February 5, 2014

The following excerpts are taken from the article “Taking The Liberal Shilling …” by Phelim McIntyre on the Voice of the Voiceless website: “At the start of this year the UK’s Association of Christian Counsellors (ACC) sent out a statement declaring that they do not support any form of therapy to help people overcome unwanted homosexual feelings, what they define as reparative or conversion therapies, and that no member of the ACC could offer them. This is a worrying change of position as, until the statement, the ACC was the only UK body that supported both the client’s right to choose such a therapy and the therapist’s right to offer this type of therapy. Already we have seen a therapist kicked out of the ACC due to their change of position.”

“The full statement is full of errors and misunderstanding and has the tone of having been dictated by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and the UK government’s new Professional Standards Authority (PSA),” …

“The ACC statement also includes the fact that ‘Counsellors / therapists do not make assumptions that the client is looking for a particular outcome’. Yet all therapy does this. If a client comes to me because they want to overcome an eating disorder, obsessive compulsive behaviour, low self-esteem what am I as a therapist to do? Am I to presume that they do not actually want to stop self-harming? That they do not want to break the cycle of binge eating and vomiting that is bulimia?”

“Am I to presume that there is something else or am I to work with the client on the issue that they want to work with? Not if it is unwanted homosexual feelings? In this case I am to presume that they are suffering from the effects of a hetero-normative society (whatever that means) and refuse to work with them on their desired outcome in line with their religious belief system. This position makes nonsense of the role of the therapist and of the authority of the professional body by breaching the core principle that underlines all counselling and psychotherapy – that we deal with the issues that the client wants to deal with.” …