Theory and Research

6. STrenGTHS-baSeD PraCTiCe ■ 113

During one meeting, Nancy entered the room in tears because she had not scored as well as she would have liked on a test. Nancy exclaimed, “I’m a failure!” Rebecca empathetically reflected Nancy’s struggle by stating, “This has got to feel horrible because you’ve worked so hard to catch up and to get better grades.” Rebecca then reframed Nancy’s perceived failure by stating, “and yet you haven’t given up, you have accomplished so much already, you are a per- sistent person.” Nancy asked Rebecca if she really thought that. Rebecca was able to honestly reply that many people have given up on obtaining good grades or even given up on school all together. Rebecca then affirmed Nancy for her tenacity and her desire to do well even when it was difficult. Rebecca reframed Nancy’s sorrow as a strength by stating, “[I]n fact, your sorrow that you didn’t score well on the test is an indication that you care about yourself, your life, and your future goals. Your sorrow is an indication that you don’t want to give up now either.”

After 12 sessions, Nancy stated that she did not have time for services anymore because she wanted to join a club that met on the day Rebecca and Nancy usually met. Rebecca mentioned that she had been thinking that Nancy had met most of her therapy goals anyway, and so this might be a good time to stop their work together. Together, they reviewed their most recent goals and agreed that Nancy had met them. Rebecca suggested that they meet one more time to celebrate Nancy’s successes. At their final session, Rebecca gave Nancy positive feedback about her work in therapy and pointed out how many successes she had achieved along the way. Rebecca also expressed confidence in Nancy’s capacity to navigate future trials, obtain her lon- ger term goals, and validated Nancy’s worth as a person. Nancy stated that she was going to miss Rebecca and wondered if she would ever see her again. Rebecca responded with empathy, noting that many people felt similarly when ending counseling. Rebecca assured Nancy that if she wanted, she could always call her to schedule a future appointment. Nancy said that she was glad to know it was an option and thanked Rebecca for her time.

CRITIQUES OF STRENGTHS-BASED PRACTICE

There are several common critiques of SBP. First, SBP has been critiqued as overly focused on clients’ strengths to the point of ignoring clients’ very real problems (McMillen et al., 2004). From this perspective, SBP, in an attempt to move away from the deficit-focused, pathological models of human suffering, has accidentally and naively turned the sole focus to what is going right while refusing to acknowledge what is going wrong. In this view, SBP is, at best, overly optimistic and, at worst, insulting to clients who turn to social workers when they are experi- encing major crises in their lives. Though proponents of SBP have argued that SBP at its core does include a focus on problems as well as strengths, and dual focus models have been articu- lated (e.g., McMillen et al., 2004; Simmons & Lehmann, 2013a, 2013b), this remains one of the common critiques of SBP. Similarly, some have argued that a focus on strengths and resilience takes attention away from important societal injustices and leads social workers to advance individualistic solutions to structural problems (Davis, 2014). By conceptualizing and enacting a multi-level SBP, however, injustices and structural problems could also be addressed through the tenets advanced in this chapter (Shapiro, 2015).

Another critique is that SBP lacks conceptual clarity. In this line of thinking, SBP is a vaguely articulated social work value or perspective on practice without one agreed-upon definition, making it difficult to apply consistently in actual practice (Probst, 2009; Smith et al., 2014). According to this argument, SBP has only been described at a surface level, resulting in con- cerns about the role SBP should play in the profession of social work (if any) and how to regu- larly apply SBP principles in practice. For example, though the term strength is often used in social work practice, a strength may be defined entirely differently in every intervention stage, though definitions are rarely clarified. During the assessment stage, a strength may be viewed as an already-existing asset to be identified, while during the intervention stage, a strength could be a target characteristic to be nurtured and developed or an outcome where change over

Bolton, K. W. P. M., Hall, J. C. P. L., & Lehmann, P. P. L. (Eds.). (2021). Theoretical perspectives for direct social work practice : A generalist-eclectic approach. Springer Publishing Company. Created from capella on 2022-05-04 19:57:24.

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