When reading about externalising conversations, I experienced a profound shift in the way I look at problems. As a social worker, I had been trained to somewhat diagnose client’s problems and hypothesising the various ways that these problems could have possibly manifested. A common habit when adopting this way of looking at things is the tendency to look at the problem as inherent in the client, either in individual character traits, or in patterns within the family system. It is a great irony to me, when as helping professionals, we work towards reducing the impact of the problem on our clients, but we insinuate that the problem and the person are one of the same, an action that may further increase the influence of the problem with our clients. We do this through the language we use with our clients, and the beliefs we have about their relationship with these problems.
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