The Implementation of New Counseling Techniques

In all helping professions, the first rule of practice is, ‘do no harm.’ In counseling, practitioners are ethically and legally bound to insure that their clients are not subjected to anything that can cause harm. In order to insure this, all practitioners must make sure that any techniques of counseling that they implement during therapy have been properly researched, studied, and explained. Each technique should have research that demonstrates its effectiveness and benefits over other techniques used in the past. A practitioner should only use a technique of counseling after there have been numerous research studies that prove its effectiveness and usefulness in the counseling room.

            There are several reasons why practitioners should not rush into using new techniques that have not been thoroughly studied and proven effective. First of all, it would not be ethically responsible of a practitioner to implement a counseling technique that could possibly cause irreparable damage in the client’s progress (Hohmann-Marriott, 2001). If the technique has not been scrutinized by professionals and been picked apart and analyzed for potential pitfalls, the client essentially becomes a guinea pig for that technique. This causes an ethical and legal problem because all clients are entitled to informed consent, in which each client must agree to participate in the counseling process. Informed consent must explain if the practitioner is including information gathered by the therapeutic relationship between the client/practitioner in a research study, the client’s right to confidentiality, and a general overview of the practitioner’s plan for therapy. It would be unethical for a therapist not to tell their client about a technique that is being used in the counseling session that may not be productive, and properly researched by professionals in the field (Hohmann-Marriott, 2001).

            Clinical experience does play a large supporting role in determining if a practitioner is qualified enough to make the decision to use, disregard, or further research a particular technique. Depending on how long a practitioner has been licensed in the field, they could possibly be vital in further developing the technique by actually implementing the technique in counseling sessions, and documenting these cases. The only time a practitioner should be implementing new techniques is if the practitioner and client are both participating in a research study about the effectiveness of the technique. If a new technique is truly helpful, there will be a large amount of research to back it up. The research will speak for the technique’s usefulness, and this will outshine any professional who may be pushing for a technique for biases reasons. By allowing for the research to be conducted, any less-than-pure motives of professionals can be weeded out when looking at the statistics (Jansen, 2009).