What is “self”?

Adrian Ward

What I am seeking to establish in this chapter is that our self is our primary tool of practice “it is the means through which we experience and conduct our practice, including the psychological and emotional demands which practice entails. I would argue that this remains true whether or not we think of our work as specifically relationship-based. However, this raises several questions including, first, what do we mean by self in this context, and then what do we mean by the use of self?

We might initially assume that our self is a single, fixed quantity, because we all know roughly who we are and what we are like (we would not have got far in this work if this were not the case). Self, in this set of assumptions, represents continuity in our personality, security in our identity and reliability and consistency in relationship “it is our human nature. However, although this view has its appeal, self is more complicated and elusive than it may seem, as I hope to show.

The term “self” is also often used as shorthand for a whole set of aspects of personality and identity, including our personal beliefs and values, our anxieties and “constructs” “a combination of our rational and intuitive views on the way the world and other people operate, and therefore on how we can interact with the world and other people. It may be seen as being not so much the sum of our experience as the continually evolving process through which we experience, grow and act. Each of us evolves our own unique character and self through our own individual pattern of experience, feeling and thought, and we also develop a “sense of self” in which we become aware of and protective of our own self. This is true not just of our personal lives but also of the professional world.

This does not mean, however, that self is a fixed single quantity. We all know that we may behave and relate differently in our personal relationships than in our work or study relationships; that others may see different sides of us in these different contexts and may know little or nothing of our other sides. So self may be said to be to some extent contingent upon environment and context, and adaptable or at least selectable according to our strategy. Thus I may be (or attempt to be) a different self in my interactions with my boss than I am with my friends, or I may find I am quite a different person with my own family or partner than I am with my clients. Some of these decisions about shifting self/selves may be made at a conscious and deliberate level, whereas others are probably more unconscious.

Self may also shift over time: I may develop my self as I mature in my life and my practice, so that I become more responsive, less insecure or more confident. Experience may teach me not to worry so much about what may happen if I make a mistake “or perhaps that I should worry more! As I evolve, I may also feel more able to draw on certain aspects of myself in different situations, and more able to leave behind anxieties which troubled me before. So self may be said to be mutable and selectable over time “I can begin to choose more about myself in order to use different parts of myself as I wish to. It is partly through this variability and the ability to select and employ different aspects of our self that we start to develop the capacity to actively use the self in practice.

Self is not a purely internal quality, however, solely dependent on our immediate family environment. We are all also located in our community and society as a whole, and our sense of our own identity and potential, our self-worth and self-belief are further contingent on the extent to which we feel we can identify with others and feel valued and respected by them and by the extent to which we find we have genuine opportunities to assert and achieve for ourselves within society. For many people, however, including some of those who find themselves in the position of becoming service users, there may be a struggle to feel accepted or heard, known or valued within society, and they may feel ignored or despised or actively conspired-against by those in authority. People may feel excluded or devalued because of negative stereotypes about their ethnic origin, their gender, their sexuality or about the particular part of town in which they live. They may feel that these negative stereotypes are almost branded on them, making it impossible to be heard fairly or treated equally. As social workers, we need to know about such stigma and to understand something of what it means for people “as well as understanding how we and our agency may be contributing to it.

Furthermore, it is not only the service user who may have such experiences of conflict between self and society. We may all have ways in which we differ from the perceived norm and may thus have been subject to negative stereotyping and the consequent threats to or impingements on a sound sense of self. See Kumsa (2007) for a powerful example of the ways in which such experiences may inform and affect our assumptions in practice (in this case, in working with refugees). As social workers, we will need to reflect on our own self in similar terms: what experience do we ourselves have of feeling oppressed, overlooked or rejected by society, and if we cannot identify such experience, how can we ensure that we will understand the full range and depth of the service user’s experience? As with other aspects of this theme, questions such as these need to be continually asked in respect to each new encounter, rather than assuming they can be put aside after brief consideration in a training exercise.

There is finally a sense in which the whole concept of self can be seen as contested and elusive in a postmodern world in which there are few fixed entities and no absolute certainties, and in which competing ideologies and discourses put everything in doubt. In particular, although in much of the earlier literature on the use of self there are echoes of the white western Christian “soul”, firmly located in historical certainties about good and evil, “normality” and “abnormality”, all of that now needs to be seen in a different light. The self is a much less solid and secure concept than it may have appeared even 50 years ago. Although we do need to think about self in social work as if it is an identifiable and perhaps core aspect of personality, we may also have to accept that this is shifting ground and that ultimately when we think about what we mean by “self “, we can perhaps say, rather as St Augustine said about time, “So long as nobody asks me what it is, I know, but as soon as I am asked, it disappears from my view”.

This feature from: Relationship Based Social Work is published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.