Communication within the social work helping relationship

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Social Work and Reflective Communication SWP22REC
Lecture Four

• Communication within the social work helping
  relationship -
• relating theory to practice
• Slides prepared
• by
• Dr Trish McNamara

2
The pluralistic approach

• Advantages
• Disadvantages

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Advantages
4
Range of conceptual tools and clinical methods

• Client centred approaches
• Psychodynamic approaches
• Cognitive behavioural ideas
• Systemic therapies
• Narrative constructivist approaches
• Radical-structural ideas
• Feminist approaches
• See Trevithick (2000) Ch2 and Sullivan et al
  (2000) Chs1 and 2

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Disadvantages

• Can be lacking in rigour and conceptual clarity
• Can be indiscriminate
• Can lack attention to context especially issues
  of diversity
• Is difficult to evaluate

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Revisiting the three psychological forces

• Humanism
• Cognitive behavioural approaches
• Psychoanalysis

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Critique of the humanist client centred
approach- Advantages

• Accessible and easily understood
• Values all forms of experience
• Is accepting and non-judgmental
• Aims at a meaningful and egalitarian relationship

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Critique of the humanist client centered
approach- Disadvantages

• Difficult for social workers to implement in
  their everyday work
• Requires high degree of motivation not viable
  with reluctant people
• Is individualistic does not take account of
  societal pressures
• See Trevithick Appendix 1

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Interpersonal Communication and Counselling
training programs

• Often underpinned by a humanist client-centred
  approach sometimes combined with some cognitive
  behavioural ideas
• Adler and Rodman (2006)
• See Ivey and Ivey (2003) Ch 1 for discussion of
  this

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Cognitive behavioural approaches

• Approaches to treatment and to helping
  people resolve specific problems using selected
  concepts and techniques from behaviourism, social
  learning theory, action therapy, functional
  school in social work, task centred treatment,
  and therapies based on cognitive models.
• Barker (1995) cited in Trevithick (2005) Appendix
  2

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Key Concepts

• Focuses on
• Activating event or situation
• Beliefs or thoughts about the event or situation
  often irrational
• Emotional consequences often irrational
• Disputation the service user is taught to
  replace irrational beliefs with rational beliefs
• Ellis and Greiger (1977)

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Critique of cognitive-behavioural approaches-
advantages

• Brief, widely applicable and relatively easy to
  learn
• Behavioural approaches especially useful for
  teaching skills e.g. life skills
• Cognitive behavioural approaches useful for
  approaching complex social problems
• Builds on strengths of two conceptual bases
• See Trevithick Appendix 2

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Critique of cognitive-behavioural approaches-
disadvantages

• It is directive, often has high expectations and
  demands commitment
• Focussed on the presenting problem not causes or
  underlying problems
• Can use abstract, detached or abstract language
• Some service users do not have the capacity to
  undertake the homework set
• Trevithick (2000 ) Appendix 2

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Gestalt Therapy

• The fundamental "formula" of Gestalt theory
  might be expressed in this way. There are wholes,
  the behaviour of which is not determined by that
  of their individual elements, but where the
  part-processes are themselves determined by the
  intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the hope of
  Gestalt theory to determine the nature of such
  wholes.
• Max Wertheimer (1924)

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Key Concepts

• Thinking and problem solving are characterized by
  appropriate substantive organization,
  restructuring, and centring of the given
  ('insight') in the direction of the desired
  solution.
• In memory, structures based on associative
  connections are elaborated and differentiated
  according to a tendency for optimal organization.
• Cognitions which an individual cannot integrate
  lead to an experience of dissonance and to
  cognitive processes directed at reducing this
  dissonance.
• In a supra-individual whole such as a group,
  there is a tendency toward specific relationships
  in the interaction of strengths and needs.
• The epistemological orientation of Gestalt theory
  tends to be a kind of critical realism.
  Methodologically, the attempt is to achieve a
  meaningful integration of experimental and
  phenomenological procedures (the
  experimental-phenomenological method). Crucial
  phenomena are examined without reduction of
  experimental precision. Gestalt theory is to be
  understood not as a static scientific position,
  but as a paradigm that is continuing to develop.
  Through developments such as the theory of the
  self-organization of systems, it attains major
  significance for many of the current concerns of
  psychology.
• International Society for Gestalt Theory and its
  Applications (GTA) website

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Psychoanalysis
Any line of investigation, no matter what its
direction, which recognises transference and
resistance and takes them as the starting
point. Sigmund Freud 1914 3
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Key concepts

• The unconscious mental processes of which the
  subject is not aware
• Defence mechanism avoidance strategies
  (knowingly or unknowingly employed)
• Resistance times when clients cannot or will
  not talk freely
• Transference emotional responses to current
  relationships which originate in earlier
  unresolved or unconscious experiences
• Trevithick (2000) Appendix 5

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Critique of psychoanalytic approaches
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Advantages

• Concepts such as the unconscious, transference
  etc help us to understand human behaviour
• Explains all behaviour including difficult
  behaviour and addresses the meanings we ascribe
  to events
• Is neutral to emotional expression
• Continues to give rise to other theories and
  approaches - TA, Crisis intervention, PTSD, ego
  psychology

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Disadvantages

• Elitist, expensive and lacks clear time
  boundaries
• It is a complex theory to grasp
• Can create dependence on the client-therapist
  relationship
• Tends to ignore social and cultural influences
• Has been hard to evaluate

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Psychodynamic psychotherapy

• affect and feelings
• subconscious processes
• therapeutic relationship (transference/countertran
  sference)
• developmental processes
• trauma/disruption
• dreams

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Example of psychodynamic psychotherapy

• Dr. Hans Strupp interviews Richard
• Video in Library - Three Approaches to
  psychotherapy III - Part One