THE USE OF SELF IN SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

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THE USE OF SELF IN SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

In various ways, social work refers to the provision of a relationship that functions to facilitate service-users in negotiation or handling of community, family, or personal conflicts, tensions, or transitions (Oxhandler et al. 2015). According to the International Federation of Social Workers and International Association of Schools of Social Work, the social work profession encourages social change, solving of problems in human relationships as well as the liberation and empowerment of people to better their wellbeing (Kaushik 2017).  Employing social systems and human behavior theories, social work intercedes at the point where people interact with their surroundings. Thus, the principles of social justice and human rights are central to social work. Evidently, central to social work practice is the “use of self.” The “use of self” phrase in social work has often entrapped me with curiosity and confusion. Studies about social work practice indicate that social workers themselves are tools of the profession. The “use of self,” according to the Licensed Independent Clinical Social Workers (LISCW) is defined as “sharing myself with my clients through skillful self-disclosure and empathy and authentically bringing all I’m made of into the therapeutic relationship for use as a therapeutic tool” (Trevithick 2018, p. 1842). From this definition, the “use of self” implies the rational and efficient use of skills, values, and knowledge of the social work profession to better the welfare of the client - a group, community, individual, or society. Thus, the “use of self” notion forms the base of therapeutic work. Gordon and Dunworth (2016) reason that the use of self in social work is aimed at engaging with questions regarding how we experience our own selves in all that we do with our clients, how our disturbing and complex experiences can be verbalised, represented, and put in use in the client-worker context relationships that are fundamental to practice. In this paper, I critically analyse my understanding of the use of self and explain how I may demonstrate appropriate employment of self in helping process to show core ethics and social work.

The use of self is a fundamental foundation to best practice in the social work profession. The use of self has significance to all social workers within the setting in which they practice. Equally, it is critical to the growth and survival of the profession. Personally, I entered the profession out of the desired to assist people in need and contribute to societal betterment. Like many, I was drawn to this line of work wherein I could assist clients surmount challenges and hardships that life brings. From experience, I have come to the knowledge that the use of self is what partly separates social workers from other professions.

The “self” connotes the subject of a person’s individual experience of phenomena: emotions, thoughts, and perception (Feize 2018). Self, in phenomenology, is conceived as what experiences the self. The self-concept signifies the image that we ourselves have. This image, according to Sutton (2016), develops in several ways, but is specifically influenced by our interactions with people who are important to our lives. Self-concept is our image or perception of our uniqueness and abilities. Marlowe et al. (2015) add that a self-notion is an assortment of beliefs regarding an individual’s uniqueness, nature, and typical behavior. An individual’s self-concept is also the mental picture of themselves since it is an assortment of self-perceptions (Trevithick 2018). Among the ways that I demonstrate the self-concept is through beliefs like “I’m clever,” “I’m hardworking”, or “I’m pretty.” Thus, the individual self comprises of personality traits and attributes that differentiate us from other people.

Self is employed in various professions and contexts of our daily lives. The use of self in social work practice refers to a combination of values, skills, and knowledge in social work profession and education with aspects of an individual’s personal self, including belief systems, personality traits, cultural heritage, and life experiences (Froggett, Ramvi & Davies 2015). In my view, the use of self helps social workers to strive for genuineness and authenticity with the clients they serve, while simultaneously honouring the ethics and values that they so highly cherish in social work practice. Social work educators and practitioners assert the following regarding the use of self: owing to the fact that social work professions, like social work, deal with subtle facets of human behaviours, modalities’ intangibility dimension and results of interventions have a dominant presence (Kaushik 2017). From this assertion, I have lived knowing that social workers usually look for gestures, indications, or subtle cues in our clients’ behaviours to be able to diagnose the problem areas and proceed to design interventions. The indicators of failures and successes of actions and activities, too, are not readily perceptible and thus are components of the concept of “use of self.” However, against this knowledge, Marlowe et al. (2015) contend that a social worker should not just listen to their clients and then proceed to prescribe some social-psychological medication despite the fact that most clients ask for same. According to Gordon and Dunworth (2016), a social worker should instead endevour to assist a client, community, or group to better their understanding of themselves and relationships with other people and tap their clients’ individual community resources in solving individual challenges (Blakemore & Agllias 2019). The social worker functions on the basis that people have the ego power and strength to solve their individual challenges when they really share them with other.

Further, I initially thought that the use of self is a talent. However, through study and practice, I have gotten to understand that the use of self is a skill. According to Liechty (2018), the “conscious use of self” entails the skill of intentionally and purposefully using capacity and motivation to communicate in manners that facilitate change and this implies that the use of self is not a talent but a skill. Feize (2018) expands the meaning of conscious use of self” by stating that it is the practice of combining skills, values, and knowledge in social work education with one’s personal self like belief systems, personality traits, cultural heritage, and life experiences.

Self manifests itself in a number of ways, a thing that I never knew. From the definitions, it is evident that there is a personal self. As a result of the need to qualify “self” as “personal,” there exists a “professional self” as well. During the course of my study, I have also come across the “authentic self.” A question arises: what does “authentic self” mean? As a logical corollary, Anderson (2016) suggests that there is also the “unauthentic self.” These led me to the conclusion that despite having only one “self,” we have several “selves” or many shades of “self” residing in a single body. Therefore, Blakemore and Agllias (2019) propounds that to properly integrate social skills into the authentic self, functioning of some domains like relational dynamics, belief systems, and personality is crucial. Therefore, to understand the self-notion, these domains should further be probed.

