Why It’s Time to Rebuild Counseling from the Ground Up
The therapy establishment is a pipeline for ideology, not healing. This is how we fix it.
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When “Diversity” Excludes You: Why It’s Time to Build Something New
The school said it welcomed diversity—until I mentioned my Buddhist practice. Suddenly, I was an outsider in the so-called “inclusive” profession of counseling.
This year, the Counseling Compact goes into effect, allowing approved counselors to practice across state lines. On the surface, it sounds efficient—until you realize it consolidates power into a gray-zone institution largely shielded from democratic accountability. Behind the scenes, organizations like the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) and Chi Sigma Iota (CSI), the field’s honor society, have lobbied hard to control who gets included in this multistate agreement.
Their efforts paid off. Now, counselors must pass an exam from the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC), with test fees totaling over $100 per person—a multimillion-dollar payout to NBCC, and a backdoor way to bind practitioners to its ideological Code of Ethics.
While a CACREP-accredited degree isn’t explicitly required yet, graduates of alternative programs like MPCAC are already being shut out—despite having paid for their degrees in good faith.
Efforts to reverse this trend have barely started, and the process will be slow, state by state. With so many pieces already in motion, there’s a real case to be made that it might be faster—and cleaner—to start from scratch.
After all, parents dealing with school counselors who conceal their child’s gender confusion don’t have time to wait.
But where do we even begin?
The Decision Point: Reclaim or Reinvent?
There are two possible strategies to build new therapy outlets. One is to reclaim specifically “counseling” by building new institutions that rival the American Counseling Association (ACA), CACREP, CSI, and NBCC—competing over the definition of who gets to be called a counselor or “Licensed Professional Counselor.”
With this path, the goal would be to keep existing licensing and other identified assets, and over time purge the ideology by out-competing the existing organizations. Lobbying and battles over legislation, maybe even lawsuits would be part of the process.
The other is to abandon the current system and create a new profession entirely—one based on talk therapy but free from captured institutions and ideological gatekeeping. A true fresh start, but one that would have to battle for licensing perhaps against the existing organizations, or battle for deregulation.
Either way, it will be a fight.
Let’s focus today on the first option: building new professional associations from the ground up.
Rebuilding the Profession: One Pillar at a Time
The first step would be forming a new 501(c)(3) organization or revitalizing an existing one, like the American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA), with the goal of becoming a genuine alternative to the ACA.
It sounds daunting—but remember: A&P was once the largest grocery chain in America, the Google of its time. It vanished. Institutions can fall. The ACA isn’t immune. Or the ACA could linger and Critical Theories based counseling could remain an option for clients it appealed to.
The foremost challenge of this new organization would be agreeing on a set of founding principles. This would be my wishlist, but it would be up to the founding group to decide:
Objective Science-based Treatment
The Primacy of Client-centered Care and Well-being
Respect for human dignity
Viewpoint diversity
Protection from Ideological Coercion
Transparency
Accountability
Curiosity
Institutional Neutrality
From there, you'd need to build a new ethical code, a robust membership base, and relationships with insurers—particularly to offer insurance for trainees, disrupting the ACA pipeline.
Plus you’d need a firewall against conflicts of interest, a process to settle disputes, and structures to support dissenting opinions, even when the decision ultimately goes the other way. Think the Supreme Court dissent process and no more mega-conventions where accreditors, licensing boards, and activists all gather to set the profession’s direction.
To Accredit or Not to Accredit?
Eventually, the question of a new accrediting body would come up. That could mean building another 501(c)(3) aligned with similar values to the new professional organization. This would go toe to toe with CACREP, and offer ideological variety. The danger? Becoming just another ideological enforcer, albeit an evidence-based one, which may be justified for a profession based on science.
Other challenges would include educating the public on what would set graduates from the new accreditor apart from CACREP-trained therapists and breaking into licensing everywhere that CACREP has already got locks against direct competition written into the law.
Alternatively, maybe it’s time to reconsider accreditation entirely.
Despite all the money and power poured into accreditation, there's little evidence that it improves educational outcomes. In fact, it often does the opposite—locking in outdated or politicized content and shielding it from accountability.
If we truly care about what helps clients, we need to examine what sort of training actually produces the best therapists, and no, we don’t currently know what does that. That’s because current accreditation focuses on inputs and assignment results, not real-world outcomes. No one even tracks which graduates truly excel in the field after leaving grad school.
A new plan of action may ditch accreditation altogether, shifting the focus from inputs (like who teaches what) to outcomes. What if we tracked therapy results in the field after graduation and reported on what worked instead of baking in ideology and declaring that ideal?
Expect legal and legislative fights either way.
Credentialing: Time to Rethink the Test
The NBCC exam is now required for multistate licensure, turning credentialing into a multi-million dollar revenue stream. But again where’s the evidence that this exam improves client care?
Nowhere. This is a cash grab that alleviates fear and insecurity while limiting client choice.
If we stick with national testing, let’s create a new nonprofit testing body—one focused on meaningful skills and free from ideological strings.
Better yet, why not rethink credentialing itself? In a world where we trust peer and client reviews on Etsy and Airbnb, why not explore transparent practitioner reviews based on real outcomes?
There is only so much money and time to throw at these problems. Strategic use of those resources is what will put us on the path to improved results.
The Nuclear Option: A New Professional Identity
The boldest path? Create a new professional identity entirely—“Psychological Consultants,” perhaps—with fresh education, ethics, and licensing bodies.
It may sound radical, but given the current state of affairs, it might also be the most practical and quickest to achieve long-term solution.
So what would it take to do that? What models could we build from? Are there already alternatives quietly gaining traction?
Those are the questions we’ll begin to explore next week.
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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