Ethical Stewardship of Resource Therapy Worldwide
Resource Therapy International provides ethical guidance for the international Resource Therapy community. Our Code of Ethics supports safe, respectful, competent, and responsible practice, teaching, supervision, research, and public representation of Resource Therapy.
Members of RTI are expected to uphold this Code alongside the laws, professional regulations, and ethical standards that apply in their own country and profession.
Resource Therapy International is committed to the ethical stewardship of Resource Therapy worldwide.
Our Code of Ethics guides members, trainers, supervisors, committee members, and representatives in practising, teaching, researching, and promoting Resource Therapy with integrity, competence, respect, and care.
RTI members are expected to:
Work within their competence and legal scope
Respect client welfare, autonomy, privacy, and dignity
Represent Resource Therapy honestly and accurately
Maintain appropriate professional boundaries
Use ethical advertising and public communication
Protect confidentiality
Respect intellectual property and the Resource Therapy lineage
Engage respectfully with colleagues and the wider RTI community
Follow applicable laws and professional codes in their own jurisdiction
Support the responsible international growth of Resource Therapy
By becoming or remaining a member of RTI, members agree to uphold the ethical standards of Resource Therapy International.
Core Ethical Principles
1. Respect for Human Dignity
RTI members must respect the inherent dignity, worth, autonomy, and individuality of every person.
Members must treat clients, students, supervisees, colleagues, trainers, committee members, and members of the public with courtesy, fairness, and care.
Members must not discriminate on the basis of age, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, language, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, neurotype, health status, political belief, social background, or professional discipline.
Resource Therapy should be practised and taught in a way that honours the person as a whole, not as a collection of symptoms, problems, or pathologies.
2. Client Welfare and Safety
The welfare of clients must be the primary concern in all clinical Resource Therapy work.
Members must take reasonable steps to protect clients from harm, exploitation, coercion, humiliation, boundary violations, or unsafe therapeutic practice.
Members must work within their competence and must seek supervision, consultation, referral, or emergency support where required.
Members must never present Resource Therapy as a substitute for appropriate medical, psychiatric, psychological, legal, crisis, or emergency care.
3. Competence and Responsible Practice
Members must practise, teach, supervise, and represent Resource Therapy only within the limits of their qualifications, training, professional registration, experience, and competence.
Members must not misrepresent their level of Resource Therapy training, membership category, certification, trainer status, supervisory status, professional title, or clinical authority.
Members must continue to develop their professional knowledge, ethical awareness, and Resource Therapy skill through appropriate professional development, supervision, consultation, or reflective practice.
4. Integrity and Honesty
Members must act with honesty, transparency, and professional integrity.
Members must not knowingly mislead clients, students, supervisees, colleagues, employers, professional bodies, insurers, the public, or RTI.
Members must communicate truthfully about:
Their qualifications
Their membership category
Their training level
Their trainer or supervisor status
Their professional registration
The nature of Resource Therapy
The likely benefits and limitations of therapy
Fees, policies, and service conditions
The status of any certification, accreditation, approval, or endorsement
5. Respect for Autonomy and Informed Consent
Members must respect the right of clients, students, and supervisees to make informed choices.
Before providing clinical services, training, supervision, research participation, or assessment, members must provide clear information about the nature of the service being offered.
This may include:
The purpose and nature of Resource Therapy
The member’s qualifications and role
Fees and cancellation policies
Confidentiality and its limits
Record-keeping practices
Risks, benefits, and alternatives
Limits of service
Referral options
Mandatory reporting or legal obligations
Complaints pathways
Consent must be voluntary, informed, and appropriate to the person’s age, capacity, culture, and legal circumstances.
6. Confidentiality and Privacy
Members must respect the privacy and confidentiality of clients, students, supervisees, members, colleagues, and organisational information.
Members must protect confidential material in clinical records, supervision notes, training discussions, case examples, research material, online communication, emails, social media, and digital storage.
Information must not be disclosed without consent unless required by law, professional obligation, risk of harm, or another recognised ethical exception.
Case material used in teaching, supervision, writing, conference presentations, research, or marketing must be de-identified unless explicit written consent has been obtained.
Ethical Clinical Practice
Trauma-Informed Resource Therapy
Resource Therapy is often used with trauma, dissociation, grief, shame, anxiety, depression, relational injury, and complex emotional states. Members must therefore practise in a way that is trauma-informed, paced, respectful, and clinically responsible.
Members must attend to safety, stabilisation, consent, readiness, emotional regulation, and the client’s capacity to engage in therapeutic work.
Members must be especially careful when working with:
Complex trauma
Dissociation
Suicidality or self-harm risk
Family violence
Child protection concerns
Psychosis-spectrum presentations
Substance misuse
Severe depression
Medical or somatic symptoms
High-conflict relationships
Clients under legal pressure
Children, adolescents, or vulnerable adults
Where a matter is outside a member’s competence or scope, the member must refer, consult, or work collaboratively with appropriately qualified professionals.
