Reading A

Ferguson, H. (2018). How social workers reflect in action and when and why they don’t: The possibilities and limits to reflective practice in social work. Social Work Education, 37(4), 415-427. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2017.1413083

Reflective practice is a core concept in social work and probably the most well known theoretical perspective across the entire applied professions of teaching, health and social care. Its origins lie especially in Schon’s (1983) formulation of how professionals engage in ‘reflection in action’ by thinking about their experience and what they are doing while they are doing it and afterwards using ‘reflection on action’ to think about and link their practice to knowledge (Redmond, 2006). Despite its popularity there has been very little research into how, or indeed if, practitioners do actually reflect in practice (White, Fook, & Gardner, 2006, p. 19). This paper draws on an ethnographic study of social work practice in child protection, in which I observed and audio-recorded the face to face encounters between social workers and children and families, mostly on home visits, and incorporated questions about reflective practice in interviews with practitioners (Ferguson, 2016a, 2016b).

The paper shows that social workers thought about some aspects of what they were doing while they were doing it. However, there were limits to how far practitioners could reflect in action and sometimes wished to. The demands of face to face work were so great at times that workers could not think about or feel that complexity while they were in it, if they were to be able to focus on service users’ needs. Non-reflection arose to protect the worker from unbearable levels of anxiety and was rooted in what, following psychoanalysis (Briggs, 2005, p. 23; Hollway & Jefferson, 2013; Trevithick, 2011), I will call the defended nature of the self.

In social work literature reflection is often tied in with the ‘use of self’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ . I argue however, that the ‘self’ in question is regarded as an apparently limitless resource that the worker taps into and uses to help service users. The theory of reflective practice needs to be underpinned by a much more sophisticated theory of the (defended) self and how it is used and I will suggest that this can be found in psychoanalysis and work that theorises how the lived experience of the senses and the (mobile) body shape our capacities to think and act (Ingold, 2011).

Much greater acknowledgement is needed of the limits to reflection and when it is not possible or even desirable. Reflection is too all encompassing a term to capture the complexity of what is occurring in these moments and it will be argued that the interior work practitioners do on themselves is better understood in terms of what Casement (1985) calls ‘internal supervision’. Some, like Ixer (1999), have argued that despite all the work that has been done on it, there is no such thing as reflection. I do not go that far. There is something called reflection and it has value, but it also has limits, which need to be understood if we are to achieve a deeper appreciation of the complex nature of social work practice, the demands the work makes on practitioners and the implications for service users.

Researching Reflection

The research was based in two local authorities in England and involved social work teams who did short and longer term child protection work.

What Is Reflection and The Self?

When students and practitioners are told to ‘reflect in action’ what precisely are they being asked and expected to do? There is a vast literature on reflection and reflective practice, reviews of which point to the plethora of tools and techniques for reflection. There are also many conceptions of reflective practice associated with different research and theoretical formulations and approaches (D’Cruz, Gillingham, & Melendez, 2007; Ixer, 2010; White et al., 2006, p. 17). Schon’s (1983) classic formulation of reflection in action and on action was intended to challenge the dominant perspective that professional practice is a technical—rational activity that merely involves the application of rules and expertise to problems. He argued that professionals use reflection to deal with the uncertainty that pervades their work, shape their thinking and actions and learn from experience.

In the social work literature, Sheppard argues (2007, p. 129) that ‘The reflexive practitioner shows a high degree of self-awareness, role awareness and awareness of assumptions underlying their practice.’ Many argue for the need for critical reflection, which is the use of reflective abilities with respect to power and its complex expression (White et al., 2006, p. 13). Imbalances of power between workers and service users arising from social class, gender, race, sexualities and ability need to be reflected upon, and unethical uses of power avoided (Fook & Gardner, 2007). For instance, Schaub, Willis, and Dunk-West (2017, p. 440) show that some social workers appear not to think critically about sexuality, leading to some ‘bracketing-off’ of oneself which limits their capacity to fully engage in the relational aspect of social work.

