Ethics, a form of philosophy involves dealings with morality and judgements of proper conduct (Frankena, 1973), denoting the significance of psychotherapists’ moral obligation towards the client. Its purpose is to reflect a straightforward value system, and to communicate decisional and behavioural rules with clarity To illustrate this further, the Australian Psychological Society (APS) Code of Ethics specifies ethical principles and accepted guidelines governing the psychologists’ actions and methods to make the public known of their professional practices. The ethical standards define the best practices of professionals and ensure the high quality of practice.

A psychologist must bring and maintain appropriate skills and learning within her area of practice. Falling under the Prudence principle, The Code of Ethics (2007) section B.1.2 states that a psychologist may only provide psychological services within boundaries of their professional competence, where a) working within their limits of training, education, and experience and b) basing their service on established knowledge of discipline and profession of psychology. However, the psychologist concerned is specialized in clinical psychology for adults, and now is dealing with adolescents, whom are clients beyond her scope of expertise. This raises the issue of limited professional competence. Nonetheless, rural regions often see a high demand due to lack of specialists normally found in urban locations. A change to the rural location brings pressure toward the psychologist to practice beyond their capability. The ethical trap possibilities lay in the fact that her qualification does not apply for the therapy, however there is no other way to go about it. Deemed as the “Circumstantiality” trap by Steinman et al (1998), it entails the circumstances on which they occurred must be taking into