The Lexicon of the Strengths Perspective
Language and words are powerful. Words can inspire, yet they can destroy. We must examine the words we use with and regarding our clients. We should ask: Are we communicating hope, belief in their potential, and acknowledging their resiliency? Or are we teaching helplessness, defeating their goals, or weakening their aspirations? We are compelled to pay attention to our lexicon. Here are some concepts that are important to consider…
Believing in the client
Believing in the client is central to the Strengths Perspective. Questioning the validity of the clients’ views does not help them to overcome adversity or oppression. We must convey our belief in the clients’ potential.
Dialogue and collaboration
Establishing relationships with others is indispensable to all human beings. In dialogue, we can discover and test our own knowledge, inner strengths, and wisdom; we can begin the healing process within; we can revisit our own narrative and redefine it.
In a humble and caring dialogue, based on empathy, connection, and inclusion, we can overcome the barriers of oppression and mistrust. This horizontal relationship facilitates deep connection and collaboration. When we work with clients, we collaborate with them through an open negotiation and the recognition of the clients’ insights, views, and aspirations. In other words, we collaborate with them by listening to their voices.
Empowerment
It is necessary to challenge the derogatory labels in order to identify and mobilize the power within individuals and their communities; foster connections among individuals, families, institutions, and communities; overcome the victim mindset and paternalism. This is possible when we trust people’s wisdom and perspectives, and believe in their dreams.
Healing and wholeness
For the Strengths Perspective, transformation and healing can come from the clients’ internal sources (not only from external sources). Healing implies looking at the whole person and recognizing the innate ability that body and mind have to regenerate and endure challenges. However, “healing requires a beneficent relationship between the individual and the larger social and physical environment” (p. 14).
Hope
Optimism and hope are necessary in the process of healing and transformation. Hope is related to positive emotions and feelings (Benard, 2004). It conveys the belief in a positive future. The Strengths Perspective proceeds from the recognition of the clients’ promise and potential. This does not mean that we do not acknowledge the individual, communal, or structural challenges. We understand the individual pain, suffering, limitations, and needs, keeping always a hopeful attitude and a profound belief in the possibility of change.
Membership
Belonging and inclusion are essential to human beings. We must proceed from the recognition that every single client we serve is a human being like us, a member of our species, and thus, is expected to get all the respect, dignity, and responsibility that every human being deserves.
Plasticity
Self-regulation, flexibility, and adaptability, are words that several authors have used to describe this human capacity to “alter, extend, and reshape behavior, feeling, and cognition” (Saleebey, 2006, p. 11). A clear example of this surprising human plasticity is evident in the placebo effect.
Resiliency
Most of the literature about resiliency points out that all human beings have the inner capacity to overcome adversity and rebound from trouble. Resilience refers to the capacity to surmount adversity, to meet the challenges and ordeals of daily living as well as extraordinary circumstances that confront us. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from, or to simply endure with dignity, the tribulations that life may send your way. The facility for resilience is available to everybody; it is not just a property of some special people. It is amplified by the resources and resourcefulness of individuals, families, and communities, and by the education, mentoring and support that people find in their lives.
References
Saleebey, D. (Ed.). (2006). The Strengths Perspective in social work practice (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Quote
"In fact, for just about any population of children that research has found to be at greater risk than normal for later problems—children who experience divorce, live with step-parents, lose a sibling, have attention deficit disorder, suffer developmental delays, become delinquent, run a way, become involved with religious cults, and so on---more of these children make it than do not."
Bonnie Benard. 2004. Resilience: What We Have Learned, p. 7.
