self’ and self-disclosing appropriate aspects of my personal and professional experiences. T is approach fi ts with the idea of creating ‘therapeutic relationships’ that are safe spaces for change to occur (Sprenkle, et al. 2009).
5. Finally, we invite clients to comment on how they are experiencing the process of engagement, based on the above points. T is can be revisited as needed and can involve practitioners taking relational risks (Mason, 1993) to hear what’s going well and what could be done diff erently. We are both very clear that the role
Method We consider that the following supports
us in enacting the above principles in our clinical work.
Small acts of resistance Given that we have discussed working
with marginalised and oppressed groups, we thought it would be essential to discuss what we can do as practitioners in acts of solidarity with our colleagues, communities and the people that we work with. So what do we do with all of this power we occupy, where some voices are louder than others, where some voices don’t yet exist? We can take part in small acts of resistance in solidarity (Reynolds, 2012), which informs us from our positions and speech acts. Creativity itself can be seen as a ‘small act of resistance’ in the face of overwhelming pressures and burnout. By moving away from merely having a workshop about techniques, the aim was to speak to practitioner’s values and ethics, the heart of their practice. What we would want to invite the readers to consider is in what way do you perform ‘small acts of resistance’ against oppressive service practices? Finally, what would it be like to recognise that the families we oſt en fi nd the most challenging to engage are probably also performing their own ‘acts of resistance’? What do you think that says about the services we operate from and within?
Engagement We both believe that, as practitioners,
we need to stop trying to make families fi t our models and inatead create models that fi t the family’s needs (Madsen, 2007). T e view we adopt around engagement is that it is a recursive process, rather than merely
Context 169, June 2020
“ joining the family dance” (Minuchin, 1982). We have broken down how we see engagement into stages. 1. First, we need to consider how we are being ‘invited in’, who has sought us out to get involved and what are their expectations (Palazzoli et al., 1980). We would then want to explore with the family what are their wants and wishes, which might be diff erent from the referrer’s. We at empt not to get triangulated between the family and referrer by creating space for everyone to share their expectations.
2. Secondly, exploring the clients ‘relational history’ with our various identities as a professional, male, ethnic minority. T is goes back to Burnham’s (2012) visible/ invisible social graces. Every client will have experiences with particular groups of professionals, genders and ethnic groups. We feel it’s important to acknowledge this in the clinical work by off ering the space for clients to name their experiences with certain groups and how that might infl uence how they work with us.
3. Also, focusing our at ention and celebrating the natural changes that are occurring; for example, noticing in a family that a young person has transitioned well to secondary school and the parents are providing them with a level of independence appropriate for their age; as opposed to focusing on the changes they are not making or change that is occurring too slowly.
4. We privilege how we are developing a ‘good enough’ relationship before moving into the domains of therapy. What we mean is that we try to connect as people, which for me (Hendrix) would involve bringing my ‘use of
of engagement is down to the clinician, and that families are not ‘hard to engage’ but that we have not been able to off er them something that they are willing to consider or ‘buy into’, which re-iterates the importance of not doing therapy ‘on’ people but instead fi nding how to do it ‘with’ them.
Creativity Oſt en, when we talk about creativity
it can stifl e practitioners. In fact, when we asked participants at the workshop in what ways they felt they had been creative, this generated a lot of conversation. T e initial feedback from some practitioners was “I don’t think I am a creative person”. We then unpicked what creativity might be: that it’s not necessarily how good we are at art- and design-based activities, but that creativity in this context is how well we can adapt to something that we are presented with so that we move away from default responses. T e impact it can then have is that we: • Feel less constrained • Are helped to avoid burnout • Are allowed to see opportunities – especially when facing dilemmas
• Are able to move away from ‘default’ set ings
• Are invited to take more risks • Are more likely to hold onto hope • Can introduce playfulness • Can introduce some diff erence into the system. In the workshop, we explored when
practitioners had been able to be creative. We adapted Bruner’s (1986) landscape of action and landscape of consciousness questions to help practitioners refl ect on those moments. We asked the following questions, which the practitioners’ fed back was helpful for them to acknowledge
21
Engaging clients through re-engaging ourselves
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