Ethics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners: : A Guide for the Professional Practice of Energy Medicine and Energy Psychology

Introduction

When we started the two-year Eden Energy Medicine Certification Program in 2005, our students ranged from physicians and other seasoned health-care professionals to those who had never had a course in ethics. We developed a case study approach to teaching ethics, which proved highly engaging for our 220 students of all levels of experience. The human dilemmas in ethical issues cut across all bounds, and our role-plays, mock ethics hearings, and penetrating discussions of the core issues were illuminating for us as instructors as well as for the students. We have tried to capture this interactive case study approach in this book as well.

We quickly make it clear to our students that ethics are far more than a list of rules that will restrict them or requirements that should put fear in their hearts. Ethics are the principles adopted by practitioners within a field to translate the desire to serve into the profession’s evolving wisdom about how best to serve. Based on lessons gleaned from the experiences of those who came before, health-care ethics provide guidance to members of a healing discipline in:

How to create and maintain a vital interpersonal context for providing healing services, and

How best to navigate through the various types of challenges that may arise when providing those services.

Along with developing strong professional competence and taking robust care of one’s own health and well-being, embracing sound ethical practices is the third pillar for being able to provide outstanding health-care services.

Representing yourself as a practitioner of energy medicine or energy psychology, or any of the more specialized designations within energy healing (a few of the many forms include Reiki, Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch, Touch for Health, Energy Kinesiology, the Emotional Freedom Techniques, Thought Field Therapy, and the Tapas Acupressure Technique), is a public trust. It assumes you have met the training and practice standards of the appropriate professional organizations and boards and that you demonstrate a commitment to strong professional ethics. This book is designed to help you succeed in that commitment. If an ethics problem arises, the burden of proof is on the practitioner to demonstrate that the actions taken were done in good conscience and informed by the field’s established ethical principles and practices.

The Ethics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners provides practical guidelines for the kinds of ethical issues likely to be faced in an energy healing practice. Because of the alternative status of energy healing and the sensitivities involved in working with the body’s energy systems, energy practitioners face ethical challenges that not only fall within but also go beyond the boundaries of conventional healing modalities. As energy healing practices enter mainstream health care, new ethical challenges at the interface of conventional and complementary approaches have also been appearing. For instance, providing energy medicine or energy psychology services to a person in a hospital before and after surgery requires coordination with the medical staff, communication about the purpose and expected effects of the interventions used, and an understanding of institutional sensibilities and lines of authority. The professional subspecialties within energy healing are each represented by one or more organizations, and each of these organizations has addressed ethical issues for its membership in one way or another, sometimes with highly sophisticated ethical codes.

The ethics code presented in this book has been informed by many of those guidelines and codes, and it attempts to present an approach to ethics in energy healing that reflects the highest standards, presented in the most practical manner possible. The Ethics Handbook for Energy Healing Practitioners is written to serve the various subspecialties within energy healing, so a given case vignette may be more appropriate for one form of practice than another. We should also emphasize that no single book can cover as complex a topic as professional ethics in a way that addresses the learning needs of every practitioner or that adequately addresses every conceivable ethical dilemma. Additional resources are presented in the references section at the end of the book; there are also instances in which consultation with a colleague, attorney, or your professional organization is the best route for obtaining sound ethical guidance.

Although attempting to follow strictly every item in an ethics code might be an admirable expression of a deep commitment toward the highest standards of health-care service, in the complexities of everyday professional activities, some ethical principles may be unclear for a given situation. Or a sound ethical principle may conflict with another ethical principle, with local laws, or with the expectations of the practitioner’s employer. Difficult judgment calls may be required to resolve such conflicts, and there are numerous situations where it may not be possible to follow rigorously every ethics standard published in your profession or in this book. Welcome to the complex world of stepping into another’s life with an intention to help! It is as worthy a journey as it is challenging.

We invite other professional organizations to adopt or revise the ethics code presented in this book.

