Editor's Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER Magazine’s Back-to-School Guide for Social Work Students, edited by Linda May Grobman and Karen Zgoda, is available now! Get this e-book at:  http://www.amazon.com/WORKER%C2%AE-Magazines--School-Students-ebook/dp/B00EZAXVJ8 (Kindle format) or http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/355823 (ePub and other formats).

 

Check out all of our social work and nonprofit books, social work greeting cards, social work buttons, and more. All of our books and products are available through our secure online store at: http://shop.whitehatcommunications.com.

 

 

You can also download our catalog in PDF format.

 

 

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Job Corner

 

Featured Excerpt

 

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the Summer 2014 issue of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER. Read the full article at:

One of the most inclusive and refreshing aspects of the social work field is the diversity of its constituents. Studying and working alongside people at different points in time in their life—with different backgrounds, and different levels of experience—is not uncommon. As a result, human service providers, perhaps more than any other group of people, recognize that a passion for helping others to reach their full potential knows no color, gender, faith, or age.  

 

Upon graduating from college with my BSW, I moved to a medium-sized city to accept a job with a medium-sized nonprofit. Not long after starting my entry-level position, it became clear that my organization was thriving and that there would be a boom in hiring, particularly within my department. Otherwise put, we were an increasingly diverse department, in an increasingly diverse nonprofit.    

 

Four years later, I am now the manager of my department, supervising a group of passionate, committed staff, some of whom are more than a decade older than I. Although I was fully aware of this fact when I accepted the position, it didn’t negate my inherent discomfort about supervising people who were older than me.    

It wasn’t long before the apprehension crept in. In every team meeting, every performance review I conducted, and almost every moment of supervision, I found myself fretting: Am I being taken seriously? Is this person willing to take direction from someone with less work experience? What could I possibly teach this person that he or she doesn’t already know?    

 

For weeks, I could feel myself shrinking under these fears. Then I realized...I had nothing to fear all along. In fact, once I shifted my perception, I realized I had a treasure trove of learning experiences right in front of me. I just had to be willing to look past my own self doubt. Doing so wasn’t always easy, but I took steps to work past my hesitance and fulfill my managerial role with confidence and humility.    

For those of you similarly rising through the ranks at a young age, here are my top five tips for kicking the cold feet and embracing your manager status.

 

A strengths-based approach may be our go-to when working with clients, but many of us find it difficult to extend the same encouragement and acceptance to ourselves. Nevertheless, taking the time to recognize what it is about yourself that you value and appreciate goes a long way toward helping you understand why you’re destined for success.    

 

Eventually, as self doubt began to sneak in about my ability to lead and manage my department, I was forced to remember why I would be great at the job (cue forced smile)! Besides, what choice did I have but to show up every day and do my best? It may not have been as easy as willing my confidence and watching it appear, but I began to put the “I can do this” pieces together. After all, what the position needed was someone who was familiar with the field, familiar with the history of the department, excited about the job, compassionate, organized, and motivated. And what do you know—I was all those things! Slowly but surely, acceptance of my strengths far surpassed the ways in which I thought I was unsuitable for the job.    

 

Alas, I’ve learned that feelings of defeat are not uncommon in our field, whether it’s the seemingly endless budget cuts that diminish much-needed resources for the people we’re serving, or a challenging interaction with our clients or co-workers. In the end, exercising the ease with which we’re able to find the productive and valuable in any situation serves not only us, but our clients, as well.

 

Read the rest of this article at:

 

 

Articles from the Summer 2014 issue of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER include:

 

...and much more!

 

 

Features

By Dr. Frank Ochberg

 

A little over 40 years ago in Stockholm, Sweden, a notorious bank incident occurred. Instead of simply robbing the bank, the gunman held several employees hostage, demanded that his imprisoned friend be released and brought to the bank, and also requested money and safe passage. This episode lasted six days and was, during that time, the top news story in the world. Afterwards, it was learned that bonds were formed between the hostages and the perpetrators. This sort of bond is now called "the Stockholm syndrome."

 

Back then, in the mid-seventies, I was a consultant to the FBI and to Scotland Yard, helping mid-rank detectives perfect their skills at hostage negotiation. A handful of us studied sieges, interviewed victims, trained negotiators, and worked alongside SWAT teams, technical experts, and incident commanders. The US Department of Justice convened a National Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism. I was the psychiatrist on that task force. The others were all criminal justice professionals.

