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Self-Reflection and Ethical Relationship Herman Ong Upper Iowa University
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Abstract Many researchers have noted a tendency of ethics violation of counselor and helping professions in recent years. It is admittedly to say that the behavior and value of one counselor can have a great impact and influence on many clients. In order to avoid the negative influence to client, self-reflection and self-awareness are needed. By case study of self-reflection in romantic relationship, I attempted to examine the influence of my childhood experience, such as competitive-style family, and how it damaged and implicated on the style of social interaction as well as duties of helping profession. Unfinished business, such as “Mistrust” and “Perfectness” were revealed and greatly expressed on my social interaction as worse as prospective profession. This study finally concluded that it was inevitable to avoid the influence of childhood experience on one’s personality and thought. However, through skills of awareness to self and others, such as “Openness to learning”, “Embrace incompetence”, “Positivity” and “Focus on Here-and-now”, professional helpers can also find the way to encounter their unfinished business.
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Self-Reflection and Ethical Relationship In past decades, there had many researches done by Hong Kong scholars or researchers regarding to the life satisfaction. For any reason, Hong Kong people have always been found to score lower in life satisfaction when comparing with western countries, such as United States of America or Europe etc (Yan & Zheng, 2007; Lee & Wu, 2008). In fact, one of the positive predictor and criterion of life satisfaction is relationship and social interaction (Sparks, 1988). It is highly correlated with people satisfaction to life as well as mental disorders, such as depressive, anxiety or personality disorders. Therefore, it is admittedly to say that the quality and quantity of social relationship would greatly impact on one’s behavior, feeling, thinking and value. According to the Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stage theory (1950), our personality and behavior are largely determined by the different stages of interaction with society. And Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud (1938/ 1995) also stressed the childhood experience, especially with parent and family in affecting one’s personality too. It is universal and inevitable to affirm the influence of social relationship in one’s life, regardless of his stratum and profession, even to a practitioner or counselor. As a matter of fact, I found the impact of social interaction was most significant in my approach to romantic relationship. Interestingly, I had two times romantic relationship, everytime when I was approaching a new romantic relationship. I would suffer from the repeated flaws and conflicts with that partner and resulted in the same sad ending. Usually, during the romance, I was defensive,
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picky, bossy and dominant, insecure and splitting hairs. For example, I always had a mental checklist for my partner when dating. Romantic relationship was seemingly like a business trade or assignment rather than a joyful life course which full with Eros and feelings to me. The checklist included many expectations and rules for my partner. More the boxes she failed to check, less possibility I would approach or engage in this relationship. Moreover, I would usually compare her with other relatives as well and tried to pick her flaws as much as I could, thus I always felt all the partners I met were less mature and intelligent than me. In most of the time, I was very concern how much I paid, intrinsically or extrinsically when compare with my partner. There had no “unconditioned love” in my romantic relationship, everything should be in fair deal as well as beneficial to me. However, I still perceived I was the one who contributed more in each relationship. In order to develop a romantic relationship, “Admire”, “Interest”, “Future”, “Pressure” and “Superiority” were essential to me instead of “Unconditional love”, “Romance”, “Eros” and “Companionate”. Literature review Romantic relationship is an abstract concept to examine in academe due to its lack of consensus construct and criterion validity. Nevertheless, there still have some theories explain “Love”. One of the famous love theories is “Style of love” theory proposed by Canadian sociologist, John Allen Lee (1973). According to Lee, there have 6 styles of love, and my aforementioned style of romantic relationship precisely was a mixture of the love styles
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named “Mania Love” and “Pragma Love”. The mania lover like me are possessive, dependent and controlling while the pragma lover is a “business-man” who select their partner by practical and rational criteria. On the other hand, the way I approached the romance was somehow fit into the “social exchange” theory (Chadwick-Jones, 1976). In the framework of social exchange, romantic relationship was a mean to maximize my profit and interest. Intrinsically, I possessed the higher self-esteem through being criticizing and mastering to my partner while I obtained extrinsically a superior identity from social relatives by comparing and selecting a partner who have been well-accepted by social norms in terms of appearance, figure and stratum. Shimanoff (1980) had also explained the relationship by relationship rules theory. He suggested that romantic relationship also have a list of rules that acquires partners to follow and govern each other. When the rules are broken, it would damage the relationship as worse as broken up. Apparently, the checklist for my lover was a rule list, it served as a tool to help me govern my partner in order to protect myself not being harmed by anyone who acts out of my expectation. This was a kind of self-defensiveness as well. Therefore, the critical question I have to ask myself is “Why you worried of being harm during the social interaction?” and “How it developed?” Discussion Recap to my memory, I think the childhood experience affected my value and behavior of social interaction the most. It led me to develop the aforementioned characteristics and
