The Social Work Relationship: A Transformational Gift

by SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD

     Social work is the first profession to identify the practitioner’s relationship with our clients and its essential components as the key vehicle that leads to hope, awareness, change—and in many noted cases, transformation. The relationship is devoid of superiority and condescension. Clients are not viewed as sick or “less than,” “in treatment with” a healthy paragon of knowledge and virtue. Social workers deeply believe that each client is capable of finding meaning, fulfillment, and integration of the importance of self and mutual respect.  

     Following are five social work identified essential components of motivating professional relationships:

1. Understanding: an awareness of the psychosocial development of our clients, where and when they experienced deep losses, disappointments, and trauma, and their effects. 
2. Empathy: the ability to step into a client’s shoes, to see and experience their world through their perspective, not our own. Achieving empathy necessitates boundaries—the awareness that the client’s world is separate from ours. 
3. Compassion:  the motivated use of our education, training, and life experiences, united with purpose, to alleviate the suffering of another and enhance the capacity for fulfilling direction.
4. Commitment: the dedication to address the prejudice, hatred, and evil “isms” that impede self-esteem, deny opportunity, and obstruct justice.
5. Self-Awareness: the examination of personal life experiences, including ingrained prejudices and unfinished emotional business, that make it impossible to see and hear what our clients convey to us—both spoken and unspoken. Self-evaluation is a necessary process throughout our professional life. 

     In this period of overwhelming illness, loneliness, divisiveness, and danger, it is deeply distressing to see how often the importance of the interactive professional relationship—as the key vehicle leading to hope and change—is overlooked, marginalized, and devalued.  

     The importance of addressing prejudice and debilitating “isms” remains paramount in social work education and practice. In far too many settings, the importance of a client-centered relationship—where through respect, engagement, support, and thoughtful challenge, clients change themselves and their worlds—is overshadowed by a movement dependent on a brain disease model. This model emphasizes methodology, rather than the integration of key research findings with the core necessities of a powerful professional relationship.

     Countless newly minted social workers have told me that though they resisted being “social worked” while students, the lack of understanding of themselves in the context of what their clients touch in them limits their effectiveness and satisfaction. They identify this as a major source of confidence erosion, resulting in burnout and leading to the desire to leave the social work profession.  

     Social workers must protect our roots. Ours is a value-based, humanistic profession. We well know that each of our clients is far more than a designated psychiatric category—that the human condition involves far more variables than diagnosis. We profoundly believe—indeed we have seen!—how clients in the gravest of circumstances change their worlds and inspire others to do the same. Toward this goal, our most important change agent is and will always be the use of OurSelf in client relationships. This contribution must be proudly cherished and celebrated, and never, ever overlooked, replaced, or lost.  

The above tribute is illuminated in SaraKay’s book, Burnout and Self-Care in Social Work (ed. 2), 2021, NASW Press. The differentiation between empathy and compassion is based on the work of social worker Karen Gerdes. Psychologist Carl Rogers has publicly acknowledged social worker Jessie Taft for her introduction of client-centered therapy.

SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD, whose private and pro bono clinical social work practice is in Philadelphia, is a certified group psychotherapist and family life educator. She is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) and the Social Worker of the Year (2018) from the Pennsylvania chapter of NASW, and the 2013 NASW Media Award for Best Article. In 2018, she was one of five graduates of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice selected for the school’s inaugural Hall of Fame. SaraKay is the author of Burnout and Self-Care in Social Work (2nd Edition).