Ethical Issues a Religious Counselor Must Consider While Dealing with LGBT Client
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Abstract
The code of ethics’ primary purpose is to protect the client’s confidentiality and welfare. A religious counselor must consider various issues and ethical standards while offering counseling services to an LGBT client. The LGBT, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, describes communities, persons, or individuals with sexual orientation or gender identity. The religious counselor must nature and develop the capacity to manage their values, not to influence the counseling process. When handling a client whose values conflict with the religious counselor, it is no doubt that the client’s needs come first.
Ethical Issues a Religious Counselor Must Consider While Dealing with LGBT Client
Numerous professional organizations such as psychology, social work, and counseling have come up with a code of contact established on ethics that provides a broad guideline to its members. The codes of these national lines of profession share some common similarities and the difference in multiple spectrums. The code of ethics’ primary purpose is to protect the client’s confidentiality and the client’s welfare. Code of ethics is also provided to protect the public and direct the professionals on how best to conduct their work to provide their clients’ best services. As a religious counselor dealing with a client who is a member of the LGBT, there are numerous ethical issues that a counselor must consider to ensure that apt services are provided for the clients. As a counselor at some point in their career and work. One will come across clients who come from different cultures and beliefs. Hence, it is the counselor’s ethical responsibility to learn and be well equipped with the relevant information that suits their clients. One of the most vital things a counselor can do is prepare and engage in self-reflection on their own gender identity and sexual orientation. Until a counselor understands their sexual orientation and sexual identity, it will be challenging to deal with an LGBT client. Hence it is paramount for the counselor to reflect on their sexual orientation and what it means to them personally, how it influences their life and how their sexuality affects the relationship between the counselor and the client. This paper will provide comprehensive research on ethical issues a religious counselor should consider practicing when dealing with an LGBT client.
The LGBT, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, describes communities, persons, or individuals with sexual orientation or gender identity. To briefly describe a lesbian is a woman whose romantic or emotional attraction is towards other women. Gay is a word applied when referring to an individual whose emotional attraction or romantic or physical attraction is to the people of the same sex. On the other hand, individuals described as bisexual can develop an emotional, physical, or romantic interest in an individual of the same gender or another gender. During an individual lifetime, one can experience such attraction to a different degree and various forms. Individuals who are bisexual do not have the particular sexual experience of being bisexual. An individual who is bisexual does not need not to have had any sexual experience at all to be recognized as bisexual. Finally, the transgender term can be used for individuals whose gender expression or gender identity is different from the one the individual was assigned at birth. The doctors give individuals who are transgender a hormone to make their bodies in line with their gender identity. In other cases, an individual may undergo a surgery process to bring gender alignment.
Ethical dynamic is certainly not a simple intellectual and direct cycle that follows characterized and unsurprising advances. In reality, it is vital to recognize that feelings impact the way you settle on moral choices. As a specialist, your emotions will probably impact how you decipher your LGBT clients’ conduct and conduct. Besides, if you are awkward with a moral choice and don’t enough arrangement with this uneasiness, it will impact your future conduct with your client. A fundamental piece of perceiving and working through a moral concern is examining your convictions and qualities, inspirations, sentiments, and activities with a manager or an associate. During the time spent creating the best moral choices, it is additionally imperative to include your clients at whatever point conceivable.
Since you are settling on choices about what is best for their government assistance, it is proper to examine the idea of the moral predicament that relates to them. For example, moral dynamic from an LGBT treatment point of view calls for including the client at each phase of the therapeutic cycle, which depends on the women’s activist rule that force ought to be adjusted in the beneficial relationship. Talking with the client completely and adequately is a critical advance in moral dynamic, for doing so builds the odds of settling on the ideal choice. As indicated by Corey et al. (2017), significant remedial advantages can result from the incorporation of the customer in the emotional, moral cycle, and she offers a few techniques for achieving this objective at both the hierarchical and individual levels (Corey et al., 2017). When we settle on a client’s choices for the customer instead of with the client, Walden keeps up that we burglarize the customer of intensity in the relationship. At the point when we team up with customers, they are enabled. By requesting the customer’s point of view, we can accomplish better guiding outcomes and the best goal for any moral inquiries that emerge.
Transference
Transference is the cycle whereby clients, such as the LGBT, venture onto their specialist’s past emotions or mentalities toward their parental figures or critical individuals in their lives. The transaction is perceived as having its beginnings in youth and comprises a redundancy of past subjects in the present. How the clinician manages a customer’s transaction is pivotal. If specialists are unconscious of their elements, they may miss significant restorative issues and not enable their customers to determine the emotions they are bringing into the remedial relationship (Corey et al., 2017). The customer’s sentiments are established in past connections; however, those emotions are currently felt and coordinated toward the specialist. This example causes mutilation in the manner customers to see and respond to the advisor. By carrying these early recollections to the relationship with the advisor, customers can understand how their previous associations with huge others have brought about uncertain clashes that impact their current connections.
Transference isn’t a trick; all ideas are expected to clarify each feeling customers express toward a specialist. Numerous responses clients have toward instructors depend on the present time and place style the guide shows. On the off chance that a client communicates outrage toward you, it might be a transaction. On the off chance that a customer communicates good responses toward you in like manner, these emotions might be certified; excusing them as puerile dreams can be a method of putting separation among yourself and your client. It is feasible for specialists to blunder one or the other way—rushing to clarify away negative emotions or too ready to consider accepting good sentiments. To comprehend the genuine import of customers’ demeanors of sentiments, specialists need to effectively work at being open, helpless, and fair with themselves.
