Understanding the ACA Code of Ethics in a Way That Feels Human

When you come into therapy, you deserve to feel safe, respected, and genuinely listened to. At The Pine Center, we want you to know exactly how we hold that kind of space. The ethical guidelines we follow help us show up with care, clarity, and integrity. The code of ethics are not just rules. They are the commitments that help us support your healing in a way that honors your whole self.

The ACA Code of Ethics guides much of the work we do, but what matters most is how these ideas shape your real experience in the room with us.

Why These Ethical Guidelines Matter

You might have wondered at some point what keeps your therapist grounded, or how they decide what is helpful, or what protects the things you share. Ethics are one way we create a space where you can explore your inner world without fear.

These guidelines help ensure that we:

• Protect your privacy and confidentiality

• Honor your identity and lived experience

• Avoid harm or conflicts of interest

• Communicate openly and honestly

• Stay accountable through ongoing learning and self reflection
  

Imagine sitting with someone who treats your story with steadiness and genuine care. That kind of safety does not happen by accident. It is supported by clear, thoughtful ethical practices that are meant to protect you.

What Ethics Look Like in Practice

Ethics are not abstract for us. They show up in real, everyday ways that shape and impact your experience in therapy.

Confidentiality

What you share is protected. We only break confidentiality if there is a real concern about safety. You have the right to know exactly what those situations are and we outlines those clearly and explicitly.

Informed Consent

Before and throughout therapy, we explain your rights, what to expect, and how the process works. It is a conversation, not a one time form. You are always in the driver's seat and have choice.

Cultural Humility and Identity Affirmation

We listen to and affirm your identity, culture, values, and lived experience. We do not assume. We stay curious and respectful.

Boundaries

Clear boundaries help keep therapy a safe and focused space for you. They exist to protect the relationship and support your healing. Boundaries also help to protect and preserve the clinician. Boundaries are a part of open conversation at The Pine Center.

Competence

We are committed to ongoing training, consultation, and supervision, especially around trauma, dissociation, cultural competence, and identity affirming care. Your healing deserves skill and intention.

Ethical Practice and Social Justice

Ethical practice is not only about following rules. It is also about the deeper values that guide how we show up with you. At The Pine Center, our understanding of ethics is rooted in social justice, community care, and an awareness of the systems that shape people’s lives.

This means we recognize that healing does not happen in a vacuum. It happens within a world where people experience oppression, discrimination, generational trauma, and unequal access to safety and dignity. Ethical practice calls us to pay attention to these realities and to honor the impact they have on your life and your healing.

A few basic ways social justice in therapy looks:

• Naming the ways systems and structures can harm people

• Respecting the wisdom and resilience within communities

• Holding awareness of power and how it operates inside and outside the therapy room

• Supporting you in navigating institutions that may not be safe or affirming

• Remaining accountable to ongoing unlearning and re-learning

  
  

For us, ethical care includes standing against harm, honoring your lived experience, and building a therapeutic relationship that respects your agency and humanity. It means we do not separate personal healing from the world you live in. We acknowledge both.

Five Areas of Ethical Care

The ACA Code of Ethics is detailed, but it can be understood in five main areas. These categories help map out the protections that support your therapy experience.

The Counseling Relationship

This covers trust, respect, clarity, and boundaries between you and your therapist.

Confidentiality and Privacy

This includes how your information is protected and when disclosure may be required for safety.

Professional Responsibility

Therapists are expected to stay accountable, continue learning, and make thoughtful ethical decisions.

Relationships with Other Professionals

If we collaborate with medical or other providers, we do so in a way that honors your privacy and best interests.

Evaluation and Assessment

Any assessments we use must be fair, culturally aware, and based on your informed consent.

Therapist taking notes thoughtfully during a counseling session

How Ethical Care Supports Trauma and Identity Work

For many people who have survived trauma or who are navigating identity related stress, therapy can bring up questions about safety. Ethical guidelines help create a relationship where you can move slowly, choose your pace, and trust (or at times question) the process.

For trauma and dissociation informed care, ethics help us:

• Prioritize your emotional and physical safety

• Honor your autonomy and choices

• Meet your story with compassion instead of judgment

  
  

In identity affirming work, ethics help us:

• Respect your identity without hesitation

• Actively affirm and validate your experience

• Support you in navigating systems that may be harmful or oppressive
  

These commitments shape the foundation of a therapeutic relationship that is grounded in dignity.