Notions of reflection and ‘use of self’ are often used inter-changeably or conflated as part of an agenda to promote ‘emotional intelligence’. Howe (2008, p. 185) writes that:

It is argued that the worker needs to be able to acknowledge and understand their own emotional states if they are to be able to get in touch with the feelings of the service user and the potential for their emotions and experience to trigger emotional reactions in the worker (Howe, 2008, p. 185). Training and supervision are seen as key to developing reflective practitioners. As Howe puts it,

From observing practitioners in my research it was evident that self-awareness assisted them to be ethical and helpful. Social workers often managed to remain composed in moments when service users were in distress, absorbing their sadness, shame, fears, and at times their joy. Some of the vast literature on reflection provides valuable insights into how this occurs (Trevithick, 2012). Too often however there is a simplicity to how reflective practice, the (use of) self, and ‘emotional intelligence’ are written about which belies what I have found occurs in practice. The research shows that there are times and situations in which practitioners find that it is better not to reflect in the manner advocated in the literature. A significant factor in the failure to recognise the limits to reflection is how ‘the self’ has been conceptualised as a coherent unproblematic entity, as something distinct and unified that the worker accesses and goes into in order to connect to themselves and their service users. Understood in this way no limits are placed on the capacity of the self to absorb feeling, on the mind to think and on the depths of reflection that are possible and needed.

A professional ‘self’ can be said to exist in the sense of a core personality and identity that each individual has, albeit one that is not fixed but open to change. Ward (2010, p. 64) suggests that what effective practitioners ‘have developed (perhaps intuitively) is a personal quality which overlaps with professional skill to create an effective persona’. However, while we each have a unique persona the ‘self’ that is being used by social workers is not a unified, coherent entity with a limitless capacity to be reflected upon in the manner suggested by the literature. It is a self that is fractured; a defended self that is principally concerned with protecting itself from unbearable levels of anxiety (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013).

This notion of the ‘defended subject’ or self (Briggs, 2005, p. 23) draws from psychoanalytic thinking, which argues that from birth the self is primarily constituted through its relationship to anxiety. The infant is in a complete state of dependency on parents/carers and hunger for instance triggers uncertainty and anxiety about whether they will be fed. Unbearable (‘bad’) feelings are split off and projected into parents/carers, who become ‘good’ objects through providing food and comfort (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013, p. 19). The child’s ability to cope, learn and develop psychological well-being is heavily influenced by the capacity of carers to receive and process the child’s projections of unbearable emotional states and make them tolerable for the child, by attuning to their needs, and providing understanding, comfort and care (Bower, 2005, p. 155). This process, which Bion (1962) called ‘containment’, is similar to the kinds of processes that go on in professional supervision where at its best practitioners are enabled to express feelings and helped to think about anything unbearable that has been split off (Ruch, 2007).

Casement (1985) argues that practitioners’ experience of being supervised is crucial to them being able to develop the capacity to reflect, self-analyse and contain themselves when interacting with service users, a process he calls ‘internal supervision’. The supervisee learns in supervision to see how they are as a practitioner and watch themselves as well as the client. They take this learning into practice by monitoring what it may feel like to be the service user, putting themselves into the service user’s shoes in his or her relationship to the professional, trying for instance to listen to what it crosses their mind to say and silently trying out a possible comment or interpretation. With practice, Casement argues, it becomes possible for the practitioner to use these two viewpoints simultaneously, the service user’s and their own. The processing function that holds together these two positions and states is what Casement calls the ‘internal supervisor’. A key task of internal supervision is to enable the practitioner to maintain a benign split within themselves whereby their mind is free to move between themselves and the service user (Casement, 1985, pp. 34–35). In some respects what Casement is referring to is similar to reflection in action and indeed Smith (2010, p. 114) regards it and internal supervision as broadly the same thing. However, in my view Casement’s concept of the internal supervisor takes us further than a generic notion of reflection by explaining more clearly the internal work, the self-analysis, the practitioner has to do, especially in very challenging situations, and how not only thinking but non-thinking occur in practice. It adds greater psychological depth in terms of the possibilities and challenges involved when anxiety and the defended self result in the professional being unable to think about the service user in a meaningful, potentially helpful way.

Reflective Practice, In Practice

Social workers in the research generally found it quite challenging to explain what they were doing and feeling in the midst of doing it, in part because they are not practised at doing so. In all of the interview data drawn upon here the practitioners were interviewed (usually in the car) straight after the home visit and asked questions such as: ‘Were you reflecting in there on what was going on at the time?’. The following is typical of the way many reflected out loud on the question while trying to answer it.

