ABSTRACTION
Context of Counseling in SW Practice
Framework of Social Work
--Systems Thinking- this framework places emphasis on the interrelationships and interactions of the parts of a whole, namely the
system
-The emphasis on the transactions across boundaries, such as communication, is an important feature of systems thinking.
-Understanding of family transactions and organizational dynamics are particularly relevant in the context of counseling in social
work. It is from the field of family therapy that these ideas have had most influence on social work practice.
The Location of Social Work
-Local Authorities- Large welfare bureaucracies specifically, social services department, probation service, specialist project,
residential and day care units, and attachments to hospitals, health centers, schools or prisons.
-Voluntary Organizations- watchdog or critical observer, sometimes engaging in conflict with statutory departments and pressing
for change and specialist able to focus on those coping with specific physical disability or particular ethnic groups.
-Private Practice- freelance trainers, guardians in the child care field, seasonally paid workers in independent agencies.
The Use and Provision of Social Work
Casework- is a problem-solving process by which an individual, family or group is helped to cope more effectively and
gratifyingly with some problematic aspects of his person-to-task or person-to-person roles (to cope with, not to adjust to)-
Perlman 1973
-Perlman is advocating a problem-focused rather than need-focused approach. Her problem-focused approach is much more
deliberately and selectively focused on clearly identified problems, felt and seen by those involved, which are addressed by
tasks agreed upon by both client and worker.
Barclay Report (1982)
-They identified two different but interacting activities of the Social Worker
Social care planning- involves planning, establishing, maintaining and evaluating the provision of social care at all levels from
the wide geographical area to the individual family (work with the environment and the client).
Counseling- process of direct communication and interaction between client and social workers, through which clients are
helped to change, or to tolerate, some aspects of themselves or of their environment.
Later defined specifically as a range of activities in which an attempt is made to understand the meaning of some event of state
of being to an individual, family or group and to plan, with the person or people concerned, how to manage the emotional and
practical realities which face them.
-However, Pinker strongly criticized the main report and the other minority report. Overall the social worker’s orientation would
be more generalist and also more informal and less narrowly professional. Counseling skills would have a much less central
place in their work
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Griffiths Report, 1988
-Continues to address the issues of social care planning debated in Barclay Report. The dilemmas of trying to being together the
dual concerns of broad policy development and the needs of individual, families and groups are also highlighted.
Community Care
-The enabling of people to live as independently as possible in their own homes (care at home rather than in institutions)
-Most of the debate about these proposals was concerned with the likely inadequacy of available resources to meet increased
expectations. Less thoroughly discussed were the fundamental changes in the roles and relationships of the workers faced with
implementing the ideas.
-Social workers as one of the professionals assuming responsibility for implementing new functions/ideas, having the role of case
manager is especially pertinent to the counseling component of social work and this role involves taking responsibility for ensuring
that individuals’ needs are regularly reviewed, resources are managed effectively and that each service users has a single po int of
contact
-For workers accustomed to being direct providers, nothing less than a complete transformation of their role and a massive
culture shift is involved. Instead of making an objective assessment of need, they are having to become rationers of resources,
with new budgetary duties, concerned with cost-efficiency monitoring and gatekeeping.
Implications for Counseling
-Points out that case management assumes a marketplace model of interpersonal relationships, in which two equal
individuals come together to agree a bargain on the exchange of goods and services
-Social work service would use a variety of counseling skills to work with those mainly needing a therapeutic approach
to cope with the loss, change and adaptation
-One important question to consider in the context of counseling issues is the impact on direct practice of social
work’s location in the large local government bureaucracies wherein the most important consequences for
counseling practice is the powerful tension experienced by workers between the very personal nature of the tasks
being undertaken and the impersonal nature of the bureaucracies and legislative framework
-In a controversial paper entitled “The post-Seebohm depression, attempting to account for a prevalent sense of
frustration and pessimism among social workers, since the Seebohm upheaval in the early 1970’s, they were trapped
in an industrial type of line management structure in which they were instructed rather than consulted, found
themselves embroiled in a trade-union kind of wrangling, so that their suggestions met with an adversarial response.
