Clinical Writing About Clients: Seeking Consent and Negotiating the Impact on Clients and Their Treatments
✍ Scribed by Nancy A. Bridges
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 139 KB
- Volume
- 54
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0160-7960
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The author discusses her experiences seeking consent from 16 clients to use clinical material for publication. Sharing case examples from her practice, she elucidates her process with clients and focuses on the beneficial and detrimental effects on the therapeutic relationship. Seeking consent raises issues of confidentiality and stimulates wide‐ranging, layered, and linked emotions and meanings for clients, including feelings of closeness, envy, and shame. If the counselor actively employs this process as a therapeutic tool with openness to unexpected meanings, it may advance the therapeutic conversation and developmental possibilities. When there is a negative effect on the client or the process, counselor's shame and guilt may be stimulated and consultation is recommended.