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     There are many gray areas in social work practice, and self-disclosure is no exception. Despite the fact that the literature typically frames self-disclosure as a complex and controversial use-of-self practice issue (Goldstein, 1994; Knight, 2012; Urdang, 2010), inquiring minds still want to know: “So...should I do it or not?” This is often the case for students and newer practitioners. And who can blame them? Social work practice is full of chaos and complexity, and sometimes it just feels reassuring to get a solid answer. As a teacher, I’ve said, “It depends,” more times than I’d care to admit to excellent questions posed by students. So, last semester, when a student proposed, “Ahhh...can you please just tell us what we should say when a client asks us a personal question?” during a first semester practice course, I paused, collected my thoughts, and did my best to lay out reasons why the question of whether or not to self-disclose is tough to answer. What follows here are some musings and basic parameters to consider when thinking about this baffling practice issue.

 

    If a client asks me my age, should I tell them? If not, how should I respond? Should I tell my client where I’m going on vacation? Is it okay to have family photos in my office? When is it appropriate, if ever, to tell a client that I am also in recovery? Is there a difference between telling a client that I am in recovery from substance misuse vs. another form of mental illness? Is it okay to cry with clients?

 

    Generally speaking, self-disclosures come in two forms: self-revealing and self-involving (Knox & Hill, 2003). Nearly all clinicians self-disclose to clients in some way or another. If you wear a wedding ring, for example, you are disclosing something about your personal life to your clients. Let’s consider the example of a clinician working with a client who endured several years of domestic abuse. In this situation, a clinician letting the client know that she is affected emotionally/viscerally by the clinical encounter is an example of a self-revealing disclosure: “I feel deeply moved by your account of leaving this relationship after years of turmoil and abuse.” If the clinician informs the client that she, too, is a domestic abuse survivor, she is making a self-involving disclosure. It is easy to see why self-involving disclosures are the more controversial of the two. Although in both examples the clinician makes a choice not to be a “blank slate” in the therapy room and inserts her humanity, self-involving disclosures carry a greater risk (more on this later).

 

    Although I’ve always tended toward minimal use of self-involving disclosures with clients, I can vividly recall an instance when a self-involving disclosure seemed to have a positive impact on treatment. I was working with a young adult client struggling to sift through a flood of mixed emotions prior to her wedding day, most stemming from complicated family dynamics. With the intention of validating just how stressful rites of passage can be (despite social messages that such events should be perfect), I briefly shared the story of my own wedding day, which began with a phone call early in the morning alerting my soon-to-be husband that his father had just died. My disclosure did seem validating to the client. It offered her a model for accepting the confusing and messy aspects of her experience—the anger and sadness regarding her family situation and the excitement and joy surrounding her marriage.

 

    Now, it’s possible that the same disclosure in another clinical scenario would have backfired, which brings me to the next point: context is everything. We need to evaluate the situation at hand, the probable impact on the clinical relationship, and the likelihood that the disclosure will be helpful (or not) for the particular client (Urdang, 2010).

 

 

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