The Therapist’s Power: Dual Relationships and the Duty Not to Exploit

The American Psychological Association's ethics code contains two standards that are more interesting than they look.

Standard 3.05 restricts multiple relationships: a psychologist should not enter a secondary relationship with a client — social, financial, familial — where it could reasonably be expected to impair objectivity or risk exploitation. Standard 3.08 prohibits exploitative relationships with anyone over whom the psychologist has supervisory, evaluative or other authority.

What makes them worth studying is that they are prospective rather than outcome-based.

The prohibition does not say: do not exploit a client. It says: do not enter arrangements in which exploitation becomes possible, because you cannot reliably tell from inside whether you are compromised.

That is an explicit institutional judgment that practitioner self-assessment fails, and it is correct. Chapter 339 is the mechanism — the operator's own vocabulary reorganizes to accommodate what they are doing, and the reorganization is not visible to them.

The reason the leverage exists in the first place is worth stating, because it generalizes. Therapeutic influence is unusually potent for structural reasons. Disclosure is radically asymmetric: the client reveals everything and the practitioner nothing. Transference means the client's feelings toward the practitioner are shaped by relationships that have nothing to do with them. Dependency is built into the arrangement. And the client cannot evaluate the practitioner's competence, because evaluating it would require the expertise they are paying for.

Every one of those conditions appears elsewhere. Clergy have the same disclosure asymmetry and add moral authority. Teachers and supervisors have evaluative power. Coaches, mentors and managers have all of it in weaker form. Doctors have dependency and information asymmetry. Chapter 180's yoga trainings had certification dependency, which is why the abuse pattern there is structurally identical.

The audit for a practitioner in any of these positions is two questions.

What can this person not evaluate about me, and what would happen to them if they withdrew?

Where the answer to the second is anything substantial — their treatment, their career, their standing, their community — a secondary relationship is not a judgment call.

The counter-response is the one the code prescribes and it is structural rather than personal: supervision, so that someone outside the relationship can see it; referral, where a conflict exists; and documentation, which makes the relationship reviewable.

This counters Law 20.