Chapter 13 - The Keys to Professional Ethical Behavior

Excerpts:

The keys to professional ethical behavior are qualities and strategies which help us intervene with ourselves, even when we are vulnerable to unethical behavior. When we are feeling slightly off track with a client, these keys can offer us a checklist to see which key we might have neglected in a particular case. They are: authentic caring, willingness to examine our own motivations, willingness to tell the truth, and willingness to ask for help (consultation) and to learn.

Telling the truth to ourselves

At some point in examining our own motivations, we become willing to tell the truth to ourselves. We can start with that willingness. We often begin by knowing that there is conflict inside and that while one part of us is willing to know, the other part is not.

Willingness to tell the truth to ourselves often means being ready to lay down the defense mechanisms which protect us from knowing what we are up to. A look at the specific defense mechanisms and coping styles listed in the DSM-IV might provide information about which patterns we are using. Usually the DSM-IV is used to diagnose clients, but in this case, it comes in handy for diagnosing ourselves. In order to defend ourselves from the truth, we therapists use defense mechanisms, too!

Once we know that we are bolstering our denial about something, we are hot on the trail of identifying what that something is. Some of the common mechanisms we use in defending against issues with clients in non-ordinary states are denial, projection, projective identification, rationalization, anticipation, dissociation, repression, humor, intellectualization, omnipotence, and devaluation. I will discuss each of these with examples of how they might be employed unconsciously.

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