The Importance Of Ethical Boundaries In Psychology

will allow current and future professionals to understand the borders of their competence. Ethical boundaries are necessary and can be deemed critically important for building healthy relationships with clients. Boundaries are meant to be beneficial in the professional relationship. Setting boundaries play a key role in achieving successful outcomes. As a psychologist, staying competent is required to demonstrate and understand the appropriate and effective manner that is consistent with the expectations as an educated professional within your field. Competence connotes motivation and action to achieve a level of qualifications or capabilities within a chosen professional field. Implementing competency-based approaches are put in place so that

Competence is based on supervised experience, education, professional experience, and consultation studies. Psychologists are expected to have knowledge about the different areas of competencies and the foundational areas of psychology. When providing services to children, adolescents, and adults, you must possess knowledge of appropriate assessments, therapeutic techniques, intervention procedures, and the ability to perform, plan and implement your areas of demonstrated competence. Maintaining competence throughout your professional role as a licensed psychologist is crucial. Psychology is continually evolving, generating new research pathways, and assessment methodologies provide psychologists with the proficiency to retain and strengthen their developmental progressions in functional competence. “Lifelong learning is fundamental to ensure that teaching, research, and practice provide an ongoing positive effect for those with whom psychologists work” (Fisher, 2013, p. 78). Spiritual and religious competencies for psychologists, requires them to have training in multicultural competence. There is a great need in psychology for both religious and spiritual

The term spirituality, is strikingly missing from the 2010 APA Ethical Principles for Psychologists and Code of Conduct. In the year 2011, the APA Division 36 Psychology of Religion was changed to the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. This is done because we have a need for both religious and spiritual competencies and need to find an intersection of psychology and spirituality The field of psychology has not yet established a research based solidarity that is set on religious or spiritual competencies, methods for assessing them, and standards for how they are taught to professionals in psychology. “When identifying spiritual distress as deserving, the same intensity of attention as physical pain makes spirituality a recognized domain of care” (Balboni, Puchalski & Peteet, 2014, p.2). Spiritual and religious competencies are set in place to facilitate and authorize professional psychologists to address and identify any spiritual or religious problems, and to channel a clients interior and exterior spiritual and religious resources, thus boosting and improving treatment outcomes. There have been discussions on how professionals can successfully integrate spirituality into the treatments and care of clients. Psychologists can be trained to recognize the possible signs