Ethical Practice in Couple and Family Therapy: Negotiating Rocky Terrain.

Couple and family therapy has a long history as a valuable and necessary intervention, and yet the complexity of providing services to multiple parties has not been commonly explored in professional literature. Managing clients at different ages, stages, and capacities, working with multiple agendas and multiple systems, fostering and maintaining rapport with a range of people, all requires more thought with couple and family work. While codes of ethics offer values and principles for decision making, managing the specifics of practice when working systemically tend to be developed in supervision. While this can work well, habits of practice and blind spots can occur in positive, established professional relationships. This article looks at how the fundamental ethical requirements of practice differ in relation to couple and family work: competence, juggling multiple imperatives, boundaries, confidentiality, and informed consent. Its aim is not to provide rules for management, but to raise awareness and foster dialogue about perennial issues in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]