‘The main thing to fear,’ says Jeremy Clarke in Question Time (Therapy Today, November 2009), ‘is not being on the playing field in the first place.’
 
Where the game is rigged, the rules not transparent and the opponent far more practised and powerful than we are, the last place any of us needs to be is on that playing field. We need to shift the power base here. As participants in the regulatory game, we will always be on the wrong foot and the regulator will always hold the more powerful cards. We need to move the process into the counselling room where we have some chance of seeing what is going on.
 
Since the impetus towards regulation is based largely on manipulation, fuelled by deep-seated fears, I think it fair to say (as Carl Rogers might have done) that the regulatory protagonist/client is anxious and incongruent. If I perceive that a client is playing games, then the last thing I should do is to engage in the game. I can name the game, but I must not play it. If the client absolutely refuses to let go of the game, then eventually, sadly, the process ends. At that point, either the client realises that there is something missing from his or her life and seeks to re-engage with the therapist; alternatively, the client goes off grumbling to all their friends about how awful we all are, you can never trust therapists and they need to be regulated, struck off, banned etc.
 
The point is that if I refuse to play the game, there is half a chance that I will connect with the client. Even if I don’t, at least I come out of the process with my integrity intact. If I play the client’s game, I must always lose. The client knows the rules and holds all the cards; I am left with nothing. Of course the client also loses; there are never any true winners here.
 
Part of my refusal to play the regulatory game must also mean letting go of the fear of economic insecurity. This is one of the most powerful cards in the regulator’s grasp; the practitioner’s fear of being without work. I would suggest that counsellors might need to let go of the idea of counselling or psychotherapy as, necessarily, full-time occupations. I question anyway how effective full-time counsellors can be; there is the risk (rather like politicians) of losing touch with a world which does not revolve around therapy. There is a lot to be said for working part-time jobs for the sake of everyday security, and seeing counselling practice as a bonus.
 
It is the professionalisation of counselling that has led us to this point and the threat to status – and income – which holds us in thrall to the regulators. If counselling is, as I believe it to be, an essentially subversive practice, then there is something a little dishonest about the pursuit of professional respectability. That is more of a threat to counselling, I must suggest, than anything that the regulators can do to us unaided.

William Johnston