2005 by Charley Huffine MD, Seattle at 08:26 AM
Is the practitioner ashamed of his expertise? Is he overly concerned about what the client thinks of him? Social workers are able to help clients because they have seen hundreds of similar cases. They are able to naturally join with the client and use CBT techniques to liberate him from a muddled state by pointing out strengths. Clients find hope when they believe the worker has the power to help. The recovery movement is simply a manifestation of people becoming empowered to help themselves. Posted Thursday, September 1, 2005 by Arnold W. Hammari, Idaho LCSW at 06:55 AM
Sometimes it is the sense of hope and shared meaningfulness that is the key missing component when trying to understand why families are unable or unwilling to engage. True recovery and problem-solving is hard to achieve without them. I really like this concept of the Recovery Dynamo. The diagram illustrates the importance of a strong working alliance between the professional and consumer/family. It is a much more humane process that allows mutual understanding and trust to grow.
Posted Saturday, August 27, 2005 at 05:09 PM
That's a great idea-- fusing this humane perspective with research evidence. I believe there's quite a bit to substantiate several of the links as mentioned by the last person-- but also where the links are not so well examined, eg the idea that engagement is about shared meaning making is a new take on that as far as I knos, then it points to where more work on fleshing out the model could be undertaken. Posted Monday, July 25, 2005 at 09:57 AM
I really like this model, too. But given the emphasis on Evidence-Based Practice these days, it would be REALLY useful if the ideas in the dynamo could be connected to research evidence. For example, there is some evidence that hope and optimism promote better problem-solving, that participation in decision-making increases involvement, etc. Please take this and go farther with it. Posted Saturday, July 23, 2005 at 11:25 AM
How could you not like an article that has key processes: empowerment, trust, openness, learning, all swinging around the point "hope." Also the ideas are expressed in a simple, straightforward way. I think this is going to be an extremely useful tool for teaching in the helping professions. Posted Thursday, July 21, 2005 at 12:29 PM
I also really like this model-- and I like the word "humane" as applied to it. All the time we hear about the importance of "relationship" but this really provides some insight into how relationship can be helpful and has important implications about how to create the kinds of relationships that will actually be helpful. The emphasis on mutuality is also important-- mutual understanding implies a sort of reciprocity that avoids bot the pitfalls of excessive professional control of the "relationship" as well as the other extreme when the family is in charge but may not be receiving the benefit of what the professional has to offer. Posted Thursday, July 21, 2005 at 09:12 AM
I love this model. It is humane! How appropriate to the theme of recovery that the whole thing should pivot around hope. Thank you!! Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005 at 08:44 AM
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