The importance of not being judgemental (or how chaos theory relates to social work!)

When people tell us about their lives and their situations, it's natural for us to connect them to our own experiences and draw parallels.  Indeed, personal experience is a very useful part of any social worker's knowledge base.  However, without checks and balances it can also be very damaging to the way in which we practice.

The obvious example is where a social worker feels that they "know" how someone is feeling.  Philosophers of Mind would quickly tell that social worker that they cannot know how someone is feeling.  Empathy has a large role to play in social work interactions, but is not about knowing.  Rather, empathy is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another" (Oxford English Dictionary).  Albeit quite subtle, the difference between sharing / understanding and knowing is very significant.

Even where a service user has superficially the same experiences as us, we cannot extrapolate to say we know how they feel.  Say, for instance we are the same age, gender, ethnicity, etc. as a service user and are disabled in the same way as them.  Perhaps we also went to the same school and live in the same town.  Can we say we know what their experiences are and how they feel?  Chaos theory is a good analogy here: the same prima facie initial conditions of a system can produce widely divergent results.  Similarly, experiences that look exactly the same can be perceived very differently by two different people.

When working with a service user (or talking to someone in the street!) we need to remember that we are not that person, and that no two people have the same experiences regardless of how similar we might think they appear.  Our best guess comes from spending a long time talking to and being with that service user, and even then we are still guessing.