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As the market for psycho-practice in the UK changes it is putting many practitioners in a tight comer. How do I register? Can I register? Do I want to register? It has produced a jostling for dominance by the pro-register faction of such incongruity that the creative juices of some practitioners like myself have been stimulated into putting together a viable alternative, The Independent Practitioners Network. (IPN). And it has spawned one particular metaphor - gardening - that I'd like to explore here.

000In a recent talk to a conference at St George's Hospital entitled 'Registration: what it will mean to you the counsellor', Professor Emmy van Deurzen, a former chair of UKCP, had a lot to say about counselling and registration that seems to me highly dubious. I am quoting her talk here in a some detail because it furnishes a good example of the worldview that has energised the development of alternative ways of being accountable.

000In the opening of her presentation, she adopted the curious professorial/parental device of telling the audience what they think:

You know what registration is about in practical terms. You have been told how' the United Kingdom Register of Counsellors is going to work. You know the facts and you still have the fantasies. Sometimes you think that being registered would guarantee your professional status and make you feel a whole lot better about yourself At other times you think that all this registration business will just make the distinctions between people more artificial and more definitive. You fear that you might be really penalised if you cannot obtain registration or that registration will just make everybody less interested in what they do as the profession becomes bureaucratised and systematised, perverting and distorting its original purpose.

000And in an interview about UKCP last year, Professor van Deurzen spoke of the inevitability of hierarchies forming. Yet is the institutionalised dominance that counselling and psychotherapy registers represent really inevitable? Or the only choice? Isn't it, at the very least, open to question?

000One of the feminist tradition's sweetest gifts has been its challenge to the 'naturalness' and 'inevitability' of male dominance and therefore dominance in general, since the theorising about dominance had hitherto been in the hands of -surprise, surprise - mostly men. And isn't this, as I would suppose, a perspective that belongs in any self-respecting counselling or psychotherapy training?

000If so, how can it be, as I find myself repeatedly asking, that some of the leading register builders seem entirely at ease with the way that their institutions seek to dominate the market for their services? Take, for example, statutory registration. Speaking about statutory regulation and the EU, Professor van Deurzen remarked:

There is a long road ahead - but this road will eventually lead to potential statutory registration of counsellors and psychotherapists (my emphasis)

000But how can this stance, this institutional agenda that implicitly means engaging the state to help police the boundaries of a profession of counselling and psychotherapy, possibly be congruent with the work of counsellors and psychotherapists who espouse an empowering posture in their practice? Is it not the case that many, if not most, clients come with difficulties that are at root to do with power, with the playing out of agendas of dominance and subjection?

000Since I believe that most psycho-practitioners do indeed try to work and even live, from this 'power-with' ethical stance, it seems reasonable to expect that the organisations that represent them should also do so. How are clients well served by having a dominance-free practice coupled to a dominance-laden institutional structure?

000Professor van Deurzen certainly seemed to feel entitled to tell us what's good for us. In her talk she went on to say that, when counselling and psychotherapy were small scale and scarce, she was happy with self-monitoring:

Of course this freedom was sometimes abused, but there is no doubt that the advantages of creativity and diversity that it engendered on balance outweighed the negative factors.

000Yet now this had mysteriously changed.

000 The situation that has now evolved with the rapid expansion of this sector has required us to check this unbridled freedom and diversity. We have needed to mitigate the creativity and individuality with quality control and accountability.

000The question for me and, I guess, for many readers of Counselling News is -who is the 'We'?

000Is it the 'We' of the BAC, feeling understandably a little congested after the indefensible tabloid attacks of the BBC's Watchdog programme? Or is it the 'We' of the UKCP?

000When I looked into how UKCP is structured I found that it is comprehensively influenced by its psychodynamic/psycho-analytic member organisations who comprise more than half the total membership and who contribute many of the principal officers.

000Also, psychiatrists now form half the executive committee of the governing board of the UKCP and one of this inner ring is the Chair of the Registration Board. Is that the kind of 'We' that you, the reader - as a counsellor - would find acceptable?

000As numerous complaints about inaccessibility and lack of democracy attest, some even surfacing in the UKCP's journal, it is manifestly not an organisation that represents its membership.

000As I have elsewhere argued, contrary to its claims to be the core of a united profession of psychotherapy, UKCP is actually a trade association, composed primarily of training organisations, that is trying to structure the market for its services. In hastening, I fancy slowly, to put up a register of counsellors, this is the company that BAC and UKCR invites you to join.

000And so on to horticultural metaphors. Professor van Deurzen asserted in the conclusion of her talk that:

When a garden has been very fertile and has been left to itself for a long period of time it is overgrown. Sprawling plants obscure each other's light and deprive each other of nutrients. It is then necessary to cut the plants back, quite drastically' and carefully select the ones that one wishes to encourage and make room for, at the same time as uprooting those plants considered to be weeds.

000Again, this seems to me riddled with presumptions that domination and control are natural and inevitable. There is the presumption that the field of UK psycho-practice is a garden, and not for example, a meadow.

