Written by Pamela Gawler-Wright, Director of Training for BeeLeaf Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy 

A Training MO shares its experience of creating a representatively diverse membership and explores how an active Equal Opportunities and Diversity policy grows from both conscious and unconscious dynamics.

As new kids amongst the neighbourhood of UKCP Training Organisations, BeeLeaf Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy has had an interesting and challenging couple of years. One example of how UKCP works well is having access to so many models of good practice and the generosity of the community to share literature and developed protocol. Due to this collective and diverse wealth, we have been inspired and empowered as an organisation to improve several aspects of how we do what we do in the preparation of effective and ethical psychotherapy practitioners.

Also, BeeLeaf members have been told we have something to offer in this exchange and, in response to several requests, here is a little of our philosophy and practice that has resulted in BeeLeaf enjoying a genuine diversity of trainees, in terms of race, religion, sexuality, age and physical ability.

I hope too that it is safe to be honest here about areas of Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EOD) practice that still raise challenges for us and around which we often witness continued confusion and dissonance within UKCP.

Despite years of effort and talk, a UKCP general meeting is peculiar in our age in that it is still almost uniformly, attended by white, middleclass and middle-aged folk, with the best representation of diversity being most visible amongst UKCP staff members.

Whereas some points of process which will be offered here are useful in building a more representative diversity amongst UKCP Registrants and Candidates in Training, what I will argue first is that without the accompanying beliefs, values and internally driven motivation for such an aim, an EOD process alone might achieve nothing more than a PC ritual to assuage liberal discomfort.

Don’t Tolerate Diversity. Celebrate It!
To give a little context, this table presents the representation of some sub-groups within the Trainee population of BeeLeaf over the last five years. These figures are from core training and do not take into account open seminars and CPD events.

Male    42%
Female    58%
Ethnic Minority    29%
Minority Sexuality
(gay, lesbian, bisexual)    15%
Actively Practicing Religion
(Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Judaism, Moslim, Seikh)     22%
Physical Disability    3%

Before going into the content of this information there are a couple of other points to consider.

One is, who is obviously missing from this table?

The other is that we have this information at all. Not because of some government directive. Not because of some burden of required quota. Not because of an adherence to political correctness. We keep such records at BeeLeaf as a celebratory ritual, an utterance of gratitude for the individuals who are drawn together to create a group, a community, a culture. These records are for us as much a ledger of gain in our collective wealth as would be an annual rise in academic achievement, or a set of accounts calculating a drop in overheads.

This sentiment spreads its conscious and unconscious dynamic in our training rooms. We do not train in a manner to promote tolerance of diversity. Tolerance would be a questionable goal, built on a presupposition of difference as in some way intolerable without special developmental activity. We train in a way that identifies, utilises and celebrates diversity. The qualities we wish our practitioners to develop are not toleration or charity, but respect, curiosity and delight in another’s experience and meaning-making, especially when different from theirs.

Without this diversity our training would be deeply impoverished. This was borne out recently when, by some unusual array, a group of trainees in one of our Sexuality seminars was entirely heterosexual, except for one of the trainers. Sincere though all members were, the ensuing dynamic of discussion and learning was lacking dimensions that the normal multiple perspective affords. Having experienced the presence of diversity and its advantages, it caused us to wonder how such an absence of diverse experience could create a marked paucity in training if all seminars were with similarly homogenous groups. Could much of our syllabus, which revolves about the core themes of sameness and difference, belonging and individuation, even make anything more than abstract sense if we did not have a community wealth of diversity?

I am blessed to number amongst my friends Reverend Patricia Novick, an intimate of Martin Luther King, who continues her pledge to her murdered friend in her ongoing work across the US, ranging from programs in inter-generational storytelling to health programs for carers and leaders. What I observe in her indefatigable spirit and awe-inspiring executive intelligence, is that Patty, like King, dreams of and focuses on connectedness rather than barriers. That does not mean a denial of barrier and difference. The line of difference is recognised and quickly interpreted as a further frontier for connectedness, strengthening our ability to embrace other through enhancing security in our self-definition. I can retrospectively see this system of values-driven beliefs and action as an unconscious dynamic within BeeLeaf’s service provision, upon which I believe our realisation of a truly diverse membership has been based. Policy and procedure has followed beliefs and values, rather than the other way around. (See references below for some of Patty’s projects).

