Professional ethics
On serving (and scrutinising) ethics committees
Over more than thirty years of practice I have sat on professional ethics panels, advised colleagues caught in complaints, and researched the way regulatory bodies wield their power. This page gathers what I have learned, and why I think ethics is the living centre of Gestalt work — not its bureaucratic edge.
Three decades on panels
A long apprenticeship in professional self-governance
I have served on ethics committees for Gestalt therapy associations, training institutes and broader psychotherapy bodies since the early 1990s. That work has taken several forms — sitting on standing committees, chairing complaints panels, drafting codes of practice, consulting on individual cases, and reviewing the procedural conduct of other jurisdictions.
Alongside the formal appointments, colleagues frequently reach out privately when they find themselves at the wrong end of a complaint, or when they need to think clearly about a complaint they may need to bring. Over the years I have accompanied dozens of practitioners through that terrain.
It is sober, often heavy work. It is also, in my view, one of the most important things a senior practitioner can do for the field.
The cases that come through
What actually lands on an ethics committee’s table
People often imagine ethics complaints are about dramatic breaches. Some are. But the steady traffic is quieter, more ambiguous, and frequently more instructive than the headlines suggest.
Boundary drift
Dual relationships in small communities, blurred lines between supervision and therapy, gifts, contact outside the session, friendships that began as professional contracts. These are rarely cynical — usually a slow erosion of clarity that no one named in time.
Consent, fees and frame
Disputes about money, missed sessions, recording, sharing of notes, and what a client believed they had agreed to. Most of these traced back to a frame that was never written down with enough care at the start.
Power and influence
Therapists who, often without seeing it, leaned on transference to push beliefs, recruit clients into causes, or extend their authority into areas of life clients had not contracted for.
Competence and scope
Working with trauma, eating disorders, suicidality or relational complexity beyond the practitioner’s training. Not malicious — but harmful, and a reminder that goodwill is not the same as readiness.
Confidentiality breaches
Case material recognisable in workshops, social media, supervision groups, or casual conversation. The digital era has made the old habits much more visible.
Complaints about the complaints process
A whole category in itself — practitioners reporting that the committee adjudicating them caused more harm than the original concern. This is the territory my own research has focused on.
What the work has taught me
Who minds the minders?
The question that has shaped my thinking is a simple one: when a body exists to oversee professional conduct, what oversees the body itself? In many jurisdictions the honest answer is — very little.
Procedure matters more than intent. Most of the harm I have seen done by ethics committees was not done by bad people. It was done by well-meaning volunteers operating without due process, without legal training, and without an appreciation of how the weight of their role lands on the person being investigated.
Power is the very thing under examination. It is a peculiar irony that committees convened to consider a practitioner’s use of power frequently demonstrate poor awareness of their own. The investigator and the investigated can mirror one another in ways no one names.
Unspoken agendas creep in. Personal dislikes, old professional grievances, theoretical loyalties, conflicts of interest — these surface in deliberations and, without strong structures, can quietly shape outcomes.
Natural justice is not optional. The right to know the case against you, to respond, to be heard by someone without a stake in the outcome, and to a proportionate response — these are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the bare minimum if a process is to be ethical in itself.
Most complaints are repairable. The majority of matters I have seen could have been addressed earlier through honest conversation, supervision, or simple acknowledgement — long before a formal complaint was needed.
Why ethics sits at the centre of Gestalt
Not a rulebook bolted on — a way of being in contact
Gestalt practice is unusually intimate. We work with the live edge of contact, with body, breath, transference and the field between two people. That intimacy is precisely what makes the work powerful — and precisely why ethics cannot be an afterthought.
A code of ethics, in this tradition, is not a fence built around the practitioner. It is a discipline of awareness: staying alert to how my needs, history, status and longings may be shaping what I am doing right now with this client, in this moment.
For that reason I teach ethics inside our training programs as part of the relational core of the work, not as a final module to be ticked off. Every supervision session I offer carries an ethical dimension — what is being asked of you, what are you bringing, where is the field tilting?
And when the relational repair work fails — when something does need a formal process — I want practitioners to know that those processes themselves must be held to the same standard of care as the work they are scrutinising.
An ongoing inquiry
If you have a case worth thinking through, I would like to hear it
I continue to write and research on the conduct of regulatory bodies, licensing boards and professional ethics panels. If you have lived through one of these processes — from any side — and would be willing to share the story in confidence, your experience contributes to a body of work that is otherwise rarely told.