Values and the Relationship with the Client
Therapists must build up the capacity to deal with their qualities, so they don’t unduly impact the guiding cycle. This cycle is moral organizing: deliberate putting aside of the advisor’s very own attributes to give moral and proper directing to all customers, particularly those whose perspectives, values, conviction frameworks, and choices vary altogether from those of the guide. Putting aside our qualities doesn’t imply that we should surrender or change our qualities. Instructors don’t need to like or concur with their customers’ decisions to satisfy their moral commitment to help those looking for their help. Numerous customers will have a perspective not quite the same as that of the therapists, and clients bring us many issues. They may have felt dismissed by others or experienced segregation (Corey et al., 2017). Customers should not be presented to additional separation by advisors who won’t deliver administrations to them due to contrasting qualities. If you somehow managed to fuse an individual qualities articulation in your educated assent materials, what might you incorporate? OK, distinguish explicit regions you experience issues keeping up objectivity about because of the qualities you hold? OK, remember your situation for any of the worth regions we address in this part? Albeit maybe good-natured, such divulgences put the accentuation in some unacceptable spot—on the guide’s qualities.
This can undoubtedly pass on a critical mentality to customers about issues with which they might be battling. Customers regularly come to treatment looking for a sheltered and strong environment where they can share privileged insights and unburden themselves of disgrace or blame. Customers are in a weak position and need comprehension and backing from a therapist, not judgment, in guiding your customers’ battle to make changes in their lives. We question the basic presumption that guides have more superior shrewdness than their customers and recommend better methods of being more joyful. Verifiably, psychoeducation is a guide, and advisors encourage a cycle of helping customers increase a full comprehension of their issues (Corey et al., 2017). Be that as it may, the way toward guiding is intended to assist customers with finding their assets for managing issues instead of tuning in to exhortation from others. Directing is a discourse among advisor and customer designed to add to the customer’s objectives and enable the customer to settle on decisions that are in their wellbeing.
Multicultural Practices
One of the significant difficulties confronting psychological wellbeing experts is understanding the intricate job social variety and likeness in remedial work. Customers and advisors bring a wide assortment of mentalities, values, socially learned suppositions, inclinations, convictions, and practices to the therapeutic relationship (Corey et al., 2017). A few instructors may keep the significance of getting these social factors in guiding; others may overemphasize the significance of social contrasts, lose their immediacy, and accordingly may lose contact with their customers. Since every one of us comes from a kind mix of societies and personalities, all advising communications can be viewed as multicultural occasions. Working viably with social variety in the helpful cycle is a necessity of good moral practice.
When a religious counselor deals with an LGBT client, the question of values erupts in the therapy process. Hence, it is paramount to reflect on the effect of the work experience and value will have on the client. It is also essential to consider the possible impact the client’s belief will have on the religious counselor, and the potential conflict that may result as the client and the counselor possess a varied set of values and the significance of learning how to cope and manage the conflict in an effective way. During the counseling session, the religious counselor should learn to respect the client’s values and have the capacity to work with a range of clients who have varied values and worldviews. It is paramount for the counselor to note the client has the full right to live by the personal values even if those values go contrary to the religious counselor’s beliefs. According to Wise (2015), all the counselors must establish a flexible cognitive complexity to enable the counselor to stick to their own sets of beliefs that permit the counselor to serve different clients in the other way, which is not harmful to the beliefs of the clients. A religious counselor should learn to combine both professional and religious identity when dealing with an LGBT client. The religious counselor will certainly have conflicting ideas and beliefs concerning sexual orientation, and the counselor may find himself channeling the client to the sets of his beliefs concerning LGBT. The training institution’s responsibility is to offer the trainee counselor the understanding, attitudes, knowledge, and relevant skills that are important in equipping the counselor with a diverse competence when it comes to counseling. The religious counselor’s values should not supersede the profession’s values to serve the client’s best interest. It is the profession’s responsibility to provide guidelines and the responsibility that all the counselors must adhere to.
The religious counselor must nature and develop the capacity to manage their values, not to influence the counseling process. When the LGBT client comes for help, one is often searching for a supportive and safe space where they can unburden themselves and share a wide range of secrets. When a religious counselor opens up about their beliefs and value system, suck kind of disclosure may easily portray a judgmental attitude to the client’s struggles.
Ethics on value conflict
A counselor must have a diverse understanding and competence on counseling issues. Hence, lack of competence across various sexual orientations should not be a reason why a counselor refuses to counsel an LGBT client. Despite their line of specialization, all counselors should be in a position to possess basic competence across sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, gender, and all the other features listed in the non-discriminatory statement of the ACA’s code of ethics of 2014. In cases where the client’s ethical values do not agree with the client cannot form the ethical ground for a referral. It is possible for the religious counselor and the LGBT 1client to successfully work through the value disagreement and offer the needed services to the client. However, it is only ethical for religious counselors to consider referral when they do not have the required skills and the competencies necessary to handle the problem presented by the LGBT client.
Ethics of referrals
When handling a client whose values conflict with the religious counselor, it is no doubt that the client’s needs come first. Referring to a client since their beliefs disagree with the counselor’s values and beliefs based on religious grounds may course harm. It can lead to a feeling of abandonment to the client, which is against the principles and the professional codes of counseling that mandate counselors never to course harm. However, referring to a client since his values conflict with the counselor’s is unethical, inappropriate, and discriminatory. The code of ethics in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy does not have a discriminatory claim. The Marriage and Family therapist should be in a position to offer professional help to individuals without discrimination on a varied basis, which includes disability, health status, gender, social-economic status, national origin, age, ethnicity, race, relationship status, and religion, among other numerous fields.
Conclusion
Ethics is a significant angle in directing callings because of the job it plays in the structure of associations with the customers, just as working with the customer, so that is adequate agreeing. Besides building associations with the customer, morals direct that the customer’s protection should be kept up. In this way, when working with the customer, it is significant that all advisors consider maintaining the moral qualities that are upheld by the calling and the law.