中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Dual relationships are important and controversial issues on counseling ethics. Friendship between a client and former counselor is one kind of dual relationships, and the pros and cons are still debatable. Hence, to explore clients' experiences about friendship with a former counselor will provide important ethical implications. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to understand clients' experiences with and perceptions of friendship with their former counselors. Methods: A narrative research holistic-content perspective was adopted to conduct in-depth interviews for this study. Two female participants, age 50 and 24, were interviewed for about total 6 hours each. The interviews were analyzed to discover the themes relating to their experience of friendship. Results: Participant 1 (P1) defined friendship as a long-lasting and supportive relationship. P1was grateful for and cherished the friendship. P2 defined friendship as a relationship that allowed her to be loved, and felt that it offset her regret and feelings of incompletion with counseling termination. The analysis indicated that the friendship is influenced by the former counseling relationship, the completion of counseling termination (which means there is no unfinished business of the counseling relationship), beginning and maintenance of friendship, and role definitions of a client and former counselor in the friendship relationship. Conclusions: This study revealed that friendship between a client and former counselor involves issues of boundary coordination, role adjustment, and power ranking. If a client and former counselor develop an equal power friendship that has clear definition of roles and boundaries, the friendship can have a positive impact on the client. Otherwise, the client may have difficulties with role disequilibrium with the change of the relationship.