Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 55

We all have them—certain things we like and, of course, dislike about other people. Each of us could get a good start on our own private list of negative reactions by completing the following sentences, as many ways as possible, with complete honesty and without censoring ourselves:

 I can’t stand it when someone …

 I’d rather not be around someone who …

 The worst kind of person is someone who …

 The people who are responsible for more trouble in the world than anyone else are the …

 The kind of person I’d hate to be seated next to on a long car trip is …

 It’s not politically correct to say it, but personally …

 You may not like it but there’s a good reason everyone says that all [members of some racial, ethnic, religious, or other group] are [name of some characteristic, usually negative]—It’s true!

Our personal list may include negative emotional reactions evoked solely by someone’s membership in certain social categories based on

 Religion

 Politics

 Race

 Skin color

 Ethnic group

 Caste

 Weight

 Intelligence

 Education

 Mental health status or disorder

 Country of origin or current citizenship

 Immigration status

 Income (or lack of it)

 Occupation

 Physical ability or disability

 Mental ability or disability

 Sexual orientation

 Gender identity

 Gender expression

 Speech (e.g., whether the person makes grammatical errors, uses slang unfamiliar to us, speaks our language with an accent)

 Age (e.g., someone who is very old)

 Dress

 Personal hygiene

These negative emotional reactions based solely on such categories have the potential to choke off our respect for the dignity of that person.

This chapter is a reminder that treating others with respect for their dignity is a basic ethic of our profession, one easily overlooked but facing countless challenges. None of us is perfect in this area. All of us will fall short more than once over the course of a career. It will suddenly strike us that we’ve been sitting with a patient for most of a therapy session and for most of that time our mind has been elsewhere; we’ll breathe a deep sigh of relief as we terminate a patient, realizing that we never liked the person, never invested much in the therapy, and feel joy that we’re rid of that person; a patient will say something that somehow breaks through our shell and we’ll discover that some time ago we’d lost our sense of shared humanity with someone who’d started to seem like a stranger. The Golden Rule is useful here, no less so for being a cliché: We must strive to treat our patients and others with the same respect for their dignity that we wish to receive from others.