Social work self-care education informed during the pandemic: Experience,reflection,and suggestion

First challenge: Help-seeking ice-breaking

During the pandemic, students were surrounded by an array of proximal demands and stressors in their personal life, schoolwork, and field practice more than ever. We observed an issue that had been in existence but became more significant since the pandemic: the meaning of self-care seemed self-evident to students but sounded distant and was regarded as secondary. Many students often tended to compress needs, feign well-being, self-blame for performance less than expectations, and set challenging goals for themselves to reach. Some students confided that they felt ashamed to ask for help from others, even from instructors, for an extension. A couple of students often held their difficulties until the end of the semester, though we repeatedly mentioned no hesitation in reaching out.

The challenge showed us a common barrier in self-care practice that was often neglected in our social work self-care education: the help-seeking dilemma. Previous studies indicated that our self-image as professional helpers is often imposed by the idealistic perceptions of clients. Such self-image can affect self-esteem and cause disappointment when failure or challenge happens (Siebert and Siebert, 2007). Therefore, in social work self-care education, it is crucial to create a class environment that embraces our vulnerabilities as social work professionals, develops self-compassion, and addresses barriers to seeking help. Specifically, one of us directly explained to students that asking for help could be not easy since it might challenge our high self-esteem. As students heard the point, they smiled with relief and further discussed the pressure to overcome it in a collective manner.

Second challenge: Exploring self-care methods

In the context of the pandemic, some widely promoted self-care methods showed their limited application in some circumstances. For example, having a quiet place for meditation or doing outdoor exercise now seems impractical or even impossible during a quarantine. Attending the virtual classroom reduced class interaction which was essential to convey peer support. Also, it was sometimes a trade-off between taking time for self-care talks and completing course contents. Our solution was to regularly devote about 10 minutes each class to a casual check-in. For instance, when their dogs and cats appeared in the virtual meeting by accident, when they ate their morning cereal in front of the screen as they were ‘sitting’ in class, when the sunshine blurred the camera, such moments naturally led us to talk about loving pets, favorite foods, and different kinds of things that could cheer us up in daily life.

But still, there was a gap that some self-care techniques centering around emotion-focused self-care could not bridge to meet the needs of students and reduce stressors. The students in one of our classes explained how they were overwhelmed by the news about the pandemic. After a piece of news triggered their anxiety, anger, and sadness, they were driven to look for more details and other related reports until they felt emotionally overwhelmed and stopped with a sense of guilt for not working instead on assignments. Responding to such a struggle, we discussed self-care tips, such as developing healthy phone habits, adjusting attitudes toward news, and reducing distractions. Nevertheless, many stress-coping strategies that students looked for were far less explored. There were students who did not feel comfortable disclosing their experiences in class. Facing their deep personal struggles in one-on-one meetings, we found that teaching self-care techniques should not stand alone without the support from professional counselors.

Third challenge: Self-care through empowerment

As personal stress was intertwined with social problems and political uncertainties during the pandemic, students in our classes were deeply troubled by social injustice, racism, and political polarization. To integrate the self-care component into the policy practice we taught, empowerment was identified as the bridge since taking action has been called ‘radical self-care’ to respond to social problems (Powers and Engstrom, 2020). Accordingly, we guided our students to develop a belief that rather than suppressing their strong feelings (e.g. sadness, disappointment, and anger) toward social issues, they could turn those emotions into the motivation to learn social policies and engage in social changes.

In this sense, we fostered a learning environment in which students were comfortable sharing their feelings and opinions on social issues, social policies, and politics without the concern of being different from and judged by others. On this basis, students were further encouraged by class activities that simulated public advocacy (e.g. elevator speech, mock legislative hearings). Particularly, students expressed their gratitude for the mock legislative hearings because such activities allow them to speak out about what they want in the roles assumed but are a challenge to engage in in reality. However, transforming the class activities into real-world actions calls for more structural support. We found the contrast that students who acted alone found it stressful to speak to people in authority and hold different political stances, while students who had been involved in advocacy groups showed more boldness in action. Identity-based groups and action groups aimed at a specific change are highly expected but often unavailable.

Recommendations for social work self-care education

Based on our experiences and reflections above, we offer the following recommendations for future self-care education for the international social work community.

First, social work self-care education needs to tackle the obstacles to practicing self-care. It should not be assumed that the straightforward meaning and obvious value of self-care naturally leads to practice. Further studies can apply behavioral health theories, such as social cognitive theory, planned behavior theory, and the health belief model, to understand the personal and contextual factors that contribute to the untended self-care needs, especially those related to the help-seeking dilemma that many social workers face.

Second, social work self-care education is expected to combine emotional, cognitive, and behavioral coping methods, so that students can identify the source of stress, understand the influence of negative thoughts, and take on actions for change. For graduate-level social work students, educators may guide them to apply the evidence-based counseling approaches (e.g. Cognitive-behavioral Therapy and Problem-solving Therapy) to themselves in coping with stress. In the meantime, social work educators can look for some reliable and valid self-care inventories that indicate the main domains of the self-care concept and an array of different self-care methods (as reviewed by Jiang et al., 2021). In this way, self-care education could be flexible in developing either in a causal short class session or in a structural manner throughout a semester.

Third, social work self-care education needs to bridge the gap between classroom-based support and agency- and identity-based support in the practice setting. Social work students, in most cases, will no longer have access to self-care support from professors and other university-based resources after graduation. Once entering the workplace, they may not immediately be able to identify the available support resources at their agencies, professional associations, or advocacy groups. Therefore, self-care education should not only be integrated into the social work curriculum (Newell and Nelson-Gardell, 2014) but also into students’ extracurricular activities and field placements. For example, social work educators can guide students to connect with advocacy groups outside the social work program, empowering them to get involved in a much broader scope of collective efforts for social justice.

Conclusion

By integrating self-care contents into social policy courses during the pandemic, we found that social work self-care education could be broadened in terms of purpose, scope, and content. From the perspective of career development, social work self-care education aims to prepare students to transit from schools to workplaces by breaking the paradox of social workers’ help-seeking and identifying professional care support resources. The scope of social work self-care needs to be expanded from the individual level to the professional and social levels, including the promotion of empowerment through collective efforts. Moreover, the delivery of self-care education is expected to be enriched by introducing emotional-, cognitive-, and behavioral-based stress-coping strategies, so that students can acquire diverse self-care knowledge and skills for their personal and professional well-being.