The worker describes how by reflecting on the spot he thinks about and to an extent revises his understanding of the service user and their needs. A great deal of what professionals do depends on what Schon (1983, p. 49) calls ‘tacit knowing-in-action’ which involves ‘knowing more than we can say’ and they struggle to find the language to describe what they do. A lot of practice is performed intuitively and draws on personal and professional knowledge and experience built up over a lifetime. The findings support the work of scholars of reflective practice (Redmond, 2006; Taylor & White, 2000) who argue that knowledge of how to practice is not based on simply applying theory and technical rules and expertise to a problem but, as Schon (1983, p. 49) puts it, ‘our knowing is in our action’. All kinds of learning occurs in the process of enacting professional work. Understanding derives not only from what is going on in the mind but what is occurring in the body and through movement as well as stillness (Ingold, 2011, p. 17). This was evident in the research, for instance, when conversations with parents were difficult and workers moved, sometimes suddenly jumping to their feet and looking around family homes (Ferguson, 2018). Sometimes this kind of improvisation occurs through the worker consciously reflecting in action, while at times it is largely unthought about and is based on tacit knowledge and is intuitively enacted. This means that what practitioners are able to say about how they think and reflect on what they do covers only some of the richness of their performances (Ferguson, 2016c).

Social workers identified different levels to reflection, the most common formulation being a distinction between what is reflected upon in the moment of conducting practice—in action—and afterwards.

Similarly, Monica described the process of reflection and its various ‘layers’ as: ‘It’s like you’re having this conversation, and yet somewhere, you’re helicoptering above your conversation’, a phrase she had heard a counsellor use on the radio.

This articulates the classic formulation of reflecting in action as a form of cognitive self-monitoring which is achieved by elevating one’s mind—‘helicoptering’—above the interaction with the service user. Eraut refers to this as ‘meta-cognition’: ‘a person’s ability to be aware of what they are doing or have just done’ (Eraut, 2008, p. 6). This enables the worker to think about her assumptions, questioning style, how the service user is responding, and the meaning and value of the encounter. Monica also vividly describes how reflection on action goes on after the encounter in the office, supervision, and at home at night.

This worker was interviewed having just been observed on a home visit at which another layer of reflection—critical reflection—was apparent. A mother—here called Maggie—had complained to the police for the fourth time about her boyfriend assaulting her. The 42 min home visit was based in the sitting room, with Maggie sat on the settee with her 12 month old son Robbie on her knee. Maggie said she is now determined to get away from her violent partner. The police had apprehended him but let him go and he has been taunting her since. Monica showed great empathy towards Maggie, assured her she was doing the right thing contacting the police and supported her analysis of men’s violence and the poor response of the system:

The worker clearly practised in a critically reflective way by drawing implicitly on a feminist perspective to place abusive men’s behaviour in the context of the social power and sense of entitlement men have within patriarchy and the propensity of the criminal justice system to let men get away with it. This should not be taken to mean that all social workers in the study always critically reflected in this manner; it shows rather aspects of what critical reflection involved when it did occur by making explicit the kinds of power dynamics that were affecting service users.

Suspended Self-Preservation: The Limits to Reflection

While the data bear out the existence of some aspects of reflective practice, the findings also suggest that the current popular notion of reflection in action is too simplistic to capture the complexity of how social workers think, or don’t. The following social worker’s account was typical:

While this worker is talking about dealing with frightening situations ‘suspended self-preservation’ had a more general relevance to how these practitioners think—or sometimes don’t think- about their feelings in practice.

Angela uses meta-cognition and engages in some internal supervision that enables her to see herself in interaction with others. She allows some emotion to be felt (being ‘pissed off’), but closes off to the possible deeper impact of what she is experiencing and what is being projected into her. She had just been observed on a visit to a family where child neglect was a major concern and like many social workers in the study spoke of the difficulties of shaking off the effects of the ‘dirty’ home conditions and unpleasant odours that attached to her nostrils and clothes. Stopping these sensory experiences and accompanying emotions like disgust from becoming overwhelming occurred through conscious and unconscious defences of the self (Trevithick, 2011).

