This workshop is aimed particularly at those educating social workers, those involved in professional development/ continuous training – CPD - contexts and everyone interested in the concept of shame in social workers. It will draw on the participants’ knowledge and experience to explore the emotion of shame. It will examine one method of working with shame in social workers, and through group feed-back will generate further knowledge of the ways in which we can support social workers through this destructive state and transfer this understanding to their work with service users. The emotion of shame is hard to quantify amongst social workers, but in our experience many people have experienced this feeling, even intensely, during their careers. It seems to be a complex, deeply internalised but powerful affect, almost by its nature kept hidden and unspoken. Denial and defence mechanisms can also affect the efficacy of any intervention,. By contrast, having spaces to examine, reflect on and even share feelings of shame may alleviate some distress in social workers, and offer the potential for a more nuanced understanding of service users and shame. Shame, considered as a feeling of inadequacy (often summarized in sentences beginning with ‘I am not sufficiently’ followed by adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘capable’, ‘competent’, etc.), seems to be a fundamental element of social work, as a profession that touches the limits of human experience where abuse, extreme poverty, suffering, dependence, deviance, and end of life generate shame. Shame and recognition deeply influence the practice of social work and affect both social workers and their users. The former is destructive; the latter restorative. Examining how shame is generated, often organisationally (e.g. austerity’s reduction of available time, resources, preventative and supportive work etc. being experienced as a personal failure of skills or a betrayal of social work ethics) may ameliorate the negative effects produced by such an emotion. Disentangling these organisational pressures from what are one’s own failures, as ordinary mistakes may be impossible to admit or face in ‘blame and shame’ cultures, and reflecting carefully on them, offers the potential to lessen the damage from shame, and learn from sharing experiences. . The authors have been undertaken exploratory workshops on shame with social workers in Italy and England,, in which reflective frameworks and reflective writing were used to explore this mostly unknown territory of social work. This workshop proposes to: • firstly, present some of the reflective tools and some examples of the narratives written by social workers exploring their relationship with shame; • following this, the participants will be asked to experiment with these reflective tools (some specific reflective frameworks) described at the beginning of the workshop, and share the outcomes, following the pattern the workshop leaders have trialled, in order to build a common understanding of the methods being deployed; • finally, a discussion will be generated to draw out the group’s ideas about the strengths and limitations to addressing shame in social work through such methods.

Workshop “Shame and social work” / Frost, Elisabeth; Sicora, Alessandro. - (2021), pp. 303-303. (Intervento presentato al convegno 10th European Social Work Research Conference (Social Work Research: Contributing to Innovations in Practice, Policy and Social Development), organised by ESWRA - European Social Work Research Association and the University of Bucharest tenutosi a online nel 5 - 7.05.2021).

Workshop “Shame and social work”

Sicora, Alessandro
2021-01-01

Abstract

This workshop is aimed particularly at those educating social workers, those involved in professional development/ continuous training – CPD - contexts and everyone interested in the concept of shame in social workers. It will draw on the participants’ knowledge and experience to explore the emotion of shame. It will examine one method of working with shame in social workers, and through group feed-back will generate further knowledge of the ways in which we can support social workers through this destructive state and transfer this understanding to their work with service users. The emotion of shame is hard to quantify amongst social workers, but in our experience many people have experienced this feeling, even intensely, during their careers. It seems to be a complex, deeply internalised but powerful affect, almost by its nature kept hidden and unspoken. Denial and defence mechanisms can also affect the efficacy of any intervention,. By contrast, having spaces to examine, reflect on and even share feelings of shame may alleviate some distress in social workers, and offer the potential for a more nuanced understanding of service users and shame. Shame, considered as a feeling of inadequacy (often summarized in sentences beginning with ‘I am not sufficiently’ followed by adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘capable’, ‘competent’, etc.), seems to be a fundamental element of social work, as a profession that touches the limits of human experience where abuse, extreme poverty, suffering, dependence, deviance, and end of life generate shame. Shame and recognition deeply influence the practice of social work and affect both social workers and their users. The former is destructive; the latter restorative. Examining how shame is generated, often organisationally (e.g. austerity’s reduction of available time, resources, preventative and supportive work etc. being experienced as a personal failure of skills or a betrayal of social work ethics) may ameliorate the negative effects produced by such an emotion. Disentangling these organisational pressures from what are one’s own failures, as ordinary mistakes may be impossible to admit or face in ‘blame and shame’ cultures, and reflecting carefully on them, offers the potential to lessen the damage from shame, and learn from sharing experiences. . The authors have been undertaken exploratory workshops on shame with social workers in Italy and England,, in which reflective frameworks and reflective writing were used to explore this mostly unknown territory of social work. This workshop proposes to: • firstly, present some of the reflective tools and some examples of the narratives written by social workers exploring their relationship with shame; • following this, the participants will be asked to experiment with these reflective tools (some specific reflective frameworks) described at the beginning of the workshop, and share the outcomes, following the pattern the workshop leaders have trialled, in order to build a common understanding of the methods being deployed; • finally, a discussion will be generated to draw out the group’s ideas about the strengths and limitations to addressing shame in social work through such methods.
2021
Book of Abstract of the 10th European Social Work Research Conference (Social Work Research: Contributing to Innovations in Practice, Policy and Social Development)
Bucharest
n.a.
Workshop “Shame and social work” / Frost, Elisabeth; Sicora, Alessandro. - (2021), pp. 303-303. (Intervento presentato al convegno 10th European Social Work Research Conference (Social Work Research: Contributing to Innovations in Practice, Policy and Social Development), organised by ESWRA - European Social Work Research Association and the University of Bucharest tenutosi a online nel 5 - 7.05.2021).
Frost, Elisabeth; Sicora, Alessandro
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/339294
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