Annemarie Gockel

Parenting in poverty: Perspectives of high-risk parents

Parents considered high risk by child protection services commonly are striving to raise children in poverty but are identified as requiring improved parenting skills. Parent perceptions of their own needs are typically not sought or elicited. This longitudinal study of 35 parents over 18 months garnered 115 in-depth interviews focusing on parent views regarding barriers to effective parenting. Analysis indicated that parents uniformly identified poverty as the primary barrier to their capacity to provide adequate care for their children. Themes elicited indicated that financially parents were living precariously close to margins of defeat. Parents accepted personal responsibility for their economic and parental failings, equating no income with bad parenting. Depression and despair associated with poverty were acknowledged to impair parenting and increase self-doubt about parenting capacity. Experiences with social services generally led to low expectations of parenting assistance. The need for improved aid for impoverished parents is discussed.

The Promise of Mindfulness for Clinical Practice Education

This article reviews the recent trend in mindfulness-based psychotherapies and explores the utility of mindfulness training for clinical practice education. It presents the current literature and evidence suggesting that mindfulness training may provide a vehicle to foster essential clinical skills and attitudes, increase self-care and reduce the impact of occupational stress, and prepare students to understand and use mindfulness-based interventions in practice.

Spirituality and the Process of Healing: A Narrative Study

To respond to calls for qualitative research to compliment quantitative findings, deepen our understanding of spiritual coping, and build theory (Hood & Belzen, 2005; Miller & Kelley, 2005; Pargament, Ano, & Wachholtz, 2005), this pilot study used a narrative method to examine the experience of 12 participants who self-identified as drawing on spirituality for healing. Participants described a 7-step process characterized by (a) openness, (b) shifting to a spiritual perspective, (c) going within, (d) connecting with the sacred, (e) undoing patterns, (f) setting healing intentions, and (g) following their inner guidance to transform experiences of mental and physical illness into experiences of healing. Participants emphasized the role of spirituality in reconstructing positive meanings in the face of crisis, and deconstructing patterns of thought, feeling, behavior, and experience associated with illness.

An Evaluation of Prepracticum Helping Skills Training for Graduate Social Work Students

Although foundational practice classes play a key role in helping prepracticum students develop counseling skills, we know little about the effectiveness of this form of helping skills training. This study assessed the effect of helping skills training delivered in foundational practice classes on proximal indicators of counseling skills acquisition, including measures of counseling self-efficacy, empathy, anxiety, and hindering self-awareness or rumination. Participating students made significant gains in counseling self-efficacy that were maintained at 3-month follow-up. Reductions in anxiety, rumination, and personal distress in interpersonally challenging situations were observed at follow-up, indicating that students made a successful transition to the field following training. The frequency of large-group role plays in particular was related to gains in students’ counseling self-efficacy.

War and the Soul

Written by a psychotherapist, with more than 25 years of experience in working with Veterans and civilian survivors from World War I to the Iraq War, War and the Soul presents a powerful addition to mainstream models of trauma recovery by addressing the moral and spiritual nature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its treatment. The text is divided into three sections. The first section of War and the Soul describes the transformations of the soul in response to war and creates a psychospiritual context within which traumatic stress can be understood. The second section From Myth to Reality brings alive the struggles of returning combatants and civilians and explores the moral and spiritual dimensions of their struggles. The third and final section The Long Road Home, which ties up the package by outlining holistic avenues to address combat wounds, and extends traditional psychological models by drawing on world spiritual and religious traditions. In this review, I explore three pivotal themes in the text: (1) Dr. Tick’s application of depth psychology to war and combat stress, (2) his analysis of the modern experience of combat stress, and (3) his critique and reconceptualization of mainstream treatments for PTSD. First and foremost, this book represents an analysis of war and combat stress through the lens of Jungian depth psychology. Dr. Tick argues that one of the reasons we have been unable to eradicate war is that we ignore its fundamental roots in the mythic or spiritual realm. Rather than seeing war as rationally driven by politics and economics, he ties the origins of war to the irrational realm of myth as reflected in the stories of war-like gods or godkings that are fundamental to many world religious and spiritual traditions, from the Iliad of the Greeks to the Hebrew Bible. He suggests that archetypes such as the warrior represent ‘‘fundamental forms in the human psyche, innate to all of us’’ (p. 29), which drive us as though unconsciously possessed to assume the mantle of war at whatever cost as an individual and as a society. From this perspective, salvation lies in becoming aware of the sway of these archetypes and making conscious choices to live them out metaphorically, in ways that serve to create peace and not war. Because the mythic realm is synonymous with the spiritual realm in the Jungian universe, Dr. Tick’s framework redefines the landscape of war as the landscape of mythology. The central actor is the psyche, originally understood as the soul.

