Is it ethical for a counsellor to publish a blog?

This is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while. I love writing my blog and sharing my thoughts and experiences with others. But I’ve also been very aware of the potential ethical considerations relating to my work as a counsellor…

I’m choosing to write this today, because this month’s ‘Therapy Today’ (The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy ‘s magazine for members) discusses the ethical dilemma of inappropriate self-disclosure.

The article discusses the dilemma of a client becoming upset by a photograph in the counsellor’s home of the counsellor and her children, which the client felt to be an inappropriate self-disclosure regarding the counsellor’s life. It also makes mention of a discussion I was at a couple of years ago at the BACP annual conference by a professional indemnity insurance company. The company talked about complaints being filed with them by clients relating to inappropriate self-disclosure as a result of photographs being on show in the counsellor’s home. Any personal photographs or objects we display leave us open to complaint.

This is an especially pertinent issue for counsellors who, like myself, counsel from home. I’m careful in my counselling room, not to have any personal photos or intimate mementoes of my life. Although really, the whole room is a self-disclosure … everything in that room was chosen by me and potentially says a lot about me. My problem comes if clients need to use the bathroom; in which case I have to take them through more of my home. During this journey, it’s possible that they may catch sight of photographs and other personal clues about me and my life.

In our training, or certainly during my training, we were cautioned against any kind of self-disclosure, unless we could justify it in terms of its being beneficial to the client. In the counselling room with clients, I rarely feel the need for self-disclosure, and so the client knows very little about me, other than the me I present in the counselling relationship … in our training, this is how we are told it should be. With clients who come to me with eating disorders, they very often ask me what experience I have of working with eating disorders and if I have any personal experience. In these situations, I always tell the truth. I feel it’s important to be transparent and honest with clients. And for many, they are instantly reassured to know that I have had personal experience of the condition that brings them to me. I don’t tell them much else, other than that I am now recovered, which again gives them hope for their own recovery. I also find that clients don’t ask for any more … they’ve come to counselling to make sense of their own issues, they’re not interested in my story.

But this still leaves me with the dilemma of my blog. Everything I write in here is a self-disclosure. I own everything I write and although many of the entries are triggered by experiences I have or things people say to me, I’m always very careful to ensure that no one else is ever identifiable in my writing (unless I have their explicit permission). However, the very public nature of blogs means that past, present and potential clients may very well be reading this. Am I giving too much of myself away? If potential clients have read it before contacting me, is this setting up expectations within them of who I am? Does it lead to the counselling relationship beginning on an unbalanced foundation … in this case, the client knows more about me that I do them. Clients who haven’t read my blog don’t have that knowledge or those preconceptions. And from a purist ethical perspective, that’s the way it probably should be.

But I enjoy writing my blog. And I do know that clients read it … I’ve had a number of comments from them stating that they like what, and how I write, and that it makes them trust me more, but the conversation relating to my blog has never gone further than that. I’ve never discussed the content of a blog with a client … and I don’t think I ever will. What I choose to write on here is personal, but at the same time, I’m always very aware of the public nature of blogs and so am careful to ensure I never put anything on here that I don’t want people to know. My blog is me being transparent, honest and congruent with myself and anyone who chooses to read it … but only about those things I’m willing to share and have known.

I do though, think blog writing by counsellors is something that needs discussing from an ethical perspective….

The Embodied Experience of a Researcher Researching Embodiment

My experience to date of researching the embodied subjectivity of therapists working with clients presenting with eating disorders is having interesting and unexpected effects on my own sense of embodiment. My experience of living within, and experiencing the world from within, my own body has changed over the last year and a half that I’ve been conducting the research.

For many years, I now recognise how much I lived from inside my head. I intellectualised everything and tried to rationalise everything, living a very detached life, regimented by self imposed intellectual ‘rules’. Believing I had to be “the good little girl” in order to be loved and accepted, I was relatively disconnected from my Self and my own body. I took my cues as to how I “should” be from this set of rules; living life according to how, and who, I believed other people wanted me to be.

This disconnection from my Self and my body was a huge contributory factor to my experience of eating distress and non-acceptance of my body. As I journeyed through Anorexia, I attempted to disappear, causing my body to become increasingly small and insubstantial … as I felt my Self to be. Moving then through a phase of Bulimia, I was attempting to grow, to fill my body with my Self, to allow both my Self and my body to become more substantial … but an ongoing lack of self-acceptance led to the Bulimic purge and rejection / repulsion of that attempt. A rejection / repulsion of my Self. And these symbolic meanings of eating disorders seem to be relatively common to a number of people experiencing eating distress.

My ongoing internal battle continued until I stopped fighting myself and allowed my Self to live within my body. And for a number of years prior to embarking on my research, I felt myself to be relatively comfortable with my experiencing of my Self in my body.

However, as I’ve read countless books and research articles, and interviewed people for my research, my sense of embodiment has intensified massively. I’m now very aware of how I chew over any information given to me before digesting it and allowing it to become part of me and my belief system. In the past, I was more likely to simply swallow whole what people told me, introjecting other peoples’ beliefs and ideas about the world, and consequently then not living true to my Self. Now though, reflecting on any information I receive allows me to mull it over, consider if and how, I can integrate it with my own beliefs before digesting it and allowing it to become part of me. Bulimia fits symbolically into this idea … wolfing down food indiscriminately (food symbolically representing information, ideas, love, etc) before then rejecting / expelling it through the act of purging because it doesn’t fit comfortably into one’s sense of Self.

I’m now very much more connected to my body. I’m aware of constantly checking things out with my body to find out how I’m feeling about something. It’s very easy to rationalise / intellectualise things, but feelings experienced within the body can often be relied upon to tell the ‘truth’ … trusting one’s ‘gut instinct.’ It takes time and awareness to ‘listen’ to your body and to learn to interpret what its feelings are communicating to you … my body now, is a valuable source of information for me…

I’m aware now of when I’m biting something back, something I’m maybe reluctant to voice … by the tension in my clenching jaw. Linked to this is a tendency to chew my lower lip, again when I’m biting something back; this is usually linked to feeling angry & not wanting to verbalise what I’m feeling. My shoulders raise slightly when I’m tense … I become aware of it, consciously drop them, and & I feel instantly relaxed. I have a certain tilt to my head when I’m feeling confident … when I need to access that confidence, I know I can tilt my head that way & I feel instantly more confident! And one of the big ones for me is holding tension in my stomach … for many years, I hated my stomach, rejected it … I now know that for me, my stomach is where my true Self rests … tension there means I’m not connecting fully with my Self.

And a rather more bizarre effect for me, has been how react to TV programmes such as “You’ve Been Framed” where people are shown experiencing physical pain … I find myself struggling now to watch them as I physically feel their pain. I’m also aware of a ‘rush’ of feeling from my adrenal glands as my body physically responds as though the incident is happening to me … bizarre!

Our bodies are fascinating communicators and they tell us so much about ourselves. Observing other people’s bodies can be very telling too; it’s easy to hide the truth behind words, but our bodies are constantly ‘leaking’ out the truth! It’s simply a case of learning how to read the messages of our own, and other people’s bodies.