The Science and Art of Integrating the Mind and Body in Clinical Social Work

Northcut, Terry B.; Strauss, Rebecca

doi:10.1007/s10615-014-0497-y

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As a social worker with both practice and academic experience, and as a long-term yoga practitioner, I have found it surprising that there hasn't been more formal discussion had about how embodied practices like yoga can facilitate practitioners' abilities to navigate their own somatic maps as they interact with others and as a way to build their personal resilience (Mensinga, 2011). Although mindfulness practices have gained recognition in recent years (e.g., Lynn & Mensinga, 2015;Northcut & Strauss, 2014) and neuroscience has highlighted the importance of exploring the body when working with traumatised individuals (van der Kolk, 2014), social work continues to lag behind in having professional discussions about how to better understand and include the body to meet its agenda. As a researcher, I am interested in why social workers and human service workers seem reluctant to discuss the impact of their own visceral experience on their professional practice and have sought to explore this both informally (with colleagues and students) and formally as part of my research.…”

Section: Just As Bodies Are Inscribed With Greater and Lesser Degreesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘No Coughing for Me, but I'm Okay!’: A Human Service Worker's Narrative Exploration of Her Own and Other Workers’ Body Stories Told in a Domestic Violence Service

Mensinga

2017

Children Australia

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Relational, body-oriented and brain-based approaches to recovery and change are increasingly popular modalities for working with traumatised children and adults. However, although these approaches encourage the awareness, and the harnessing of workers’ visceral experiences, there is little in the literature to describe how practitioners navigate their own somatic maps. In a research project undertaken from 2008–16, I invited nine human service workers to tell and explore stories about their own experiences of the body that emerged during, and/or in relation to, their own professional practice. A narrative methodology was used to help facilitate a depth of understanding of how the participants used their own bodies as a source of knowledge and/or as an intervention strategy with those with whom they worked. In this paper, I explore one of many stories told by Coral in which she describes the processes she uses to navigate her own somatic map as she interacts with clients and workers in a domestic violence service. I conclude that creating spaces for workers to explore embodied experience in the professional conversation is important, but is difficult without an acceptable discourse or narrative template. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, including the ‘body as subject’ encourages better outcomes for clients and provides richer accounts of human service workers’ professional experience.

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Section: Just As Bodies Are Inscribed With Greater and Lesser Degreesmentioning

confidence: 99%