Amanda Williamson Coaching and Counselling Service in Exeter, Devon

[UPDATE 19th August 2014: The issues covered in this post regarding the lack of regulation and the shocking Palace Gate scandal have now been published by The Mail on Sunday as a matter of public interest. Please click here to read more about this important piece with a link to the Mail on Sunday article.] 


I wrote extensively about my stance on regulation around a year ago. I was so fed up of hearing therapists argue the toss about whether it was a good or bad thing.



What about clients? What about the public? What do the people that come and spend time and/or money on our professional services want? Well, I do care deeply about what my clients want so I went out and asked the public and hey presto! Guess what? The majority WANT counsellors and psychotherapists regulated and MOST OF THOSE ASSUMED WE WERE ALREADY REGULATED.

Why is this a problem? Well, like a lot of things that lead to big changes in priority, the real push for me was experiential learning; witnessing serious misconduct in a fellow professional. This was so bad that I resigned from the agency I was working in, that he owns and runs as a private business.

Cutting a long, almost two year horror story short, Palace Gate Counselling Service, the agency I worked at for two years, was taken to two separate complaints hearing by the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) and each individual complaint warranted removal of the agency's membership. Yes, this agency acted so disgracefully in the eyes of the regulating body that their membership was removed twice.



The BACP are generally quite forgiving and lenient to therapists who have acted in contravention to The Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Their monthly publication Therapy Today sees a summary of the latest sanctions which usually amount to writing a self-reflective essay and submitting to the BACP, and ramping up supervision. It takes a lot for the BACP to withdraw membership and if the complaint amounts to the therapist's word against the client's then it is my understanding that it is particularly difficult for the BACP to uphold, unless they have a LOT of evidence. 

So the practitioner at the centre of these complaints, who is not and I assume never will be a member of a regulatory organisation, was able to "hide" behind the organisation. 



A blogger who write extensively about the uses and abuses of therapy, and in particular the problem with the lack of regulation is Phil Dore aka Zarathustra. He followed the story after the agency posted a rather bizarre blog regarding the complaints against them. He wrote an interesting piece about the BACP findings here.

Jemima, who writes on Sometimes it's Just a Cigar,  picked up the story here. A commenter on that particular post writes a lot of sense:

"That we have a system where people who are quite possibly vulnerable and traumatised can be ‘treated’ by totally unregulated counsellors is not just wrong it’s dangerous. Every industry needs rigorous, enforceable guidelines and penalties for those who infringe them. There’s nothing to stop me putting a sign up at my door and offering ‘counselling’, just like that awful woman who tried to ‘cure’ someone of their homosexuality. Change is long overdue and any decent therapist or counsellor would welcome it."

What frightens me is that trainee counsellors who work for these organisations are being taught how to practice by owners, directors and supervisors who not only refuse to be held accountable, but have been twice struck off their professional body.

Well for starters, beauty isn't clean shaven armpits and Botox-frozen foreheads, not in my opinion. But you wouldn't think that was the case from all the crap we are bombarded with in magazines/on the internet/billboards.

I am supposed to be writing my accreditation essays this morning. Yesterday, when I was in full flow on the longest of the four pieces required, my butterfingers ended up flinging the last dregs of tea onto my keyboard. It broke. I couldn't fix it and am now behind where I wanted to be, essay-wise. So here I am with a new keyboard, with a free few hours, and ready to go. Except I need to get something off my chest, and it's been a long time coming.

Madonna's Armpit Selfie

The first contributing factor (besides growing up and spending years of being being faced with cultural expectations of "beauty") was Madonna's so-called Armpit Selfie that she shared on Instagram. I have only seen a fraction of the onslaught of comments and whilst I'm not surprised it has caused an outcry (I mean, what a slut, deliberately flaunting it) I continue to be disturbed by comments such as "It's as bad as not washing" to "I just vomited".

I also saw an article from The Independent tweeted which is in some respects very silly (Beyoncé really isn't that inspirational) but also makes some important points about natural hair.

My Armpit Selfie

In the heady days of MySpace being The Social Network to be using and cruising, I changed my profile picture to one of a woman's arm and torso, showing one hairy armpit. It wasn't mine, but wow did I get some vehement responses from a LOT of people. Some blokes I didn't even know telling me how disgusting I was. Wow.

What are we doing to our kids?

Having three children of late primary and high school age, the topic did come up fairly recently. I asked them what they thought about women having hairy legs or armpits. Two were ambivalent. One (male) said that it seemed stupid and pointless to remove it. I inwardly glowed. These are the kids that do not like clothes because they are fashionable, they like clothes in colours and fabrics that please their individual tastes. My daughter cannot understand the obsession with people trying to look younger - "What's wrong with looking your age? What's wrong with wrinkles?". Good questions. Which leads onto the next piece of crap I saw this morning, via the internet: "Celebrities who are Aging Horribly".