Telling the Ultimate Tale: The Merits of Narrative Research in the Psychology of Religion

Narrative research is based on the understanding that we create our experiences through language. That is, we story ourselves into being. What do narrative researchers do when we meet the limits of language to express experience? In an earlier issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology, Coyle (2008) raised this issue as a particular challenge to qualitative research in the psychology of religion. In this article, I draw on the findings of a study I conducted on spiritual coping to illustrate how narrative research addresses this challenge. By offering a broad range of tools to investigate the form as well as the content of peoples stories, narrative methodologies take the reader beneath the surface layer of content to reveal multiple levels of meaning. In this article, I also build on Coyles arguments about the importance of qualitative research in the psychology of religion by demonstrating the specific strengths of narrative methods in reflecting both the range and complexity of peoples spiritual and religious experiences.

Teaching Note―Practicing Presence: A Curriculum for Integrating Mindfulness Training Into Direct Practice Instruction

Mindfulness training is increasingly being recommended as a vehicle for fostering clinical skill development across the helping professions. This teaching note introduces a curriculum for integrating mindfulness training into a foundational social work practice course. Research supporting the potential efficacy of applying mindfulness to social work training and practice is reviewed, and the application of the curriculum is described in detail. Student responses to the training are integrated with a description of relevant exercises, and implications for social work education are considered.

Mindfulness training as social work pedagogy: Exploring benefits, challenges, and issues for consideration in integrating mindfulness into social work education

ABSTRACT Mindfulness training is increasingly being integrated as a contemplative pedagogy in social work education. Social work educators are using mindfulness training to support student self-care, facilitate critical reflection and enhance dialogue around challenging topics, integrate spiritual and holistic perspectives, and to help students develop direct practice skills. In this article, we describe a course we developed, where we use mindfulness training as a means of enhancing student self-care and well-being. We draw on our own experience, student evaluations, and the existing literature to identify and reflect upon key considerations in introducing this innovative experiential pedagogy into the social work classroom.

Can God Help? Religion and Spirituality among Adolescent Male Sex Offenders

Religion has been identified as a key protective factor against delinquency among teens. Sex offending, in particular, is often seen as a moral as well as a clinical and a correctional issue. Yet, there is virtually no research exploring religion among adolescent sex offenders. Although religion is a multidimensional construct, it has most frequently been assessed by one or two blunt measures such as church attendance or self-rated salience of religion in existing studies (Johnson, De Li, Larson, & McCullough, 2000). In this project, we used a multidimensional measure (the BMMRS) to explore the impact of religion on delinquency committed by adolescent sex offenders (N = 196). We found that religion played a significant role in the lives of the incarcerated adolescent males who formed the sample. In a mediation analysis, religion partially meditated the relationship between trauma and nonsexual delinquency among this population. Implications for research and treatment are explored.

Embodied connections: Engaging the body in group work:

Group work is a key modality in social work practice. In this study, we sought to explore how the growing trend toward body-oriented psychotherapy is being integrated into group work, and to identify the potential significance of this trend for social work practice with groups. We conducted in-depth interviews with 20 practitioners engaged in developing this emerging form of practice across the United States, and used thematic analysis to identify how integrating body-oriented psychotherapy may impact the nature and practice of group work from their perspectives. The overarching theme identified was that using body-oriented psychotherapy serves to Deepen the Group Process and Enhance the Therapeutic Potential of Group. This overarching theme was supported by four subthemes that describe how participants used body-oriented psychotherapy to enrich their group work. These subthemes include Coming into the Present Moment, Accessing the Body’s Unconscious Knowing, Regulating Affect and Facilitating Working Through, and Enhancing Interpersonal Connection. We discuss how these findings fit with existing research on group work and body-oriented psychotherapy, and describe how they reflect recent neurobiological models of therapeutic change. We also identify potential benefits and limitations to using body-oriented psychotherapy in group work, and outline key considerations for responding to this emerging trend in the profession at large.