Duty of care & ethical considerations

We are in the process of setting up “The Association of Provocative Change Works”, and my wife, a longstanding medic, is writing up a series of detailed policies. A major reason for this is to ensure proper duty of care during client sessions. Unfortunately, in the world of personal change, there are often some truly daft and at times dangerous examples of a lack of duty of care towards clients and no real ethical considerations.

They can’t help themselves….

I’ve, in recent times, been increasingly aware of some of the delusional thinking and claims in some coaching and therapeutic approaches. One of the worst examples during covid 19 was one NLP trainer’s insistence on the value of “NLP filters| to protect people from covid 19. I blogged about some of this here

I am not the only person, concerned about such matters, Andrew T Austin talked about this here

These characters simply can’t help making increasingly more grandiose and quite frankly ludicrous claims about their own “skills” and “techniques” In my original NLP trainings over two decades ago, I would regularly come across people attending courses to “start their new professions” as a therapist after a few days training. The daftest of all trainings in my view was “The advanced NLP therapeutic specialist” training, a whopping five days of unconscious installation in a London hotel before being unleased into the wild. If only it were a brilliant spoof…

Years ago I attended a hypnosis confidence where once character claimed to be an expert in curing food phobias. I watched a car crash demonstration which over ran and during which he demonstarted a level of ineptitude I thought impossible. The hypnosis conferences are in my view like the 8th level of hell, where individuals are trying to flog places on trainings and products with what I can see as very poor levels of skill. I’d love to see some evidence for the contrary, but of course many such characters who present, don’t actually see real life clients.

Who needs pesky modern medicine anyway?

Over the years, I’ve seen quite bonkers claims to “cure Parkinson’s” reverse allergies and cure all manner of illnesses, believing in “the power of the unconscious/ Its the classic “get out of jail card”, and of course creates all manner of dangerous outcomes for clients. Groucho probably put it best when he stated

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot”. 

Of course, it’s only a matter of time before there’s a lawsuit and/or a major fatality as somebody is stupid enough to believe in unconscious installation instead of a vaccine or other common-sense medication. There will always be differences in coaching and therapeutic approaches, but a proper professional duty of care toward clients is always important if you care about people.