-Another implication for counseling is the stark contrast that exists between the emotional climate facing a new client
of any agency dedicated to counseling and that confronting a new social work client in the busy reception area of
local authority team (ex. First help-seeking encounter)
-For a social worker who values the potential of counseling in a particular situation, a further type of constraint is
often experienced, that of a tension between the voluntary and statutory aspects of his or her professional response
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Practice of Counseling in Social Work
1. Boundary Issues Counseling and befriending
This concept help us to look at ways of
marking off and establishing the -informal unburdening, ventilation of feeling and discussion or getting it off
identity of something by our chest is a basic ingredient in practically all types of more formal helping
differentiating it from other entities relationships however, the very existence of this common ground can lead to
and from its surroundings, it is also a degree of ambiguity, perhaps best expressed in the distinction between
concerned with setting limits. The being professional and behaving professionally
focus is to look at the boundary region
that aids mutual understanding by -In social work, the value of befriending and similar informal process of giving
exploring the common ground or and receiving help is so well accepted that many agencies now try to make
activity and another. This includes: provision for its availability to those who may not always have easy access to
friends either alongside or in place of direct professional input, the social
*Who is the Client
worker’s role in such instances becomes one of catalyst, initiating and
-the primary focus of the helper enabling lines of communication in addition to whatever direct involvement
(individual, family, couple, group, may be required.
community or combination)
-main determinants: agency policy,
worker’s training, resources available
and client’s needs
*Time and place
Counseling and Psychotherapy
-important ingredient in effective
helping is the care and attention given Counseling Psychotherapy
to maintaining appropriate Location wide range of setting health care/private
boundaries in relation not only to
the task but also to the frequency and practice
duration of sessions and their Time-scale short-term long term
location. Frequency weekly or less may be more other than
weekly
*Level of work in the helping process Users clients patients
-the intermediate area, which is Aim strengthen coping abilities change determination of
dependent on a deepening problems
relationship, includes thorough Problem recent origin-onset longstanding, origin
clarification of problems and remote
confrontation defenses
Main Topics eternal issues inner world
-this sort of thinking helps to clarify Method clarification of issues work with the transference
the ways in which counseling both
differs from and also shares common
ground with befriending and
psychotherapy, respectively:
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Role Conflict in Social Work
Counseling and advice-giving
-most counseling practitioners firmly eschew such a role and regard themselves as essentially or
mainly non-directive, indeed the demarcation between these two activities is often used to clarify
the nature of counseling by including the avoidance of advice-giving in its definition.
-the dilemma for social worker is that their role more often than not requires them to offer both
advice and counseling. This can be confusing for the client, it is also challenging task for the worker
to combine these functions without losing some of the essential elements of counseling
Direct work and/or environmental treatment
-for those working in the agencies entirely dedicated to counseling, the question of engaging in
anything other than face to face work with clients may rarely arise
-Modifying the wider situation of the client is generally not seen as the responsibility of the
counselor on the other hand, for those who use counseling as just one component of their work.
This is especially true to social work, where a significant proportion of the total time spent on a
case may be taken up with indirect contact, work of this sort has been variously called indirect
treatment, environment or milleu work and resource mobilization.
Counselor and/or agent of social control
-Social workers particularly acute role conflict whenever they have to involve clients in
experiences of compulsion (much of their work with offenders and with child protection and all
compulsory admissions to hospital or residential care fall into this category).
-Social work is in a unique position here, no other context of counseling involves the worker in
issues of social control and their accompanying dilemmas to anything like the same degree.
Counselor and/or social reformer
-in relation to political climate of social work, is the extent to which the worker has a
responsibility to be an agitator, attempting to change the system. If as seems evident, many of
the problem faced by clients are rooted in poverty and disadvantage, then political action may be
a more effective remedy than counseling.
-It is part of the skill of social work to negotiate with such groups, social should negotiate on behalf
of the clients with their political masters, and encourage client groups towards fuller, more direct
participation in the political process.
