What Are Social Graces in Clinical Psychology? A Psychotherapy and Social Psychology Podcast Episode.

Whenever a client comes into our therapy room or whenever you meet a psychologist, they have certain privileges and disadvantages that you don't have. Also, you’ll both have different life experiences, perspectives and focuses that you will share and you will differ in. This is because every one of us is wonderfully unique with our own thoughts, feelings and lived experiences. Yet as aspiring and qualified psychologists, we need to acknowledge that we have certain social graces or privileges that our clients don't have and vice versa. Therefore, in this clinical psychology podcast episode, you'll going to learn what are social graces, what are some types of social graces and how social graces can impact the therapy process. If you enjoy learning about psychotherapy, clinical psychology and privilege then this will be a great episode for you. 

Today's psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Moral Psychology: Introduction to the Social Psychology, Biological Psychology and Applied Psychology of Morality. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.

What Are Social Graces in Clinical Psychology?

Social graces is an acronym that helps us to understand the visible and invisible aspects of our identity, so this allows mental health professionals to examine the elements of our identity that impact our behaviour and lives. This is what each letter of the Graces in social graces mean:

·       G- Gender, Generation, Geography, Gender Identity and Geography

·       R- race and religion

·       A- age, appearance and ability

·       C- culture, caste and class

·       E- education, economics and ethnicity

·       S- sexuality, sexual orientation and spirituality

In addition, social graces is a framework designed by Burnham (1993) and updated in 2012 that asks mental health practitioners to be aware of how their identity influences their thinking and approach to work. Since social graces focus on how different aspects of our identity impact our practice.

Some academic definitions of social graces include:

·       “A mnemonic that separates out different aspects of identity into separate categories.” (Butler, 2017, p. 17)

·       “Mnemonic for aspects of difference” (Jones & Reeve, 2014, p. 2)

·       “A suitable framework […] through which therapists can reflect on their own beliefs and prejudices in order to understand how they might bring these into the therapy” (Totsuka, 2014, p. 106)

Therefore, some quick examples of how thinking about social graces can impact clinical practice is, if you’re a young and beautiful young woman (age, appearance and gender) how might these social factors impact your clinical practice compared to a middle-aged woman with an average appearance? The middle-aged woman would likely have more clinical experience than the young woman, yet the young woman would probably be treated better and have advantages because of her youth and attractive appearance. Yet both women because of their gender would be unlikely to face one or two gender stereotypes compared to male therapists. Due to the myth in society that women are more sensitive, caring and better therapists than men.

On the other hand, men would have a lot of benefits compared to women because of the patriarchal society we live in.

Personally, if I look at myself briefly, I am a young 24-year-old white non-binary person who was assigned male at birth and I look male in appearance. I am from a middle-class background, I’m gay and in terms of sexuality, I am not very active and I have only ever had one relationship. All these different social factors would impact my clinical practice in different ways. For example, whilst I’m aware of a lot of social issues, especially those faced by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, I will never be able to fully understand the impact because I have not experienced them myself because of my class. Also, when I work with heterosexual clients, again I have a great awareness of heterosexual relationships but because I’m gay and I’ve only ever had one relationship, my understanding will be limited. However, because of biological sex and appearance, I get a lot of male privilege that other clients and practitioners don’t get and I’ll be able to help and support autistic, LGBT+ and trauma survivors a lot in my clinical practice because I’ve lived those experiences too.

What Is The Purpose of Social Graces?

The social graces framework is useful because it allows psychologists, counsellors, educators and therapists to talk about aspects of our identity and how they might impact how we relate to other people. Therefore, it’s designed to make identity factors a part of our clinical discussions about our personal privileges and disadvantages that we face in society. This includes our own implicit biases because once our biases are identified, we can help neutralise them so we can become more thoughtful, fair and effective practitioners.

Nolte (2017) page 4 mentioned:

“provides a helpful way for us to become intentional in our developing awareness of, reflexivity about and skillfulness in responding to sameness and difference.”

Because I want to lead by example here, I know I can sometimes be biased against different classes, which is weird because I come from a very, very deprived area. Therefore, because I make myself aware of my classist attitudes, I’m able to catch myself and stop the thought and biased attitude in its tracks.

Moreover, Partridge and McCarry (2017) argued that the framework can help psychologists to use our reflections to inform our future actions so it gets us to think about how we can ensure that we are fairer in the future. Social graces can help us to reflect on our actions in the first place so we can think about how our identity influenced a situation, and social graces allow us to subvert the dominant discourse. This involves psychologists considering how to rethink ongoing behaviours that give privilege to dominant social identities, like white, male, middle-class, able individuals. Lastly, social graces allow us to consider new alternatives for future actions so we can come up with new ways to behave that are fairer.