Suspension of feeling and self-preservation occurred at times by practitioners consciously turning reflection on and off, to meet the demands of the situation. A social worker, Hannah, was shadowed on a visit where a mother refused to let her in and quickly became very upset, spending 14 min on the doorstep crying and shouting at Hannah and seeking assurances that she would not remove her daughter from her care. Afterwards Hannah went straight to another home visit, which I also observed. Six days later after having been back to see the family again, here is Hannah explaining aspects of how she coped with the impact of the doorstep encounter:

This confirms the importance of practitioners being contained by having opportunities to ‘offload’ feelings to colleagues in the office, both informally and in supervision. As with Angela’s narrative, it also reveals the vital role of the car as a potential reflective space (Ferguson, 2010, 2011) and how loud music can assist workers to deal with the deep emotional impact of the work by helping them not to reflect. Hannah used the loud music to drown out thinking about what she had experienced because to reflect on and allow herself to feel her raw painful feelings would have prevented her from being defended and resilient enough to face the next family and practice effectively. And it seemed to work, as the next visit was also very challenging and the social worker managed to overcome parental resistance and meet her aim of seeing the child on his own.

The more emotionally and viscerally demanding and anxiety provoking the encounter the harder practitioners found it to reflect in action, at any depth and the less control they had over their defences and whether they reflected or not. Gary, spoke of this after he had just been observed interviewing a father— Michael—about his cannabis use:

This account sets out well the process of internal supervision (see also Casement, 2006, pp. 132–150) and the anxiety and worry that go on both before and during the encounter with the service user. The practitioner perceptively articulates a core challenge of how to adopt the position of acknowledging and monitoring feelings while suspending fully feeling them, so as to make the work possible.

The language of ‘splitting’ was also used by Gary to describe this:

Through internal supervision Gary has created a split within himself whereby his mind is free to move between himself and the client, between thinking and feeling. Some reflection is going on in the moment described in the sense of an awareness of danger and vigilance in monitoring how to get out of the house safely, while at the same time needing to defend the self from becoming flooded by anxiety.

Amy referred to the need to defend the self in terms of erecting an ‘internal barrier’.

So the worker reflects in action, but only up to a point, the cut off being when the interaction with the service user is felt to impact on their inner self in an unbearably intrusive way. Erecting a ‘barrier’ to defend their inner life from the unbearable feelings is a means to trying to get through the encounter. The irony, given the importance placed in the literature on reflection, is that not reflecting in action provides a basis for being able to act (at all) and getting through at least some of what has to be done.

Some found the challenge of being able to think and provide internal supervision for themselves on some home visits too great.

The worker’s struggle to focus effectively on the child was confirmed by the observation. She did ignore him and found the visit difficult due to the father’s resistance, a very tense atmosphere and the disgust she felt at the home conditions. She was able to become aware of how ineffective her practice was while she was doing it, but was so anxious and disgusted she was unable to adjust it to achieve what she needed to. She became overwhelmed. Reflecting in action does not therefore always lead to the worker being able to act there and then on the understanding gained from it. Realising she was being ineffective was a useful thing for the worker to know even if she couldn’t change it, because if a worker leaves an encounter knowing they haven’t achieved their aims they can at least go back again.

Serious risks arise when the self becomes completely defended, workers stop thinking and are not even aware of their non-reflection. This occurred in a minority of observed cases, where social workers became intuitively, emotionally, and cognitively absent and did not relate to children and parents in meaningful ways to the extent that they and the risks they faced became invisible (Ferguson, 2017). This arises from a thorough-going closing down of the self, rather than a temporary suspension and defence of that self. It involves not only not thinking about the experience of the work but not even knowing about what is not being thought about. As has been shown, non-reflection can have a reflective element in how through internal supervision the worker gains momentary awareness and makes a decision that this is so difficult it is not safe, productive or bearable to dwell on how emotionally and viscerally demanding it is. Yet at a deeper level not reflecting in action is not so much a choice practitioners make as a product of how in the moment the defended self leads them to enact the impulse not to dwell on painful feelings but to split them off. Its basis is existential and has unconscious elements. At its most worrying, where fear of feeling becomes embedded in organisational culture (Cooper & Lousada, 2005), a continuous cycle of unconscious disconnection from emotional states can exist, leaving practitioners and managers often unable to think clearly about the safety of service users and the well-being of staff, and blame and other toxic experiences may then prevail.

