TPC Journal V8, Issue 3- FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 3 255 aside their own experiences and assumptions when they interact with their participants and thus accurately capture their participants’ voices” (Kocet & Herlihy, 2014, p. 182). To apply this concept to counseling, Kocet and Herlihy stated that ethical bracketing is defined as the intentional separating of a counselor’s personal values from his or her professional values or the intentional setting aside of the counselor’s personal values in order to provide ethical and appropriate counseling to all clients, especially those whose worldviews, values, belief systems, and decisions differ significantly from those of the counselor. (p. 182) Counselors can engage in ethical bracketing by seeking supervision, consultation, continuing education, and personal counseling (Kocet & Herlihy, 2014). This bracketing technique allows counselors to confront their values and establish awareness of how their values may be impacting their views and interactions with clients. Counselors may more easily recognize the unique worldviews of clients through this process, thereby respecting the diversity of clients in their cultural contexts. Such recognition protects the welfare of clients as counselors strive to work from the client’s worldview rather than their own (ACA, 2014). The CVCM, along with ethical bracketing, can be used as a guiding ethical decision-making framework for counselors to explore the systemic nature of their values and resolve values-based conflicts with PAD. Values-Based Ethical Decisions and Bracketing With PAD The CVCM is designed to assist counselors in managing personal conflicts related to values that may arise when working with clients (Kocet & Herlihy, 2014). The model begins with a prompt for counselors to determine if the nature of the conflict is personal or professional and ensues with steps that align with the nature of the conflict. However, considering the systemic makeup of individual values, particularly related to PAD, counselors must be mindful of the influences that stem from the profession’s values in the formation and modification of their personal values. Personal and professional values are interwoven and will consequently impact the ethical decision-making process related to values-based conflicts with PAD (Heller Levitt & Hartwig Moorhead, 2013). As a result, adding a systemic lens to the process of resolving values-based conflicts using the CVCM and ethical bracketing is important to maintaining ethical practice with PAD clients. The systemic sources of values related to PAD are important to consider in the second step of the CVCM; this step includes a prompt for counselors to “explore core issues and potential barriers to providing appropriate standard[s] of care” (Kocet & Herlihy, 2014, p. 184). Gathering awareness about counselors’ personal views related to death, dying, and PAD is the crux of working through this step in the model. As previously discussed, counselors must engage in reflective practice to examine influential factors throughout each ecosystem. Each system contributes to counselors’ personal views and beliefs, and reflecting will bring awareness to not only the sources of counselors’ values, but also potential barriers to overcoming values-based conflicts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cottone & Tarvydas, 2016; Kocet & Herlihy, 2014). Beginning with the macrosystem, societal norms and religious and spiritual views of death and dying will influence the exosystem. Legislation that gives clients legal freedom in certain states to decide to end their lives is situated in the exosystem. As the decision to engage in PAD is legalized, it then trickles down into the mesosystem where groups, such as work colleagues and family, hold beliefs and values about PAD. These beliefs and values influence counselors in new ways and impact the intrapersonal reactions counselors have in their microsystem of experience. Counselors must examine the interactions between settings and the messages they receive in those settings. Then, they