Human givens and social work continued...

No ‘experts’ needed

The simplicity of the human givens approach helps overcome social workers’ traditional fear that they aren’t ‘expert’ enough to offer counselling. Social work training may cover psychodynamic, humanistic and ecological systems, and cognitive models of assessment and intervention. This may give social workers the impression that any counselling needed should be in-depth and relatively long term. (In fact, this is the last thing that clients may need, as I know from the many young women I’ve had referred to me to help them ‘come to terms with their sexual abuse’. As one young woman put it, “I’ve talked and talked about how I was sexually abused, and I don’t ever want to talk about it again. What I want is help with my life now.”) So social workers, feeling ill equipped in terms of time and skills, end up getting others to do the direct work — such as counsellors or independent social workers or voluntary organisations – and have even less personal contact with their service users.

But the human givens approach shows how positive results can be achieved in any contact with a service user, however short. For instance, having found out that Angela was a gifted violinist, social workers would need to know how to motivate her to take it up again. With the human givens approach, this might be achieved through the judicious use of techniques such as active listening with a twist (“So you haven’t got around to playing again yet?) or reframes (“My violin belonged to the old me” — “So the new you has a real talent to draw upon to make you feel happier”), to put a positive slant on a seemingly negative situation. The skill of reframing, along with other crucial skills, such as building rapport quickly, using the imagination constructively instead of destructively and entering an individual’s reality, can be learned very quickly within a human givens framework. I also think we could use stories or metaphors much more, to motivate in social work.

Rucksack and rocks

I often tell children, and adults, who are struggling to come to terms with whatever has happened in their family, “I have this theory that we are all born with an invisible rucksack on our back, and parents unintentionally start filling them with rocks as we grow up. Once we are adults and building lives of our own, instead of saying, ‘I don’t want to wear this anymore; let’s take it off’, we add our own rocks to the rucksack.” I’ve often had young people tell me that just hearing this enabled them to say, “OK, that was my life with my parents, but I can live my own life now”.

Sometimes, referring people to films or books can achieve much, far more quickly than labouring over a troublesome issue. One young woman had been bereaved of her father in a highly traumatic way. Although she was in no way to blame, she felt guilty and responsible. I suggested that she go to see Disney’s The Lion King (in which the old lion king dies trying to save his son). When she came to see me again, she had done as I suggested, and said calmly, “It wasn’t my fault, was it?” The film image had bypassed her
resistance to accepting that truth, whereas repeated verbal explorations and reassurances had achieved nothing.

Knitting for charity

The human givens approach works right across the board. It has now been recognised by the Audit Commission, for instance, that, in some local authority areas, the emotional needs of elderly people are being left out of their care plans. The human givens model provides the perfect means for putting them back in: elderly people in residential homes might be fed and warm, but what meaning do they have in their lives? What can we do to help them feel useful and have some control over the way they live? Again, the answers don’t have to be complex. They can be as simple as encouraging more able residents to help less able ones; or asking some to knit squares for charity; and others to be in charge of the houseplants. These are practical solutions that don’t demand much social worker time but yield such beneficial results.

Help for Simone

The approach can even be used in child protection cases (if a parent’s needs can be addressed without detriment to the children). For instance, Simone, a single mother, started to neglect her six young children after her violent partner walked out on her. Social workers had repeatedly told her she needed to clean up her house and get her children to school, otherwise the children would have to be removed. However, they didn’t really look at what was stopping Simone. When I reviewed the case with a social worker, it was clear that Simone was isolated and depressed, giving her limited attention to her children’s needs and receiving precious little herself. She felt her life was out of control, and that she was a bad mother and had been a bad wife.

The social worker succeeded in getting Simone to see that, if she had the skills to look after her children before her partner left, she still had those skills available to her now. The social worker motivated her to join a parent and toddler group, which enabled Simone to meet other women and start
to forge connections with them. Not only has Simone become able to take care of her children properly, but also she is now taking a course in basic computing. She hopes to return to part-time work when the children are all at school.

Creating hope

What is crucial in all this — and integral to the human givens approach — is to convey the message to the people we are helping that we expect them to change for the better. When we do social work day in and day out, and see some of the same people on our case list for years on end, it is easy to feel, “This person (or this family) will never change”. Subconsciously, people read our expectation of them, and proceed to fulfil it, whatever possibilities they might have had for doing things differently. By concentrating on analysing needs objectively and devising solutions, the human givens approach prevents us from becoming mired in people’s moving stories of misery that take away both their hope and our own.

Reducing social worker stress

Because the human givens are about physical and emotional needs that we all have, it works just as well in helping social workers reduce their own stress — and therefore increase their efficacy. In my work counselling social workers suffering from work-related stress, I ask them to look at their own emotional needs and how well they are being met. Ruth, a 30 year old, single, residential social worker at a care home for young people, was one of the first people with whom I tried this approach. She routinely worked long hours and, because the unit was short staffed, ended up working even longer, covering for other people when they were sick. She knew she was feeling increasingly stressed and tired. When she looked at her life, she realised that her needs for giving and receiving attention, community, autonomy and purpose were all met through her work, and her need for flow was not met at all. She was shocked when she realised how much work had taken over her life. She immediately decided to introduce the possibility for flow and to create more balance in how her other emotional needs were met. She has since resumed rowing, which she used to love, and has re-established connections with friends. She is also resolutely refusing to work extra-long hours to cover for others.

She has realised that, when we are stressed and overworked, the first things we drop are the leisure pursuits, the pleasurable activities that we enjoy, and that actually help prevent stress. Deriving all of our emotional needs from the people we work with can create a conflict of interests — on many occasions we need to be able to be emotionally detached. And our generosity in working longer than we should, albeit through a genuine desire to help, may serve only to cover up the cracks in the system and delay the recognition that increased staffing is essential.

Fieldworkers, when they fill out the human givens inventory of needs, can also see why they are feeling lost. Too much work, with lack of clear goals, with too few staff can result in social workers running around responding to crises only. They feel their work has very little meaning or purpose for them (they are not helping people); that they used to have flow (when they carried out direct work with clients) but not any longer; that they cannot give enough attention to service users, so fail to connect with them; that they feel out of control, because they are trying to be in so many places at once.

There is much excellent social work going on, achieved in extremely difficult conditions. However, the human givens approach can help social workers help others more quickly and effectively, thus upping job satisfaction, at the same time as helping them routinely take care of themselves. It is an equalising way of working that says, “We all have needs, and sometimes they just don’t get met in the most empowering ways”.

© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Jan Little

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This article was written by JAN LITTLE, a freelance trainer and consultant with over 20 years' experience in social work, including 10 in social work management. She has worked for both the statutory and voluntary sectors in social work education, research and development. Although she specialises in children's services, she has also worked in adult services both as a fieldworker and a consultant. She currently provides a counselling service to several local authorities for employees experiencing work related stress.

This article was originally entitled 'How to put the heart back into social work' and first published in Volume 9, No. 4 of the Human Givens journal, and then subsequently as an appendix to the book:
Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

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