-Assessment: a key to boundary management
-how much of the work should be carried out directly with the clients and how much with the
wider social systems impinging on them? the answers to questions of this sort are by no means
self-evident and there is always a degree of risk in opting for one course of action and neglecting
another. To a much greater extent than others who counsel as part of their job, social workers
have to grapple with these dilemmas in almost every situation they handle.
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2. Value Issues
3. Self-awareness and motivation for
Social work requires its practitioners to helping work
reason with distressed people about Issues concerning discrimination
the most contentious moral issues in - Self questioning is therefore a vital
their society and to negotiate about -process of official acknowledgement ingredient in a good counselor’s
the most difficult aspects of human that real problem of prejudice and approach not only in teasing out
relationships. This statement provides imbalance of resources exist has not factors in the choice of such work but
an explanation for social work’s long- been straightforward even in social also in the ways in which the work is
standing preoccupation with value work, where evidence for them conducted. Unless increasing self-
questions, principles, and ethical appears overwhelming, denial and awareness can be developed, there
dilemma. complacency are still prevalent. will be a real danger of worker’s using
clients to meet their own needs, and of
*The values of counseling described *Racism- defined variously as the the worker’s blind spots denying them
as: belief in the inherent superiority of the help they require and this is a
one race over all others and thereby lifetime struggle.
-commitment to encouraging the right to dominance
individual and group growth and -Skynner suggest that the agency
autonomy within a wider framework, -Hall 1980, this is different from serves as an arena where important
to goal setting and output as well as ethnocentrism in which the alleged aspects of the worker’s childhood can
process inferiority, disabilities and negative be relived and personal needs
traits of the out-groups are thought to expressed in behavior if not always in
-to prioritizing and making decisions; be culturally determined whereas in words. Avoidance of exploitation of
to thinking things through and being racism there is a belief that the clients can only happen if workers can
open disabilities are inborn. experience their own real needs
directly rather than vicariously through
-to liberation from oppression and -Several distinct approaches can be clients and can be offered
elitism discerned in successive attempts of appropriate satisfaction of them by
social work practitioners and means of adequate personal and
-to supporting and valuing the kind of educators to address injustice based professional development
leadership that facilitates leadership on racism.
and empowering in others to -How to find a right balance between
cherishing and respecting each other 1.Assimilationist position involvement and detachment is
another central issue, it seems
*Empowerment of clients and their - expectation that black people would necessary to adopt to two opposite
participation in decision and defining conform with and thereby become position, the worker should be
services more integrated with the white- prepared to identify with the client and
british way of life. It is based on the to become emotionally immersed in
- BASW code of ethics lays on social traditional liberal attitude that the situation and yet simultaneously, it
worker the duty to help their clients everyone should be treated the same, is vital to observe and intellectually
both individually and collectively to people are people regardless of monitor what is going on , this requires
increase the range of choices open to culture and origin- so called binocular vision, this raises again the
them and their powers to make colourblind approach crucial need for growing self-
decisions, this means enabling clients awareness, it is where a sounding
to identify realistic choices by 2. Multicultural approach board, a really good supervisor or
providing individuals and groups with supportive peer group can make all the
full information on which decisions can - attempts to counteract worst aspects difference
be based and encouraging self- of such attitudes, it coupled with an
advocacy. ethnically sensitive perspective, in -Self-awareness is vital requirement,
which cultural diversity is counselors are exposed to all sorts of
Gender differences in help-seeking acknowledged and better primitive feelings and disturbed
understanding is sought of the behavior, so those working
-the significance of gender in religions, traditions, customs of intensively with them can easily
counseling and social work was not specific ethnic minority groups. Also, become affected, caught up and even
given the attention it warranted, anti-racist initiatives aim not merely at pushed to retaliate because such
despite the fact that gender issues is understanding racism but at actively primitive functioning in others is liable
embedded in social work practice. trying to eradicate it. to evoke one’s own most primitive and
Women and men seek and use unresolved feelings. It is irresponsible
personal help in markedly contrasting to try practice counseling role in any
ways, and equally that each sex is setting without thorough training and
regarded and responded to very ongoing supervision
differently by agencies and workers.
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