*sigh* I am actually getting really fed up of seeing actors Botoxed and Filled up to their eyeballs. Where are their natural expressions? It looks fake and weird and spooky to me. How is that beauty? I first noticed it in The Golden Compass where the then 39 years old Nicole Kidman's forehead was smoother than her 11yr old co-star Dakota Blue Richards (as well as totally frozen). Weird.

and also…"30 Fairly Shocking Pictures of Celebrities Without Make-up".

I suppose we did have the recent phenomenon of the no-make-up selfie where hundreds of thousands of women bravely dared to go bare-faced (a few of those with a hint of Instagram photo make-over).

I am disappointed in this aspect of society because I want people to love me and love my children and love the people I love, because of who they are. Because of their uniqueness and quirks and flaws. Is love insisting that your girlfriend shaves down below? I'm not blaming men here, we're all at it, we're all responsible for this, and things are getting worse for men too as more and more men seek cosmetic surgery.

Junk food for the Ego

Seeing evidence of celebs' cellulite and plastic surgery makes me feel fleetingly better about myself, but feeding the ego such a rubbish diet leaves a post-crap-consumption crash.

I gave up reading fashion magazines years ago. But now I have this garbage injected into my psyche by simply using Yahoo email and having a Facebook.

I saw this amazing slam poetry video a few years ago and it stays with me. The message haunts me, because she's right and she eloquently, and bluntly at times, highlights what is so wrong with our cultural ideals of beauty and why we are missing out on what's really important:

(if you can't see the video on your device click here:)

Here is a list of the books that influenced me, that helped me grow as a person, at various stages of my life, pre and post counsellor training.

I have a very clear idea about what I believe are the answers to these important questions and I think that by sharing my thoughts you can get a little idea of the kind of counsellor I am and how I work.


Would everybody find some benefit in counselling?

No, I do not think so. The very idea of counselling is abhorrent to some so how would it possibly benefit them? I know counsellors, and people who have had counselling, who say that everyone should do it because it has been so helpful for them.  I get this, as having personal counselling was very effective and powerful for me, so much so that I decided to train in it. However, it is my belief that it is only helpful to those that believe that it might be helpful for them. It is certainly not for everybody. Some people really have no reward in talking to a stranger about their innermost thoughts and feelings. Some find it hugely helpful. There is no right or wrong here, just different ways of being in the world.

Do we have to talk about our traumas to be able to move on from them?

Hmmm. This is quite a contentious issue. Somebody might have an awareness of a traumatic incident such as abuse. Is it helpful for that person to go over it in therapy? Possibly... to a point. But it depends...

Looking at trauma work, and post-traumatic stress recovery, it is understood that talking about a traumatic incident and simultaneously expressing the associated emotions can help the brain relegate the event to the past. Until this stage, of the trauma being 'processed', the brain flags the incident as 'current threat' and the trauma can infiltrate the here and now through flashbacks and extreme anxiety (a great book for this topic is Babette Rothschild's The Body Remembers). So in these circumstances it may well indeed be in a client's best interest to explore the traumatic event within a therapeutic relationship to facilitate the processing, if there are signs that the trauma is affecting the here and now AND, and this is most important, the client believes that it might be helpful for them.

However, traumatic incidents do not always wreak havoc with people's lives. Is it always essential to poke around in the past and reopen old wounds?

I did have a therapist once try to dredge up some old alleged trauma that he believed I had encountered. This was highly annoying because the fact was, I had no recollection of said trauma, and in fact, was not exhibiting any symptoms of PTSD. What he might in fact have been doing is a very dodgy thing referred to in therapy as false memory syndrome. This is very dangerous territory and one of the reasons I believe that therapy should be regulated. Unfortunately there are some therapists out there that believe that they know better than their clients and highjack the therapeutic space with their own agendas. This I believe is akin to the gay-conversion therapy that has been in the press recently, and, quite rightly, is not tolerated by the vast majority of therapists.

So what about the pussycats?

Well, once I had two cats from the same litter, a boy and a girl. The male was robust and the female was the runt - slightly frail, undersized, poor sense of balance and prone to infection.

When the cats were approximately 8 years old, I noticed that Leo, the male, had some sort of injury, There was a wound on his back and he was clearly in pain. I took him to the vets and was told that it appeared he had been shot by an air-rifle in the back. The vet suspected that it was quite some time ago, and that the bullet was working it's way out. Later that night, I inspected his sister, Lili, and found that she had a lump in her back. I wasn't quite sure how I had not noticed it before, but it felt like an air-rifle pellet under her skin.

I took them both back to the vets. Leo was not responding to the antibiotics and the wound was getting worse. The vet said that the best thing would be for him to have it surgically removed. She inspected Lili and said that she was certain that it really was quite a long time ago that both of the cats had been shot. Lili's pellet was causing her no problems whatsoever, and the safest thing to do would be to leave it alone. Leo's body however, was struggling and causing a bit of a mess trying to purge itself of the pellet.

And so, it is my belief that some people suffer trauma with self-limiting effects, and others are affected more profoundly. It just depends. As it happens, with the pussycats, it was the robust one that suffered the most with this particular trauma. It just goes to show that you can't necessarily predict who will struggle more.