It is a heavy time to be alive, and an even heavier time to be a practitioner in the business of holding human pain and  suffering. We are navigating a world fractured by systemic inequality, rising costs of living, and global instability that leaks into every therapy room.

In times like these, the instinct of many institutions is to tighten the grip—to “professionalise” by which they mean to reify white eurocentric norms, to standardize, and to gatekeep. This brings me to SCOPED (the Scope of Practice and Education framework), and why, as an anti-oppressive practitioner, I have made the conscious decision to step outside the traditional accreditation path.

My perspective isn’t just academic; it’s ancestral. I come from a working-class background, shaped by the stories of resistance and at its  core the  Firefighters’ and Miners’ Strikes of the 1970s and 1980s. I grew up understanding what happens when the state or large institutions decide that a community’s way of life—their very survival—is “unproductive” or “unregulated.”

During the strikes, it wasn’t official frameworks that saved people; it was the soup kitchens, the shared picket lines, and the quiet, fierce solidarity of neighbors who knew that if one fell, we all fell. That is where I learned what “help” actually looks like. It is horizontal, not vertical. It is a hand held out, not a badge of authority looking down.

SCOPED, in its essence, creates a hierarchy based on privilege and access to power. By categorising therapists into tiers based on specific academic and institutional criteria, it inadvertently mirrors the very class structures that have historically excluded working-class and marginalised people. It does this by mechanisms long identified as tools of oppression –

Gatekeeping: It prioritises expensive, long-term institutional training over lived experience and community-embedded practice.

Marginalisation: It risks pushing those who work in the “trenches”—those supporting the most vulnerable for the lowest pay—into a “lower tier” of recognition.

The Neoliberal Trap: It turns therapy into a commodity to be regulated like a factory line, rather than a human encounter.

To me, decolonising therapy means dismantling the idea that a “qualified” therapist must fit a white, Eurocentric, middle-class mold. It means valuing the wisdom of the community as much as the theory of the textbook. By refusing to participate in the SCOPED-aligned accreditation process, I am choosing to stand in the margins where the real work often happens.

Choosing not to pursue accreditation isn’t an act of “slacking”—it’s an act of resistance. It is a commitment to being different. I want my practice to be accountable to the people I sit with, not to a framework that feels increasingly detached from the realities of those in the margins

My practice is rooted in horizontal relationships which attempt to dismantle the power structures between us.  We are two humans navigating a broken system together, with a need to do things differently to survive. 

Our healing is bound up in each other, with each other, impossible without each other. 

A Note to My Colleagues

I want to speak directly to my fellow practitioners who do choose to go through the accreditation process. Please know there is no judgment here.

We live in unsafe times. The pressure to have that “Accredited” badge for job security, for insurance, or for a sense of safety in a precarious economy is immense. Taking a moral stance is a privilege that not everyone can afford in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. I have the immense privilege of my race, perceived class, gender presentation and some sort of respectability within my profession, even as I don’t have a clue what respectability entails. 

We are all trying to survive while we help others survive. Whether you are working from within the system to change it, or standing outside of it to challenge it, I see you. My opposition is to the framework, never to the people trying their best to do good work within it.