Sexual Boundary Violations In Psychotherapy

This book explains how sexual boundary violations occur in psychotherapy, how to avoid them, and how such violations affect clients, therapists, colleagues, institutions, and families.

This book addresses training, supervisory, and therapeutic issues related to the consequences from sexual boundary violations among mental health professionals and clergy. These problems are discussed on theoretical and practical levels aimed at understanding, recovery, rehabi...

Sexual boundary violations are considered the most serious ethical infractions in the mental health profession, as well as in higher education and pastoral counseling. Recognized as unethical due to the power imbalance inherent in the structure of the therapist-patient and teacher-student dyads, erotic contact between therapists and patients has been revealed in prevalence studies to occur at an unacceptably high incidence rate (nine to twelve percent) among mental health practitioners. There exist few programs, teaching methods, and preventative measures that adequately address the problem of sexual boundary violations, despite the fact that discussing this problem openly is no longer taboo. Sexual Boundary Violations addresses this gap, providing educators, trainers, and clinicians with a resource to aid in developing programs, ethics workshops, seminars, and other educative or clinical teaching projects.

What do you do when you run into a patient in a public place? How do you respond when a patient suddenly hugs you at the end of a session? Do you accept a gift that a patient brings to make up for causing you some inconvenience? Questions like these—which virtually all clinicians face at one time or another—have serious clinical, ethical, and legal implications. This authoritative, practical book uses compelling case vignettes to show how a wide range of boundary questions arise and can be responsibly resolved as part of the process of therapy. Coverage includes role reversal, gifts, self-disclosure, out-of-office encounters, physical contact, and sexual misconduct. Strategies for preventing boundary violations and managing associated legal risks are highlighted.

Preceded by Boundaries and boundary violations in psychoanalysis / Glen O. Gabbard, Eva P. Lester. New York: BasicBooks, c1995.

In this acclaimed volume, authors Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., and Eva P. Lester, M.D., shed light on the many controversies surrounding boundary issues and equip readers with strategies for recognizing and dealing with boundary problems on the part of clinicians and patients.

This book is for the professional who feels unsure when entering the gray areas that inevitably arise in psychotherapy practice. The author carefully differentiates between what constitutes appropriate and helpful boundary crossing rather than inappropriate boundary violation and explores the ethical and clinical complexities involved in boundary issues such as the exchange of gifts, nonsexual touch, and more.

Should a therapist disclose personal information to a client, accept a client's gift, or provide a former client with a job? Is it appropriate to exchange email or text messages with clients or correspond with them on social networking websites? Some acts, such as initiating a sexual relationship with a client, are clearly prohibited, yet what about more subtle interactions, such as hugging or accepting invitations to a social event? Is maintaining a friendship with a former client or client's relative a conflict of interest that ultimately subverts the client-practitioner relationship? Frederic G. Reamer, a certified authority on professional ethics, offers a frank analysis of a range of boundary issues and their complex formulations. He confronts the ethics of intimate and sexual relationships with clients and former clients, the healthy parameters of practitioners' self-disclosure, electronic relationships with clients, the giving and receiving of gifts and favors, the bartering of services, and the unavoidable and unanticipated circumstances of social encounters and geographical proximity. With case studies addressing challenges in the mental health field, school contexts, child welfare, addiction programs, home-healthcare, elder services, and prison, rural, and military settings, Reamer offers effective, practical risk-management models that prevent problems and help balance dual relationships.