This blog is addressed to organisations responsible for registering psychotherapy or counselling and to those responsible for employing such professionals.

You should know something that is fundamental, at least to psychoanalytic or psychodynamic approaches. We hold it as axiomatic that people are not naturally inclined to be stupid, cruel or suffering. Indeed, if those who appear this way could find the source of their problems, they would have done something about it.

Therefore, the source of human problems that appear to those suffering to be so challenging that they need help, will be found below their threshold of awareness, below the surface. In other words, these problems originate in something unconscious.

Registering bodies should know that one of the most common causes of psychological or emotional problems is an unconscious belief.

For anyone else reading this blog, I should define what I mean here. Ron Britton was the person who first described this phenomenon. In normal development we constantly produce images of ourselves in relation to others or parts of others as an attempt to explain to ourselves what is happening to us. As the analyst Wilfred Bion pointed out, these ‘explanations’ will change as a result of new experiences.

This is a vitally important point because it means that our sense of our own identity and of our environment continue to change throughout life. This is a fundamental sign of psychological and emotional health. It means that no ‘idea’ about ourselves is fixed, it is merely the best explanation we can come up with at any particular time.

I daresay that most of us will recognise the truth of this, particularly the obvious fact that any particular ‘idea’ we develop about ourselves or our environment, can only be based in what we know at that time. We cannot ‘know’ what we haven’t experienced yet but, when we do have a new experience, it changes everything that we thought we knew. Sigmund Freud knew this and described the way that we reconfigure things in the light of new experience as ‘après coup’, which means, after the ‘hit’ of a new bit of information about ourselves or the world we live in.

I think one of the best examples of this is the way that, however much we believe we know what it will be like to become parents, it’s only when we actually have a real, live baby, that we discover that we had absolutely no idea what it’s really like.

Of course, one of the periods of our lives that features both rapid change and yet also serious resistance to that change is adolescence. I’ll get to this in a minute.

Let us now return to the job of the therapist/counsellor. The patient/client brings us the internal conflict and we first try to identify what this is. We do it by noticing how they treat us. There will be a clue here. For example, they treat us as if we are going to take something away: by noticing this, we will be able to deduce something about the hidden belief… the wish is for us to agree with that belief, and the fear is that we will take it away.

This is the point at which we can truly understand the suffering. The patient needs us to agree with the belief, which, you will remember, is an attempt to make sense of something problematic. For example, a boy brought up by a violent father might form the belief that all men are dangerous. This protects him from the seriously difficult realisation that his father is different from other men. The role of the therapist is to hold onto the reality which, at the moment, is too difficult to bear. It is the therapist’s ability to do this that gradually conveys to the patient that, maybe it is possible to face that reality.

This is extremely difficult for any therapist or counsellor because we know that maintaining awareness of the reality, which means the fallacy of our patient’s belief, we are creating a place in which the patient will finally confront pain. It can make the therapist feel that the accusation that we want them to suffer is true. We need the help of our training and of our registering body (or employer) to manage this. Gradually we can help the patient to recognise the actual conflict and, for the first time, discover a different way to manage the problem than simply hold onto an impossible belief.

For example, the belief that all men are dangerous, when it can be seen as a false belief (and I should say that UNCONSCIOUS beliefs are ALWAYS false – they are held unconsciously so that the normal consequence of a belief, namely that it can be tested against reality, will not happen) will force the patient to review his view of his father, no longer as a ‘normal’ male, but now as someone different to the norm. This can lead to a situation in which the patient can, for the first time, manage his relationship with this father in an ‘authentic’ way.

All of the foregoing leads us to this fact about the therapeutic approach. It is essential to the health of the patient/client that we DO NOT agree with their unconscious beliefs or the conscious expression of them – which will be in some impossible claim about their identity. Only by refusing that path do we offer hope.

Now let’s turn to the real point of this blog.

I have said that a fact of human life, that is the life of someone who is conscious, is that their view of themselves and the world they live in, will continue to change throughout life.

Abuse of our fellow human beings often takes the form of a statement that they are fixed and unable to change themselves or their circumstances. Buddha, who knew a bit about suffering, said that it was caused by clinging. Anyone who reinforces an idea that change is not possible, for instance, ‘you are born a slave and will remain one forever,’ is an abuser.

He taught that a path to freedom from suffering comes from ‘right mindfulness’. I take this to mean the capacity to face reality. He changed the course of his life when he was able to see the truth, he saw that time passes and we will all become old, he saw that new life is the result of the fertilisation of an egg with sperm and he saw that sickness shows how we all need help. Those of you with a psychoanalytic training will recognise that a psychoanalyst called Money-Kyrle described these as the Psychic Facts of Life.