 

For one year (1976-1977), I lived in Europe and visited many survivors of hostage incidents, served as an instructor for the London Metropolitan Police, and spent time in the command center in Holland during a major hostage incident involving a simultaneous terrorist attack on a school and a train.

 

Somebody, not me, coined the term, Stockholm syndrome, based on the attachments among the hostages and the robber and his accomplice in that Swedish bank. But I defined and explained the term in a memorandum to the FBI while I was studying and consulting in Europe. I noted three things that were very significant for us, the experts on the outside, who wanted to save lives and resolve the dangerous episode without bloodshed. First, the hostage was often attached to the perpetrator. Whether she or he felt love or gratitude or friendly affection didn't matter. Ironically, paradoxically, the hostage cared more for the hostage-taker than for us who were charged with saving the hostage's life. Second, the "bad guy" was attached to his victim, despite threatening her or him with death. In Stockholm, Olsson, the robber, tied a noose around Kristin's neck so that she would be strangled if the police inserted gas to sedate everybody in the vault of the bank. But her affection for him was, he later admitted, reciprocated. That meant that he wanted her to survive. Third, both parties, hostages and hostage-holders, distrusted the authorities and were allied against them. That meant that they couldn't send secret messages to any of the hostages. They couldn't depend upon their loyalty to the intervention team.

 

Those three elements became part of our FBI training protocols. Negotiators and incident commanders were cautioned to look for the bond between hostage and hostage-taker and to avoid relying on the hostage to cooperate with our attempts at rescue.

 

I was often asked, "Why?" Why would hostages become so attached to criminals who violated their freedom, dignity, and security? Here is what I noticed and how I explained the situation:

 

These captures are usually sudden, shocking, and terrifying. Survivors told me, "I knew I was going to die." Some thought they might die, but many said. "I knew," not "I thought." They were not allowed to move, to speak, to eat, to use a toilet. That made them like children--regressed, dependent, unable to fend for themselves. Without consciously realizing it, they were emotionally infantilized. But then, little by little, they were given certain privileges and creature comforts. One former hostage told me, "They gave us blankets, cigarettes. Somehow, they came off human." He added, "You had to fight a certain feeling of compassion." Isn't that interesting? "You had to fight a certain feeling…." He was a newspaper editor held hostage on a train in Holland. He didn't want to like the terrorists who held him and threatened him. They were killers. But that feeling of compassion came over him. It wasn't love. It was positive and it caused him to feel attached to them.

 

I believe that we humans, along with other species, experience a very strong bond to our parents, particularly our mothers, during childhood. That feeling is reciprocated. The mother-infant bond is vital for survival. We can't describe the feeling we had as pre-verbal children, so let's assume it is something like gratitude. We are given warmth when we are cold, food when we are hungry, and a clean diaper or a toilet when we need sanitation. These are the earliest gifts of life.

 

A terrorist or a criminal (or, for that matter, an abusive spouse or parent) may be a source of terror and then a source of relief from the state of being terrified and infantilized. That person, by NOT killing you, by giving you the various gifts of life, evokes a primitive and profound feeling. It is the precursor of all the various forms of positive human feelings we experience later in life. We can feel compassion, friendliness, warmth, agape (non-romantic love) or eros (erotic love). The former hostages that I interviewed experienced something on that spectrum, usually non-romantic, often difficult to put into words.

These positive sensations could last a long time. Months. Years. When the sensation finally vanished, there was often a sense of loss--even of grief.

 

It does make sense to consider the ironic attachment, the "trauma bond," to be a return to infancy and the creation of an emotion that was once necessary for keeping mother and infant in each other's arms. It is not a sign of weakness or of mental illness. It is natural, predictable and useful. It serves the goal of survival.

 

And, yes, it comes from being a victim of violence. It does not mean that the victim likes being victimized. It has nothing to do with masochism. But some people will, unfortunately, learn to equate being abused with being protected. That makes life very difficult for survivors of childhood abuse. "Who can I trust when those who gave me life were violent to me--but also were the ones who DIDN'T kill me?"

The trauma bond and the Stockholm syndrome do create that third element--them (hostage and hostage-holder) against us (the "good guys" who are outside the siege room trying to rescue everyone, but ultimately intending to arrest the perpetrators).

 

Survivors of captivity and survivors of family violence must overcome their trauma bonds and their Stockholm syndromes. These attachments are, in a way, normal. They happen frequently and they serve a powerful purpose: survival. I sometimes tell my victim-patients, "You were raised by wolves." They were lucky to come out the jungle alive. Now they must learn how to recognize trustworthy humans and avoid predators. Not easy.

