For counsellors and psychotherapists this is a very important question. Distinguishing between your personal morals and your professional ethics can be the one aspect of self-awareness that can determine whether you are a safe or an unsafe practitioner.
Simply put, morals are our personal principles about what is right and wrong and ethics are external rules, which, for our profession, are set out in our Codes of Ethics. Our morals are what we personally believe to be right and our ethics are what our professional bodies deem to be standards of professional behaviour.
Why does it matter to distinguish between the two? Because our morals might not align with those of our clients and to impose them or assume they are shared, consciously or unconsciously, would be unethical.
Let’s think of some examples.
If your personal morals for intimate relationships are based on monogamy you could presume that non-monogamous relationships are unsafe, doomed to failure, an expression of attachment deficits, or abusive to children. Even if you have the training to understand that non-monogamous relationships are just another form of relationship, you might find yourself cheerleading primary relationship structures or minimising the effect of hierarchical polyamory systems on secondary and tertiary partners. You might cast people who have had affairs in monogamous relationships (which the research says is the majority by the way) as cheaters, avoiders and narcissists, rather than people trapped in a social norm that doesn’t work for them. To impose your moral position would be an ethical breach in these circumstances.
How can you distinguish between your personal morals and professional ethics?
If your personal morals are based on independence, self-reliance, personal choice and self-actualisation, as many of our values in white western cultures are, you could find yourself in practice missing the importance of community, family and compromise for clients from collectivist cultures. You could even put your clients at risk with compulsory coming out narratives, or lack of awareness of honour based cultures. Again, this is an ethical breach.
You have the right to have the personal belief that same sex relationships are wrong and that there are only two genders. However, to impose those beliefs on LGBTQ people in your psychotherapy work would be a gross and profound breach of your professional Code of Ethics.
This all tends to boil down to examining our biases and the closer we are to having majority identities, by which I mean social positions that are not marginalised, like being white, ci-gender and heterosexual in the UK context, the greater the risk we have of mixing up our personal morals with your professional ethics. Education and awareness is the key. How are you developing and expanding your reflexivity in your practice?