How You Can Feel More Supported

Here are some ways you can use this information to feel more confident in therapy:

• Ask questions whenever you need clarity

• Remember your rights around consent, confidentiality, and respectful care

• Share when something feels uncomfortable or unclear

• Trust your instincts about whether a therapist feels right for you

• Learn about therapy ethics so you can advocate for yourself
  

You are an active partner in this process. Your voice matters.

If you've been harmed in therapy, if there has been an ethical violation, or you've been hurt and repair has not occurred - first, we are so sorry for that. Second, that is not ok or acceptable. If you feel like something is off, bringing it up with your clinician is the ideal first step. We also understand that sometimes the ideal thing isn't always the best thing or the safe thing. In this situation, escalating your concerns to a practice owner or the clinician's clinical supervisor would be appropriate. If that's not possible or safe, we would recommend contacting the licensing board for the clinician.

Moving Forward with Trust and Care

Starting or continuing therapy can feel uncertain at times, but ethical guidelines offer stability and transparency. The ACA Code of Ethics is one way therapists commit to honoring your healing with respect and care.

At The Pine Center, we are committed to creating a space that is trauma informed, identity affirming, and grounded in a decolonial understanding of healing. Your story matters here. Your safety and dignity matter. Your healing matters.

Take a moment to breathe. You are not walking this alone. You deserve a therapy experience rooted in compassion and ethical care.

Therapy for a World on Fire: Trauma-Informed Support for Burnout, Grief, and Overwhelm

We Know the World is Burning and We Aren't Afraid to Talk About It

You're not overreacting.

The world is on fire, figuratively, literally, existentially.

If you’re feeling the weight of just trying to survive in a world that far too often these days feels violent, chaotic, and upside down… you’re not alone.

If you’ve found ways to cope, even if they’re messy, even if they’re not always sustainable, we want you to know: they make sense.

Signs You Might Be Carrying Collective Trauma

Maybe it’s the news. Maybe it’s a quiet grief you carry in your body, one that doesn’t always have words. Maybe you’re just tired; tired of having to keep showing up in systems that ask you to normalize burnout, racism, homophobia, ableism, ecological collapse, political cruelty all while keeping it together, staying productive, and pretending everything is fine.

You might notice:

• Numbing out or feeling emotionally flat

• Trouble concentrating or staying present

• Over-functioning or constantly staying busy

• Doomscrolling or obsessively seeking information

• Feeling stuck in cycles of guilt, helplessness, or rage

• A sense of detachment from your own needs, values, or emotions

• Difficulty resting or feeling safe in your body

Well, of course you do!

This is not a diagnosis but a response to a broken system

These are not weaknesses. They are adaptive responses to living in a chronically dysregulated world. On that note, living in a chronically dysregulated world, shocker, dysregulates people. This isn’t a personal failure. It’s an human response to systems that have been intentionally built to keep people from thriving.

You Deserve Care That Holds Your Humanity

At The Pine Center, we don’t pathologize your pain, we sit with it. We know it. It's ours too.

We get curious about your patterns, not critical. We honor the ways you’ve learned to survive, and we walk with you as you learn new ways to exist, ways that are rooted in connection, care, and choice.

We know that no amount of self-care can undo structural harm. There aren’t enough bubble baths in the world to take away the ache of living in late-stage capitalism, or the burnout of caregiving in systems that don’t give back. Not everything can be fixed, but it can be witnessed. We’re not here to hand you a gratitude journal and send you on your way. We're way past that.

We’re here to be with you, honestly, relationally, tenderly, in the fire. We understand what you've had to normalize just to keep going.

This is therapy that names what’s real. That doesn’t shy away from rage or sorrow. That makes room for complexity and contradiction. That invites your nervous system to breathe, maybe for the first time in a long while. We believe that you don't have to make peace with injustice to find peace in your body.

Here, you don’t need to pretend it's all ok and that everything is normal. You get to show up exactly as you are: overwhelmed, numb, heartbroken, disconnected, resilient. All of it belongs.

You deserve care that holds your humanity. Especially in a world that keeps trying to take it from you.

We're here for you when you're ready, and until then, please take care of yourself.

Ways to Support the LGBTQIA+ Community through Donations

Perhaps, like me, you've woken up today feeling the weight of decisions made by others and watching as those in power strip away the rights of so many.

In response, I spent a bit of time this morning compiling a list of places you can donate money to in support of the LGBTQIA+ community. If you have the means, I encourage you to offer financial support. If you don't, I get it - please instead take a moment to share these resources with a friend who might. Please look over other ways to support these organizations if monetary support isn't an option.

There are many amazing organizations, and this only scratches the surface in the time I had before joining my first session this morning.

