Steve_Bamlett_blog

What profession do you admire most and why?

It is very difficult to admire a profession. Not least because some of the most undesirable aspects of some professions are those characteristics that are most usually given the name ‘professional’. It usually indicates taking a back seat on one’s own emotions or instincts and being driven only by the goals that have been planned. That can be no bad thing although it too, often in already insensitive persons, becomes the cause of a failure to listen to feedback that ought to indicate a need for direction change or even taking time out from the process to just sit, listen and be with the person talking to you.

A profession that listens, assesses and constantly revises its planning, and/ or implementation of a plan is however an ideal of the social work profession. That does not mean chopping and changing but collaborative work to revise and reassess, maintaining a person’s strengths in the pursuit of a change they have found the strength to seek and to build up into a recovery that can sustain lapses, for to lapse is human.

Recovery from bad circumstances, and consequent maladaptation to such circumstances, is best conceived of as an spiralling motion. As it self-reviews in a cycle of assessment, review, planning and implementation of behavioural or other change, it can lapse but not to where the circle began because spirals cycle by elevation, even if their first circle starts on a two-dimensional plane. Cycles include the provision to lapse as part of the review process. Ideally the nature of the ‘lapse’ becomes itself an object of work so that the whole process of cycling both contains and cognitively re-frames lapses within it. The person co-working on themselves learns to rise above where they started and use the new strengths added to old ones, and to find means of positive self-attribution for the achievement.

Good social workers invest a lot. They use transference and counter-transference as tools. Yes, those tools are dangerous of course – because they invest psychic energy that has deep roots and may attach to unresolved matter in worker or the person co-worked with. And yes, they also cause exhaustion and burn out. But no-one has ever found a good social worker who can remain good without taking that risk, particularly the risk that one’s assessment of one’ own capacity to tread into areas of overwhelming experience will be insufficient.

But the cost of good work is always the risk of permanent damage, deterioration of powers or even death. If it were not so, there would be no risk to assess and perhaps no need for social work intervention which always involves the handling of past damage, present harms and future danger. We should not be gloomy about this, for there is no truly totally safe alternative. We take precautions and increase our training (indeed we should always do the latter) but to follow safe procedures blindly would get one nowhere, especially someone genuinely seeking help. No where is safe in examples of true need where the psychological, social, behavioural and even spiritual mix messily

So social work is still my ideal but it has to be faced that many many bad or burnt out social workers continue to practice, unable to either face or act upon the skills of self-assessment and self-recovery which are the sine qua non of the job. Two forces in particular are dangers. First the siren call of practice that is built on prescribed protocol and process. No dynamic of action that is inflexible will ever work in social work – it barely works slavishly followed in the most routine and AI, or expert system, vulnerable administrative labour.

The second danger of the profession is that it accepts its own demise through expectations of its role, and efficacy in that role, and this is the most serious present danger. It is so because the profession is hated by the Tory party who have been in power too long in truth, and has failed to grasp that it cannot exist or work in the declining spirals of decreased resourcing and psychological expectation of the capacity for social and individual recovery that integrates with low resourcing.

Tories hate social workers because good ones believe that the status quo and ideologies of the normal hide rather than reveal the ills of society and seek to change them using all the tools possible, including the politics of the public state. The last serious attempt to make this possible was by Andy Burnham and Ed Balls at the end of the Brown government. It fell with that government and because Gordon Brown told a bigoted woman that she was in fact a bigoted woman.

In truth social work must and can only exist when people believe in the role of public service, public wealth and public health and not the private, and privatised, versions of those things. At the moment good social work is an abstract concept (an idea or ideal) not a reality. It persists in some people who keep going in a broken system but I know few or none who will survive unless they accept roles and power in the management of the decline of social work. The road back will be difficult.

Love

Steve