Reflection In Social Work

I believe my feelings did have an impact on my interaction. First, because of my anxiety, I was somewhat uncomfortable being in front of the camera here, especially without warning ahead of time. When watching it back, there were times I appeared nervous, which would be less likely to happen in a real situation where I was not being filmed. Next, I feel very strongly about maintaining familial relations, and that came across when I asked questions about her daughter and how Elizalin’s life changes are also affecting her. Finally, I am a large advocate for self-care and feel all students, especially those in human services pathways, need to take time out of their busy lives for this. Thus, I checked in to see if she had a plan and how she was
I also feel I did fairly well with inviting my client to elaborate. At one point, she mentioned that being pregnant was “one of the stressors in her life,” so I asked her what other stressors there are. I felt that was a good way to get a sense of how she was feeling and what in particular was causing the stress and anxiety. It is tough to give specific times where I focused on the client’s concerns because it seems like I did the whole time. We stuck to the topics of graduate school, stress, and her pregnancy, all of which she brought up. I asked open-ended questions, often starting with “how do you feel about…?,” which allowed her to describe her emotions. I did not have my own hidden agenda and was committed to focusing on what she needed to discuss. I also feel I did a good job in letting her do most of the talking. Finally, I did not offer any premature advice or solutions, which is surprising to me. I tend to want to “fix everything” and give lots of
I have heard about how powerful of a tool it is from multiple people, but it never seems to work as well for me. There was one instance (4:50-4:55) where I was waiting for her to continue to her challenges further, but she did not. Something I could have done was waited longer to see if had more to say or invited her to elaborate. I feel I need to have more practice prompting the client to hear more of his or her story if there is a lull in conversation and no one is speaking.
Something I feel I need to work on is summarizing the client’s concerns. I am skillful in identifying her feelings, but do not and reiterate what she said. This is especially important to do at the end of the session to wrap up what was discussed. I feel I typically do a better job of this than it shows in the video, though it is clearly something that I can improve. In terms of listening without interrupting, I feel I was somewhere in between the 80% of the time mark and 100%. There were a couple of times, particularly 0:31-0:32, that I found myself interrupting Elizalin a little bit. Sometimes, I get eager to ask a question and do not let the other person continue talking. This is something I need to work a bit on during my time in the program, particularly at my upcoming