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• Words matter. They not only describe a thing, but define it. Imagine being described as ‘wheelchair-bound’, or a ‘wheelchair user’. In the former, the wheelchair is the active party, limiting the freedom of its passive incumbent; in the latter, the disabled driver breathes life into the otherwise inert wheelchair.
  
  For a profession that is meant to be comfortable with silence, therapy sure relies a lot on words. Rightly so, for words and their meanings are our stock-in-trade, and we pay our clients’ language close attention. An anorexic client who constantly denies herself, mentions being repeatedly told as a child that she was ‘too much’ for her mother; her counsellor finds herself filling more of the space than usual in sessions, as if trying to feed her deprived client a large nourishing helping. A male client tells of his fury at being ‘shut out’ of his holiday home by his partner; two weeks later, he turns up for his third appointment a day early, and his counsellor doesn’t let him in.
  
  ‘Too much’ and ‘shut out’: simple expressions, yet powerful and complex meanings for the people concerned. The first client’s response was to make herself increasingly invisible. The second’s was to pound on the caravan door. Thankfully, he was more respectful of the counsellor’s door, but underneath, I imagine his wound was much the same.
  
  But it isn’t just clients who coin phrases; we therapists have a jargon all our own, and the freezer-full of therapy-speak carries an assortment of flavours. The psychodynamic therapist will readily get their tongue around the lollipops of projective-identifications, internal objects and the reflection process whilst in the person-centred drawer you’ll find plenty of self-actualisation, advanced accurate empathy and non-directive cornets and wafers. In other compartments, you’ll find a variety of solution-focused tubs, CBT choc-ices, or family packs rippled with reflexivity and the co-ordinated management of meaning. Of course, such labels are not intended for client consumption, other than perhaps to remind them (and kid ourselves) that it is only we professionals who hold the keys to the knowledge of human relationships. Such jargon is our shorthand code, the telltale scent-marks that indicate to other practitioners whether we’re of the same clan as themselves or members of some foreign tribe, and I have little time for it.
  
  Of course, it was not always so. There was a time I delighted in trying out my command of such new-found concepts in Case Discussion Group, showing off that I was no stranger to notions of positive reframing, symptom carriers, countertransference, or Henry Dicks’ Three Levels of Marital Fit.
  
  Language is deeply wrapped up with identity. I knew of a man who refused to accept his wife’s decision to change her first name; ‘I married Mary 23 years ago,’ he said, ‘I can’t suddenly start calling her something entirely different!’ They divorced over it.
  
  Names matter. All the more so now regulation of our profession is galloping/creeping over the horizon, and the arguments have begun about what we can, and cannot, call ourselves.
  
  I tend to take labels with a pinch of salt. A prospective supervisee boldly introduces themself as someone who ‘works psychodynamically’. An hour and a half later the supervisor has found no evidence of any such thing, unless you believe gathering a few morsels of information about a client’s childhood to be synonymous with psychodynamic enquiry and practice.
  
  Perhaps things are best identified by what they do rather than what it says on the label. I used to refer to myself as a counsellor, but increasingly describe what I do as therapy. Yet, when I meet a stranger who asks what I do for a living, I often as not reply that I’m a paid listener. It oils the conversation, is unpretentious, and pretty close to the truth.
  
  Keen-eyed readers will have noticed a name change to this column, from ‘Therapist column’ to ‘In practice’ when I took it on earlier this year. ‘In practice’ describes something common to us all, whether we are students-in-training, newly qualified graduates, or old stagers who think they’ve seen and heard it all before. Each one of us is engaged in practising our art/craft/trade – if not to ‘get it right,’ then at least in an attempt to do it a little better, whatever the thing itself is actually called.

• Kevin Chandler is a therapist, supervisor and author of Fifty-Minute Hour, a novella about a man dragged along to Relate (in the collection 8 Hours), and the novel Listening In: A Novel of Therapy and Real Life.