Values are easy to name.

Looking honestly at ourselves is where we start.

PCFINE's ongoing effort is to hold ourselves accountable to what we believe: that the work of understanding relationships cannot be separated from the social, cultural, and ethical contexts in which those relationships exist.

Good clinical training doesn't just teach skills — it cultivates ethical awareness.

At PCFINE, we believe our responsibility extends beyond the consulting room to the systems we participate in, the profession we shape, and the communities we serve.

To Our Students and Members We are committed to creating learning environments where clinicians can explore difficult material — including their own biases, blind spots, and areas of discomfort — without shame, and with the support of colleagues who take this work seriously.

To the Couples and Families Our Clinicians Serve The quality of our training directly impacts the people who walk into our graduates' offices. We hold ourselves responsible for preparing clinicians who can work across difference — of race, culture, sexuality, gender, class, and family structure — with depth, humility, and care.

To Our Profession We believe psychodynamic and systemic approaches have essential contributions to make to the mental health field — and that those contributions are diminished when the profession fails to address its own structural inequities. We advocate for training models that integrate clinical sophistication with social awareness.

To Ourselves as an Organization We are not a finished project. We commit to ongoing self-examination — of our curriculum, our leadership, our membership, and our culture — and to making changes when we find that our practices don't match our principles.

There is hardly a social context more damaging to the healthy functioning of couples and families than systemic and structural racism.

As an organization dedicated to understanding relational life, we have a responsibility to confront how racism operates — in the profession, in our field's institutions, and within our own organization.

We acknowledge that PCFINE has contributed to, benefited from, and been diminished by a system that privileges white skin.

For too long, this was reflected in our educational content, in the lack of racial diversity among our faculty, board, and membership, and in a narrowing of our original mission — which once extended beyond clinical training to include public education, outreach, and community consultation.

We are working to reintegrate that broader vision.

Our commitments include:

• Reviewing and expanding our curriculum to address race, racism, and systemic inequity across all educational and professional development activities.
• Increasing the representation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color among our faculty, students, members, and leadership.
• Building a more inclusive environment where BIPOC students and members experience genuine belonging.
• Recommitting to PCFINE's founding mission of public education, outreach, and consultation beyond the consulting room.

A Board-appointed Task Force guides this work, consulting to the organization on priorities, strategies, and accountability. This is not a completed project. It is an ongoing process of examination, action, and change — and every member of our community has a role in it.