Emotion as a Skill: A Practical Methodology for Coping with Emotional Risks in Social Work

Emotional risks are ubiquitous in social work practice and pose significant threats to the health and well-being of practitioners and clients. Emotional skills are recognized as the best practice approach for coping with these risks. However, existing research on emotional skills is almost all from the fields of medicine, education, and psychology, and little attention is paid to it in the social work literature. To address this gap, the study explored Chinese social workers' experiences and perceptions of using emotional skills in practice through semistructured interviews (N = 28). The study suggests that emotion can be used as a practical skill for social workers, who have developed two patterns of practice for emotional skills: "self-directed" emotion management and "other-directed" emotion management. In the practice of coping with emotional risk in oneself and others, social workers navigated three stages of identification, understanding, and management and employed relevant professional skills (such as body scanning, empathy, and communicating emotions to others). The study results are pragmatic, and the action plan model of emotional skills has significant implications for social work practice and education.