To be succinct, freedom from suffering requires help to face reality.

We cannot do that if we have already agreed with our patient/client that a belief they hold, which is a denial of facts of realty, is true; we are colluding with the mechanism that they have developed to cling. It is abusive.

At last, I can turn to the substantive issue.

I am appalled that registering bodies like the UKCP and BACP as well as others like Metanoia, have accepted without any reference to their psychodynamic membership a policy that makes therapy impossible. The policy is to ‘affirm’ a patient or client’s belief about their gender identity, whether or not it conforms to their biological identity. It is abusive to affirm someone’s belief about themselves when it clearly stands against the basic, scientific facts. This is the result of propaganda that is expressed most chillingly by Stonewall but also by those campaigning for a ban upon ‘conversion therapy’. I shall deal with the corrupt logic of these views in a minute.

First, I want to write about the problem for a young person who believes that they are ‘in the wrong body’.

The first thing to notice is that the expressed belief is not unconscious, they know it and express it. So, the first thing a therapist has to do is to hear it, which means to make it clear that they have taken in that the patient believes this to be the case, but we must wait now, so that the unconscious belief of which this ‘wrong body’ claim is an expression, becomes clear.

In my experience almost all children, particularly when puberty kicks in, feel at odds with their own bodies. Indeed, many actually feel attacked by their bodies, which are doing all sorts of things like growing hair or breasts; this is a phenomenon called, ‘psychotic functioning’. It is not actually psychotic, but it is clearly unreal, since the single obvious thing is that we are our bodies. This is such a common phenomenon of adolescence that everybody is aware of one of its manifestations, self-harm: the young person will often cut themselves and feel actual relief in the act. The other results of this feeling of being attacked by your body are eating disorders. These have the same intrinsic formula of something I think of as ‘me’ controlling something I experience as alien, my developing body.

The problem is that we have developed a conscious mind which is available to be filled with all sorts of ‘ideas’ which seem to us to have the same level of reality as the facts of life described by the Buddha and by Money-Kyrle. There is a very simple reason for this which is that our conscious experience of the activity of our brain (a bodily organ by the way, which in each of its cells, carries the DNA that determines our sex) is in the form of feelings or affects. This creates a problem because affects are also the basic ‘language’ of our conscious or ‘cognitive’ mind. You can see how easy it is to assume that feelings that come from the function of our conscious mind must have the same weight or truth that feelings from the activity of our bodies have.

To be brief, developmental psychologists and therapists have known for over 100 years (longer in the East) that children and adolescents all (to some extent) have a form of body dysphoria. Most of us are driven by this ‘dissonance’ to explore our identities and our relationships in an attempt to discover our unique, adult sexuality. Of course, this will be continually subject to change as a result of experience (‘Meeting my new partner was mind blowing, I’ve never had better sex’, is not an uncommon comment that we must all have heard from friends). The agony of child/adolescent development is that it is all so unknown. We can forgive them for wanting certainty.

What is more difficult to forgive is the adult who tells a confused, lost young person that they can provide the certainties that will put an end to that child’s suffering. Until the trans-cult (as I named them in a previous blog) came along, the usual examples of such dreadful behaviour were those who would fill these lost children with fundamentalist certainties that would lead them to become suicide bombers.

So, these new ‘fundamentalists’ whisper in the ears of children who feel at odds with their own bodies that gender (by which they mean an ‘idea’ belonging to that cognitive world of consciousness which, as I have repeated too often already, will always change throughout life) is or can be fixed. In other words that it carries a validity that trumps biology. This is the unconscious belief that has been organising these children’s struggles and now an adult says, ‘You are right, it’s not a mere belief, it is a fact. If you were born a boy but believe you should be a girl, you can be, just by believing it.’

