The Utah Department of Professional Licensing recently adopted a rule prohibiting therapy intended to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. We welcome the attention the state’s conversion therapy discussion has brought to the need to reduce harms that people have experienced in therapy. It now provides an opportunity to expand the discussion about reducing harms, regardless of age.
We are the Reconciliation and Growth Project, a think tank of ideologically diverse therapists and educators. We have met biweekly for seven years, engaging in robust dialogue to craft consensus on ethical therapy practices regarding sexual orientation, gender identity and religious faith. We have come to understand that any therapist across the ideological continuum, including liberal and conservative practitioners, can cause harm by advocating a predetermined outcome.
What constitutes ethical therapy? What should each of us expect from therapists and counselors?
We believe clients benefit from mental health therapy that allows for exploration of many possible life paths. Ethical therapy with minors and adults respects their evolving self-determination across a range of healthy futures.
We believe ethical therapy addresses minority stress, which is the experience of feeling alienated, inferior, or not belonging. Minority stress results from discrimination, prejudice, or lack of acknowledgment. Ethical therapy acknowledges and reduces minority stress, allowing clients to safely explore a variety of meaningful life paths. It also typically fosters authentic belongingness with family, peers, and community.
There are healthy ways for LGBTQ+, same-sex attracted and faith-based clients to live out their lives and values. We encourage professional therapists, teachers, religious counselors, life coaches and others to approach clients’ life values with care and respect.
We support all efforts to learn respectful dialogue across persisting differences and we invite everyone to participate.
More information about our process for engaging in respectful dialogue and how clinicians can best promote healthy outcomes with religious clients with sexual and gender diversity, may be found at ReconciliationAndGrowth.org, including our “Declaration on Avoiding Harm” at NoHarms.org.
Lee Beckstead, Ph.D. in private practice and member of LGBTQ-affirmative Psychotherapists Guild of Utah.
Jeff Bennion, LAMFT, Connections Counseling Services, co-founder of North Star International.
Jerry Buie, MSW, LCSW in private practice, Pride Counseling.
Lisa Tensmeyer Hansen, Ph.D., LMFT in private practice, Flourish Therapy, Inc.
Ty Mansfield, Ph.D., LMFT in private practice, co-founder of North Star International.
David Clarke Pruden, MS, The Family Development Foundation.
Marybeth Raynes, LMFT, LCSW in private practice and co-editor of “Peculiar People: Mormons and Same-Sex Orientation.”
Jim Struve, LCSW in private practice and co-founder of LGBTQ-affirmative Psychotherapists Guild of Utah.