Boundaries and Power
Members must maintain clear and ethical boundaries.
Members must not exploit the trust, dependency, vulnerability, admiration, financial position, professional hopes, or personal circumstances of clients, students, supervisees, trainees, colleagues, or members.
Members must not enter into sexual, romantic, coercive, manipulative, or financially exploitative relationships where a professional power imbalance exists.
Members must take particular care in dual relationships, small professional communities, international training settings, online groups, and situations where a person may be both a student, supervisee, colleague, client, trainer, or organisational member.
Working Within Scope
Members must understand and respect the limits of their professional role.
RTI membership does not, by itself, authorise a person to practise psychotherapy, counselling, psychology, social work, psychiatry, medicine, supervision, training, or any regulated professional activity.
Members must ensure they are legally and professionally permitted to provide the services they offer in their own country, state, territory, or jurisdiction.
Where Resource Therapy is used by practitioners from different professional backgrounds, members must make their qualifications, scope, and limitations clear to the public.
Risk, Referral, and Duty of Care
Members must respond appropriately to risk.
This includes taking reasonable action where there is concern about:
Risk of suicide
Risk of self-harm
Risk of harm to others
Family or domestic violence
Child abuse or neglect
Elder abuse
Serious mental health deterioration
Medical emergency
Professional misconduct
Unsafe practice
Members must follow relevant legal, ethical, and professional reporting obligations in their jurisdiction.
Ethical Teaching, Training, and Supervision
Ethical Teaching of Resource Therapy
RTI trainers and presenters must teach Resource Therapy accurately, respectfully, and responsibly.
Training must be presented in a way that reflects recognised Resource Therapy principles, language, clinical procedures, and ethical safeguards.
Trainers must not exaggerate what students will be able to do after a course, nor imply that training alone overrides the need for professional competence, supervision, registration, or lawful scope of practice.
Training materials should clearly distinguish between:
Introductory learning
Clinical training
Advanced clinical training
Supervision
Trainer training
Certification
Membership
Professional registration
Legal permission to practise
Student and Trainee Welfare
Trainers must create learning environments that are respectful, inclusive, psychologically safe, and professionally appropriate.
Students must not be pressured to disclose personal trauma, undertake therapeutic demonstrations, or participate in exercises beyond their consent or readiness.
Where experiential learning is used, trainers must explain the purpose, boundaries, risks, and alternatives.
Trainers must manage emotional material responsibly and provide appropriate support, referral, or follow-up where needed.
Ethical Supervision
RTI supervisors must maintain clear boundaries, confidentiality, competence, and professional responsibility.
Supervision must support reflective practice, ethical decision-making, clinical development, client welfare, and accurate use of Resource Therapy.
Supervisors must not exploit supervisees financially, emotionally, sexually, professionally, or organisationally.
Supervisors must be honest about whether supervision is educational, clinical, consultative, evaluative, certification-related, or part of a formal approval process.
Assessment and Certification
Where RTI is involved in certification, accreditation, trainer approval, directory listing, or professional recognition, decisions must be made fairly, transparently, and according to clearly stated criteria.
Members involved in assessment must avoid conflicts of interest, favouritism, retaliation, discrimination, or misuse of authority.
Where concerns arise about a student, trainee, trainer, or member’s competence or conduct, these must be addressed respectfully and through appropriate RTI procedures.
Ethical Representation of Resource Therapy
Public Communication
Members must represent Resource Therapy accurately and ethically in public settings, including websites, social media, directories, training pages, brochures, videos, podcasts, blogs, conference presentations, professional profiles, media interviews, research publications, and public talks.
Members must not make claims that are misleading, exaggerated, fear-based, exploitative, or unsupported.
Members must not claim that Resource Therapy guarantees outcomes, cures all conditions, replaces medical care, or is suitable for every client.
Advertising and Marketing
Marketing must be truthful, respectful, and aligned with professional standards.
Members must not exploit public fear, distress, trauma, diagnosis, grief, shame, or vulnerability to sell services, training, supervision, products, or membership.
Members may describe the potential benefits of Resource Therapy, but must do so in a balanced and ethical way.
Members must not falsely imply:
RTI endorsement
Trainer approval
Certification
Professional registration
Insurance eligibility
Government recognition
Academic accreditation
Specialist status
Clinical superiority
Guaranteed client outcomes
unless those claims are accurate, current, and verifiable.
Use of RTI Membership and Logos
Members may refer to RTI membership only while their membership is current and only in the category that applies to them.
RTI logos, certificates, seals, branding, directory badges, and official wording may only be used according to RTI guidelines.