Conclusion

Practitioners reflect in action in some ways that fit with the literature. But the evidence considered here has shown that there are times when they limit reflection in order to defend themselves as a way of making the work bearable and doable. They have a vested interest in not going into the depths of the difficult experience they currently are in. Such splitting was a consequence of the fine balance that has to be struck between thinking about emotional and sensory experiences as they occurred in the moment and not thinking about them too much and becoming over preoccupied and paralysed by them. Some non-reflection can be healthy as a practical way of being that enables the worker to psychically protect themselves, and try to meet their goals. As Smith (2010, p. 115) observes, for some people some of the time ‘it is necessary to move away from rather than towards their selves’. Crucially however, any kind of non-reflection should only be a temporary state and needs to end with supervisors providing containment, and enabling critical thinking on what has been experienced.

While Schon (1983) wisely recognises some limits to reflection in action, too much social work scholarship does not do so, while adopting a naïve and flawed theory of self. This leads to the expectation that students and experienced practitioners, even at moments of high intensity, can, even should, be able to reflect in action on their feelings and thinking to ensure a skilled and ethical use of self. Connecting the use of self to reflection in action in such simplistic ways is no longer tenable. Due to the defended nature of the self there are experiences and situations where reflection in action is deeply problematic, to an extent that it may be neither possible, desirable or beneficial.

The theory of reflective practice is not sufficient to make sense of how, or if, practitioners think in action and I have argued that it needs to be supplemented with insights from psychoanalysis and theories of embodiment and lived experience, taking into account movement, the senses and complexity, as well as the sedentary nature of practice (Ferguson, 2018; Ingold, 2011). This reveals the impact of anxiety on the self, its need to defend, and the crucial role internal supervision plays in helping practitioners to think in the heat of the moment. The research findings support Trevithick’s (2011) argument that defences and defensiveness are common experiences in social work and need to be far better understood and worked with. Internal supervision is a more accurate way than the generic term ‘reflection’ of accounting for the kind of self-analysis that needs to happen at a deeper emotional, sensory, experiential level that may enable practitioners to contain their thoughts and feelings—or not.

It is of paramount importance that the limits to reflection are fully recognised, so that workers are not misunderstood, or pathologised by expectations that they should be reflecting in action when this is not possible. That said, social work education and training need to build on the important work that has been done (Fook & Gardner, 2007; Redmond, 2006) by helping practitioners to develop their capacities to contain themselves through good internal supervision so as to be able to tolerate anxiety in difficult situations that bit more to allow vital insights about the service user and helping process to arise. Briggs describes a therapeutic method that derives from Freud of giving ‘free floating attention’ to the client and encounter. It is a way of trying to surpass what is expected of the client and relationship and try to discover something new, unexpected or that isn’t conscious (Briggs, 2017, p. 103). Similarly, Bion (1970, p. 124) argued that therapists need to achieve a ‘state of patience’ in being able to tolerate uncertainty. Of course statutory social workers are not therapists. They work in fast moving bureaucracies where time to devote to service users—some of who do not want a service—and the scope for patience is stretched. Yet in my study I observed social workers sometimes achieving that kind of containment of themselves and capacity to bear a lot of feelings and connect effectively with children and parents, while some others were less capable of it. Briggs is surely right then in arguing that a great deal is to be gained from developing the capacity to ‘sit with uncertainty, powerful feelings and impulses, and to treat these seriously’ (Briggs, 2017, p. 110). It is what is required and social work education needs to enable students to achieve it by learning about the complexities of the self, their emotional lives, and what affects thinking. One form of training that research shows assists in this is the experience of undertaking a lengthy period of infant observation (HingleyJones, Parkinson, & Allain, 2016), an approach that is adopted on some social work courses and that needs to be universally implemented (Parkinson, Allain, & Hingley-Jones, 2017), alongside a focus on critical thinking and the dynamics of power in practice.

Finally, this argument clarifies the vital importance of reflection on action. Staff support after practice encounters needs to be rigorously reflective, analytical, and critical, taking fully into account the feelings and sensory experiences that may have been split off in action and not thought about. Good experiences of supervision in turn supports the further development of the internal supervisor and the worker’s capacity to contain themselves in the difficult circumstances that threaten to stop them from thinking and feeling what as far as is humanly possible they need to be able to.

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