CHAPTER 1

Ethical Dilemmas You May Face

We are, at least in part, drawn into the healing professions because it pains us to see people suffer and we believe that we have tools or gifts that can reduce suffering, enhance health, and promote overall well-being. Leading from that pure and powerful motivation in offering our services to the public, we may nonetheless find ourselves faced with situations where our good intentions are not enough to produce the outcomes we desire for our clients. In fact, despite our purity of intention, we may become embroiled in situations in which our clients feel we have done them harm and question our motivations, and our colleagues judge us harshly. Informing ourselves of our profession’s ethical guidelines is one of the most potent steps we can take to avoid such hazards and to navigate safely through volatile circumstances if they do arise.

To truly serve our clients we need not have just good hearts, but educated hearts.

—The Educated Heart, p. 1

Scope of Practice

Unfortunately, good intentions can sometimes innocently trump sound judgment. A woman is referred to you by her physician who believes her ulcerative colitis can be better treated using an energy and dietary approach rather than by routinely starting her on medication. You learn that she is going through a divorce. After an assessment, your work focuses on her large intestine and spleen meridians, and you teach her simple acupoint tapping techniques to help her manage her stress. You also teach her how to energy test for food. Her symptoms rapidly subside. She then brings in her seven-year-old daughter who began wetting her bed after learning of her parents’ impending divorce.

You develop tremendous sympathy for mother and daughter. The husband is a successful attorney whose overwhelming schedule leaves little time for his daughter or for any real family life. He is a harsh disciplinarian when he is present, and both mother and daughter are afraid of him. In the divorce proceedings, he is insisting on financial arrangements that would leave mother and daughter nearly destitute, and he is threatening to obtain custody of the daughter if the wife does not acquiesce. He has shown little interest or affection for his daughter, yet he has made it known that he has built a strong case for obtaining sole custody. In desperation, the mother asks you to testify that in your professional opinion, she will be the better parent. You are pleased to have an opportunity to be a voice for justice in this situation and strongly present sound reasoning that the girl will be better served in her mother’s custody. Despite the opposing attorney’s attempts to cast doubt on your credentials, the woman wins primary custody as well as a fair financial settlement.

So far so good. Six weeks later, however, you are served with a summons. The husband is suing you for damages as well as registering a complaint with your ethics board that you used your influence improperly in the divorce proceedings. You recommended that custody be awarded to the mother without ever having met, interviewed, or assessed the father. Furthermore, you are not a mental health professional nor do you have specialized training in evaluating custody disputes.

Your sense of outrage about the father’s behavior and demands eclipsed your understanding of your scope of practice. You might have been able to make a legitimate link between what you found in the daughter’s energy system and her emotional stress about the divorce, possibly even connecting these with her enuresis, but speculation beyond that took you out onto a very shaky limb. Knowing the boundaries of your areas of competence in the eyes of the law could have helped you move into the situation with your eyes open (enlisting, for instance, a colleague with the proper training and credentials) rather than blindly falling into serious ethical and legal difficulties.

Boundary slip-ups usually have an innocent motivation.

—The Educated Heart, p. 17

This unfortunate outcome was avoidable. Most ethical blunders can, in fact, be avoided with basic knowledge of ethical guidelines and a determination to apply them. In this case, the larger issue was your scope of practice, specifically the boundaries of your credentials and your publicly recognized professional competence. Another bedrock ethical principle has to do with informed consent and the full disclosure that makes informed consent possible. This can be particularly tricky with energy healing, which is often surrounded by an aura of mystery and magic and may attract desperate people in dire straits.

Informed Consent

Blatant omissions or deceptions in one’s disclosure statements clearly constitute negligence, but sometimes in energy healing the issues are so subtle they could never lead to an ethics board taking action against the practitioner. Nonetheless, they may still involve lapses in awareness that do harm. For instance, you have been working for two years with a woman who has become one of your favorite clients. You helped her overcome fibromyalgia, and she continues to consult with you every few weeks for tune-ups. One day she comes in clearly distraught. She has just learned that she has breast cancer and that it has metastasized. You are shocked. You ask her if she had any signs or warnings. She tells you that she was aware of a lump in her left breast that had been slowly increasing in size, but she was confident that if it were dangerous, you would have detected the malignant energies during her regular visits and warned her.

