by making romantic or sexual advances; or educational, in which someone comes out in order to educate or encourage others, usually in front of an audience. Patient self-disclosure in psychotherapy Patient self-disclosure has been a prominent issue in therapy, particularly in psychotherapy. Early studies have shown that patients' self-disclosure is positively related to treatment outcomes. Freud is a pioneer in encouraging his patients to totally open up in psychotherapy. Many early clinical innovations, such as lying on the couch and therapist's silence, are aimed to create an environment, an atmosphere, that allows patients to disclose their deepest self, and free them from concerns facilitating conscious suppression of emotions or memories. Even with such efforts, Barry A. Farber says that in psychotherapy, "full disclosure is more of an ideal than an actuality". Patients are prone to reveal certain topics to the therapists, such as disliked characteristics of themselves, social activities, as well as relationships with friends and significant ones; and tend to avoid discussing certain issues, such as sexual-oriented experiences, immediately experienced negative reactions (e.g. feeling misunderstood or confused) due to conscious inhibition. In psychotherapy, patients have to deal with the tension between confessional relief and confessional shame all the time. It has been shown that the length of therapy and the strength of the therapeutic alliance (the bond between the patient and the therapist) are two major factors that affect self-disclosure in psychotherapy. As SPT indicates, the longer patients spent time with their therapists, the range of issues being discussed broadens, and more topics are marked with depth. The greater the depth of the discussions, the more likely the patient feels being vulnerable. To strengthen the alliance, cultivating a comfortable atmosphere for self-disclosure and self-discovery is important. Ethical decision making Ethical and moral decision making has been the topic of contentious academic debate for some time. According to a study, SPT was found to be one of the most applicable communication theories to explain the way people make their decisions based on their ethical and moral compass. The theory shows strong correlation between self-disclosure and reinforcement patterns, which are shown to have a big impact on one's perceived ethical code. This can be applied to a number of fields including communications, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and sociology. Patient/therapist self-disclosure The condition of patients with eating disorders have been shown to improve with therapist self-disclosure. In 2017, a study was conducted surveying