 

But many, many survivors have learned to retrain themselves and to escape the patterns of behavior that were useful as hostages, whether they were hostages in a siege room or in their own homes. That is encouraging. If you were "raised by wolves" or dependent upon a predator at any stage of life, understanding the Stockholm syndrome can help you understand yourself. This understanding can place you on a path from victim to survivor--a survivor who thrives and succeeds and knows whom to trust.

 

 

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Did you know THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER has a social work book club? We do! Ogden Rogers’ Beginnings, Middles, & Ends: Sideways Stories on the Art & Soul of Social Work, has been getting great reviews. An excerpt from this book, “Chestnuts,” is on our website now. And I want social workers from all over to read this book as a group and discuss it, because I believe it provides a way for social workers to think differently about social work and learn. So, if you would like to participate, please read the book, and we will announce a time/times when we will be discussing the book online via our website and online chat. The book is available on Amazon in print and Kindle editions. It’s also now available at the iTunes store and Google Play. Follow the book club activities on Facebook.

News & Resources

Colorlines is presenting “Life Cycles of Inequity,” a yearlong multimedia series about the lives of black boys and men.

 

The murders of both Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis have sparked a renewed discussion about the tragedies that surround so many black male lives. But as Colorlines Editor-at-Large Kai Wright wrote in introducing the series this week, "We know that their deaths cannot truly be understood without first examining the context of their lives."

“Life Cycles of Inequity” will explore that context in monthly installments. Each monthly package will focus on a life stage or event that for black men is uniquely impacted by inequity. Each will be anchored by a video in which award-winning filmmaker André Robert Lee will introduce us to black men who are trying to build lives amid the inequity.

 

Join the conversation about this series on Twitter, on Facebook or in the comments section of Colorlines.

 

 

I am seeking articles for upcoming issues of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER magazine and/or our website. I am especially interested in articles in the following categories:

 

 

 

I also welcome submissions of poetry, photographs, illustrations, artwork, videos, audio, and other creative work depicting social work and related topics.

 

Please contact Linda Grobman, editor/publisher of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER, at: lindagrobman@socialworker.com

On Our Web Site

 

The Summer 2014 issue of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER is available now! It is available to download in PDF format at:

 

 

THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER’s Web site at http://www.socialworker.com includes the full text of hundreds of articles from past issues of the magazine. The current issue is featured on the site’s main page. Articles in various categories, such as field placement, ethics, and technology, can be found by clicking on “Articles” in the top navigation of the site.

 

In addition to the free PDF and Web versions of the magazine, the magazine is available in PRINT at http://newsocialworker.magcloud.com! Order it today!

 

You can also purchase bound volumes for 2011, 2012, and 2013 at Amazon.com. Search for “The New Social Worker” (in quotes).

In Print

White Hat Communications, publisher of THE NEW SOCIAL WORKER magazine and the Social Work E-News, has published several books about social work. These books make great gifts (for graduation, holidays, or other occasions) for yourself, or for your friends, students, and colleagues in social work!

 

Briefly, those currently in print are:

 

 

DAYS IN THE LIVES OF SOCIAL WORKERS: 58 Professionals Tell Real-Life Stories From Social Work Practice (4th Edition), edited by Linda May Grobman

 

MORE DAYS IN THE LIVES OF SOCIAL WORKERS:35 Real-Life Stories of Advocacy, Outreach, and Other Intriguing Roles in Social Work Practice, edited by Linda May Grobman

 

DAYS IN THE LIVES OF GERONTOLOGICAL SOCIAL WORKERS: 44 Professionals Tell Stories From Real-Life Social Work Practice With Older Adults, edited by Linda May Grobman and Dara Bergel Bourassa.

 

 

IS IT ETHICAL? 101 SCENARIOS IN EVERYDAY SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE: A DISCUSSION WORKBOOK, by Thomas Horn

 

 

THE SOCIAL WORK GRADUATE SCHOOL APPLICANT’S HANDBOOK: The Complete Guide to Selecting and Applying to MSW Programs, by Jesus Reyes

 

We also publish books on nonprofit management. Want to start your own agency? Check out THE NONPROFIT HANDBOOK: Everything You Need to Know to Start and Run Your Nonprofit Organization (6th Edition) and IMPROVING QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE IN YOUR NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION, by Gary M. Grobman.

 

 

All of our books are available through our secure online store at:

 

 

You can also download our catalog in PDF format.

VISIT OUR SITES

www.socialworker.com