SOCW 6500 Week 4 Use of Self Reflection Example

The Reflex to Reassure: A Use of Self Reflection on One Trait, Quick Comfort Offered Before a Worry Is Fully Heard, Traced Briefly to Its Origin, Weighed in Two Moments With a Composite Client Awaiting a Medical Test, and Paired With a Considered View of Self-Disclosure

Student Name

Walden University

SOCW 6500: Field Education I

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Reflex to Reassure: A Use of Self Reflection on One Trait, Quick Comfort Offered Before a Worry Is Fully Heard, Traced Briefly to Its Origin, Weighed in Two Moments With a Composite Client Awaiting a Medical Test, and Paired With a Considered View of Self-Disclosure

The Trait

The trait this paper examines is quick reassurance: my tendency to answer a client's worry with comfort before the worry has been fully heard. I notice it as an urge, almost physical, to say "That's understandable" or "I'm sure it will be fine" the moment someone sounds afraid. In seminar role plays my peers have pointed it out twice, and in my Week 3 process recording I caught it at turn 12. This reflection looks at where it comes from, how it showed up with a client this week, what it did for the client and for me, and what I will do with it.

Dewane (2006) describes the use of self in social work as the deliberate and conscious use of one's personality, beliefs, relational habits and life experience in the service of the helping relationship. The word deliberate matters. A trait used without awareness is not a use of self; it is a habit acting on its own. Quick reassurance is one of my habits.

Where It Comes From

I grew up as the oldest of four, with a mother who worked nights. When my younger siblings were frightened, my job was to calm them quickly so the household could function. Reassurance was useful, and I was praised for it. I include this history for one reason: it explains why the reflex feels like care to me even when it does not serve the person in front of me. It was care, in a household that needed calm. In a helping relationship, the client often needs something else first: to be heard.

Two Moments With a Client

This week I met with a composite client, a woman in her fifties in the agency's family support program, who was waiting for the results of a biopsy. The details are composite and do not describe any real person.

In the first moment, early in the conversation, she said, "I keep thinking about what they'll find." I said, almost immediately, "It's so normal to worry while you wait. Lots of people get good news." She nodded and changed the subject to her son's school. What did the reassurance do for her? It may have offered a moment of comfort, but it also told her, without my meaning to, that her fear had been dealt with and we could move on. What did it do for me? It eased my own discomfort at sitting with someone else's fear. What did it cut short? Whatever she was going to say next about what she was thinking.

In the second moment, near the end, she returned to the test: "If it's bad, I don't know what I'll tell my kids." This time I noticed the urge and waited. I said, "You're already thinking about how you'd tell them." She cried briefly and then talked for several minutes about her two children, what they had already been through and how she wanted to protect them. That conversation was the most important part of the hour, and it happened only because I did not reassure her.

Hepworth et al. (2017) describe premature reassurance as a common barrier to communication, one that can leave clients feeling their concerns have been dismissed. The two moments with this client show the difference in a small way: the same worry, met once with comfort and once with reflection, led to very different conversations.

Self-Disclosure

This client also asked me, "Have you ever had to wait for something like this?" I have; my mother had a biopsy two years ago. I chose not to share that. Knox and Hill (2003), reviewing research on therapist self-disclosure, suggested that disclosure should be infrequent, should serve the client rather than the therapist and should return the focus to the client quickly. I asked myself whose need a disclosure would serve. Telling her about my mother might have shown solidarity, but I suspected it would also have been another form of reassurance, a way of saying "it turned out fine for us," and that it would have shifted the conversation toward my family. I said instead, "Many people I've worked with describe the waiting as one of the hardest parts. What has it been like for you?" I am not sure that was right. A brief disclosure, followed by a return to her, might have strengthened the relationship. I will discuss the choice in supervision.

What I Will Do With the Trait

I do not want to remove the trait. Warmth and a wish to comfort are part of why I chose this work, and there will be moments when reassurance, offered at the right time and grounded in fact, is exactly what a client needs. What I want is to use it deliberately. In practice, that means three things: when I notice the urge to reassure, I will first reflect what I have heard; I will offer reassurance only when I know something factual that supports it; and I will track, in my process recordings, how many times I reassured before reflecting. By the end of the term, I want that number to be close to zero.

References

Dewane, C. J. (2006). Use of self: A primer revisited. Clinical Social Work Journal, 34(4), 543-558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-005-0021-5

Hepworth, D. H., Rooney, R. H., Rooney, G. D., & Strom-Gottfried, K. (2017). Direct social work practice: Theory and skills (10th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Knox, S., & Hill, C. E. (2003). Therapist self-disclosure: Research-based suggestions for practitioners. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 59(5), 529-539. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10157