Читать книгу Positive Ethics for Mental Health Professionals - Sharon K. Anderson - Страница 32

Similar to the list of needs and motivations you considered around being a therapist, generate a list of your values—both personal and professional. You might use the list identified by Schwartz. After you’ve created your list, rank them based on their importance. Which ones are personally most important? Which ones are personally least important? Now, narrow your focus to professional values: When you think about fulfilling the role of therapist, which values are most important? Make note of the overlap and potential conflicts between (and within!) your lists of personal and professional values.

These lists of needs, motivations and values are part of your core—the foundation of your professional/ethical identity. A good understanding of your core helps you shoot for the ethical ideal (not perfection, by the way)—setting your goals, understanding the tripping points along the way, and choosing excellent behaviors.

However, not all of your needs, motivations, and values as a professional are satisfied at any given time. For example, your value of helping, your motivation of wanting to see them grow, and your need to feel successful will not be fully actualized when you don’t see clients improving, or improving as quickly as you think they could. Staying mindful of your full set of needs, motivations, and values may help ground you during these times of discouragement.

It is important to know the difference between having values and the expression or implementation of those values. Sometimes it will appear that the values you hold conflict with those of the psychotherapy profession. However, the issue may be one of expression rather than the values themselves. For example: We may value compassion, but we cannot show our compassion with clients in the same way we do with friends (hugging, lending money, sharing our problems, etc.). Many of the situations and issues we explore throughout the book, about boundaries, confidentiality, and so forth, will involve how we express our values differently in professional contexts. Many will also involve actual conflicts of values.