Confidentiality and Neutrality with Multiple Parties

Avoidance of secret alliances and triangulations.

Joint intervention with both partners presents superlative ethical challenges, the most critical being the preservation of impartiality.

It is common that, due to the accumulated tension, each member will try to psychologically seduce the expert in order to drag him/her towards his/her own ideological trench.

They will look for looks of complicity or veiled agreements that delegitimize their counterpart.

The specialist must perform an introspection exercise to detect if he is internally favoring an individual, since any bias will irremediably filter through non-verbal channels such as tone of voice.

External supervision with a colleague is an indispensable tool to gauge this neutrality and avoid triangulating the conflict, which would invalidate the treatment.

Protocols for hidden unilateral communications

Another serious threat to the integrity of the work occurs when one of the parties involved decides to contact the facilitator outside the scheduled session to reveal confidential information behind his or her colleague's back.

This practice violates the principle of transparency that underpins relational optimization.

To neutralize this maneuver, it is urgent to stipulate a clause of total openness during the initial framing.

It must be clearly stated that any message transmitted privately will be openly exposed at the next meeting.

Likewise, unchangeable policies should be defined on how to proceed if one of the parties is absent: decide whether to cancel the meeting or to record it, ensuring that the professional never accumulates exclusive information power.

Criteria for referring cases due to conflicts of interest

The dilemma often arises as to whether it is viable to transform an individual process into a couple's process when the accompanying person requests to join.

The determining variable in accepting this transition is the length of the therapeutic bond.

If the facilitator has been working alone with the original user for a long period of time, the level of trust and complicity will be asymmetrical.

Introducing a new person into this ecosystem will cause the newcomer to perceive a pre-existing alliance against him/her.

In these scenarios of structural imbalance, the ethically responsible action is to decline the dual intervention and refer the couple to a professional from outside the background.

It would only be acceptable to make this change if the individual contact had consisted of very recent exploratory appointments.

SUMMARY

Working together requires absolute impartiality. The participants will try to generate hidden alliances, so the practitioner must be permanently vigilant in his gestures so as not to show favoritism that destroys processes.

To avoid secret manipulations outside the formal meeting, it will be stipulated that any information shared privately will be exposed to both members. Keeping secrets irreparably destroys all trust in the ecosystem.

It is unethical to transform extensive individual follow-ups into group follow-ups, as prior affinity disfavors the newcomer. In these asymmetric cases, it is mandatory to refer the case to other specialists.