So, what do these fundamentalists ^[1] do to the minds of these children? They affirm an unconscious belief and, in doing so, not only give these children permission to attack their bodies, but actually encourage them to do so. They don’t point out that to use surgery and drugs to transform the appearance of their bodies won’t actually change their biological state but will, in fact, involve the loss of pleasure from sex. They won’t be able to orgasm, and they won’t be able to reproduce. All they will have done is to change the appearance of their sexual body to masquerade more successfully as the opposite sex. They don’t tell them that because they are reinforcing an impossible belief. ^[2]

Now let’s be clear here. I have no problem at all with the event that some people, helped by therapists who hold onto and point out these truths, might decide, on the balance of their internal pain, that it is better to live a life of ‘transition’ rather that remain in a body that has the features of their biological sex. If this is really the way someone wants to go in the full knowledge of the ‘facts of life’, I would want to support them in whatever way I can. But I would see it as my duty, no less, to be sure that they have reached an age where they really do know about adult sexuality and have fully experienced adult sexual urges. As Dr David Bell says in the excellent BBC podcast, Nolan Investigates: Stonewall (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p09yjmph), children often feel sex is yukky and having babies, even yukkier. This only reveals that they haven’t had their conscious/cognitive ‘ideas’ changed by the experience of full adult sexuality. It would, in my view, be an outrageous dereliction of the duty of care that psychotherapists and counsellors hold to endorse an act of such radical damage to their bodies until they felt that their patients/clients had truly understood the issues.

Let’s think about why this cult has been able to develop and, worse, has managed to corrupt the thinking of governments (Scotland), the NHS, Universities and psychotherapy registering bodies. We shall discover this if we think about the journey of a child who is considering transitioning.

First I shall point to the elephant in the room. Biology will always trump cognitive capacity, which is a very late arrival on the evolutionary scene; cognitive capacity has only evolved because it serves the primary task of the species: to reproduce. We are extremely good at this – look at the evidence of the enormous population and its trajectory. The consequence is that we are designed to recognise our ‘reproduction mate’; it is dead easy to recognise the different sexes. We all know that the man who believes he has changed into a woman, still comes over as a man, but we feel embarrassed to say so. I shall explain this in a minute.

Bearing all of this in mind, let’s follow the trajectory of a child who believes it is possible to change sex.

• We might imagine that there is a view of reality that they know is there, but hate, because it says this:
  • You feel persecuted by your body (or, you feel convinced you are really of the opposite sex).
  • You think in these terms because you know, as part of your innate, species knowledge that there are two sexes.
  • You believe you will be happier if you could be the other sex.
  • But you know you can’t.

• They develop a solution based upon the magic belief that, after all, it is possible to change sex.

• This magic belief allows their conscious mind to start to imagine the relief from become the opposite sex.

• They become convinced that this is the only way that they’ll be happy.

Now, at this stage, although they might spend a lot of time holding onto the magic belief, playing with it, seeking support for it, nevertheless it is forever threatened by ‘bad’ reality.

In other words, inside them the conflict remains between the yearned for magic solution and the threat from nasty reality.

So, they do what we learn to do as very young babies (and keep doing throughout our lives); they project what can’t be borne into someone else, where it can be hated and attacked.^[3]

If we are the ones into whom this is projected, what we receive is not just the knowledge of the fact of biological difference. Much more importantly, we take inside us the emotional tag: ‘hated’. Thus, the simple expression of truth has become tainted with the risk of being hated if we dare to speak it. We are likely to feel (again, an affect) that naming this truth will cause someone pain.

You see, the trans cult, by the simple yet brilliant technique, reminiscent of Trump and Johnson, of baldly stating a lie – ‘gender trumps biology’ – pushes the rest of us into the role of the ‘Holder of Biological Truth Who Will Be Hated If We Say It.’

And that, dear reader, is why otherwise rational people don’t argue, but acquiesce.

But I won’t acquiesce. This lie has opened the door to a vicious attack on women as well as on free speech. Friends of mine are currently hounded by their own employers or their own registering bodies, losing jobs and reputations. It has to stop.

By the way, and this is addressed to the Registering bodies and employers, you should know that the child whose false belief that they can change their sex is affirmed by your registrants or employees will be the one who, when it all goes wrong, under a law against ‘conversion therapy’, will have the right to sue you for misrepresenting truth and, as a consequence, converting them from their biological sex. BE WARNED

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[1] I spent many years studying religions and can say that the organised and particularly the ‘orthodox’ or fundamentalist versions of these religions (and I don’t mean the original teachings which are almost universally wise) have at their centre a hatred of and an attack on women. We should not, therefore, be surprised to see that the most virulent expression of this cult of gender trumping biology is aimed at destroying the identity (and, therefore, rights) of women.

[2] By the way, the Court of Appeal didn’t ‘overturn’ the finding of the lower court in the case of Bell versus the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, is merely made it obligatory on the clinicians to ensure that these facts were understood by the children prior to allowing any ‘transition’.

[3] What I am describing here is well known to psychoanalysts as features of the earliest state of mind, called the paranoid-schizoid position, although I prefer to call it the fundamentalist state of mind. I shall make a short video to explain this as soon as I can.