Anyone want to email BACP re article about parents of trans people?

Only just spotted that one, @Sparklybutold 😂 An absolute classic of Freudian slippage.

“Lack of judgment and listening skills” 😂

So the take home is ‘as a therapist, I go in with a preconceived idea of what this client should do, I then apply my therapeutic ‘skills’ to manipulate my client to thinking the same way I do’ about right?

'As therapeutic professionals, we can use our empathy, lack of judgment, and listening skills to support these parents, helping them to work through their feelings and allowing them to start supporting their child or to do it better.'

Anyone spot the ironic mistake? 🤣

I just joined Mumsnet to say that, as a quite recently qualified therapist I read the Therapy Today article and agree with the OP, but feel too nervous to put my name to a letter. I think this might be worth mentioning in the letter, if it's relevant: that it doesn't feel safe to speak out. I find the BACP quite intimidating.

I'd describe myself as pretty "woke," passionate about social justice, and to me that includes being a feminist who wants to be able to say gender is a construct and sex is real.

TT was set up to oppose the BACP MoU...
CTA also has a network of people who reject critical social justice in therapeutic contexts. So there's bound to be a way of connecting with trustworthy counsellors who actually know what their job is, instead of parroting groupthink.

BACP is the organiser of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy with its many signatories so this has widespread ramifications. These organisations need to be taken back from the inside if it is possible, board etc.

Perhaps you could contact those two organisations for guidance about finding a counsellor you could trust? I read through their main pages and they do seem committed to remaining separate from the ideology.

Sorry you had such a bad experience @WifeOfTiresias I hope in time you feel able to seek out a more appropriate therapist.

Thanks for the kind comments, 💯 more support than I received from that counsellor!

Not sure if I would be able to trust another counsellor enough to be able to open up to them after that experience. It took a lot to take that step and I was soundly trampled on.

Another BACP member here with similar concerns. Yes, happy to work on a joint response.

thefactsarefriendly · Today 09:23
Critical Therapy Antidote recently published a book on this called Cynical Therapies, and is there to join if you're wanting to push back. Same with Thoughtful Therapists.

Thank you for telling us about them.

I doubt that any therapist like the one who was abusive to WifeofTiresias is any good at all, regardless of the problems of someone who comes to see them. They would be equally useless for someone suffering from gender dysphoria.

What happened to you was horrible on every count, WifeofTiresias. I hope you can get some help 💐

@WifeOfTiresias , contact Thoughtful Therapists to get a non-woke therapist. You deserve to be heard. x

Critical Therapy Antidote recently published a book on this called Cynical Therapies, and is there to join if you're wanting to push back. Same with Thoughtful Therapists.

Wow. That’s awful - your “trauma was not considered worthy of help”. So sorry for you.

Challenging is an important part of therapy. For a challenge to be an effective therapeutic tool, the therapist needs to know their client. That's why it is a late-stage tool and needs caution.

It should never be based on the therapist's preconceived notions or values. Or over empathy with someone outside the room.

Exactly Boots!

And I don't mean that a therapist shouldn't challenge your ideas, offer alternative perspectives, talk with you about how you might be contributing to problems in relationships and whether changing how you act within these relationships could help you "achieve your therapy goals" (🤢), and so on — but the client is the focus, not their kid, and the client should be the one setting the broad agenda (even if the therapy is to help them work out that that they might have to follow a different route there than the one they thought they would travel).

@JarByTheDoor you deserve your therapist to be your therapist.

Not your child's. Not your partner's. Not your mother's. Not a wounded helperperson that wants to push their own agenda.

Your therapist.

I was suffering from extreme anxiety which was making it impossible to hold down my job, a large part of which was caused by the trauma of being a transwidow. Booked counselling with a a BACP accredited counsellor to try to piece together my shattered mental health. As soon as I tried to talk about my experiences as a transwidow I was immediately shut down and left in no doubt that the counsellor considered me a hateful bigot. I made that my last session and there is no point in booking with anyone else as I'm pretty sure I would get the same reception. So I struggle to deal with my issues alone as my trauma is not considered deserving of help.

I don't even need my therapist to be GC, I just need them to respect the fact that I am.

I've had perfectly good, mutually respectful, helpful therapy from a practitioner who profoundly disagreed with me on trans issues — I even told her that though I understood that she was in no way intending to advocate for dangerous treatment, unlike her I believed affirmative therapy for young people with gender dysphoria was at best poor practice and at worst a form of abuse which could lead to profound harm, that treatment leading to the sterilisation of disproportionately gay and autistic young people was highly suspect, and that if she were to perform that type of therapy, in my opinion she would be, however inadvertently, potentially abusing and harming vulnerable people.

And you know what, it was absolutely fine. The therapist didn't try to educate me, or gaslight me, or turn me into someone else's support droid. We explored my thoughts and feelings about this topic, why it bothers me, and how that ties into my life, my politics, my sexuality, my autism, etc. etc. — y'know, therapy stuff.

I wasn't made to feel my beliefs and feelings were wrong just because they were different from the therapist's, or less important than the beliefs and feelings of genderists. Who knows, maybe she secretly judged the hell out of me but it doesn't matter because (a) that didn't show in session, and (b) the therapist didn't then publish an article in an industry magazine revealing dismissive and patronising attitudes towards my opinions and feelings. (They do know clients can access these things nowadays, right?)

The issue isn't so much having a therapist who disagrees with me, it's having a therapist who doesn't behave like a fucking therapist — where, if I'm the client, I'm the client, and what matters is what's best for me. Okay, relationships are part of that, and if one of the things I'm taking to therapy is that I want a better relationship with my gender-dysphoric kid, then discussing whether it's worth making concessions and changes is going to be part of that, but I don't expect the therapist to decide they know what beliefs I should change and what outcomes I should value, what fucking TV programmes I should watch, and what my function as a parent is, and therapise me with a goal of their choosing.

I stopped being a BACP member in 2018. By that time I was well pissed off with them printing any old indulgent, harmful shite written by people I wouldn't trust my keys with, nevermind my MH.

I have counselled parents of trans-presenting teens. They were the client. Not their children. It was my job to be the parents' therapist. Not their children's.

I’m an accredited BACP member too and work with Children and Young people. That article, like most of the articles in Therapy Today, was just infuriating. Every day I work with families being torn apart by the enforced pressure of gender politics and ideology when very often, and especially but not exclusively with teenage girls, the real issues at play are things like ptsd, ASD, ADHD and the associated difficulties experienced in tolerance of strong emotions. Therapy Today goes straight in my bin.