If you have additional resources you'd like added, please comment and I'll update as I can.

Sincerely, An unapologetically human and upset therapist

o   Human Rights Campaign has spent more than 40 years creating the most powerful movement for equality our country has ever seen. But despite this progress, our most marginalized are still suffering from violence, discrimination and fear. Our goal is to ensure that all LGBTQ+ people, and particularly those of us who are trans, people of color and HIV+, are treated as full and equal citizens within our movement, across our country and around the world.

• https://www.hrc.org/

o   American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

• https://action.aclu.org/give/now

o   GLAD LAW Through strategic litigation, public policy advocacy, and education, the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law) mission statement defines our works in New England and nationally to create a just society free of discrimination based on gender identity and expression, HIV status, and sexual orientation.

GLAD Law is committed to fulfilling this mission with urgency and perseverance.

• https://www.glad.org/get-involved/ways-to-give/

o   Transgender Law Center is the largest national trans-led organization advocating self-determination for all people. Since 2002, they’ve been organizing, assisting, informing and empowering thousands of individual community members toward long-term national, trans-led movement for liberation.

• https://transgenderlawcenter.org/ways-to-give/

o   Black Trans Advocacy Coalition (BTAC) Established in 2011, The National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition is the only social justice organization led by black trans people to collectively address the inequities faced in the black transgender human experience.

• https://blacktrans.org/donate/

o   The Trevor Project offers crisis services, advocacy, peer support and public education for LGBTQ+ folks 24 and under. This includes a 24/7 year-round crisis lifeline.

• https://give.thetrevorproject.org/campaign/652264/donate?_ga=2.235381505.1404267095.1737467482-1932184714.1737467481?c_src=UCGOF240010100&c_src2=dt-2025_direct

o   Trans Lifeline is a grassroots hotline and microgrants 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis – for the trans community, by the trans community

• https://give.translifeline.org/campaign/stonewall-membership-program/c467387

o   Transitional Justice is a grassroots organization created for the express purpose of providing refuge and support for transgender political refugees who are fleeing persecution.

• https://transjustice.io/

o   Marsha’s House: LGBTQIA+ young adults experiencing homelessness in New York City have never had housing resources within the shelter system tailored to their needs. But that changed in February 2017, when Project Renewal opened Marsha’s House, the city’s first shelter to fill this gap and serve LGBTQIA+ individuals ages 18 to 35.

• https://www.projectrenewal.org/get-involved/donate/

o   The Transcend Campaign/Pfund Foundation – supporting LGBTQ+ communities in the Upper Midwest. Their goal is to support transportation costs for queer youth from North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa to receive necessary and life-saving healthcare out-of-state, cover tuition costs for remote schools that are welcoming to all gender identities in cases where students' local districts are not safe spaces for transgender and queer youth, and provide small cash grants to other organizations doing groundwork in those states.

• https://www.pfundfoundation.org/donate

o   Open Arms Project is a mutual aid project of TRACTION started in 2023 in response to the alarming increase in anti-trans legislation and rhetoric across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Two-Spirit, transgender, nonbinary, gender-diverse, and gender-nonconforming (trans+) people and their families are seeking to escape legislative persecution and violence. The Pacific Northwest has long been a destination for such folk, and we expect migrating people and families to increase over the next decade.

• https://tractionpnw.org/give/  

o   Elevated Access was launched in 2022 in response to the extreme healthcare bans being enacted in state legislatures. They are a non-profit organization that enables people to access healthcare by providing flights on private planes at no cost. Our volunteer pilot network transports clients seeking abortion or gender-affirming care across the United States.

• https://www.elevatedaccess.org/get-involved/ways-to-help

Charlotte, NC Specific

o   There’s Still Hope

• https://www.tshcharlotte3.org/donate-please
  

• Supportive Housing Communities https://secure.qgiv.com/for/supportivehousingcommunities/

o   The Freedom Center for Social Justice is creating culture shifts in social justice, civil rights, LGBTQ+ communities and spaces where people of low wealth and racial minorities dwell. We are proud to work in collaboration, across lines of difference, with local and national organizations that fight for equal protection under the law.

• https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fcsj-donate?refcode=website

o   Time Out Youth offers vital programs, fostering unconditional acceptance, and creating safe spaces for self-expression through leadership, community support and advocacy. Their Vision is to inspire inclusive communities where all youth are equally empowered to reach their true potential.

• https://timeoutyouth.org/donate/

o   For more, please visit: https://charlottetranshealth.org/community-resources/