Strengths and Secondary Trauma in Family Violence Work.

The growing influence of the strengths perspective represents an important shift in the style and substance of social work practice, away from diagnosing problems to assessing and building on client resources and abilities (Saleebey, 1992). The strengths perspective involves turning away from rational, empirical models that order and codify reality, toward a constructivist view, which holds that the identification of human problems reflects not objective reality, but the perspective of the one doing the looking. It involves a "reframe" of social work's (and Western culture's) focus on problems, experts, and authority. As Weick (1992) explained: With this constructivist understanding, three assumptions emerge from the strengths perspective. First, clients have personal and environmental strengths and are more likely to act on those strengths when they are affirmed and supported. Second, the strengths perspective views the client as the expert on his or her own experience, defining the experience and the process of resolution of any problems he or she has defined. It insists on the suspension of disbelief about what a person says about his or her own life. Third, the role of the social worker shifts from expert and "fixer" to collaborator who respects and fosters the strengths of the client (Saleebey, 1992).