My response to my friend Joe Burgo’s website post about therapist self-disclosure on http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/input/Â :
“Unprofessional” seems to me a label many folks use when confusing their personal values and preferences with the a profession’s written code of ethics. There’s a very broad continuum of appropriate and useful self-disclosure, although various sub-schools of psychotherapy define appropriate self-disclosure quite differently. Â To model and give appropriate emotional intimacy, therapists who use Interpersonal approaches often disclose Much more about themselves than Psychoanalylitically oriented therapists.
There’s nothing written in stone that forbids therapist’s self-disclosure, and every situation/client calls for different degrees of self-disclosure. As long as the therapist clearly understands the therapeutic reasons for a self-disclosure and doesn’t violates their profession’s written code of ethics , “unprofessional” seems to me a matter of personal taste. Dr Bob