Your theoretical orientation is one of the most important decisions you will make as a social worker. Theoretical orientation prepares you for practicum by providing a framework for the assessment, intervention, and treatment of clients. As a social worker, one must know how to respond to various complex individual and family issues, behaviors and emotions. If the social worker does not know how to respond to the client, then he or she may appear incompetent to the client. Actually, the social worker may be incompetent regarding that particular issue. Most theories recommend that social workers are competent to address most of the major life issues that clients present within the relationship. Therefore, being knowledgeable and well-trained …show more content…
Out of the ten strategies I found that the get real strategy seems to be more useful. The get real strategy is putting your theoretical orientation into your everyday life style. I find this very useful because it allows you to become familiar with the theoretical orientation with many different people and all sorts of situations and learn how to perfect it. Out of the ten strategies I found to that be the least useful was read original work. The read original work is textbook information about various theories. Sometimes this information can be lost and you have to use different sources and its only use to get started. So I do believe you can go without this information and find other ways to learn about your theoretical …show more content…
The theories I found the least appealing were analytic psychology, family theories school of thought and constructivist school of thought. After completing the selective therapy sorter my therapy that I received was cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behavior) all interacts together. Specifically, our thoughts determine our feelings and our behavior. Cognitive behavioral therapy aims to help people become aware of when they make negative interpretations, and of behavioral patterns which reinforce the distorted
In conclusion, these psychoanalytic approaches all have their pros and cons to each approach as we go through them. Each of these approaches also can be used to describe and compare therapy techniques with the Grinch. It was interesting to see the difference that these three approaches all had. I believe that there has been some significant information that was positive out of all of them as well as some negative ones. One never knows as they are first meeting with clients what the real issue is until they get into the sessions a little more. It is important to find an approach that is proper and would assist an individual who may not be willing to be counseling.
Social Work is the study of people and how they interact with the systems in their environment and other people. Social Workers use theories, sets of ideas or concepts, of human behavior and apply them within their professional social work ethics to the problems facing clients in order to help them gain balance in the systems in their lives. Theories help to organize knowledge enabling social workers to help make sense of problems. There are many different theories. They have been grouped into broad categories called theoretical lenses (Rogers, A. 2013).
The Psychodynamic Theory has not proven itself to be very effective. It helps people more when it is paired with other approaches, and is now the starting point, or basis, in other types of therapy (Comer, 2011).
Professionalism in the social work field goes beyond licensure and expertise (Cournoyer, 2014). According to Cournoyer (2014), social work professionalism encompasses the concepts of integrity, self-efficacy and knowledge, self-understanding and self-control, and social support (Cournoyer, 2014). Embedded in social work professionalism is the person-environment perspective, which posits that our personal attributes, interactions and relationships with others, and environment influence a social worker’s practice. Cournoyer stresses that it is a social worker’s responsibility to acknowledge and regulate his or her personal biases, ideologies, and beliefs when working with clients in order to prevent them from negatively impacting the therapeutic
Social workers should have a strong knowledge base comprising of information gathered from variety of empirically tested theories which allows them to effectively appreciate the nature of people’s problems. Theory is a vital component in social work practice that guides the way in which social workers view and approach their clients, at micro, mezzo and macro level. Theory helps predict, explain and assess situations and
As a social worker, I have never interrogated my theoretical orientation, in part because I considered that common sense, agency´s directions, and social policies guided social work interventions. In fact, Mullaly (2010) discusses that social workers do not see the relation between theory and practice, and social work is perceived as a performance of practical duties. This was my perception until now, in particular, because I have been analyzing anti-oppressive principles and I realized that my experience has many nuances of those principles. Therefore, my past interventions have some commonalities with the anti-oppressive perspective, and then some strengths and limitations compared to the Canadian social work. (1) One of these strengths is empowerment. Power is an important element of
Cognitive behavioral therapy earliest inventors were behaviorist, such as Skinner, Watson, and Pavlov. They’re the ones who led to the advancement for behavioral treatment of mental disorders. Behavioral modification is a technique that uses positive and negative reinforcements to change a particular behavior and reaction to a stimulus. Behavioral therapist only focused on an individual’s behavior not their thoughts. During this era, psychologists applied B.F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism to clinical work. Much of these studies focused on chronic psychiatric disorders, such as autism and psychotic behavior. His methods also focus...
