Let's face it, the main reason why we wanted to be social workers was for the very fact that we want to be able to help others. The part about empowering persons and facilitating change only came later once we started our social work education. We had experiences where we found that friends and people could depend on us for help, and we decided that social work was probably the best job which suited this ability and skill we have.
Difficulties, however, arise when we realised that what we defined as helping others, is actually different from how social work officially defines help. There is that bit about "client self-determination" that we have to consider. To what extent is the help in line with what our client needs, and are we providing help that would make our clients dependent on us for future survival. In the context of caring for a family member or friend, we can provide unconditional support over many years, but this might not useful within a professional social work context, where our interventions have to strike a balance between helping enough to engage our clients, and not helping too much that our clients become overly dependent on us to resolve their problems.
I was enjoying my usual Sunday game of Floorball, and was preparing to leave the courts in Kallang area, when I saw a fellow floorballer (you might want to google floorball if you are not sure what this sport is about) leaving the area.
Thinking of wanting to do some good, I called out to him and found out that since he was going to the MRT train station, I could give him a lift.
What I didn't realise however, was how different the area now was, with the spanking new Sports Hub being recently opened and all. I managed to get myself lost in a sequence of multiple roundabouts, and almost entered the expressway.
I was rather apologetic to the guy, and he was really nice about it. After some discussion i realised that the station was actually nearer to the floorball court area than I previously though, a u turn and another sequence of roundabouts later, we finally found a place that he could alight. Unfortunately he still had to walk some distance to the station.
He was really nice about it, thanked me and got on his way. As I sat in my car, partly due to my strained thighs, but mostly to reflect on what happened, I thought a bit of some "life lessons" I could draw from this incident:
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.
Continue reading "Reflection Paper: The Narrative Metaphor, Externalising Conversations" »
Discussed by Insoo Kim Berg (1994), social workers frequently come across different client positions which would affect how they would go about in terms of engaging their clients towards collaborated goal setting. Especially in settings where clients are referred by a third party, it is easy for the social worker to dismiss a client as unmotivated, or uncooperative. However thinking about the different positions our clients approach us in would assist in developing more empathy as to why clients may be reluctant to see us, and also provides some ideas about the focus of our interventions.
Adapted from Berg (1994: 24 - 25)
1. Pay attention to anger and hostility since these emotions can alert worker to a potentially dangerous situation
2. If it is known that client has been hostile to other workers, find out what has been helpful or not helpful to diffuse such anger in the past. As much as it is helpful to know what to do, it is also helpful to know what NOT to do
3. If someone is paranoid or suspicious, do not argue with her; agreeing with how she sees things does not mean that you support the perception.
4. Normalise client's anger and hostility towards you. Allow her to vent her anger and frustration for a while.
5. Don't rush to defend yourself, your profession, agency, department, etc; but attend to her complaints
6. Distance yourself from the target of her anger. It can be a person, organisation, or way of behaving.
7. Give person space to move around and allow him to leave the room or walk out.
8. Affirm and reframe his anger as a method of coping or a way of addressing a need (e.g. the need to protect his family's privacy, in the case of a child protection case).
9. Explore how you would be able to work in a manner that is useful with the client, to gently move into a collaborative relationship.
10. Do not feel compelled to stay in a potentialy violent situation. Allow yourself easy access to an exit.
Source
Berg, I. K. (1994). Family Based Services : A Solution-Focused Approach. Norton
As Social Workers working directly with individuals and groups who are vulnerable, we frequently come up with several hypotheses and theories to describe and label certain behaviours common to a group of persons. These labels may be construed according to common groupings of race, gender, age, or more specific labels such as “children of incarcerated parents”, “victims of spousal abuse”, “Youth at risk”, “Children with Autism”, and so on. It is interesting to note that oftentimes these labels intersect and overlap with each other, and one would question whether we are really able to predict and understand our client’s behaviour through the generalizations that we make in society today.
How conversations with my mother play out:
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