Exploring the Truth in Social Work

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The truth consists of the whole truth, not just selected parts of it. In other words not just the bad, weak, shameful stuff but the strong, positive and hopeful stuff as well. If social workers take sections of the truth out of context (positive or negative) they cease to be a real representation and become a biased personal interpretation. If you focus on the problems more than the strengths then you do not see the whole truth. When families become aware of the problem focused nature of the worker they begin to lose trust, their desire to communicate fades and they become resistant. When people focus on problems all they see are problems, the protective factors become invisible. What you pay attention to in life gets bigger.

The only people who know the whole truth are the family members and so the workers job is to learn the whole truth from their clients, and not just to learn, but to understand what their story means to each of them, not what it means to you, but what it means to them. A social workers job is not to trust, it is to understand. What the problems mean in the context of their strengths, personality, spirituality and beliefs. What their strengths mean in the context of their problems. You and your clients working together can make and share accurate assessments and develop intervention strategies, which are useful to them as people.

Workers routinely come across family members who have a whole variety of problems and difficulties; emotional problems, parenting skills, anger management, heroin addiction, alcohol misuse, domestic violence, depression, agoraphobia, physical disability and any number of aspects of human behaviour and lifestyle that have an impact on the persons ability to be whole. Social workers cannot be expected to be experts on every kind of problem they are likely to come across. To attempt to assess on your own, how each problem impacts on the individual and the family is fraught with difficulties. Any such problem will affect each individual differently. People go through different stages and cycles dependant upon a whole variety of factors from age, emotional state, time of the year, the weather, and what happened this morning. Every difficulty is unique to the individual who has it and its effect on family members is different for each member at different times.

It is therefore not the problem that is specialised, it is the individual and it is a fundamental practitioner skill to engage and understand a client, to work in partnership with the client and to accept them as an expert on their situation. I cannot stress enough that the worker’s role is to learn from the client. The family is the expert. They know how that problem or behaviour affects their family, they know what physical, emotional and spiritual resources they have, they know what has helped in the past and with your support they will creatively come up with ideas about what might help in the future.

This article is drawn from my book, ‘Preventing Breakdown’. Published by Russell House Publishing.

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