Incorporating Religion and Spirituality into Social Work Practice with African Americans: Interview with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D.

Episode 59: Today's Social Work Podcast is on incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans. Or at least that's the official title. The unofficial title is, "If my client brings God into the conversation, what should I do?" I spoke with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, best-selling author, multicultural researcher, family therapist and clinical trainer, and recipient of awards from the American Psychological Association, Association of Black Psychologists, and the American Family Therapy academy. When I was a social work intern, I worked with an African American mother who had AIDS and whose 6 children were HIV+. The father of her children had been an IV drug user who had died of AIDS. The mother was in poor health, and rarely sought her own treatment. I had a hard time tracking her down because she spent most of the day, every day, on public transportation with one child or another taking them to and from medical appointments. I remember being on the bus with her one day (because that was only place I could meet with her), listening to her talk about how she had successfully fought hospital administration to get treatment for one of her kids. Being the eager social work student that I was, fully prepared to acknowledge my clients strengths and resources, I told her that I was in awe of her strength. "How do you do it?" I asked her. Her response totally caught me off guard. She said, "The good lord will give me only as much as I can handle." I had no idea how to respond. See, I was expecting her to say something like, "a parent will do what a parent has to do," or maybe, "I don't know either; I sure could use a vacation." I expected her response to be much more... textbook? You know, the kind of response that I had read about in my textbooks so that I could follow up with, "and so if you took a vacation, what would be different?" Which really makes no sense at all since she was obviously not about to zip off to the Dominican Republic for a week at the beach. Not so textbook. In that moment, on the bus, I found myself completely at a loss for words. Not that I didn't have a million things running through my head, I did. I just thought they all sounded stupid. On one level I was trying to figure out what she meant: "ok. She said that the good lord will give her only as much as she can handle... does that mean that when she can't handle any more, she'll die? or that the good lord knows exactly how much she can handle and then when she can't handle any more the good lord will stop giving her things to handle, or is there a third option I'm just not thinking about. I mean, I'm just a social work intern, I'm not sure what I can offer above and beyond what the "good lord" can offer her, so what now?" Ok, so in case you got lost in all of my self-talk here's a quick recap. I asked my client a question. She responded. That's it. What should have come next was me saying something intelligent. Instead, what I said was, "Wow." So why did I have such a hard time coming up with an appropriate response? Well, for one, I thought that as a social worker I should know what my client meant, and I should understand what she meant... Another things was that I had a different belief system from my client and it didn't seem right to disagree with her, nor did it seem right to agree with her, because that wouldn't be genuine. My social work education did not prepare me to deal with issues of religion and spirituality. My textbooks didn't provide me with templates for how to respond when my clients brought up the issue of God. Prior to 2001, accreditation guidelines from the Council on Social Work Education didn't require schools to include spiritual assessment in the biopsychosocial assessment, which I talk about in more detail in Episode 2, Biopsychosocial-spiritual Assessment and Mental Status Exam. Another reason is that there has been a long and contentious relationship between religion and the helping professions. Religion was either the answer or the problem. On one hand, the social work profession is in part rooted in the Friendly Visitor movement which believed that the right version of religion was the answer to poverty. On the other hand, you have Freud's legacy of religion being considered an obsessional neurosis. So for many providers, the only safe middle ground was "Religion is not within my scope of practice and therefore I'm not going to deal with it at all." Well, today's guest, Nancy Boyd Franklin, would say that when religion or spirituality is part of a client's life, the effective provider has to be able to deal with and be willing to engage in conversations about it. "Wow" just won't cut it. She would see this mother's belief in the power of the good lord as a sign of strength and resilience, not weakness or pathology. She would also say that I could have simply responded to the mother's statement by saying, "tell me more." In today's interview, Nancy spoke about the heterogeneity of beliefs among Black Americans. She and I talked about the difference between religion and spirituality, what a church family is and why it is so important, whether or not social workers should ask about religion and spirituality if clients don't bring it up, and what the role of religion and spirituality is in traditional African American families. I interviewed Nancy at Temple University's School of Social Work. She was the invited speaker for the school's lecture series on social work research. For more information about Temple's School of Social Work, or the research lecture series, please visit their website at www.temple.edu/ssa.org. And now, without further ado, on to episode 59 of the Social Work Podcast. Incorporating religion and spirituality into social work practice with African Americans: Interview with Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D. For links to resources mentioned in this episode, or other episodes on social work topics, please visit our website at http://socialworkpodcast.com