Therapists are the only group with structures to get systematic feedback on whether their assessments are correct
What feedback mechanisms are you talking about here? I’m having trouble thinking of the difference of a skilled circling facilitator that works with the same closed group, and a skilled therapist working with the same people
Circling facilitators and similar things do not have those skills and generally don’t actually try to investigate what skills they need to acquire in order to do no harm, nor to acquire those skills.
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
And I think I likely agree with this, especially if we’re looking at “all circling”, or especially “all circling like things.”
While I disagree, I do think it’s a reasonable position “you should only do Circling with a trained facilitator” (notably different from small meetups self-organizing, which I think happens a fair bunch). And I have some sense that Circling Certification requires less total training than therapy. (But I’m not sure I have much reason to expect the therapy training to be that good.)
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
I agree with this as well, but I think Czynski is claiming “therefore don’t circle” vs. “therefore find good circling facilitors” which seems like the better move here .
There may be a small minority of facilitators who do not have this problem. I do not think I, you, or anyone else can, before something goes wrong, pick them out from the crowd of seems-pretty-good facilitators who do have the problem. Especially since charismatic people are better at seeming trustworthy than trustworthy but uncharismatic people are. Individual evaluation, absent an actual record of past behavior to examine, is pretty worthless. And if they are following reasonable counselative ethics*, there will be no record; allowing such a record to be read by the public is itself an ethics violation.
Therapists are trained in counselative ethics, and if they violate them, can, and if it’s discovered usually will, face severe consequences like revoking their license and making them unable to practice. I vaguely recall that there are somewhat-analogous pseudolicense-issuers who declare people “certified Circling facilitators”. Even assuming, though, that those organizations put equivalent effort into investigating and assessing claimed violations and promulgating their conclusions (doubtful), they do not have real credibility. Revoking the certification might make it somewhat harder to continue to be a Circling facilitator; it’s a very surmountable barrier, if it is a barrier at all. Those facilitators therefore do not have real skin in the game for the code of counselative ethics, because the issuing organizations just do not have the credibility to impose it. (They lack the right to be sued, in essence.)
*I’m using this to mean “the therapist code of professional ethics” except without the connotation that it is their profession. The correct ethical standard is not actually dependent on whether it is your job or a hobby. It is sufficiently hard to maintain this standard that most people are not willing to put in the effort for a hobby, which is one part of “professional”. The other part is that requiring that someone maintain a certain code to retain their authorization to provide counseling for money is both morally and practically simpler (piggy-back it on top of contract law) than it is to require someone to maintain it for something they do as a hobby. (As an example, many people provide a similar informal service for their friends. Assume for the sake of argument that it would be net good to have all those people obey counselative ethics when they did. Even if so, it would be logistically horrendous, practically infeasible, and morally dubious to establish and enforce that norm.)
What feedback mechanisms are you talking about here? I’m having trouble thinking of the difference of a skilled circling facilitator that works with the same closed group, and a skilled therapist working with the same people
This has not been my experience with good circling facilitators.
I think Czynski is claiming many/most circling facilitators are not good.
And I think I likely agree with this, especially if we’re looking at “all circling”, or especially “all circling like things.”
While I disagree, I do think it’s a reasonable position “you should only do Circling with a trained facilitator” (notably different from small meetups self-organizing, which I think happens a fair bunch). And I have some sense that Circling Certification requires less total training than therapy. (But I’m not sure I have much reason to expect the therapy training to be that good.)
I agree with this as well, but I think Czynski is claiming “therefore don’t circle” vs. “therefore find good circling facilitors” which seems like the better move here .
There may be a small minority of facilitators who do not have this problem. I do not think I, you, or anyone else can, before something goes wrong, pick them out from the crowd of seems-pretty-good facilitators who do have the problem. Especially since charismatic people are better at seeming trustworthy than trustworthy but uncharismatic people are. Individual evaluation, absent an actual record of past behavior to examine, is pretty worthless. And if they are following reasonable counselative ethics*, there will be no record; allowing such a record to be read by the public is itself an ethics violation.
Therapists are trained in counselative ethics, and if they violate them, can, and if it’s discovered usually will, face severe consequences like revoking their license and making them unable to practice. I vaguely recall that there are somewhat-analogous pseudolicense-issuers who declare people “certified Circling facilitators”. Even assuming, though, that those organizations put equivalent effort into investigating and assessing claimed violations and promulgating their conclusions (doubtful), they do not have real credibility. Revoking the certification might make it somewhat harder to continue to be a Circling facilitator; it’s a very surmountable barrier, if it is a barrier at all. Those facilitators therefore do not have real skin in the game for the code of counselative ethics, because the issuing organizations just do not have the credibility to impose it. (They lack the right to be sued, in essence.)
*I’m using this to mean “the therapist code of professional ethics” except without the connotation that it is their profession. The correct ethical standard is not actually dependent on whether it is your job or a hobby. It is sufficiently hard to maintain this standard that most people are not willing to put in the effort for a hobby, which is one part of “professional”. The other part is that requiring that someone maintain a certain code to retain their authorization to provide counseling for money is both morally and practically simpler (piggy-back it on top of contract law) than it is to require someone to maintain it for something they do as a hobby. (As an example, many people provide a similar informal service for their friends. Assume for the sake of argument that it would be net good to have all those people obey counselative ethics when they did. Even if so, it would be logistically horrendous, practically infeasible, and morally dubious to establish and enforce that norm.)