Counselling as a Contact Sport: The Case for Regulation
Counselling is one of the most intimate, high-risk forms of psychological work yet the title counsellor is unregulated, while the title psychologist is protected as tightly as if handling theoretical nuclear material. Drawing on experience from mixed martial arts and applied psychology, this essay argues that the UK has built its regulatory system backwards. When untrained counsellors can invent trauma and misguidedly reshape people’s lives with the confidence of unregulated instructors in a dojo, it becomes clear that the public is being left exposed at the very moment they are most vulnerable.
Before I ever earned an MSc in Applied Social and Political Psychology, I spent years in mixed martial arts. I trained under excellent instructors and also witnessed the opposite: charismatic coaches who could throw a perfect punch but who taught conditioning so poorly that students walked away with permanent back injuries.
What struck me over time was simple. In martial arts, you can be incredibly skilled at performing a technique while being catastrophically unqualified to teach it. The ability to execute a move is not the ability to train a human body safely.
Once I entered psychology, I discovered the same pattern. I saw unqualified counsellors who could speak confidently about emotions and trauma but who had no grounding at all in psychological theory or evidence. They could perform the performance of therapy, yet their work often left clients confused, destabilised, or misdiagnosed.
A client might say they feel anxious at work. Instead of exploring realistic explanations such as burnout, role conflict, workplace structure, sleep, or communication patterns, the counsellor jumps immediately to childhood trauma. They treat conjecture as fact and hand the client a story that may not be true. The parallels between martial arts and counselling became impossible to ignore. And the current regulatory system makes the comparison unavoidable.
The Core Issue
In the United Kingdom, the title psychologist is protected. You cannot call yourself one unless you meet strict training requirements, hold accredited qualifications, and register with regulatory bodies. The protection exists because psychology is broad, complex, and susceptible to misuse. The public needs clarity about who is qualified.
Counselling, however, is not protected. Anyone can call themselves a counsellor. Anyone can set up a practice, market mental health services, and position themselves as a professional helper. No standard qualification is required. No regulation enforces competence. No structure guarantees that the person sitting opposite you has any training at all.
This arrangement has always felt backwards to me. Psychology is the vast umbrella. Counselling is the applied branch that deals directly with human vulnerability and human pain. Yet the broad academic discipline is tightly regulated while the face to face practice that works with distressed people is left wide open.
Psychology as a scientific discipline is protected because it involves analysis, research methods, diagnostics, and the potential misuse of theory. But counselling involves something far more immediate. It involves sitting in a room with another human being who may be suicidal, traumatised, grieving, dissociated, or unsafe. It involves techniques that can retraumatise clients if applied poorly. It involves emotional labour that requires structure, ethics, and supervision.
Many countries recognise this risk and regulate counselling accordingly. The UK does not. The United States varies wildly by state, with some requiring licensure and others offering loopholes you could drive an armoured personnel carrier through.
The irony is that psychologists spend years studying behaviour, cognition, methods, and theory, yet many will never sit in a room providing therapy. Counsellors spend their time doing exactly that, yet the title is unprotected.
This is where the martial arts analogy becomes useful. It may look strange at first, but it exposes the structural absurdity more clearly than any policy document ever could.
Side Note: The Regulatory Landscape We Have
In the United Kingdom, the regulatory picture is uneven. The title psychologist is protected in law and overseen by the Health and Care Professions Council. Only those who complete accredited postgraduate training and supervised practice can use titles such as clinical psychologist or counselling psychologist. Counselling, by contrast, sits outside this structure. Professional bodies such as BACP, UKCP, and NCPS provide accredited pathways that involve substantial training, supervised clinical hours, and clear ethical expectations, but registration with these organisations is optional. A person may follow a rigorous multi-year programme or they may choose a short course and begin practising immediately. The law treats both routes the same, and members of the public have no reliable way to tell who has met a recognised standard.
This situation does not mean that high quality counsellors or martial arts instructors are rare. Many are highly trained, ethically committed, and deeply skilled. Counsellors often invest years in understanding theory, technique, risk, and reflective practice, just as responsible martial arts instructors invest years in learning biomechanics, safety, and effective teaching. The issue is not the absence of expertise within these fields. The issue is that quality is hidden. Competence and confidence appear identical from the outside, and the public cannot easily distinguish a practitioner who has met demanding standards from one who has not.
The Martial Arts Analogy
Martial arts looks disciplined from the outside but is almost entirely unregulated. Anyone can open a dojo. Anyone can construct an identity as a master. Anyone can teach whatever they like. There is no universal standard and no governing body with the power to shut down unsafe instruction.
When you step inside the gym, you have no guarantee that the instructor understands biomechanics, pedagogy, or injury prevention. They might be talented. They might be dangerous. They might know how to fight but have no idea how to train a body safely.
I have seen students develop lifelong back problems because an instructor insisted on hundreds of fast, deep press ups with a collapsed spine. The movement was not only wrong but actively harmful. The instructor simply did not know better.
This is the risk of unregulated instruction. It rewards confidence over competence. Poor instructors flourish. Predatory instructors flourish. Dangerous techniques spread unchecked. Students get injured physically and psychologically. There is no external standard to protect beginners from experts who are not actually experts.
The lack of regulation does not prevent harm. It creates the perfect conditions for it.