Most clients already give us more authority than is rightfully ours. It’s up to us to stay honest and within the bounds of what we know.

—The Educated Heart, p. 20

While this is an extreme case where mind-reading on your part might have been the only way to have prevented a disastrous outcome, you are well advised to explore a client’s expectations and beliefs about your powers as an energy healer. Although it is appropriate to express hope and optimism, it is also critically important to be clear and realistic about your personal limitations as well as those of your unconventional profession, particularly when the client is hoping for help with a serious illness.

Unrealistic expectations may also be at play if someone with a particular condition is referred to you because you helped someone else with that condition. The person making the referral may have raved about what you did and how quickly the results were obtained, and your new client may understandably expect the same outcome. Although it is not necessary to dissuade someone of realistic hope, some potential hazards are built into the referral.

Although we can sometimes relieve a condition that wasn’t helped by the usual medical regimen of drugs or surgery, that doesn’t mean that we can hang out a shingle that reads, The Doctor Is In.

— The Educated Heart, p. 20

Say the new client is a man who has severe migraines and you have helped one of his coworkers with occasional moderate migraines. Though you may feel fairly confident that bringing the man’s energies into a good balance and flow will help with his migraines as well, you are wise to inform him that no two people’s energies are alike, no two people with migraines are alike in what they need, the appropriate treatment for him may be very different from what his friend received, and the results may vary. Otherwise, if his response is slower or less favorable than his friend’s, the positive aura he has placed around you may quickly darken into disappointment and unwillingness to cooperate further, or he may sink into a sense of personal failure and despair. The possibility of slower progress was foreseeable and could have been addressed by sensitive full disclosure during the first session.

Informed consent... means that there should be no surprises for our clients.

—The Educated Heart, p. 15

Overselling your abilities is another hazardous temptation. We all want to put on our best face in our community and in our advertising. Plus, for some clients, there is already a glow of magic associated with those who can work with invisible energies. If these combine to attract clients with life-threatening conditions such as cancer, heart disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), bipolar disorders, or progressive illnesses such as Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis, you are ethically required to lead the person in realistically distinguishing between their hopes and what you can reliably offer.

Even with less pressing conditions, attributing extraordinary powers to you may undermine a client’s self-healing capacities and willingness to participate in self-care. Imagine an older woman who is prone to calling you an angel and speaking effusively about your miracle touch. It may, in fact, be gratifying to bask in her excessively high regard for you. And though you do not need to minimize the skills you have to offer or your importance in her life—your caring and proficiency are indeed gifts to her—you may be fostering a dependence that prevents her from developing her own self-reliance and natural self-healing abilities.

Many of the most advanced healers who are regularly associated with impressive outcomes are inwardly modest and careful not to elevate themselves. They know they are working with forces that are far beyond any one personality or approach and do not take outcomes too personally. You and your clients are best served when you keep your emphasis on their natural self-healing capacities, which you are evoking—placebo effect notwithstanding. This is particularly true with clients who try to attribute magical abilities to you. The more they do this, the more they disempower themselves and the higher your fall in their esteem when they realize you are a mere mortal. Although not a matter of enforceable ethics, challenging extravagant expectations keeps your clients involved in their healing in ways that only make your work with them more potent.

We don’t need to embellish our skills or knowledge. If we do what we’re trained to do competently and with compassion, it’s more than enough.

