| الوصف: |
I am a systemic therapist and would like to be able to describe my practice as ethical. I am familiar with the professional codes of ethics relevant to my work and sign forms at regular intervals to confirm that I adhere to them, but simply upholding them doesn't convince me that I am therefore an ethical practitioner. I am coming to this inquiry with a desire to know more about what we as systemic therapists do in everyday practice that contributes to an understanding of our work as ethical. I describe this thesis as tartan, a metaphor for the way I weave together literature, conversations from practice, stories from my life, ethical considerations and methodology. Using writing as inquiry (Richardson 1997) as the primary methodology, I focus on moments in therapy sessions when there is an ethical dilemma and examine the dialogical process within which a decision is made about how to go on (Wittgenstein 1953). Writing as inquiry requires a pragmatic, emergent approach to methodology, as my thinking moves in response to and in anticipation of the writing. I weave together a reflexive, diffractive methodology with aspects of autoethnography, narrative inquiry and co-operative inquiry to present a multi-voiced piece of writing that takes an onto-epistemological position of "knowing in being" (Barad 2007). The practice material is generated from conversations in therapy and stories told by eight systemic therapists within a family therapy agency in the UK. It moves from systemic practitioner inquiry, in which moments of ethical dilemmas are enriched with heuristic models from the Co-ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), to collaborative reflexive inquiry in which the team of therapists share stories from practice. We cycle through four ways of knowing, inspired by cooperative inquiry (Heron 1996) to bring together the knowing about ethical practice that comes with practical, clinical experience and the knowing that comes from theory and literature. From this, an understanding emerges of ethical practice being created in the moment, within the multiple voices and contexts in which the moment is situated. It therefore becomes difficult for us to be able to describe our practice as ethical; we can describe only the influences on the decision we make and how they orientate and influence us to step into ethical practices. This has implications for systemic practice, training and supervision where practitioners can be encouraged to pay closer attention to the relational, dialogical processes that create an understanding of what it means to become ethical. |