Going back to my classism example, when I find that I’ve been classist against someone or a group of people then this is me reflecting on my action and realising is my own class that is making me behave this way. Therefore, in future, I need to make sure I am fairer and I need to subvert the dominant course. This is one of the many reasons why I love my Outreach work because every week I get to work with students and young people from deprived areas and help them realise that university is a great and achievable option for them if they want to go. This helps rebalance the social scales so university isn’t reserved for dominant social identities, and anyone can go and apply regardless of their age, race, gender, socioeconomic status and more.

What Are The Key Features of Social Graces?

Firstly, all aspects of identity are equally important to the social graces framework. Burnham (2003) proposed that all the aspects of our identity should be considered equally important because whilst Gender, Geography and Generation come before Race and Religion in the framework, this does not mean they are more important.

Each of the Graces are meant to be examined individually without being drowned out by any of the others.

Secondly, the social graces framework is always evolving because people will naturally add and subtract from it. Since psychologists can use the framework practically by starting a therapy session by asking people what other aspects of identity they could add to the framework. For instance, if you’re working with a refugee then they might add their refugee experience and status to the framework, and if you’re working with an indigenous person then they will add their indigenous experience to the framework because they are core, fundamental parts of their identity.

These new aspects are still just as important as any if the pre-existing aspects in the framework.

Finally, the social graces framework makes the aspects of our identity explicit and visible. As a result of our identity and the different aspects of it isn’t often spoken about or given room to be discussed inside or outside the therapy room. This means the framework gives us a chance to discuss our thoughts on the unsaid aspects of our identity in addition to the aspects that we wear on our sleeves. For example, some unsaid aspects of my identity generally my thoughts on religion, my sexuality, my sexual orientation, my gender identity amongst others. Whereas I happily wear the age, generation, biological sex, education amongst others on my sleeve.

On the whole, when in therapy sessions, social graces can be discussed with clients to get both the client and therapist thinking about how each aspect of identity impacts their thoughts and behaviour. For example, when clients and therapists talk about education, they can talk about how their education background influences their views, and when people talk about generation, they could talk about their lives growing up and how the attitudes and behaviours of different generations impact their views nowadays. Such as, if my Grandad who was born in the Silent Generation was to discuss his generation then he would talk about how you didn’t show emotion, you didn’t show that you were upset and you certainly did not talk about your feelings or complain as part of that generation. Then a therapist would explore how those attitudes impact his daily life and behaviour now, and whether these are still adaptive or maladaptive attitudes to have these days.

What are The Advantages of the Social Graces Framework?

Firstly, a great benefit of the social graces framework is that it helps us to see our own implicit biases because when we examine the aspects of our identities, this allows us to think about how they shape our actions and views about our self, others and the world. Then by talking about these aspects we can eliminate or, at least, minimise implicit biases in our clinical practice.

Secondly, the framework is great because it helps people to understand identity. I would add that this is very useful as a potential psychoeducation tool for our clients because identity is a very abstract concept, so by providing a framework to our clients that helps to facilitate a discussion. This is a really useful way to make an abstract concept slightly more tangible for our clients. As well as the framework is a useful way to examine with our clients how aspects of our identity impact our beliefs and perspectives.

Lastly, another advantage of the social graces framework is it makes us talk about the invisible and unsaid aspects of our identity. I mean without this framework, we wouldn’t talk about a lot of aspects of identity, because most aspects are often overlooked or ignored because they’re invisible. It’s really common to talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, age and education because we largely see these social factors. Yet it is rare to talk about generation, sexuality amongst others. This means it’s useful that clients and psychologists can talk through each aspect one by one to make sure nothing is overlooked.

What Are The Disadvantages of The Social Graces Framework?

The first major disadvantage of this framework is the very fact that it is a framework and not theory. This means that whilst it is a useful tool for thinking about identity, this isn’t a theory that offers us an explanation of how the world works. In other words, social graces should not be considered the same as Critical Whiteness Theory, Critical Race Theory of Intersectional Theory because each of these valuable and insightful theories offers us an explanation for how the world works. Instead the social graces framework only offers us a chance for important discussions to be had about social identity biases, so some people argue the lack of explanation about the world is a disadvantage.

In addition, a final disadvantage of the framework is that it completely fails to understand just how complex our identities are. At some point in the next year, I have a book coming out called Your Unshakable Self and I’m really looking forward to that book being released because it explores a lot about our sense of Self, our identity and all the different ways how it impacts our behaviour. This social graces framework shouldn’t cover the majority of what I talk about in this book, and another sub-issue of the framework is that it is the complete opposite of Intersectional Theory according to Bulter (2017). Intersectional Theory sees the intersectional identities as unique, impossible to talk about separately and you cannot neatly separable out our identities.

