Seductions and Arrogance

Client Presentations and Therapist Vulnerabilities
That Lead to Legal and Ethical Violations

A Legal & Ethical Seminar Addressing Client Types and Issues and Clinician Personality and Counter-transference Leading to Boundary Violations.

• Who Messes You Up (including who is mostly likely to elicit an ethical or legal breach and who is mostly likely to make a complaint).
• How You Screw Up Anyway (despite knowing better)!

Education, Knowledge, and Training in graduate programs and Law & Ethics seminars every license cycle inform the therapist of the “what” of legal and ethical boundaries and violations, but do not necessarily address the client and therapist “whys” of how a therapist comes to make errors anyway.

• There are clients that are immediately perceived as potentially problematic, while others surprise and even ambush a therapist.
• Certain clinical situations are relatively straightforward while others are littered with not only therapeutic but also legal and ethical land mines.
• Sometimes knowing or getting clarification regarding legal and ethical requirements and guidelines, instead of giving a therapist confidence, it makes him/her more uncomfortable or anxious. That is probably an indication of a vulnerability that may play out subsequently in a legal or ethical quandary, breach, or mistake.

Topics to be included:

• Legal and Ethical issues for psychotherapists,
• Client presentations (personality disorders, abuse survivors, sexualizing therapy, neediness, etc.),
• Legally and ethically challenging issues (letters, custodial disputes, mandated counseling, etc.), therapy configurations (family, couples, parents and children or teens, etc.),
• Professional practices (insurance, billing, debts), and
• Therapist vulnerabilities (ignorance, arrogance, being the “gallant knight” or rescuer, being “special,” relational self-medication, and so forth.