The willingness to become an ethical specialist and a knowledgeable counselor is what becomes the foundation of practice among numerous psychologists willing to support their professional vocation. One of the most important ideas from the literature is that a good counselor is most likely to be a person who cares a lot about their integrity and relationships with clients (Karaman et al., 2018).
Professional ethics cannot be underestimated because they extend the influence that one might have on their clients and propose unconventional therapies that could not have been approved by the given client in the past. Every action performed by the counselor should be sent through the mindfulness filter in order for them to ensure that they do not say or do anything unethical, illegal, or generally inappropriate. The supervisory relationship that might develop over time between the counselor and the client would be the most vivid sign of ethical practice.
In the case where a counselor does not realize their strengths and weaknesses, they will be most likely to damage society instead of helping it (Cottone & Tarvydas, 2016). This assumption is based on the idea that counselors have to remain attentive to detail in order to provide qualitative care to their clients and stay in line with the given ethical guidelines. Professional codes of conduct are often perceived as something optional when it comes to quite a few occupations, but for counselors, this is the Bible of relationships with clients (Zakaria & Warren, 2016).
Therefore, in order to remain ethically sound, the given counselor would also have to gain all the required legal knowledge and ensure that their practice does not violate any of the client-centered rights. When focusing on ethics, counselors should also remember that their actions would have a direct impact on the therapeutic process and the fast-paced development of a therapeutic alliance.
Another essential idea is also mentioned by Pope and Vasquez (2016), who claimed that ethics training should begin in the classroom and not at the workplace because counseling students have to gain a better understanding of how to interact with other parties involved in the process of care provision: from peer counselors to the clients’ family members.
There are more than a few complicated ethical issues that could transpire out of thin air, so counselors have to be rather vigilant in terms of how they communicate their ideas and what they do to prepare for the potential challenges associated with patient interactions. Another possibility to adopt a competent practice would be to take everything seriously and develop the counseling relationship in a way similar to how friendships tend to evolve outside the counseling “chamber” (Karaman et al., 2018). Clients have vulnerabilities, and the counselor should protect them instead of disclosing them right away.
The power that counselors have over their clients should always come with an enormous sense of responsibility because unethical practices might lead the clients to be taken advantage of outside the counselor’s parlor (Cottone & Tarvydas, 2016). This might lead us to the conclusion that in order to remain ethically sound, counselors might have to expose themselves to the possible ethical issues and assess the potential impact of such disclosure on the client’s mental health.
Unique difficulties (that every particular client has to cope with) may seem trivial to the counselor, but they should never devalue the emotional suffering that clients have to go through when opening to the counselor (Zakaria & Warren, 2016). In this case, the failure to act ethically would result in the client remaining even more traumatized than they have been prior to counseling sessions.
References
Cottone, R. R., & Tarvydas, V. (2016). Ethics and decision making in counseling and psychotherapy. Springer Publishing Company.
Karaman, M. A., Schmit, M. K., Ulus, I. C., & Oliver, M. (2018). International counseling students’ perception of ethics. Journal of International Students, 8(2), 677-695.
Pope, K. S., & Vasquez, M. J. (2016). Ethics in psychotherapy and counseling: A practical guide. John Wiley & Sons.
Zakaria, N. S., & Warren, J. (2016). Counseling ethics education: Teaching and learning development reformation. In Fast Forwarding Higher Education Institutions for Global Challenges (pp. 83-96). Springer, Singapore.