I am a child and young person’s counsellor and a member of BACP. At present I am working towards accreditation. It is a long and arduous task, but I am working with determination and am actually enjoying it. I am writing because I feel like an expert on all the criteria for accreditation at the moment, so when I received my eagerly awaited Therapy Today this month I was quite shocked at the political nature of the front cover and the leading article.

I was under the impression that equality was a central aspect to our work as well as confidentiality and naming no names. By entering into the political arena, don’t we become biased towards one side or another and start naming and blaming? I thought that was the complete antithesis of the BACP ethos, or am I filling out the forms incorrectly? I thought it was safe to be a member of BACP, now I don’t feel so sure.

I am not saying that the article has no reality, but I thought we dealt with reality as a perception for different people so that we can understand how it feels for them, rather than commenting on who owns what and what belongs to whom. If I went into the playground and tried to sort out the battles there using politics I would have to start a United Nations. People perceive war in many different ways and surely those are the issues we should be thinking about. Isn’t it our task to think about what makes people go to war from a psychological standpoint and then to consider the casualties of it from all sides?

Judith Sonnenberg