The Interpretive Ratchet...(16.5.26)

Why some professional frameworks become impossible to challenge

Earlier this year I co-authored an open letter to the BACP, signed by many practitioners and academics, raising concerns about the embedding of anti-oppressive practice as a discrete principle in the profession's revised Ethical Framework. Please do read it if you haven’t.

The letter made structural points. It warned of the risks of one interpretive tradition, rooted in critical social theory, being elevated from one valid perspective among many to a requirement of ethical competence. It asked what this would mean for practitioners who understood social harm through different frameworks. Crucially, it asked what it would mean for clients.

The BACP’s response was revealing in ways I don’t think they intended. Our structural concern was reframed as a misunderstanding of what anti-oppressive practice involves, and the reply was handled by a “member experience manager” - as though these fundamental ethical questions were no different from a problem with paying the annual subscription.

Our suggestion that the framework will constrain interpretive diversity (as currently drafted) was met with reassurance that it was designed to expand awareness, not limit it. And our worry that practitioners who worked from different traditions might face institutional pressure to conform to political tenets they may disagree with was addressed by reaffirming the importance of the very framework we had questioned.

At no point was the substance of the letter engaged with on its own terms. Instead, the concern was absorbed into the language of the framework itself, processed through its logic, and returned to us as evidence that we had not yet understood what was being offered.

I have thought about that exchange a great deal since, and I received many emails containing food for thought. Many felt the BACP response was a snub and nothing more. In truth, I agree. But the exercise of writing was important, and I think the exchange illustrates a mechanism that operates far beyond the BACP and far beyond therapy. I have started calling it an interpretive ratchet.

An interpretive ratchet is a framework that can only tighten. One that absorbs agreement as validation, silence as consent, and disagreement as evidence that more of the framework is needed. A great example of this is playing out right now in politics, where parties have absorbed electoral defeat and metabolised it as a call for more of the same, only harder and faster.

There is no input - data, evidence, resistance - that the system can process as a legitimate reason to loosen or reconsider their stance. Every response simply confirms.

This needs distinguishing from a few things it resembles but is not.

It is not the same as unfalsifiability in Popper's sense, which is a logical property of a claim. The interpretive ratchet is a social mechanism. It doesn’t require the framework to be unfalsifiable in principle, just that the institution treats challenges as confirmations in practice, which is a much lower bar and a much more common phenomenon.

It isn’t the same as the self-verifying system I described in an earlier piece, where a profession trains its practitioners through a single lens and then measures their output through the same lens, confirming its own assumptions. Self-verification is about a system confirming its own outputs. The ratchet is about a system incorporating resistance into its justification. They are related but they do different things.

And it is not groupthink, which suppresses dissent through social pressure. The ratchet does something more interesting: it metabolises dissent. The challenge enters the system and exits as further evidence that the system is necessary.

Here’s how this worked in the BACP exchange.

1. We raised the concern that embedding anti-oppressive practice as an ethical      principle would create pressure on practitioners to adopt a particular      interpretive framework regardless of whether it served their clients.
2. The response acknowledged the concern and then explained that anti-oppressive practice was not a political framework but an ethical commitment to      recognising how power and inequality shape the therapeutic relationship.      In other words, our concern about the framework was answered from inside      the framework.
3. The possibility that reasonable practitioners might understand power and      inequality through a different lens, and that their understanding might be      equally valid, was not addressed because the framework does not have a      category for that possibility. It can recognise agreement. It can recognise ignorance. It cannot recognise legitimate, informed disagreement.

The same mechanism operates throughout the profession's structures, which emerges without the need for an architect because it is a natural property of frameworks that define themselves as ethical baselines rather than theoretical positions.

This results in bizarre circumstances in which logic becomes inverted. For example:

• A trainee who questions the framework is offered further training in the framework.

• A practitioner who raises concerns in supervision is invited to reflect on their own positionality (such as their ‘privilege’) - a concept drawn from the very framework being questioned.

• A complaint about ideological pressure is investigated using the evaluative criteria of the ideology being complained about.