—The Educated Heart, p. 19

Sometimes clients want you to work under conditions that may actually be hazardous to their health. For instance, bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness) affects more than six million Americans. It is a life-threatening condition that often results in self-destructive behaviors and sometimes in suicide. While existing medications allow many patients to live relatively normal lives, others are not helped or suffer such serious side effects that they elect not to use the available medications. This may lead to desperate situations for the patient and the patient’s family and friends. There is a reasonable chance that over the course of an energy healing career, you will be consulted by at least one person with bipolar disorder who wants help in coping without medication. Two serious ethical questions inevitably accompany such a request. First, what can you reliably say about the likely impact of your services on the condition? Second, are you unwittingly conspiring with a person who hates the side effects of the medication to discontinue or not utilize a potentially life-saving though unpleasant treatment? Here your desire to offer hope and help must be carefully weighed against the real dangers in the situation, all discussed in the context of full disclosure and recorded in your case notes.

Conflicts of Interest

Full disclosure involves not only noting the limitations and possible negative effects of the interventions you use, but also potential conflicts of interest. For instance, you host a local television program about energy healing, and it is generating far more referrals than you are able to accept in the large city in which you practice. You are devoting a great deal of time to the program with no direct financial return beyond the referrals, which you do not need, and routing them to other practitioners is, in fact, consuming even more of your time. You decide to make these referrals pay off. You contact the people you consider to be the three best energy healers in the region and propose an arrangement whereby your organization is paid 25 percent of the fee for clients you refer. Two of the practitioners accept. This behind-the-scenes arrangement seems entirely fair to you since you are doing highly effective marketing for these colleagues as well as a service for those who contact you. What are you, in your innocence, neglecting? In providing referrals, you are ethically obligated to keep your clients’ well-being as your highest priority. Yet such fee-splitting arrangements give you incentive to refer to the two colleagues who accepted your offer rather than to the third, who did not, regardless of who is the best fit for the client.

Good boundaries don’t occur naturally. They need to be studied and practiced in the same way that we learn anatomy, physiology, or technique.

—The Educated Heart, p. 10

Conflicts of interest may take many forms, some more blatant than others. For instance, energy testing people for supplements that the practitioner sells for a profit is a widespread practice, used in various alternative healing disciplines. It ignores, however, the potential encroachment of personal gain or even well-intended expectations on the test’s objectivity. Or an energy healing practitioner, who after years in the field still does not see or feel subtle energies, purchases a device that is guaranteed to balance the meridians and takes a weekend seminar in how to use it. All his clients are routinely given treatment with this device as part of their sessions. Is it wrong, as better technologies emerge, to use them? Not necessarily. But even if recognized scientific research has established the device as being accurate and effective—a very large if at this point—to use it routinely with every client regardless of the person’s condition or reasons for seeking energy healing services is itself ethically problematic. It bypasses a comprehensive individual needs assessment—a hallmark of professional practice—and smacks of coercion.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is another area where uninformed innocence can lead to serious problems. Several confidentiality traps may seem obvious after the fact, but consider these common errors: leaving messages on a client’s answering machine that may be checked by the client’s family members or colleagues, sending e-mails or faxes to devices that may be viewed by others, approaching clients in public to say hello when they may then find themselves having to explain to their acquaintances how they know you, or leaving appointment books open and on your desk in a shared office. Extra vigilance is also required if you take your case notes out of the office. Imagine seeing them in your rearview mirror scattering through a busy street after you placed them on the roof of your car, searched for your keys, and then drove off.

Or consider casually saying to a friend, who had mentioned a person named Bob Oldclient, Oh, I saw Bob years ago for energy work, and finding out that your friend later said to Bob as a conversation starter, I think we know someone in common. This could evolve into an unfortunate way of being reminded that confidentiality has no time limit. What if a prospective client says, My brother came to see you a few months back, right? She seems to know about it, so you say, Yes, he did. Later you learn that she and her brother are embroiled in a legal battle and the real purpose of her consultation with you was to verify that he had been spending some of their mutual inheritance on weekly energy sessions with you. Okay, a bit more Machiavellian than what healers usually encounter, but in any case, it is your job to protect