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personality when approaching the romantic relationship. And these experience also served as an unfinished business when approaching social others as well. Psychoanalysis. I remembered my childhood was living with a big family which contained 8-10 families. However, my families were not harmony at all. They picked and fight with each other at all time. Sometimes my auntie blamed to my mother for a towel issue, sometimes my uncle fight with each other for TV watching. They competed with the limited resource everyday and everytime. This situation ended in a climax in which one of my uncles had an obsessive-compulsive disorder to gambling. He lost all of money of families and finally dead with cancer not long from bankrupt. However, this incidence put our family into a huge financial trouble with debt. Since then, my mother brought my big brother and me to public estate for avoiding renters and debtors. As a three years old child, these fights and crisis threatened me greatly and I became insecure to relationship, I perceived social interaction, even thought as close as families, it was full of suspicious and betray. Nobody can be trust except myself, it was seemingly fixated in the crisis of stage one “Trust vs. mistrust” of psychosocial stage theory (Erikson, 1950). And I internalized the competitive style of conflict resolution from my families in order to possess and get the resource as much as I can for compensating my insecurity. Gradually, this internalization became part of my conscience and value as superego (Freud, 1938/1995). Whatever my partner acted, I would compare her
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action with my previous families. If I found something she did was similar as the flaws of my families, then I would yell and pick her because my conscience told me that this act would lead her fail in somehow as my failed families. According to the Census and Statistic department (2011), Hong Kong average number of member in one family is 2.9. For most of the children in Hong Kong, they lived with one father and one mother who act as “modeling” to their child (Bandura, 1977). However, the family I lived had 10 models, all of them contributed part of my conscience and value for what thing should do and what thing should not do. Therefore, this is the reason why I was so picky and controlling in relationships. Social Comparison. Since I was confused with different models in the childhood, I had no single absolute “Identity” to self. The way I evaluated myself was coming from comparison with others. Social Psychologist, Leon Festinger proposed the social comparison theory in 1954. It assumed that human have the drive to evaluate themselves through the comparison with others. And the tendency of comparison would become more frequent when one perceived less difference from others. However, this comparison became competition because my childhood experience taught me that losing would become tragedy. Every competition I perceived as a battle which must not lose, lost may lead myself back to the failed childhood. Thus, I won’t let myself down as well as I couldn’t tolerate any fail of my partners and relatives too because their flaws might interpret as my flaws from others. Nevertheless, this
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competition was a vicious cycle in which it never ends. Everytime when I approached a new relationship, I compared my relationship with others’ relationship and even to the imaginary Plato relationship. However, since I had no absolute model of relationship in my mind or the perfect relationship, such as Plato’s Love idea doesn’t even exist in reality. I had never satisfied with any romantic partners and keep seeking for a better one in next relationship. This “future-focused” rather than “now-focused” approaching led me criticize intensively to my partner and tried to make any excuse to turn down the relationship for continuously seek my “perfect” relationship. The way of seeking “Perfectness” through competition was absolutely impact my behavior and belief to social interaction. I pushed rigorously to myself and others to the standard of “Perfectness”. It was an endless vicious competition when comparing with no absolute and standard model in mind. And this precisely was the reason of “pressure” and “spitted-hair” to my partner. In fact, the above struggles and unfinished business were not just affect my personal relationship, it does clash with my profession as well. In order to become a professional helper, we have to understand how our unfinished business affects our skills and ethics to our client. For instance, a client who has the similar childhood experience as mine seeks for the help on his study. He find he may not feasible and willing to continuous his study under the intense conflict and financial problem in family. Rather than that, he wants to work earlier for helping the family’s finance. In normal circumstance, a professional helper should provide all