My theoretical orientation can best be described as a mixture of Person-centered therapy and feminist therapy. Where person-centered therapy is all about being aware of oneself and feminist therapy encourages personal empowerment. Those two together create a great theme of evolving to become something greater in life. I believe that human behavior is a result of feeling like you, have a sense of belonging in the world. Similar to what Maslow’s hierarchy, people need to feel a sense of love in order to be happy and confident in one’s self. Once they are content with themselves as result, they will project that same love towards others. When considering my approach, I want clients to be authentic and confident in who they are. The individual
Theory has been defined as, “an organized set of assumptions, beliefs, or ideas about particular phenomena in the world (Teater, 2015).” Theory is used to understand and explain possible and perceived instances, behaviors and outcomes (Teater, 2015). Social workers use theory in order to understand, as well as, introduce interventions and solutions to their client’s individual situation. It is important for students entering into the social work profession to have a base knowledge of theories, with basic understanding of their similarities and differences to appropriately apply theory in practice. The theories which will be focused on in this paper include Systems Theory and Cognitive Behavioral Theory.
In social work profession, it is notably important that a practitioner be able recognize aspects of their decision making that may be motivated by uncontrollable circumstances such as past experiences, family values, and personal values. Uncontrollable circumstances, such as the examples listed above, all attribute to personal biases a practitioner may display when working with individuals, groups, families, or communities. A personal bias is the negative or positive perspective or demeanor, both knowingly and unknowingly, of any particular individual, or group of individuals, based on different diversity factors that may skew the way that an individual interacts or perceives an individual or group (Miller, Cahn, Anderson-Nathe, Cause, Bender, 2013). Therefore, as a social worker, the importance of practicing self-awareness is that it helps the practitioner to shuffle through personal biases, and in return, aid in social justice and be effectively responsive to diversity factors in the practice setting (Bender, Negi, Fowler, 2010).
Instructions: Responses should range between 200-300 words In a strength based approach, the social worker view themselves as a team member, not an expert. In a problem centered approach, the social worker is viewed as the fixer of the issue and is needed to fix the problem. Additionally, the word client in this model is replaced with consumer because consumers are acknowledged with possessing certain knowledge and power. This distinction “embraces the spirit of empowerment and a commitment to finding and supporting ways to advance the status of people being served,” (Long, Tice, and Morrison, pg.
Thyer explained “The practice of social work is often seen as centered around various theories of the etiology of psychosocial problems, various theories related to the proposed mechanisms of action of psychosocial interventions, various models of practice, and perhaps more overarching practice perspectives.” (Thyer, 2012) Theory is a collection of plausible correlative groups of ideas and propositions that are coordinated into a deductive system which analyzes relationships between facets of the world. (Hutchison, 2011) It is a vast view of different theories of how human behavior is developed through interactions with their environment.
Social work practice relies on many tools such as knowledge and frameworks which help guide and develop key social work skills. Theories are a major source of knowledge and frameworks, there are many theories with and used in social work practice with varying strengths and weaknesses. Due to the amount of theories at the use of social workers many do compliment as well as conflict with each other, requiring social workers to have a vast and complex understanding of them to navigate together. Ecosystems and critical theories are umbrella terms for theories and frameworks, meaning they have many application variations of themselves.
Theory is defined by Hutchinson (2015) as, “An interrelated sets of concepts and propositions, organized into a deductive system, that explains relationships among aspects of our world” (p. 567). As a student in the masters program of social work, understanding the concept of theory and how it is applied to social work practice is crucial. The perspective of a student on how theory is defined and applied could vary based on the instruction received from the program. According to Lewis (2003), words that came to mind for students when asked “What is theory” included explanations, way of thinking, concept, body of written or verbal knowledge, guidelines, foundation, and much more. Students also had a
In the field of social work theories are not concepts abstract or far from reality, it is practically represent occur in our lives, that is, we can say that our theories determine what we are by a very large percentage.