I’ve been reflecting lately on how current social behaviours seem to be out of step with core psychotherapy values and principles and how that can show up in our psychotherapy spaces.
To be a psychotherapist requires a certain set of moral qualities and ethical practices that apply not only to the way we think about, sit with and hold our clients, but to the way we interact with our colleagues, teachers, students and wider communities.
Top of the list of any agreed qualities of a psychotherapist is the ability to empathise, to see the world from another person’s point of view and to be able to communicate an understanding of that person’s perspective. This quality is not especially evident in general society at the moment, where opinion is polarised, denigration and denial of another perspective has replaced discussion and there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side to be on. Psychotherapists are required to hear multiple perspectives and acknowledge the validity in them, whilst bracketing their own personal opinion. We know that validating a person’s opinion is not the same as agreeing with it, and that connection is established when we can acknowledge another person’s perspective. Psychotherapy says there is no one universal truth. Society says you’d better be on the right side of an issue, regardless of whether or not that issue affects you personally or you understand the complexities of it.
Connected to empathy is the core quality of reflexivity in a psychotherapist. This means having an awareness of yourself and an understanding of how you impact other people. This feels like a lost quality in parts of our current society, where the demands of each individual take precedence over the needs of others. From riding bikes on the pavement, (which would have been a community offence when I was growing up), to not wearing headphones when using a tablet or phone in a public place, to using social media to express a grievance before or instead of addressing a concern directly in person and in private, to not even noticing that a person might need your seat on public transport more than you do, never mind offering it to them. The list is long! We seem to have lost the fundamental relational skills and community care that are essential to human wellbeing and social cohesion. In a psychotherapy setting the therapist is acutely aware of their impact on their client, from the way our rooms are arranged, to the way we dress, to what we share or don’t share about ourselves. The client is at the centre of the work and although our social positioning and personhood obviously affect the space, the work is not about us; it’s about our clients.
To be a psychotherapist requires a certain set of moral qualities and ethical practices that apply not only to the way we think about, sit with and hold our clients, but to the way we interact with our colleagues, teachers, students and wider communities.
A quality that has deep meaning and importance to me personally and professionally is integrity, which can be defined as ‘a commitment to being moral in our dealings with others, personal straightforwardness, honesty and coherence’. This is a quality that is easier to claim for oneself than to live by. It is a verb not just a descriptive value word; we need to ‘do’ integrity and ‘act’ in integrity. How this quality is understood will be influenced by other personal values such as loyalty, respect, sincerity, justice and fairness, all of which are complex, personal and context specific and all of which require deep consideration and thought. In a society that is more self-serving than community supporting, the concept of integrity is diluted, disregarded or not even in awareness as something that is important. I sometimes wonder if people know this word and what it means at all.
My worry is that I can see these social values permeating into the thinking and behaviours of our profession. There are public fractures of opinion and polarised political positioning in our professional bodies, a troubling sense of entitlement and knowledge superiority in psychotherapy learning spaces and what appears to be a belief that relational and ethical principles only apply to our client work and not to our exchanges with our teachers, students, colleagues and wider communities.
For me, the core psychotherapy qualities of empathy, reflexivity and integrity represent some of the best human social and community values. It feels like we need to recalibrate back to these qualities within our profession in order to model in our work the connection sorely needed in general society at this point in time, rather than allowing the erosion of these values in general society to negatively re-shape our profession.
To learn values based psychotherapy practices join us on our Diploma in Pluralistic Psychotherapy. Focussed on anti-oppressive, ethical psychotherapy, this course leads to qualification as a counsellor and access to training in the specialism of Psychosexual and Relationship Therapy.
