"Trust me… I’m a counsellor…”: A heuristic exploration of the therapist’s ability to trust themselves to work effectively and ethically as a person-centred counsellor, and not to fall in love with clients

Abstract

A person-centred counsellor’s use of self may be seen to include offering a non-possessive, and certainly non-sexual, love. For any practitioner, the question arises as to what underpins conformance to professional codes of ethics, both theoretically and personally. Generally, counselling approaches align with professional prohibitions against sexual activity through some combination of predefined techniques and explicit theoretical exclusion. The person-centred approach avoids the systematic use of techniques and the theory might be considered less explicit, and so maybe demands careful consideration. This research thus considers the underpinning which supports how a therapist can trust themselves not to fall in love with clients, and not to engage in any form of sexual exploitation. The research addresses self-trust through a highly reflexive, heuristic exploration of a therapist’s fundamental beliefs. These are discussed in relation to literature on ethics and to counselling theory. What emerges is a greater separation between falling in love and sexual exploitation, supporting a therapist’s ability not to engage in unethical activity with clients and opening the way to greater discussion of such concerns within the person-centred arena.