Touch in Therapy I: The Ethics of Touch in Psychotherapy & Counseling

Fulfills requirement: Professional Ethics for all professions

This intermediate level course reviews the importance of touch for human development and healing practices and describes the application of touch in psychotherapy as an adjunct to verbal psychotherapy.

The course opens with three audios (text transcripts are provided for all audios) that look critically at the prohibition of touch in therapy and examine its historical, professional, and cultural roots. The course reviews the sexualization of most forms of touch combined with psychoanalytic and risk management guidelines, as they present the main obstacles for the clinically appropriate use of touch in therapy. The final two articles, with audio recordings, discuss appropriate clinical uses of touch along with an exploration of why touch is not used when it might be clinically useful.

Included in this course is a supplemental resource providing detailed clinical and ethical guidelines for the appropriate use of touch in therapy, with California law highlighted as an example.

Disclaimer: This course is purely educational and does not intend to serve as a license (or permission) to mental health professionals to prescribe or practice any of the approaches discussed in this course unless they fall within the scope of practice of your profession. Check with your licensing board about the scope of practice of your profession to make sure you practice within that scope. It also does not serve as a permission to title yourself in any specific way.