Kylea Taylor, LMFT

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?

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

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.

Learn more about InnerEthics® and our self-paced courses, live training classes, and Training Program Design consulting at InnerEthics.com.

Ethical behavior is reverence for life demonstrated by right relationship to another. ~ Kylea Taylor

Featured Book

The Ethics of Caring is a unique and widely recommended text that complements standard ethics texts by helping the student or professional find right relationship with a client. The book is a Nautilus Silver Medal Book Award winner in the category “Relationships and Communication.” Published November 1, 2017.

Written for practicing therapy and medical professionals, bodyworkers, clergy, students, teachers, supervisors, and mentors, the InnerEthics® model first promotes self-compassion, then gently guides self-reflection about unconscious countertransference that often occurs in the main areas of human life. The book illuminates many extraordinary types of human experiences to help professionals become aware in case clients bring these profound states in some way to the professional for support. See more reviews. Download the Table of Contents, Excerpts and a Book Sheet with reviews

Hanford Mead Publishers  |  Amazon Print  |  Kindle

“The Ethics of Caring is an extraordinarily helpful and groundbreaking book for healers, clergy, therapists, and bodyworkers that illuminates what is necessary to offer wise and trustworthy relations to their clients.
Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., A Wise Heart, A Lamp in the Darkness, and After the Ecstasy the Laundry

“The work with non-ordinary states of consciousness brings specific new challenges and problems that go beyond those encountered in traditional verbal and experiential approaches. Kylea Taylor’s book is a pioneering venture into these new territories, providing important guidelines for practitioners and students.”
Stanislav Grof, M.D., Author of Psychology of the Future, Realms of the Human Unconscious

Online InnerEthics® Courses

Ethical Right Relationship Psychedelic Therapy

Self-paced Courses offered in partnership with Psychedelic Support Education.
Options: Certificate of Completion or CE Certificate (2 hours CE credit).

Designed for professionals interested in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or in assisting clients with the integration of profound experiences and helpful for those working with patients or clients in the field of psychedelics: psychologists, therapists, mentors, physicians, medical professionals, bodyworkers, teachers, and guides.

Learn more and enroll at Psychedelic Support: Ethics 101, Ethics 102, and Ethics 103

Featured Interview

Kylea Taylor on the Woman Who Lost Everything

If psychedelic practitioners don’t learn the basics of altered states ethics, they could end up losing their livelihood. Joseph Holcomb Adams, Ecstatic Integration, June 10, 2023. Read this article at Ecstatic Integration.