Have you seen 'From'?
(If not, beware spoilers from the show are in here – broad spoilers, but still spoilers)
It’s about a random collection of people who end up in a town that they can’t leave, with monsters that come out at night to hunt them.
Across the seasons, there have been a couple of people being told by *something* tells ‘just do this and everyone can go home.’
‘Just do this’ are things like kill a small child, or kidnap a pregnant woman and hide her from everyone.
Yes, these are horrible things, but these people are so desperate to go home, and so convinced that this one horrible thing will save everyone, that they try to do them.
Does it work?
Well, I’ll let you guess that.
I'm thinking 'Where are your lines?'
While I’m watching, I’m thinking ‘where are your lines?’
You know, where are the characters’ lines of what they won’t do no matter what… what are their guardrails?
(If you’re not familiar, guardrails are railings on either side of a road or path that stop you from falling over the edge if you get too close to it.)
Of course, in an existential crisis like being trapped in monster-land, you can probably have some empathy for people crossing some boundaries to try and escape.
The problem is, when what they’ve done doesn’t work (or, even if it does), they’re left with the knowledge of what they’ve done.
Guardrails in ... business? spirituality? everywhere?
Ethics, to me, are metaphorical guardrails.
They are our hard edges that say ‘I will not go past this point, no matter how important I think the issue is, because I may not be able to come back from it if I do.’
There have been a lot of debates about ethics over the years, both in the online business / coaching industry and the spiritual community.
And, well, everywhere.
What is manipulative and what is persuasive?
What is coercive, and what is ‘helping people make the best decisions for themselves’?
While there are many people who dismiss ethics as being ‘too subjective to argue about’, I think these people miss *part* of the point.
Our ethics – our guardrails – are what increase the likelihood that we’ll like ourselves in five years’ time.
How many people got caught up in a certain way of selling that now feels predatory?
How many people have been pulled into groups with cult-like tactics and reproduced them (ahem, MLM’s, ahem) only to come out of it a few years later and feel terrible for the way they hounded their family and friends?
These behaviours were justified with some really beautiful language – ‘you’re trying to save people’s lives, you want people to have freedom, you’re stealing from people if you DON’T market effectively (effectively = getting the people who ‘need’ your product to buy, of course)’.
But once the industry shifted and people realised that these aren’t actually consent-based practices, that they robbed people of agency and coerced them, they’re left realising they unintentionally did some damage.
Sample guardrails in my practice
Because there are so many unethical, predatory and unsafe practices in the online space, healing space, and spiritual space (of which I inhabit all three), I have a code of ethics on my website so people get an idea of what my guardrails are.
Here are a couple examples of my guardrails:
Consent at every turn.
This one gives a shout out to Lisa , with whom I did my trauma, grief & loss sensitivity training.
Consent at every turn means that you first get clear consent for your work, and check as you go, giving a person the option to withdraw their consent at any time.
Since part of my work is connecting to and listening to the body; for me that means I ask permission to connect to the body (and don’t connect before I have permission), and make sure people know they can ask me to disconnect at any time.
Another one of my ‘guardrails’ is prioritising the body’s feelings of safety.
This looks like:
If a client’s body is asking them to go somehwere (i.e., let’s go look in the liver), before we do that, we check if the body feels nervous, scared, or uncomfortable.
If it does, we do NOT proceed until we’ve addressed that, and only once there is no more feeling of worry or fear.
No ‘just pushing through it’.
I can’t say for certain, of course, but I theorise it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had someone go into a full, dissociative trauma response – because we notice the very first sign of discomfort.
Of course, a discussion of ethics wouldn’t be complete without touching on confidentiality.
It’s essential that clients feel safe with me, so I keep a strict confidentiality code in my practice.
Anything said within the client / practitioner container is kept in it – even if I know you socially.
Nothing is shared publicly – not even anonymised storytelling about my clients – without that clients’ permission.
Ethics – or guardrails – can also be about being clear about who you are so people know if you’re the right fit for them.
For example, my code of ethics includes body liberation and inclusivity.
In my mind, body liberation and inclusivity means that we have to acknowledge we live in a society based on explotiative capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and ableism.
To some people, they won’t want to work with someone who holds those views.
But many people are tired of healers and spiritual people who won’t acknowledge the reality we’re living in right now.
If you’d like to see my full code of ethics click here to see all of it.
So... what are YOUR guardrails?
While I’m sure none of us will find ourselves in an alternate universe where eviscerating monsters play hide and go seek in the night, there will always be situations that ask us what our lines are.
Thinking beforehand what your operating principles are, what the guardrails you have in place to make sure you won’t go off the rails and accidentally become a cult leader or coerce someone into working with who can’t really afford it.
I’d love to know what your guardrails are, and if you end up publishing them feel free to link them below 🙂
