Reimagining “multiple relationships” in psychotherapy: Decolonial/liberation psychologies and communal selfhood.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Promoting decolonial and liberation psychologies (DLPs) requires psychologists to critically interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions pertaining to psychotherapy relationships. One fruitful area of interrogation surrounds conceptualizations and practices concerning multiple relationships (MRs), wherein a psychologist and client share another form of relationship outside of the psychotherapy context. The prevention or minimization of MRs is widely viewed as an ethical imperative, codified within professional ethics codes and further encouraged through insurance and liability practices. From the standpoint of DLPs, the profession has not adequately grasped the extent to which psychotherapy relationships reflect individualistic selves that facilitate psychologists' serving, however unwittingly, as "handmaidens of the status quo." We present three practitioner testimonios from among our authors-Indigenous, Muslim, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and other sexual/gender minorities-to concretely demonstrate how the professional and ethical framing around this ubiquitous practice within psychology has served to flatten human relationships within a colonizing frame. We then discuss three problematic assumptions concerning MRs that are reflected in the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code. We offer communal selfhood, a theoretical framework that aligns with DLPs, as a potential space for understanding and reframing MRs. We conclude with general recommendations for conceptualizing therapeutic relationships without recourse to a problematic conceptualization of MRs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".