What You’ll Learn
Here’s what you’ll gain from this practical, ethics-grounded training built to give you tools you can put to use right away — for your clients, your practice, and yourself.
Boundaries: The What and the Why
Prevent Burnout
- Personal v. professional boundaries
- Types of professional boundaries
- Self-disclosure
- Dual relationships
- Telehealth
- Documentation
- Countertransference
- Law vs code of ethics
- How the latest codes and standards inform boundaries
- Duty to report colleagues – importance of this ethical standard
- Identify personal values and how they relate to boundaries
- Connections between personal values and professional ethics
- What to do if your values don’t align with ethical standards
- Protect your clients: Self-determination, values, and more
- Protect yourself: Burnout, ethical and legal obligations, and more
Prevent Burnout
- Predictive & protective factors of burnout
- How environment of workplace contributes
- Strategies for preventing burnout
- Personal strategies
- Seeking support
- Use stress inventory
- Time management
- Explore what boundaries are needed to prevent burnout
Ethical Self-Care and its Importance for the Modern Clinician
Integrate Boundary Teaching Into Treatment Planning
- How investing in self-care is upholding our professional ethics
- Compare areas from the code of ethics (NASW, APA, ACA, AAMFT)
- Difference in professional self-care and personal self-care
- Pillars of self-care: Emotional, psychological, physical, spiritual, professional, and relational
- Build a self-care plan to support healthy boundaries
- Teach boundaries to clients as a form of self-care
- How and when to say no
- Listen to client’s needs rather than imposing our own
- Teach clients reframing of obligations as a choice
- Identify client values to facilitate their building their own boundaries
- Recognize and manage transference and countertransference
- When to refer out a client due to transference issues
- Self-care specifically for therapists
- Eliminate unethical dual relationships
- Prevent burnout
- Have structure of healthy boundaries around work
- Support colleagues in being ethical
- Accept or reject employment based on your needs
- Supervision and peer support
- Continuing education
- Moral disengagement as result of poor work environment
Integrate Boundary Teaching Into Treatment Planning
- Limitations, risks, and scope of practice
- Examples on how to phrase treatment goals
- Recognize personal boundaries within the clinical relationship
- Use values and boundaries work with clients
- Stay objective when our values don’t match our client’s values
- Relevant ethical codes and us working in our client’s best interests
- Intervention strategies if a client’s views are harmful vs. when they are different from our own
- Communication skills for holding clients to established boundaries
- Framework for interactions with clients
- Consent and other paperwork that starts conversation
- Boundaries on how and when to communicate
- Teach clients about emergency services
- Recognize differences in client needs without compromising self or acting unfairly to others
- Modes of communication and limitations of each
Objectives
- Determine the importance of both personal and professional boundaries for self-care.
- Identify how the NASW, APA, AAMFT and ACA Code of Ethics applies to boundary setting and self-care in the outpatient clinical setting.
- Develop strategies that minimize burnout.
- Develop a self-care plan that supports healthy boundaries.
- Analyze predictive factors of burnout.
- Choose strategies to communicate personal and professional boundaries.