I completely agree with Butler (2017) because if we talk some aspects of my identity. You cannot talk about the sexuality part of my identity without talking about my sexual orientation, my gender identity, my biological sex, race and my class. Since the very fact that I am a gay non-binary person assigned male at birth who’s white and middle-aged who has very little romantic or sexual experience. Fundamentally means all these factors insect and interact to inform my views and perspectives about myself, others and the world. Equally, you cannot talk about me being a clinical psychology Masters student (education) without considering how I’m white, from the south of England and from a nationally deprived area. All those social identities impact on my educational journey and impact my views.

Those are only some examples about how you can’t treat aspects of identity separately.

On the whole, Butler (2017) argued that breaking down our identity into separate categories fails to understand just how complex our identities are. As well as the framework seeks to look at identity as a “sum of its parts” instead of an indivisible and holistic concept.

Clinical Psychology and Social Psychology Conclusion

After struggling for a few months to understand social graces and what they actually were because in my lectures, the social graces framework was always just skipped over. I am really happy that I took the time to think about social graces because they are flat out critical to understand, we should be having these conversations and we should be reflecting and always wanting to be fair. And having social graces doesn’t make us a problem in society, people will always have social graces that others do not have and vice versa, but if we do not reflect on our biases and think about how our social identities impact our and if we are not proactive in becoming fairer. Then this is where our social graces become a problem because we should always be striving to make society better, fairer and more equal for everyone regardless of their social graces.

Ultimately, Burnham et al. gave us a very useful way of looking at how our social identities impact our implicit biases. As well as this is a valuable discussion tool to help mental health professionals think about how best we can counter our own biases so we can better achieve social justice.

Everyone deserves to be treated fairer, compassionately and equally in society, let alone our therapy rooms. So if having discussions about social graces is the way to achieve these outcomes then it is something we absolutely have to do.

And you’ll likely learn a lot of fun, interesting and surprising things along the way.

I really hope you enjoyed today’s social psychology podcast episode.

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Clinical Psychology References and Further Reading

Birdsey, N., & Kustner, C. (2021). Reviewing the social GRACES: what do they add and limit in systemic thinking and practice?. The American journal of family therapy, 49(5), 429-442.

Burnham, J. & Roper-Hall, A. (2017) Commentaries on this issue. Context, 151, 47-50.

Burnham, J. (1992) Approach-method-technique: Making distinctions and creating connections. Human Systems, 3(1), 3-26.

Burnham, J. (1993) Systemic supervision: The evolution of refl exivity in the context of the supervisory relationship. Human Systems, 4, 349- 381.

Burnham, J. (2005) Relational reflexivity: A tool for socially constructing therapeutic relationships. In: C. Flaskas, B. Mason & A. Perlesz (eds.), The space between: Experience, context and process in the therapeutic relationship. London: Karnac.

Burnham, J. (2012) Developments in social GRRRAAACCEEESSS: Visible-invisible and voicedunvoiced. In I-B. Krause (Ed.) Culture and Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy. Mutual Perspectives. London: Karnac.

Burnham, J. (2018). Developments in Social GRRRAAACCEEESSS: visible–invisible and voiced–unvoiced 1. In Culture and reflexivity in systemic psychotherapy (pp. 139-160). Routledge.

Butler, C. (2017). Intersectionality and systemic therapy, Context, 151, pp. 16-18.

Cockell, S. (2017) Exploration of attire as an unvoiced ‘GRACE’. Context, 151, 19-22.

Jones, V. & Reeve, D. (2014). DISsing the Social GGGRRAAACCEEESSS. Paper presented at the AFT Conference. University of South Wales.

Jones, V. (2019). Diversity IS GRACE–Using the'Social Graces' to Promote Reflection on Diversity. Working with People with Learning Disabilities: Systemic Approaches, 243.

Nolte, L. (2017). (Dis)gracefully engaging with diversity learning – reflections on the SGs as a training tool. Context, 151. pp. 4-6. ISSN 09691936

Partridge, K. & McCarry, N. (2017). Graces that bite: Unleashing the GRR in the graces. Context, 151. pp. 7-10. ISSN 09691936

Totsuka, Y. (2014). ‘Which aspects of social GGRRAAACCEEESSS grab you most?’ The social GGRRAAACCEEESSS exercise for a supervision group to promote therapists’ self‐reflexivity. Journal of family Therapy, 36, 86-106. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12026

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