Some of Your Members are Missing!
Writing this article has made me do a fair bit of head-scratching to delineate the frontiers that the community that is UKCP could work on to extend it’s diversity of membership.

Progressive Christianity is owning that biblical injunctions against homosexuality were in fact late additions to the scriptures, inserted as reflections of cultural and historical obsessions and that the only direct Levitical edict on the subject was in the context of ceremonial purity within a specific religious order. Do we not, as psychotherapists, need to take a similarly honest look at the institutionalised discrimination that is still present through the very absence of diversity within the UKCP membership? Can we do this in a way that is not castigating us for our present state, but accepting of the facts of it and open to the exploration of remedy? Can we find an enthusiasm for this goal and collectively reach it, rather than cast it to a few individuals of a minority identity and drown it in apathy?

Consider this. The majority of readers have not continued this far in this article. Yes, dear reader, some have failed to be captured by my scintillating prose (and what kind of minority are they?!) and, I would suggest, that some others have already turned the page because they have decided that the subject simply does not affect them. Like the poem says, “I did not speak out because I was not a Jew” (Niemoeller M. 1945). However, achieving a representative balance in our training rooms and General Meetings would also be indicative of raising numbers by a significant percentage, something which I understand to interest most MOs. I hope that I have already made above some good argument for other benefits to the collective in having a representative balance.

A non-hostile yet observable frontier in the achievement of this goal is the perception that diversity issues are just problems to be solved, satisfactorily attended to now by legislation and procedure. As I recently heard a UKCP Registrant say “People don’t need to go on about this sort of stuff anymore. Everyone accepts everyone these days and we’ve got Equal Ops policies. There’s no homophobia that I’m aware of”. I would love to live in this friend and colleague’s world. However her logic would be a bit like me claiming that the proof that there is no more racism in Britain is that nobody has ever called me “Pxxi”. It is not a term likely to be thrown at us blonds. Yet when I shared a house with a Pakistani friend, walking beside her in the street taught me how she and I lived in different worlds, as for her a simple trip to the corner shop had the potential to become another experience of racial abuse. Rather than dismissing experiences of discrimination as neurotic symptoms, would it not be more accurate to recognise denial of discrimination as a coping mechanism for those of us whose membership of the majority has shielded us from dealing with a truth too painful to acknowledge. Procedures can give us ways of dealing with discrimination; they do not put an end to discrimination any more than having laws puts an end to crime.

During the 2007 AGM’s session on EOD, a comment that came from the floor was “We don’t pretend to know about what we can’t know about”, the inference being that as members of the white, middleclass, Judaeo-Christian majority, minority perspectives eluded them. This perspective is in itself a culturally shaped one, an abdication from the state of human connectedness through the Western creed of individualism. While an admirably humble and listening position is implied in this statement, if it is not accompanied by the pursuit of opportunities to further our knowing through exposure to diversity, it can become a bastion of monoculturalism.

Another frontier where we can grow through our greater understanding and exploration is the prevailing misconception that Equal Opportunities somehow equates the lowering or disparity of standards in our training and accrediting systems. This widespread yet understandable confusion is, I believe, a hang-over from certain experiments in strategies of “positive discrimination” and their resultant abuse. Such a conflict of values has possibly served to repel interest from maturing our understanding of EOD philosophy as supportive of educational standards rather than detrimental to them. Equal Opportunities are not about making allowances or special cases. Robust and consistent policies and their confident application help to protect organisations from the abuse that can issue from the victimhood of a trainee, as well as generate enlightened approaches to recognising a diversity of challenges and diversity of teaching skills to help diverse people meet the same goals and standards.

There are other frontiers for development within the UKCP community which may currently be delineated by even more complex structures of defence. This I believe could lie in our, at times, religious adherence to certain modernist theories of psychotherapy while living in a post-modern society. Earlier pioneers of psychotherapy lived and worked within a Eurocentric mindset, wherein disability was hidden and diverse sexuality not spoken of except as sin or pathology. They also grew within a time when the pursuit of reason was to establish universal truth, a goal necessarily abandoned when we collide with multi-culturism and a meta cognition of positivism as one other culturally-based epistemology amongst many. Some of our cherished gems of theory need to be reappraised as the flawed diamonds that they are. The “modality wars”, which we can all hope are behind us, are themselves manifestations of diversity dynamics.

