This Chart is designed to support self-compassionate self-reflection by helping professionals to identify motivations that might be interfering with their ethical relationships with patients, clients, or students. This InnerEthics® tool is described fully in The Ethics of Caring.
Seven Centers
According to traditional yogic scriptures, the human body has seven subtle energy centers that correspond to the physical nerve plexuses in the body. This graphic map links these Centers to areas of life (the Centers) in which we have our responses and make choices. (See Chart PDF below.)
Kylea Taylor has named these Seven Centers of life energies and interactions: Money (Change/Security), Sex (Emotion/Body), Power, Love, Truth, Insight and Oneness to correspond with generally agreed upon characteristics in these traditions. These Centers are areas of life energy in which professionals feel and act.
Right Relationship
The straight line through the center depicts Right Relationship. The Chart lists some of the fears, desires, and longings that draw us off the track of right relationship. Each Center has its own special vulnerabilities to attachment because of desires, longings, or fears.
It may help to think of the central line of Right Relationship as a rubber band stretched vertically. The fears, desires, and spiritual longings pertaining to each Center wait along the sidelines. The rubber band can be pulled either to one side or the other in a particular Center whenever we have either a desire or a fear.
When this line of Right Relationship is straight, the professional and the client are in attunement. The professional is not presently being pushed or pulled by their personal fears and desires, or by their spiritual fears and longings. They stay present with the client’s or student’s therapeutic, educational, or developmental direction.
In The Ethics of Caring (Section III), Kylea discusses each individual Center and provides some examples of the issues a therapist, minister, counselor, educator, or healing practitioner might find in working with a client. The examples include countertransference, arising from the desires, longings, and fears of the professional as these relate to each Center. Interactions between the fears and desires of one Center and those of other Centers are also addressed.
Compassionate Inquiry
Self-compassion and self-inquiry are twin allies on this journey. With a determined application of self-compassion and the intent to put the interests of clients first, along with the equally important intention to do the work of self-care and self-healing that is being called for, this Chart of Professional Vulnerabilities to Ethical Misconduct can help clarify a return to Right Relationship and to the path we committed to follow at the beginning of the professional relationship.
In her self-paced online course (2 CEs), “Ethical Right Relationship in Psychedelic Therapy”, Kylea Taylor explains how to use the Chart to identify one’s own motivations. This section of the curriculum covers applying mindfulness when working ethically with vulnerable clients, and why self-compassion is a prerequisite for self-reflection. A video demonstration and additional InnerEthics® tools provide greater insight into these dynamics.
Professional Vulnerabilities to Ethical Misconduct Chart
Copyright© 1994—2023 by Kylea Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
Please do not duplicate or distribute this chart without written permission of the publisher. Contact Kylea Taylor.
Source: The Ethics of Caring (2017). pp. 62-78.
Resource: Section III (pp. 181-261) covers each of the Seven Centers with a list of questions for self-reflection provided at the end of each Chapter.
InnerEthics® 