Right here is the total textual content of a resignation letter from a long-term member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).
07 September 2021
Mr Martin Pollecoff
Chair
UK Council for Psychotherapy
2 America Sq.
London
EC3N 2LU
Expensive Martin,
I’m dissatisfied you didn’t deem my letter of 30 April 2021 worthy of a reply. As a paid up member of UKCP since 2001 I might have anticipated at the least an acknowledgement however there was none.
Maybe, now that you’re stepping down as Chair, you’d be ok to inform me why you’re unable or unwilling to even take into account addressing any of the considerations raised about Crucial Social Justice Idea’s (CSJT) unhindered development into the sector of the speaking therapies by stealth. Why have you ever utterly ignored any of the prompt steps, taking part in to a lot of UKCP’s strengths, that might go a protracted option to sustaining the integrity and neutrality of the organisation?
The overwhelming majority of your members are unaware of what Crucial Social Justice (CSJ) truly stands for, disguising because it does its actual intentions. UKCP may treatment this by partaking with the membership and stimulating an open and trustworthy debate. As a substitute, you arrange an EDI activity drive focussing power on CSJT’s obsession with race and oppression and clearly aligning UKCP on the facet of id politics.
That is plainly evident with UKCP / HIPS Equality, Range and Intersectionality Committee who’ve changed ‘Inclusion’ with ‘Intersectionality’ when they’re truly the other of one another.
Crucial Idea knowledgeable approaches to remedy don’t have any empirical proof of helpful outcomes. It is vitally seemingly that these approaches are damaging to shoppers, and particularly to the therapeutic relationship (by means of problematising the connection and the obsessive software of the hermeneutics of oppression). Crucial idea results in catastrophising (microaggressions), all-or-nothing considering (systemic considering or blackness outlined as what whiteness just isn’t), emotional reasoning and standpoint epistemology (lived expertise over proof and actuality checking), mind-reading (assumptions of unconscious bias) and a rejection of particular person company). And all the above with none session with the membership, calling into query the character of the values of UKCP, its trustees and officers.
You latterly spoke out about ‘unregulated and unaccountable American organisations who’ve entered our market’ (Updates from UKCP’s Chair and Chief Government – July 2021) however a few of these provide some hope to counsellors and psychotherapists right here within the UK, a lot of whom are alarmed by the illiberal and divisive political ideology on the coronary heart of important idea. One such organisation, Brian Cranfield’s Worldwide Affiliation of Psychology and Counselling (IAPC), is an avowed non-political member organisation for these of us who nonetheless imagine within the therapeutic and restorative energy of the therapeutic relationship.
UKCP was initially arrange by principled individuals who properly needed to discover a honest and efficient option to regulate the advanced pluralistic discipline of psychotherapy: now it seems to be run by bureaucrats who’ve neither the stamina nor ethical braveness to face as much as the mob. The failure to speak inform, educate or encourage debate quantities to an entire capitulation and a betrayal of the membership and speaking therapies as a complete. I can now not stay a member of such a despicable and cowardly organisation and shall not be renewing my membership when it comes up for renewal in September 2021.
Please take into account this letter formal notification of identical.
Yours sincerely
Paul Dunne
UKCP Registered Transpersonal Psychotherapist
(Tackle and different contact particulars redacted)
***
An earlier model of this text was publish on the Crucial Remedy Antidote.