PS311 Unit 6 Personal Values Seminar Reflection Example

My Father's Drinking and a Client's Drinking Goal: A PS311 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Personal and Professional Values

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS311: Ethical Practice in a Diverse World

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, her family, the client and the classmates are composite; the codes and studies cited are real.

The Conflict I Carried In

By the time of the Unit 6 seminar, I had already lived through the conflict it addressed. Earlier in the term I was assigned Ms. A., a client who wanted to cut back on drinking rather than stop. My father drank until it destroyed his marriage and his health, and I have believed since I was a teenager that anyone with a drinking problem must quit completely. I asked my supervisor to reassign her. I was told no, gently, and I worked with her under supervision. I still felt, coming into the seminar, that I had compromised something important, as if agreeing to support her goal meant agreeing that my father's drinking had been a choice he could have managed.

What the Seminar Showed

The session opened with each student recounting a time when personal convictions collided with a client's or customer's choices. A classmate who volunteers at a crisis pregnancy center described struggling with clients considering abortion. Another, who works in a pharmacy, described her discomfort dispensing a medication she disagreed with. A third, raised in a strict religious family, described counseling a coworker through a divorce.

The instructor then read from the ACA Code of Ethics, which tells counselors to keep their personal values out of clients' decisions and to seek training in areas where they are at risk of doing so, and that referral based solely on the counselor's personal values is discouraged (American Counseling Association, 2014). She introduced ethical bracketing, which Kocet and Herlihy (2014) describe as intentionally setting aside one's personal values to provide services consistent with the client's goals and the profession's standards.

Bracketing my values did not mean giving them up; it meant not handing them to a client who had not asked for them.

What Changed

I realized that my belief in abstinence was not professional knowledge. It came from watching my father, and it was sincere and costly, but it was a personal value. The research on harm reduction is more mixed and more hopeful than my belief allowed (Marlatt & Witkiewitz, 2010), and the program supports moderation goals when a client chooses them. Ms. A. is not my father. She has her own history, her own reasons and the right to her own goal.

I also realized that asking for reassignment would not have solved anything. If I referred every client whose goals conflicted with my values, I would be unable to work with many of the people in a recovery program, and each one would receive the message that their goal was unacceptable, which is the opposite of what a recovery program should tell anyone.

A Session That Tested Me

The week after the seminar, Ms. A. came to her session pleased: she had kept to her limit of two drinks on three days and had not driven after drinking at all. My first impulse was to warn her that moderation rarely lasts. I caught the impulse, remembered the seminar's word, bracketing, and instead asked what had helped her keep to the plan. She described leaving her car at home on the evenings she planned to drink and texting her sister when she got home. Those were her strategies, built from her life, and they were working. In supervision afterward, I described the impulse and where it came from. My supervisor pointed out that noticing it before acting on it was exactly the skill the seminar was about. I left feeling, for the first time, that I could work with Ms. A. without either betraying my values or imposing them.

What I Will Do

Three things will change. First, I will name my reaction in supervision whenever a client's goal sets off my father's story, rather than acting on it. Second, I will complete the harm reduction training my supervisor recommended, so that my competence matches the program's approach. Third, I will keep my own therapy appointment, the one tool I have for my own history, which I had let lapse, because some of this belongs there rather than in my work.

What I Still Wonder

I am unsure where bracketing ends. If a client's goal endangered someone else, such as drinking and driving, I would not bracket that concern, because it is a professional one about safety. The line between a personal value and a professional judgment is clear in the codes and harder to find in my own reactions.

References

American Counseling Association. (2014). ACA code of ethics. https://www.counseling.org/resources/aca-code-of-ethics.pdf

Kocet, M. M., & Herlihy, B. J. (2014). Addressing value-based conflicts within the counseling relationship: A decision-making model. Journal of Counseling & Development, 92(2), 180-186. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.2014.00146.x

Marlatt, G. A., & Witkiewitz, K. (2010). Update on harm-reduction policy and intervention research. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6, 591-606. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.121208.131438