Helping Process In Social Work

The Helping Process
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The Helping Process
Social workers play vital roles in society particularly because are overly involved in assisting the disadvantaged. The field of social work purposes to not only create enriched and conducive environments that foster optimal personal development but also individuals to hone and harness their inmate attributes. Based on these facts, it is evident that the helping process is a major role and responsibility of social workers. The helping process is identified as a fluid transformative ordeal that is characterized by social worker-client interaction and inclined towards problem resolution and also growth of the affected individuals. As such, the work of social workers in the helping process is three-fold: empathetic attachment, active involvement and felt separation. There are also six distinct stages involved in the helping process. These include engagement, assessment, planning and contracting, treatment, evaluation and termination. I firmly believe that it is vital for social workers to adhere to all the stages of the helping process to have any meaningful impact on the clients.
I strongly believe that engagement as the first stage is extremely vital to the success of the social worker-client relationship. With the engagement stage, the social worker is supposed and expected to interact actively with the client. It is during this stage that the social worker gets an understanding of not only the situation and issues at hand but also the client. Butler-Byrd (2010) reiterates this position and shares “during this stage, the social worker makes initial contact with the clients and begin to establish the framework of the helping relationship”. Based on the above statement, it is vital that the social worker needs to be friendly in order to build trust. Actively listening to the client helps the social worker understand the problems faced by the client. Learning how the client thinks, feels and tackles problems is also important in order for the social worker to develop a good working relationship with the client. The social worker should initiate eye contact, create empathic responses, focus on the client’s feelings and take notes for later assessment. The time span of this stage depends on the circumstances.
The second stage of the helping process is the intake and assessment stage. In this stage, the social worker and the client review the previously shared information in order to give the social worker an angle of intervention. This stage is fundamental because it provides the scope of the help and assistance the social worker is supposed to provide. Social workers use their abilities to evaluate what the client previously states in order to identify the strengths of the client. The priorities, goals and weaknesses are also reiterated and analyzed in order for the duo to come up with a clear plan of action. In this stage, it is crucial for a social worker to teach the client how to identify and solve problems. I also highly recommend the third stage of the helping process that involves planning and contracting. During this stage, strategies are also explored in order to overcome the client’s challenges. Ultimately, a contract can be d...