"Just be true to your values"

The dangers and practical necessities of "value-neutral" therapy

Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash

In my own therapy experience, one of the things that was difficult to get over early on was the challenge of working with someone who didn’t share my religious convictions. My obsessive doubts center on fears that I’ve harmed people in the past, so I wanted to be sure that if I shared those doubts with someone and they turned out to be legitimate, that person would have the same moral compass as me and would tell me to act to rectify my negligence, rather than assuaging my fears by telling me it was “just OCD.” It turned out I was wrong on two accounts. First, that’s not how OCD good therapy works. You don’t get reassurance from your therapist about your fears; that makes you sicker. Instead, you learn to live with the uncertainty (ERP) or learn that the way you got to that doubt was flawed (ICBT). But more importantly, I was encouraged by a couple of Christian OCD therapists that any good therapist would be able to help me because they would respect my values and help me live consistent with my values.

But this brought on another doubt: what if my values are flawed and need to be corrected? If “good” therapists simply accept the value system of their clients and seek to help them live consistently with those values, wouldn’t that often mean “adjusting” or “treating” people just so they could live disordered, sinful, lives, detached from reality? Put differently, isn’t a “values-neutral” approach to therapy no different from a morally relativist approach? And if so, what are the consequences on our society?

This question was brought home to me as I reread Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and read the following passage on the way managers and therapists fail to wrestle with ends and instead focus on what Ellul would call technique and means: