Between a rock and a hard place - West Wales Counsellors find out about the hpc

Now that the HPC PLG for C&P is at the end of its life, I am off on a series of 'road shows'. I've just returned from West Wales where I addressed a room full of counsellors and psychotherapists in Rhosygilwen Mansion, one of those beautiful old conference centres amid amazing rolling green countryside and a herd of light brown cows.

I was the guest of Janet Garner, owner of West Wales Counselling and Psychology Services (www.wwcps.co.uk), a home-grown provider of EAPs for local organisations. She had been glad to see a debate at last in Therapy Today about the pros and cons of HPC registration and welcomed the chance to get some information flowing around the real implications this will have for practice.

I suggested that she ask one of the PLG members to come along too, and named someone who had impressed me with her ability to stay sensible and say sane things in spite of a very vexing situation – Fiona Ballantine Dykes of the Counselling and Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body (CPCAB)

A local trainer and practitioner made up the third and she would speak about changes in institutional education and how they impact on local counselling. The day's programme was well put together and attractive enough to entice 20 or so practitioners to sign up, tho none would come from the NHS.

West Wales is a very long way away - and not only from London; so we were both offered a room for the night. "Is that ok?" Janet G asked diplomatically, "or are you two at daggers drawn?" It was ok - I was looking forward to actually meeting Fiona in the real world and to have some time for a chat. So, a four-hour whoosh from Paddington and a four-hour wriggle through beautiful country lanes in a car brought the two of us together at a very generous table late last Friday night.

What a delight! Films, books, poetry, all turned out to be fruitful conversations. The three of us chatted about our own trajectories into the therapy world and about dogs, cats, horses, children, tragedy and love. So I was startled and amused the next day as we pulled into the conference centre car park: Fiona switched off the engine, turned slowly toward me, and mischievously said - it was nice knowing you, may the best woman win. We wryly acknowledged that we were, in important ways, on different sides of a fence.

I'd asked for the first slot of the day to avoid being positioned as an 'anti'. The last thing I wanted was to repeat the pattern laid down by the HPC which is to polarise the discussion and put me into a hopeless opposition. My strategy was to give a history and context to the rise of audit culture, and situate the HPC firmly within it. From a sociological point of view it is clear that the HPC is part of an ideology which is antagonistic to the paradigm of most of the talking therapies. I wanted to talk to Fiona as well as to the others, to give some coordinates and context with which to make sense of something that has been described as ‘being crushed by a thundering juggernaut’.

Just before the event began, Fiona leaned towards me to ask a very important question: the Chief Executive of the CPCAB had spotted the rise in regulatory bodies and the changes in counselling trainings and had figured that people who held the work dear could act as a buffer between the real world in the consultation room and the idealised life of the regulators and thus help to keep things working. However, as the regulators grow in strength and number and impose more and more guidelines and standards, it could become more difficult to hold the two worlds apart. What, she wanted to know, would I do, in such a position as this.

Good question. It reminds me of a film I saw recently - Sleep Furiously by Gideon Koppel. It was set very close to where we had our meeting, close to where Dylan Thomas used to write and live. The film became the subject of a few conversations that weekend, and when I recited a line from it - "It is only when I sense the end of things,/ that I find the courage to speak/ the courage, but not the words" - several people responded by reciting some Thomas poetry:

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Gideon Koppel may not have found the words but he made a beautiful and intelligent film - much of it is in Welsh with English subtitles. In one scene, the camera focuses on the mobile library as a woman steps in to browse. The librarian and the borrower babble away in Welsh, then when he moves forward to drop a little barrier into place at the door, she turns round and laughs, and the words "Health and Safety" break into their conversation in English. The audience in the cinema laughed in sympathy.

I can't make movies, nor am I a poet but I'm not too proud to take my bearings from these two great artists. I don't know what Fiona should do, except perhaps more of what she does already: not to go gentle into the soporific false promise of safety peddled by the HPC, but rage, rage against the nonsense of bureaucracy and try to stop it putting out the light.