Members must not alter RTI branding or use it in a way that implies approval, authority, or status they do not hold.
Professional Titles
Members must use professional titles accurately.
A member must not call themselves a psychologist, psychotherapist, counsellor, social worker, psychiatrist, doctor, supervisor, trainer, or clinical practitioner unless they are legally and professionally entitled to do so in their jurisdiction.
RTI may require members to clarify public titles, profile wording, directory listings, or promotional material where there is a risk of public confusion.
Research, Knowledge, and Intellectual Property
Ethical Research
RTI supports the responsible development of research into Resource Therapy, parts-based therapy, trauma treatment, clinical outcomes, training effectiveness, and related fields.
Research involving human participants must follow appropriate ethical review, consent, privacy, and governance requirements.
Members must not use clients, students, supervisees, trainees, or members as research participants without informed consent and appropriate ethical safeguards.
Research findings must be reported honestly and without manipulation, exaggeration, or selective presentation.
Respect for Knowledge and Lineage
Members must respect the origins, development, terminology, and intellectual lineage of Resource Therapy.
Members should acknowledge the work of Professor Gordon Emmerson and other contributors where relevant.
Members must not falsely claim authorship, ownership, invention, endorsement, or exclusive authority over Resource Therapy concepts, materials, diagrams, processes, or language.
Intellectual Property
Members must respect copyright, authorship, training materials, manuals, slides, diagrams, logos, publications, branding, and other intellectual property.
Members must not copy, distribute, sell, adapt, or present another person’s work as their own without permission or appropriate acknowledgement.
Members must not reproduce RTI materials, Resource Therapy manuals, training resources, certification documents, or branded assets without authorisation.
Collegial Ethics and Community Standards
Respectful Collegial Relationships
RTI members are expected to contribute to an international professional community marked by respect, generosity, maturity, and care.
Members must not harass, bully, intimidate, shame, threaten, defame, undermine, or maliciously criticise other members, trainers, students, supervisees, committee members, or professional colleagues.
Professional disagreement is welcome when expressed respectfully, accurately, and constructively.
Members should seek to resolve conflict in ways that protect relationships, learning, public trust, and organisational integrity.
Online Conduct
Members must maintain professional standards online.
This includes conduct in social media, email, messaging platforms, professional forums, training groups, online supervision, membership communities, webinars, public comment threads, and private professional groups.
Members must not post confidential information, defamatory material, misleading claims, discriminatory content, or material that may bring RTI or Resource Therapy into disrepute.
Conflicts of Interest
Members must identify and manage conflicts of interest honestly.
Conflicts may arise in relation to training, supervision, certification, assessment, directory listing, committee decisions, financial benefit, referral pathways, research, complaints, professional relationships, intellectual property, and organisational authority.
Members in governance roles must act in the best interests of RTI and the wider Resource Therapy community, not for personal gain, factional interest, or commercial advantage.
Organisational Responsibility
Committee members, office bearers, subcommittee members, and others acting on behalf of RTI must uphold high standards of governance, confidentiality, transparency, fairness, accountability, and responsible stewardship.
They must use RTI resources, funds, branding, records, systems, and authority only for legitimate RTI purposes.
Complaints, Accountability, and Review
Ethical Concerns
RTI may receive concerns relating to alleged breaches of this Code of Ethics, the RTI Code of Conduct, membership standards, trainer standards, directory policies, or other RTI policies.
Concerns may involve unsafe practice, misleading advertising, misrepresentation of training or status, boundary violations, confidentiality breaches, bullying or harassment, misuse of RTI branding, misuse of intellectual property, conduct bringing RTI into disrepute, or failure to comply with membership requirements.
Fair Process
RTI will aim to respond to ethical concerns in a way that is fair, proportionate, respectful, and consistent with its rules, policies, and legal obligations.
Where appropriate, RTI may use informal resolution, clarification, education, mediation, written warning, conditions, suspension, removal from directory listing, removal of trainer status, cancellation of membership, or referral to an external professional, regulatory, legal, or complaints body.
RTI is not a substitute for a government regulator, court, professional licensing board, employer, police service, or emergency service.
Member Responsibility to Disclose
Members must inform RTI of any serious matter that may reasonably affect their membership, directory listing, trainer approval, certification, or ability to represent RTI.
This may include:
Loss or suspension of professional registration
Restrictions on practice
Professional misconduct findings
Relevant criminal convictions
Serious unresolved complaints
Legal findings related to professional conduct
Actions by another professional association
Any matter that may affect public trust or safety
Review of This Code
RTI may update this Code of Ethics from time to time to reflect changes in professional standards, international practice, legal requirements, organisational growth, research, and the development of Resource Therapy.
Members are responsible for remaining familiar with the current version of this Code.