000As Professor Yi-Fu Tuan has pointed out, gardening is one of the areas along with pet-keeping, where dominance commonly finds expression.

'It is then necessary to cut the plants back...' Again, who is the 'it'? Who decides? Who is it who claims to know what to cut back and what to select and which are weeds to be uprooted ? On what criteria? Professor van Deurzen is undoubtedly aware of the dangers in what she's suggesting. Such pruning...

...if it is done haphazardly and too aggressively the result can be a sparse, unattractive environment in which little growth can be observed for a long time to come.

However in these times of rapid growth... the pruning of registration and standard setting is a welcome and entirely necessary phenomenon. . . as far as I am concerned: it was high time that we began to disentangle this overgrown field, for it had turned into a jungle, where some weird and wonderful creatures were sometimes doing untold damage.

000Here the word jungle is used to represent a state of appalling and threatening disorder populated with damaging creatures. But jungle also means rainforest, far and away the richest ecological structure on this planet and one on which the whole of its climate and possibly its future depends. And one indeed populated with weird and wonderful creatures, such as the gorilla, that along with jungle, has also been notoriously abused as a carrier of negative projection, yet in reality is a gentle vegetarian creature.

000For me Professor van Deurzen's talk provides a narrowed, inadequate and fundamentally unreliable perspective from which to claim to know who in counselling or psychotherapy is a weed and who is not.

000I thought it worth spelling out some of these incongruities and the questions that are thereby raised at length, because in many ways they represent the factors of disinformation and hubris that have done so much to generate the climate of fear and uncertainly that registration evokes in many psycho-practitioners.

000However, confronting the inadequacies of existing organisations, particularly their tendency to mirror societal norms around the distribution of power, implicitly raises another question. What kind of institution would properly represent the ethics and values of counsellors psychotherapists and facilitators?

000After at least five years of informal debate and ad hoc conferences, I and others found one answer to this question - the formation, in November 1994, of the Independent Practitioners Network.

000IPN has long since moved out of its initially reactive posture and is week by week becoming a settled, ethically sound and organisationally congruent way of holding practitioner accountability.

000It is based on a desire for an institutional structure that does not unawarely reproduce the societal norms of dominance and hierarchical top-down control. (The first screen of the UKCP's world wide web site features a large colour picture of the Houses of Parliament) IPN's solution is a network of groups of practitioners, a minimum of five and a maximum of ten in number, who get to know each other well enough personally and professionally to be able to 'stand by each others' work'.

000Implied in this is an extensive and intensive process of both support and challenge. The task entails that the group members share with the rest of the group details of their practice, its limits, their ethical commitment and also to disclose enough about their personal lives to enable the other group members to confidently support their competence. I have found this a delicate, challenging, onerous but very rewarding process.

000Overall, the network consists of an array of relatively autonomous groups connected together via link groups. There is no central bureaucracy, there are no offices or indeed officers. Practical initiatives that need to be taken or responded to from time to time are carried out by a sub-groups who form to take responsibility for that task and dissolve afterwards. The network meets at national gatherings about every three months or so to look at current concerns and to help participants and member groups consolidate their work. These, and other regional gatherings, are open to all practitioners

000As of early 1997, IPN has three hundred participants, 30 groups quite evenly distributed across the country in various stages of formation and four full member groups. As in any group there are differentials of influence and skill but none of seniority or positional power and no-one is empowered to speak for the network.

000Articles such as this one are initiatives from individual participants. However, such initiatives from within the network are welcomed and supported and this has led among other things to an independent newsletter, extensive publicity material and a world wide web site. IPN does not actively recruit (at least up to now). It has been growing steadily through accumulation, as individuals whose practitioner needs it meets, join with each other, form groups and get to know each other, or decide they already constitute a group and reach out to meet other such groups.

000IPN seems to suit people who are inclined to be self-directing and willing to engage in co-operatively devising ways of getting their professional needs met. It's inexpensive but, at least initially, can be time-consuming because of the commitment to face-to face 'encounter' and relationship with one's fellow practitioners.

000For most people IPN will not replace supervision, though some IPN groups were initially co-supervision groups. IPN opens up access to a national array of practitioners who take themselves, their clients and their accountability very seriously, who enjoy peer relations with other similarly inclined practitioners and who find unrepresentative, bureaucratic institutions quite incompatible with the fundamental values on which their practice is based.

000To put it another way. Are you looking for a congruent way of taking charge of your own process of being accountable, for delivering an ethically sound counselling to your clients and do you have the capacity to negotiate and sustain these standards with other practitioners? After all, isn't that the kind of capacity that clients can reasonably expect of competent counsellors? If so, then IPN could work well for you.

* Dominance andAffection, Yi-Fu Juan, Yale University Press 1984

This article first appeared in Counselling News June 1997 page 29

Denis Postle is a facilitator, counsellor and psychotherapist and a founder participant of the Independent Practitioners' Network.