Kylea Taylor, LMFT

Today millions of vulnerable people suffering grief, trauma, chronic illness, addiction, and life-altering change are reaching out to mental health professionals for support. As helping professionals who serve clients in profound states of transformation, we aspire to provide a safe space for their healing process.

Often, we confront therapy situations that pose ethical challenges and require judgment calls to avoid ethical pitfalls. Our judgment calls are frequently correct, but even exemplary practitioners can cross ethical lines in dual relationships, informed consent, abuses of power, and sexual misconduct.

When we work with clients in profound, extra-ordinary states, these ethical challenges can be less evident and more far-reaching. Our commitment to “Know thyself” and “Do no harm” is to examine and re-examine our behavior as an ongoing practice of personal and professional ethical well-being. How can we examine our motivations and avoid ethical transgressions while attending to compassionate self-care?

After years facilitating or supervising thousands of sessions for people having extra-ordinary states of consciousness in Holotropic Breathwork®, I became passionate about ethics. I learned from my mistakes, or the ones others made, often with dire consequences. To share what I learned with others, I wrote The Ethics of Caring book. A desire to advance a more comprehensive view and practice of ethics motivated me to develop the InnerEthics® model.

• InnerEthics® is essential for a paradigm shift to a more holistic ethical intelligence. Traditional external codes, rules, laws, and standards of care that guide our ethical behavior provide a necessary foundation. InnerEthics® builds on that foundation.
  
• InnerEthics® is an internal, complementary approach to our traditional ethics education. It offers practical Ethical Awareness Tools that support self-inquiry and compassionate self-care. InnerEthics® principles and tools help us provide our clients with a safe physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual environment for healing.
  
• InnerEthics® clarifies how to work skillfully with clients in profound and extra-ordinary states of consciousness. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is a therapeutic landscape unfamiliar to many practitioners that has the potential to intensify ethical fallibility.

An InnerEthics® approach covers ethics, transference, and countertransference basics. It helps us uncover unconscious motivations, beliefs, and biases that can result in conflicts of interest. The goal: prevent harm and increase client benefit. I envision a future where licensed therapists complete special training to qualify them to work ethically with clients in profound, extra-ordinary states of consciousness.

Most of us want to do the right thing at the right time. The more we know ourselves, the more conscious choice we have, and the less harm we will do.  ~ Kylea Taylor

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Featured Book

In her latest book, Kylea Taylor, LMFT, describes the key elements and structure of an InnerEthics® Peer Consultation Group and shares effective and practical Ethical Awareness Tools that facilitate compassionate self-inquiry and relational reflection. Her latest book is a ground-breaking successor to The Ethics of Caring, recipient of a Silver Medal Nautilus Book Award.

Professionals working with clients in profound states of consciousness can rely on this book to help them avoid ethical missteps, increase client benefits, and find personal and professional support.

Peer Consultation Groups distills Kylea’s experience facilitating and supervising thousands of extra-ordinary state of consciousness sessions and decades of teaching in-depth courses within many breathwork, spiritual emergency, and psychedelic practitioner training programs. Now available at Amazon!

Taylor’s format for peer consultation and her ethical awareness tools, developed over decades of work in the field, are essential for communities of practice to provide safe and ethical psychedelic care. ~ Diana Quinn, ND, Director of Clinical Education, Naropa University Center for Psychedelic Studies

A must-read for any practitioner of psychedelic-assisted therapy! Kylea Taylor has translated the wisdom of psychedelic therapy pioneers into a practical, accessible, affordable framework that addresses a significant ethical concern about psychedelic assisted therapy: how will therapists keep developing their abilities by attending to and exploring their own Shadow?” ~ Will Van Derveer, MD, co-founder, Integrative Psychiatry Institute

This is an extremely important and timely book that should be required reading for all training programs in psychedelic-assisted therapy. ~ Chris Bache, PhD, author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe

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Online InnerEthics® Courses

Ethical Right Relationship Psychedelic Therapy

Online courses in partnership with Psychedelic Support Education. Designed for psychologists, therapists, mentors, physicians, medical professionals, bodyworkers, teachers, and guides interested in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or in assisting clients with the integration of profound experiences. These courses provide 6 hours of Ethics CEs for most mental health professionals and nursing licenses or a Certificate of Completion.

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Featured Event

“Psychedelic Consent: An Interdisciplinary Conversation with Kylea Taylor, Emma Knighton, Edward Jacobs” – November 14, 2024. A Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions Program. This event explores the problems and possibilities of psychedelic consent with an interdisciplinary, cross-practice approach. Watch the video here.

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Featured Podcast