Supporting social work learners to work reflexively with shame

Shame is a social emotion of devastating impact and resonance. In service users shame can connect to stigma and exclusion, disconnection, loneliness, anxiety and mental ill-health. Shame is often experienced acutely by the vulnerable and the victims of abuses more than the perpetrators in interpersonal contexts of power. Shame is often generated by political regimes for example neo-liberal states and in the face of oppression and struggle experienced by individuals as their shame (e.g. in relation to poverty and the use of food banks). The experience of shame, then, may be politically and socially generated but may engulf individuals in powerful feelings by no means of their making or choosing. Social workers frequently express feelings of shame. This may connect to their inability to help people in need of resources: often to do with cuts in preventative services and other forms of work, due to austerity and the decisions of governments and organisations. Social workers experience this as professional individual shame. The neoliberal state renders the capacity for social workers to offer thorough supportive work extremely difficult. This also shames social workers. In some places, the derogation of the profession in the media is another source of shame. Similarly then to service users, they experience this devastating emotion though they have not created the conditions for it. This workshop explores methods of working with social workers in training as students and newly qualified practitioners, to explore shame productively, and reflexively examine how their own professional experiences of shame, and their knowledge of practices with this highly sensitive subject, can be harnessed as practice knowledge and practice methods. The workshop is aimed particularly at those educating social workers (though others are very welcome) to draw on the leaders and the participants' knowledge and experience to explore the emotion of shame, and ultimately to generate further knowledge on the ways in which we can help social work students productively draw on this in their work, rather than as a wound or source of struggle.