EthicsWalk addresses spiritual care as an ethical enterprise. It explores why relationships between spiritual care providers and those they serve need protection, and examines what that protection entails. PlainViews invites our readers to share their responses to each EthicsWalk column, which will be published in the following issue.

If you’d like to respond to EthicsWalk, please send a comment of no more than 100 words. You can use the e-form below (click on "hearing from you," link) or submit your commentary to the editors in the body of an e-mail (or as a Microsoft Word attachment) sent to Info@PlainViews.org. Please put the phrase “EthicsWalk” in your subject line.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Tending the Spiritual Care Provider’s Space

Monitoring internal signals that caution a spiritual care provider when one’s own needs and wants challenge healthy boundaries was the focus of last month’s discussion. This month’s acknowledges that boundaries can be pushed subtly and inappropriately by those being served. It’s fine to negotiate a boundary with self-aware and non self-serving intentionality if it benefits the spiritual care relationship and does no harm to the person served or the provider. The danger is superficial awareness of self and other or grandiose assumptions about the special-ness of either. Hence, the wisdom of practical, professional boundaries.

Pirkei Avot 1:6 advises — “get yourself a teacher, find someone to study with.” [1]   For spiritual care providers, this applies to work as much as study. Spiritual care providers need a mentor, supervisor, spiritual director, or therapist; preferably, a licensed professional with whom one can enter into a “privileged and confidential” relationship. This will be a person from whom no secrets are hid; who is present as the spiritual care provider’s own “trusted professional.” Additionally (not instead of), one should engage regularly in peer supervision.

Having such professional relationships helps one discern and direct one’s responses to one’s own desires as well as recognize potential miscues coming from others. There are sexually aggressive and emotionally abusive colleagues, patients, students and congregants. There are sexual and psychological predators among people who seek the counsel and services of spiritual care providers. One must exercise self care while caring for others.

Healthy boundaries provide safe space for appropriately intimate spiritual care relationships. Before allowing a boundary to be negotiated differently, ascertain why someone wants your additional time or “irregular” attention. Until motives are clear, be careful about divulging more than “directory” information about yourself or your work habits. Be circumspect about meeting times and locations — stick to the norms and practices of the institution and profession.

In the daily routine, spiritual care providers, as do all professionals, need to pay attention to the World of Reality for the “other” person. The impact of the care provider’s attentions and normal, appropriate affection-born-of-concern may be very different for the other than the provider’s intent. Perception is reality for the preceptor; and it is the impact of the transaction, not the intent, by which any misunderstandings will be judged when emotional, physical or sexual exploitation are experienced or alleged.

Especially, when the other’s intent (or the provider’s) is questionable, meet only in locations where other people are accessible. McDonald’s booths are private, yet safely - public if the hospital cafeteria is closed. Use the spiritual care office only when others are obviously nearby. Close the door but open wide the curtains! (Office doors should all have a window.) Avoid off-site or night visits with people to whom there is a budding special “attraction” — from the provider, from the other, or mutually.

It is always the spiritual care provider’s responsibility to monitor the emotional, spiritual, psychological and physical safety of a relationship — for themselves, the other person(s), and community.

Comments welcome!

[1] In rabbinic times, works like Pirkei Avot (“The Chapters of the Fathers,” but often translated as “The Ethics of the Fathers”) and its companion work and commentary, Avot d’Rabbi Natan (“'The Fathers' According to Rabbi Nathan”) present an ethical vision that is something like classical stoic ethics.

Anne Underwood has an undergraduate degree in religious studies, a master’s degree in rural sociology and a mid-life law degree obtained after working over a decade as a college administrator. She has mediated for the Maine family courts since 1983. Currently she serves as an advisor to the ethics commissions of ACPE, APC, the CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and NAJC, and consults with a variety of Protestant faith communities on issues of power, fair process, and congregational conflict management. Her articles on mediation and restorative justice have appeared in the ACPE News, The APC News and on the ACPE web site. Articles on clergy accountability and judicatory processes are published by the Alban Institute and The Journal on Religion and Abuse. A chapter, “Clergy Sexual Misconduct: A Justice Issue,” appears in Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as Justice-Love, Marvin Ellison and Sylvia Thorson-Smith, editors, The Pilgrim Press, 2003.