The Psychological Takeover: How Therapy is Becoming a Tool of Oppression, Dispositions Part 5

The mental health industry is no longer about healing. It’s about ideological control.

Millions of Americans walk into counseling offices seeking help, unaware they’re stepping into a system that could convince them to sacrifice their constitutional rights willingly. To become full-fledged counselors, trainees submit to having their commitments, characteristics, values, beliefs, and behaviors evaluated and judged by their professors. If they are found wanting in any of those areas, they are corrected, with pressurized ‘support’ sessions if necessary.

The ACA code of ethics lists autonomy–or fostering the right to control the direction of one’s life—as the first principle of ethical decision-making. Yet trainees are not afforded this right. They are told what to believe and think, and they are judged on how convincingly they represent the orthodoxy, as directed by the accreditation standard.

Students who don’t end up fully convinced of the truth of multiculturalism, decolonization, racial identity nonsense or any of the laundry list of mental illness-inducing concepts students are being compelled to adopt are still faced with a brutal reality. Those who grin and bear it to finish their degree are engaging in a pattern of self-betrayal that can’t help but show up in their actions as counselors.

Few who have so thoroughly trained themselves to be silent will rise to cast down the major accepted tenets of a career they now rely on for their livelihood.

The process of licensing, instituted by the state and a legal requirement to practice, is the stick that will keep professionals quiet about the abuses long after they have escaped the classroom.

In terms of power dynamics, students are vulnerable. They lack the protection of the courts who routinely side with faculty or dismiss complaints of educational malpractice out of hand.

This has done a huge disservice to students who have little recourse to fight back once they realize they’ve entered training programs, thinking that they would be taught important insights only to find themselves being indoctrinated into believing in multiculturalism. 

Looking at a section that detailed ‘preferred future positions’ in the monograph, Counseling Futures, we can see from the point of view of the leaders in counseling, that this is by design. In this quote. Garry R. Walz pontificated:

9) It will be essential that contemporary counselors be personally committed to helping clients gain an understanding of the strengths and benefits of living in a multicultural society. With the rapidly changing nature of our society, including our changing cultural composition, counselors will have to be appreciative of and knowledgeable about the emerging diversity. It is of particular importance that counselors who grew up “culturally sheltered” have first-hand experiences and interactions with people from a variety of cultures. Clearly, all counselors will need to be cognizant of the importance of multiculturalism and be personally and professionally committed to a continual multicultural renewal.

Later leaders in counseling drilled down on these ideas and tapped the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) to demand the appropriate provisions in the accreditation standard, thus creating programs that churn out graduates prepped to parrot identical talking points.

Mind Control

According to undue influence and brainwashing expert Margaret Singer, there are six conditions required to make someone a pawn:

1. Obscure the agenda to control.

2. Control the person’s time and social environment.

3. Instill a sense of learned helplessness

4. Suppress old behavior and attitudes

5. Instill new attitudes and behaviors

6. Present a closed system of logic.

Many of these show up in counselor training programs.

From the very start, no websites, and I have seen the websites of all 472 accredited schools, make it clear that students will be expected to set aside their personal and religious beliefs in favor of counseling’s professional identity values. Because this is unconstitutional, few students would think to scour any available program handbooks addressing this agenda.

Even when they do, combining mentions of wanting to “support your counselor identity and development” with the goal of forcing students to adopt multiculturalism as a value isn’t straightforward. 

In cohort model in-house counseling programs, as I experienced, a strong case can be made that training programs dominate both your time and social environment. With a course load that has students reading textbooks and writing papers non-stop, there is little time to socialize outside of the classroom. When students are encouraged to vulnerably share painful histories, insecurities, fears, and racist shortcomings on a routine basis, it would be hard to prevent the school social environment from becoming a dominant force in the identity of trainees.

A major part of the thrust of multicultural education is impressing on students how this is an area of study that can never be mastered, but they must strive to do so for the rest of their careers. There are multiple other double binds that students are presented with, from accepting that if they are white, they have privilege and shame that can never be avoided. If they are not white they will never be good enough to earn success without having standards lowered by guilty white people. It’s hard to imagine how students could avoid feeling helpless in these conditions.

Students who do not comply risk being put in re-education. With constant reminders that one can never be culturally aware enough, most quickly silence their objections.

In this context, students are presented with the ideas of multiculturalism, social justice, advocacy, intersectionality, white supremacy, sexism, racism, and transphobia. Many are also drilled on values like self-awareness, humility, openness, commitment, and more, specifically as these values apply to maintaining a worldview that presents systems as fundamentally racist.

Students are then sent forth into a world that they have been trained is systemically racist, no further evidence required.

The Unconstitutional Future of Counseling

The CACREP-mandated indoctrination of counseling students is not just an ethical failure—it is a fundamental violation of constitutional rights. Under the guise of professional development, trainees are subjected to ideological conditioning that demands obedience rather than independent thought. The result? A profession filled with counselors who have been systematically trained to suppress their own beliefs, and violate the trust of their clients.

The implications extend far beyond the classroom. How can a profession dedicated to mental health truly serve individuals if its practitioners are forbidden from questioning, let alone rejecting, the political dogmas they were required to adopt?

A system that demands ideological conformity from its trainees will inevitably erode the constitutional freedoms of the public as they bring this ideology into the counseling space by interjecting questions about racism and other multicultural subjects.

The chilling effect is clear: the counseling profession is being weaponized to enforce a worldview rather than to facilitate genuine healing and personal autonomy.

If this trend continues, the field will become a mechanism for social control—arguably where it has come between parents and children over issues of gender identity or fanned the flames of racial hatred it already has. 

The only question left on the table is whether we have the collective resolve to put an end to this.

Jump to - When Straight A’s Aren’t Enough: The ‘Disposition’ Scam in Universities - Part 1

Trained to Obey: Required Grading of Counseling Students on ‘Dispositions’ Part 2.

Trained to Betray: How Ideologically Captured Counselor Training Hurts Vulnerable Kids Part 3

How Therapy Became a Re-Education Camp — CACREP Dispositions Part 4

Further Reading

Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out by Rick Alan Ross

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China by Robert Jay Lifton

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About

Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s degree at the University of Tennessee. What I encountered, however, was a program deeply entrenched in Critical Theories ideology. During my time there, I experienced significant resistance, particularly for my Buddhist practice, which was labeled as invalidating to other identities. After careful reflection, I chose to leave the program, believing the curriculum being taught would ultimately harm clients and lead to unethical practices in the field.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to investigating, writing, and speaking out about the troubling direction of psychology, higher education, and other institutions that seem to have lost their way. When I’m not working on these issues, you’ll find me in the garden, creating art, walking my dog, or guiding my kids toward adulthood.

You can also find my work at Minding the Campus