The Ethics of Caring: Finding Right Relationship with Clients for Profound, Transformative Work in Professional Healing Relationships

The Ethics of Caring is a unique and widely recommended text that complements standard ethics texts by helping the student or professional find right relationship with a client. Written for practicing therapy and medical professionals, students, teachers, supervisors, and mentors, The Ethics of Caring model first promotes self-compassion, then gently guides self-reflection about unconscious countertransference that often occurs in the main areas of human life.

The book illuminates many extraordinary types of human experiences to help professionals become aware in case clients bring these profound states in some way to the professional for support. Staying in right relationship with a client is often an artful movement, a dance with a different “partner” each time. Yet there are helpful rules of thumb that can keep us from stepping on toes (doing harm) and actually support both professional and client in doing a beautiful, healing dance together (creating client benefit).

The Ethics of Caring is a unique ethics text designed to guide the self-compassionate self-reflection of both students and professionals (therapists, clergy, hospice workers, bodyworkers, educators, medical professionals, mentors, and other caregivers) toward understanding human motivations and counter-transference, finding professional right relationship, and making good choices with clients. The Ethics of Caring also illuminates the inevitable, profound, transformative moments in a professional relationship, which furnish greater potential for client healing, but also may bring greater ethical challenges.

My guess was that this paradox, in which caring, ethical people made such ethical missteps, might be directly related to the unconscious material that was surfacing for them and their clients during their clients’ non-ordinary, or “extraordinary,” states of consciousness or profound self discovery work. I wondered if the material that arose for clients in their extraordinary states during sessions might somehow make the attending professionals vulnerable to making choices that, often to their surprise, not only took them out of right relationship with their clients, but sometimes brought them and their clients great difficulty.
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The Ethics of Caring attempts to provide some navigational tools for dealing with the deep and often confusing interaction between client and professional. It also addresses those instances when we encounter those intense and profound experiences with our clients.

 

A journey of ethical exploration is truly a hero’s journey. Only by understanding [unconscious] aspects of ourselves and by deeply considering the ways in which they affect our interactions with others can we hope to enter more fully into truly healing relationships with our clients, and indeed, with ourselves and everyone else.

Kylea Taylor, The Ethics of Caring