Below I offer some ideas for an MO’s possible contribution to promoting a representative balance within the UKCP community. Some may be obvious. I am looking forward to the results of pooling effective EOD processes and philosophies, as Shila Rashid, Chair of UKCP EOD Committee, has suggested.

So here is a log or two to add to that fire.

Get Conscious and Keep Records
The veil to comprehension is so much more easily lifted when the wall of ignorance has been jumped. You may have a more diverse membership than you realised if you start to keep records. Some people don’t like to give details about their race, creed, sexuality or special needs. That’s fine. Record that group too. Then consider, who is missing from your family table? Sometimes just starting to think this way can generate ways to attract a greater diversity of trainees and members.

Get Your Trainers On
What representation of difference is there amongst your staff? Chances are that anyone obviously in a minority group may be more aware of the dynamics of diversity at work already and might be consciously or unconsciously shouldering a degree of your organisation’s responsibility in managing this. Have an inset event with staff exploring their good practice in holding the dynamics of diversity of gender, culture, age, race, religion and psychotherapeutic orientation. The need to manage this and celebrate its gifts for potential growth can also sometimes be observed within Sections, often with minority members again having to take responsibility for naming these unconscious processes or raising diversity issues. Diversity is as much an issue for members of majority groups as it is for those whose position makes them more aware of the dynamics of exclusion. Repeatedly leaving the responsibility of this to one group or individual forces the position of “other” rather than an embrace of diverse perspectives into the collective consciousness.

Keep Standards High and Processes Clear
I have a theory that one cause for eye-brows raising and groans escaping in UKCP meetings when EOD issues are brought up is because people may have experiences of the minority-of-a-minority attempting to abuse processes to defend themselves from required development and rigorous assessment. Where there are processes there can be abuse of processes. Training Organisations in particular need to get clear that EOD good practice does not advocate making special allowances or colluding with poor performance or psychological immaturity. It is about spotting the gaps that exclusion has left so the Trainee can take responsibility and embrace opportunity. Our responsibility as Trainers is to work to offer a person equal empowerment to reach equal standards. Equally, we have a responsibility to all Trainees that standards are not compromised by the single case where Special Needs provision is exploited rather than responsibly engaged with.

“I Don’t Want to Cause Trouble But…”
Experiencing bullying and discrimination is often accompanied by a deal of shame. Accusing some one of prejudice is so serious that those experiencing discrimination can feel that they are in the wrong if they report an experience of it. As well as your required EOD statement in your Trainee Handbook, include some simple steps of what to do if discrimination is experienced, either from the organisation or from an individual. Aim for mediatory solutions first that enrich the learning process for everyone and offer growth to all involved. However, do not fear taking firm action with a clear perpetrator. The respect and safety of the whole group are at stake.

Acknowledge Economic Exclusion
The “Pink Pound” phenomenon, the comparative economic security of male gay couples making them a target consumer group, has been widely publicised. Not so the economic inequality that is still experienced by women and most minority groups (CRE, DRC, EOC 2007). To make our trainings financially accessible to a population who truly represent our society and service users we need to be skilled and inventive in designing training through a variety of media, getting the balance right between quality and cost effective distance learning and the vital but expensive requirement of sufficient tutor and group contact learning. We also need to address the availability of sufficient quality personal therapy at affordable cost.

Get Involved in the EOD Committee’s Work
Contact the Shila Rashid, Chair of UKCP’s EOD Committee. Show an interest in the Committee’s work and see how you can both benefit by it and contribute to it. This is as important whether your organisation attracts a diverse population or a more homogenous one. You can contact Shila on shila.rashid@talk21.com

References
Martin Niemoeller, (1945) German Lutheran Pastor “First they came for the Communists”

For more on Patti Novick’s work, start by visiting www.Aliveltd.org and www.eriehouse.org

Commission for Racial Equality, Disability Rights Commission, Equal Opportunities Commission, now merged into the Equality and Human Rights Commission. www.equalityhumanrights.com/articles

You can contact the author on pam@beeleaf.com