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the pros and cons of information to that student, such as the pros and cons of continuous study and work. However, due to my background and unfinished business, I may slant to advice as worse as convincing him to continuous the study regardless of the problem of families. Due to my stereotyped belief of relationship, families are untrusty to me. Then I may interpret negatively about the acts of his families when that student talks about some incidences happened in family. Or I may only focus and selectively listen the negative information but ignored the positive information about his family. Either open-ended or close-ended question I ask, it may more or less lead the client to answer negatively to his family as well as fulfilling my expectation, such as asking the close-ended question like “So your families are now hindering your prospect badly, right?” or open-ended question like “Can you tell me more about how your families discouraged your studying”. After all of these convergent evidences, I would encourage him to self-reliance and impose the value of self-actualization on him. Finally, I may self-disclose my experience and success to that student as a role model to facilitate his thought of self-reliance. All of these seemingly facilitate the student’s positive thinking and help him ride to a brighter future. However, I failed to meet the basic requirements of a professional counselor which are respect the autonomy and independence, as well as beneficial to client. As similar as my approach to romantic relationship, “Mistrust” and “Perfectness”
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created in my childhood served as a core stereotyped belief to hinder my profession. One hand I imposed a value of mistrusting the families to the student. On the other hand I require him to self-actualize himself in order to become “perfectness” and “detached” from his trouble and failed family. All of these exactly are cloning another “me”. Moreover, it seems benefit to me rather than to the client because I possess the congruence and affirmation to my value and achievement through assimilating others. Implication and conclusion Perhaps childhood experience was part of fundamental element to construct our personality which is consistent and stable. It is inevitable and may not easy to change dramatically of my personality of “Mistrust” and “Perfectness” to “Trust” and “Relativism” suddenly. However, our profession of mental-studying provides us a critical tool to reduce the potential harm of unfinished business; it is “Awareness”, awareness to self and others. In fact, from now on, I am aware of my negativity. Then I will open my mind to learn how to focus on positivity, such as studying “Positive Psychology” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Second, I am aware of the bias to my families, thus I will start communicate with them more in order to challenge my irrational belief and misunderstanding to my families. Third, focus on “here-and-now” rather than “future”. Enjoy the moment I am being with my romantic partner as well as my relatives and families but not struggling in an “uncertain and imaginary future”. And extend this “gestalt-therapy” to my profession as listen carefully to what client
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says verbally and nonverbally; encouraging the client to express their “here-and-now” feeling and thoughts rather than imposing them a so-called better plan for future. Fourth, I have to aware of different identity and role had different power to certain individuals. The influence is not solely happened in counseling setting but in daily relationship too. For instance, my characters of “picky” and “criticizing” may influence greatly on my partner and family. Everytime they did something wrong, they would worry of being blamed or criticized by me. Gradually, they may become avoidance and refuse to try anything as reducing their openness. Fifth, I have to affront my incompetence and challenge my belief of “perfectness”. Failed experience should not be a flaw that I need to abandon and avoid. Rather than that, it is something I have to embrace in order to round up the “self”. Only with this flaw or failed experience, I am the one who I am. Therefore, it is unethical to advice the client how to avoid the flaws and strive for success. Instead, I should encourage him to open his mind and experience a life, the life only owned by him. This is autonomy and independence stressed by professional helper. Conclusively, this study of self-reflection was not aim to provide any hypothesis or theory about clinical or counseling psychology. It served as a reminder for practitioner or counselor to aware of the impact of unfinished business. In fact, it was found that the ethical violation of counselor were underestimated and increasing (Gallagher, 2009; Neukrug, 2001). Since counselor need not be licensed in some states (Mascari & Webber, 2006), it may not
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have official supervision on their ethics. However, as a professional helper, we should not rely on external supervision, such as sanction or law. Instead, we should ever bear the code of ethics in mind for providing the best interest to our client. This is a liability of a professional helper.
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