Evidently, the use of self is influenced by various domains. First is personality. According to Bogo (2017), a social worker’s personality trait has a more powerful influence upon satisfaction of clients than the social worker’s mastery skills and theoretical orientation. Whereas I used to believe that training is what equips one with social work skills and knowledge, the above assertion implies that showing one’s “real self” during social work interventions is a powerful and primary therapeutic instrument and training in the field of social work comes secondarily (Bartkeviciene 2014). This argument brings me to a belief that there could be a “false self” that some people employ in social work practice. For instance, I have interacted with many social workers who exhibited a great theoretical understanding of social work but could not sufficiently provide social work services to clients that we were serving. They masked their “real self” with their personality traits, sometimes reasoning that they did not have the ability to show compassion to clients because they are sanguine.  With time, I have gotten to believe that there could be a “real self” and a “false self” in the delivery of social work services.  Despite being fundamental to social work practice, the mastery of skills and theoretical orientation by social workers seems to have the least impact upon clients’ satisfaction compared to how social workers employ their personality traits and authenticity as therapeutic tools (Koh & Boisen 2017). This is against my knowledge of the use of self in social work practice, bringing me to the knowledge that I need to reflect “real self” at all the times. Liechty (2018) argues that social workers should take sufficient time to fully comprehend who they are individually, and their identities as professional social workers so that they holistically integrate the two roles. The fundamental aim of social work, according to Hepworth et al. (2017), is to assist clients assist themselves or to assist a community assist itself.

The second domain that influences the use of self in social work practice is belief system. Belief system entails attitudes, ideologies, perceptions, and values (Poorvu 2015). Belief system, the result of our socialization process, constitutes our subjective reality or functional reality. According to Bogo (2017), belief system serves as the lens via which we perceive the world and interpret meanings from social interactions and situations with individuals. Additionally, Samson (2016) contends that “most people are other people.” By this argument, if personality is the outcome of attitudes and beliefs that we acquire during socialization, what “self” gets concealed with ideologies and perceptions?

Relational dynamics is the third aspect of use of self. I have always known that empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence are the necessary and sufficient conditions that form the basis of all helping associations, a view that is supported by (Hepworth et al. 2017). Nonetheless, there are questions on the import of incorporating unconditional positive regard, congruence, and empathy among social work practices.

Hutting et al. (2019) reason that social workers use self in their interventions and interactions with their clients. Communication skills, empathy, and genuine concern are instrumental aspects of employing self by social workers. Nonetheless, our socio-cultural environment and socialization play significant roles in determining our empathy and relational skills (Koh & Boisen 2017). This argument has informed my understanding of the differences exhibited by different social workers in the application of skills and values in social work practice notwithstanding the homogenous training and education that they all receive. I have considered empathy as a crucial function of commonness between social workers’ and their clients’ subjective realities. Barnard (2016) opines that without a shared meaning of subjective realities between social workers and their clients, empathizing with one another becomes hard.

Important in the understanding of the use of self in social work discipline is self-awareness. From studies and practice, I have come to appreciate that it is hard to detach social work and self-awareness. Self-awareness refers to the recognition of our strengths and weaknesses, personality traits, and likes and dislikes (Wang 2012).  As a social worker, I have come to realise that self-awareness is a crucial component when preparing myself to attend to a client’s individual matter, thoughts, and attitudes, among other things, because self-awareness is all about what I have learnt regarding myself with respect to my attitudes, limitations, strengths, attitudes, as well as how my past experiences have affected me. Nonetheless, I did not know that self-awareness can assist a social worker to develop their professional skills. Through studies, I have learned that social workers promote and respect the rights of their clients’ self-determination as well as help clients in their determinations to recognise and clarify their objectives as advanced by Reupert (2017).  Social workers, according to Hutting et al. (2019), may curtail their clients’ rights to self-determination when clients’ potential actions or actions pose serious imminent, foreseeable risk to themselves as well as others. Being an academic discipline and a practice-based profession, social work promotes social development and change, liberalization and empowerment of people, and social cohesion of people (Pallisera et al. 2013). Therefore, principles of human rights, social justice, collective responsibility, as well as respect for diversities are fundamental to social work. McTighe (2011) argues that self, as instrument, entails facilitating trainees’ self-reflection, awareness, and understanding of themselves in their social-cultural contexts along with the application of the knowledge in serving their clients and the community.

The use of self is demonstrated in a number of ways in social work practice. The use of self assists social workers to acknowledge that ethnicity and culture may influence how people interact with others and cope with challenges (Heydt & Sherman 2015). The social workers’ self-awareness of their individual cultural identities inform social workers’ practices and influences their relationships with their clients (Dewane 2016). By recognizing their professional and personal limitations, a social worker demonstrates understanding of the concept of use of self by warranting referrals of the clients to other social workers or agencies that can best address the clients’ needs (Fusco 2012). Self-awareness, an integral component of the use of self, is also demonstrated in the understanding of the process of cultural identity formation by social workers and assists in guarding social workers from stereotyping (Baldwin 2013). Through self-awareness, I have been able to demonstrate the use of self in social work by ensuring that I am not bias in my service delivery but reflect empathy, warmth, and genuineness.

To conclude, the use of self is fundamental in social work practice since without an understanding of the same, a social worker will not realise the desired objectives in the problem solving process. This is hinged on the fact that an understanding of their “self” will assist them to know better whether they are able to handle a situation or refer the situation to other social workers or agencies that can best address the situation. Additionally, the use of self assist social workers to acknowledge that ethnicity and culture may affect how people cope with challenges and interact with other people. Crucial and linked to the use of self in social work is self-awareness. Self-awareness of one’s cultural identities by a social worker is also crucial to the practice since it informs assumptions regarding clients’ experiences and cultural backgrounds.