Counselling maps onto this almost perfectly.
The Problem Reappears in Counselling
A counsellor, like a martial arts instructor, works directly with a human being who is vulnerable. They sit close to the emotional equivalent of a loaded joint or a strained tendon. They can help someone regain strength and balance, or they can push them into a psychological injury that takes years to undo.
Yet the public has no way to know whether a counsellor has spent three years learning evidence based frameworks or a long weekend rehearsing therapeutic clichés. Two people can sit in identical chairs, use identical language, and charge identical fees, even though one is operating from a solid foundation and the other is improvising.
The consequences of that improvisation are rarely visible from the outside. In MMA, you know immediately when a punch was taught badly. The stance collapses, the shoulder over-rotates, the back torques in a way that makes your spine ache just watching it. In counselling, the damage is slower and quieter. It appears as confusion that the client cannot quite name, or a misplaced sense of guilt, or a belief that their entire life is defined by a trauma they never actually had.
I once watched a counsellor leap to childhood trauma as the explanation for a client’s workplace anxiety. No investigation, no curiosity, no attempt to map the environment the client was actually living in. Just an unearned sense of depth. The counsellor was not malicious. They simply did not have the training to know that anxious symptoms can come from sleep, workload, social threat, perfectionism, burnout, or a hundred environmental factors that are not buried in childhood. The result was a narrative the client did not need, and weeks of emotional labour spent digging in the wrong direction.
This is what unregulated practice looks like. The harm is not always dramatic. It is slow, believable, and authoritative enough that people accept it. It feels like guidance even when it is misdirection.
And all the while, the counsellor carries a professional title that the law tells the public to trust.
Psychology Is Protected. Counselling Is Not.
The irony becomes hard to ignore. Psychology is the abstract, academic domain concerned with theory, research, and statistical inference, and it is tightly regulated. Counselling is the intimate, interpersonal practice where real-time decisions shape someone’s mental health, and the title is wide open.
Anyone can print business cards. Anyone can frame a certificate. Anyone can claim expertise in trauma processing, bereavement, relationship issues, or identity exploration. You do not need to understand cognitive models, attachment systems, dissociation, neurodivergence, risk assessment, or ethical boundaries. You simply need confidence and a quiet room.
It is the same problem you see in unregulated martial arts. The person who looks most convincing is often the one you should worry about. The instructor with the loudest patter, the biggest personality, or the flashiest techniques is often the one who never learned how bodies actually work. And the beginners, who cannot yet tell the difference, trust the wrong person. They believe the confidence. They assume the presence of competence. They follow the tone rather than the substance.
Counselling has inherited that same structural flaw.
The Hidden Damage No One Talks About
When a martial arts instructor teaches a dangerous technique, the student feels it. They injure a wrist or twist a knee, and the pain is immediate. Bad counselling harms differently. The pain does not always announce itself through tears or panic. It often appears as a subtle erosion of self-understanding.
People begin to mistrust their own memories because a counsellor implied that something “must have happened”. They begin to doubt their resilience because their distress was interpreted as deeper pathology. They cling to a therapeutic story that feels profound but is not actually true.
This kind of harm is rarely recorded. It is rarely reported. It does not appear in statistics. But it shapes lives.
And because the title counsellor is unprotected, the public has no guarantee that the person handing them these stories has any training in how to generate them responsibly.
The Strange Inversion at the Heart of the System
If you stand back, the arrangement is almost comical. Psychology is the enormous academic landscape that may never involve a therapeutic conversation. Counselling is the hands-on practice that handles the emotional equivalent of high-contact sport. Yet only the academic landscape is regulated.
It is the same inversion you see in sport. Sports science is protected through formal qualifications. Martial arts remains a free-for-all. If anything needed a regulatory framework to ensure safe practice, it would be the dojo, not the lab. The dojo is where bodies break. The counselling room is where minds break. And neither has the safeguards people assume exist.
This is not an argument against counsellors (or martial arts instructors). Many are exceptionally skilled. Many train deeply and ethically. Many go through robust programmes and maintain high standards. The problem is that the public cannot tell the difference. The system hides quality rather than revealing it. Regulation is not a punishment. It is a signal.
It tells the public “this person has met a standard”. It tells the practitioner “you are accountable to someone other than yourself”. It tells the profession “we take your work seriously enough to protect the people you serve”.
Right now, counselling does not send any of those signals.
Simply Put: What We Owe the Public
We would never tolerate an unregulated profession that could reshape people’s teeth, or eyesight, or internal organs. Yet counselling works with something even more fragile. It works with memory, meaning, emotion, identity, and pain. When this work is done well, it is transformative. When it is done badly, the damage lingers for years.
The people who suffer are the ones who walked into a room hoping for help and unknowingly placed their stories in the hands of someone who was not prepared to hold them.
Counselling is not a casual skill. It is not a vibe. It is not a role anyone should be able to step into by confidence alone. It is a discipline built on evidence, boundaries, and the ability to handle the emotional equivalent of a beginner walking into a combat gym.
Psychology is the theory. Counselling is the contact sport.
And if anything in that relationship deserves serious regulation, it is the dojo.
Because in the end, it should not be easier to become a counsellor than it is to become a psychologist. It should be the other way around.
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