Hi, first post

Hi, I was just sitting here (writing another damn report) when I received a comment about my website www.another-way.co.uk from a social worker in the UK, here it is:

"Wonderful! Refreshing to see in my already jaded opinion of social work only two years into training. Kerri."

I know what you mean about feeling jaded Kerri, it can seem like an oppressive, painful and meaningless job at times. But what we do and the way that we do it is filled with meaning for the people who need our support. Obviously the relationships that we build with service users is often vital for their sense of wellbeing - no matter what they feel about it. And it is up to us as professionals to make that relationship a functional one. That can be extremely hard to do with service users who don't want the relationship. But it can be done.If they are resistant, we have to change.

It is all too easy to end up thinking that there is a 'them and us' scenario and the gap gets wider and wider until we feel we are dealing with a different species. In reality they and we are the same, we all want the same things, love, peace, calm, sex, happiness, food, warmth, money, holidays, fun, friends and so on. The only difference is that we are usually a bit further on the way to achieving many of those things. When you think like that you end up envying some aspects of service users lives, for me, I often envy their stronger friendships, communities and family ties and so on. When you work from this place, a place where we are all the same, then you can really start to build a real partnership and a therapeutic alliance with the families you work with.

Unfortunately as we all know, the formal and informal systems that we have to work within often have values that are at odds with the concept of building helping relationships. That can leave workers fighting against the tide of services users, colleagues and systems. But let's face it, social work is about challenging disabling systems and empowering service users.

Maybe that means that we have to learn better skills that can help people to communicate, maybe it just means talking about service users strengths in Case Conferences and supervision instead of just rolling out the usual problem focused talk. What it does always mean is that systems disempower individuals. Now that's not always a bad thing, but it usually is.

That is the thin line that child protection workers have to walk, to enable parents and children to be strong and to take control of their lives and yet at the same time for us to assess, monitor and advise while not disempowering. It can be a complete mind f****! But it can be done using empathy, understanding and a few tools and skills. That way lies some salvation for us as workers because we can actually do this job and feel each day that we have done a good job. No, don't laugh! It's true!