Therapy can be a warm and important relationship. Your therapist may know things you have told nobody else. Clear boundaries help ensure that this trust serves your care.
They cover time, fees, the setting, contact between sessions, gifts, physical contact and encounters outside therapy. Relevant arrangements should be explained.
Keeping the relationship professional is their job
You may feel gratitude, closeness or attraction. Those feelings do not make you responsible for the therapist's behaviour. They should respond professionally. Attraction does not make sexual approaches or exploitation acceptable.
Your care should not become a way for the professional to obtain friends, personal favours, loans or financial opportunities. Gratitude and agreement do not remove their responsibility.
When the same therapist sees someone close to you
A joint session agreed for a specific purpose differs from separate individual therapy for you and your partner, parent or another very close person.
For that person's separate individual care, this guide recommends a different, independent professional. This gives both of you room to speak freely without worrying about what the therapist knows from the other person.
A therapist must not start or continue overlapping relationships that put their impartiality, the effectiveness of care or your protection at risk. This is an ethical concern, not simply a matter of preference. “You both agreed” does not settle it.
The conflicts are concrete: you may leave things unsaid to protect your relationship, wonder which information influences the therapist or feel they are taking sides. Referral to another professional helps avoid these conflicts.
If another appropriate professional is genuinely unavailable or urgent care is needed, the situation requires specific consideration, professional consultation or supervision, safeguards and a plan for independent care. Cyprus being a small country, convenience or the therapist's preference are not sufficient reasons on their own.
A psychologist should also not take members of their own family or close personal friends as clients. Their personal relationship makes the professional role difficult to maintain.
The setting is part of your care
A usual appointment needs an appropriate professional care setting with privacy, safety and protection from interruptions. A café or the therapist's family living room does not provide that framework. A separate, properly organised consulting room within a home differs from a shared living room.
Some interventions have a specific reason to take place outside the office, such as an agreed exercise in a place you avoid, or a home visit when needed. Purpose, privacy, safety and consent should be discussed beforehand. These are different from a social coffee meeting.
Social invitations and personal business
An invitation from your therapist to a Christmas party, personal dinner or another social event that brings you into their personal circle is a serious violation of professional boundaries and ethics. Having only clients, or a mix of clients and other guests, does not resolve the problem. A structured therapy group with a clear purpose and agreement is different. You can decline and consider continuing treatment with another professional.
The therapist should not use the care relationship to request professional favours or personal business from you, your partner, parents or other close people. A session is not an appropriate way to seek a car quotation, discount or work on their home. If you offer a personal favour because you feel grateful or indebted, they should refuse it and protect the boundaries. The help you received does not create a personal debt.
In a small community, accidental encounters may occur. Agree beforehand how your privacy will be protected. An accidental meeting differs from social relationships arranged by the therapist. The page on concerns in therapy provides further examples.