Each of these responses is individually reasonable and could - extending good faith to all - be defended on its own terms. Together they form a system in which every challenge is processed through the logic of the thing being challenged, and the outcome is always the same: more framework, not less.

A framework that defines resistance as evidence of the problem it addresses cannot evaluate a challenge on its own terms. It becomes structurally impossible. Doing so would require stepping outside the framework - precisely what the framework’s logic does not permit. If you believe that failure to adopt anti-oppressive practice is itself a form of oppression, then a practitioner who objects to mandatory anti-oppressive practice is, by definition, demonstrating the need for it. The objection therefore cannot be heard as an objection. It can only land as a symptom, or an admission of ethical incompleteness. And a system in which objections are symptoms is a system that can only move in one direction.

This is why institutional capture accelerates rather than self-correcting, and it connects to what I have elsewhere called conviction cascades.

Cascades explain how a framework arrives and spreads through a profession. The ratchet explains why it stays.

Without a ratchet, a cascade could in theory reverse when social conditions change. You can see small signs of this at the individual level - people who were adding pronouns to their email signatures in 2021 have been removing them, and some of the more performative social signals that became ubiquitous during that period appear less culturally dominant than they recently did. But these are surface adjustments. At the institutional level, the frameworks have not loosened. If anything, they have tightened further, because the ratchet operates at the level of ethical identity rather than policy.

When a framework is embedded in the ethical baseline of a profession, it attaches to practitioners' sense of themselves as good professionals. Challenging it stops feeling like questioning a policy and starts feeling like questioning someone's moral character, including your own. That is why the ratchet continues to tighten even as the broader culture changes around it.

To see what the ratchet produces in practice, consider a recent LinkedIn post from Dr Anne-Sophie Bammens, the founder of Headstrong Counselling and Headstrong Academy, who has worked with over a thousand trainee therapists. She described her approach in these terms: "Our work has always centred anti-oppressive practice as a foundational lens - not something added on as 'difference and diversity,' but something that shapes how we teach and supervise." The academy’s Level 5 Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling ‘centres Black feminist thought’ and covers topics including racial trauma, anger and shame, migration, refugees, and Black men’s mental health. The post was promoting a workshop hosted by the University of East London, titled "Decolonising the Curriculum," in which she and a colleague would be "centring student voice and lived experience, particularly in moments where harm has happened." They would be drawing on "Black feminist thinking, alongside Beverly Engel's framework of regret, responsibility, and remedy" and developing "a model of repair that can be taken into training institutions."

This mindset (of which the training above is just one example) fails on its own terms. At scale, it does not create justice and understanding, as adherents may imagine. It creates division and separation. Eventually it creates closed moral systems – moral singularities that are self-sealing - where from the inside of each “group” the moral language and actions of those outside simply make no sense. Any “outcomes” that run contrary to the expectations within a singularity are no longer seen as data to update thinking, but proof that the entire framework must be applied more completely.

It isn’t that any of these individual training elements is indefensible. Working with racial trauma is legitimate and necessary. Attending to the experiences of students from marginalised backgrounds is a reasonable institutional concern, of course. But there is absolutely no indication that this framework is being offered as one perspective among several. It is explicitly described as foundational, as the thing that "shapes how we teach and supervise." A thousand trainees have passed through a programme organised around a single interpretive tradition, and each of them has entered clinical practice with their attention pre-structured before they saw their first client. The post doesn’t read, say, as advocacy for a position but as a full and final description of settled reality, offered at scale. That is the ratchet at work.

People - even those who tend to agree with me - tire of me saying it…. But I am not attributing bad faith to anyone involved. The people operating the ratchet are not actually aware that they are operating a ratchet. They experience themselves as maintaining standards, protecting vulnerable populations, and responding to legitimate ethical concerns. I don’t actually think the BACP official who responded to our letter was being cynical. They were being sincere, probably thought the signatories were antiquated and “being unkind” or something similar, and that is exactly the problem. The mechanism does not require bad actors. It requires a framework that has been positioned in such a way that it cannot be evaluated from outside its own terms, and people who are sincere enough in their commitment to it that they genuinely cannot see the circularity.

Sincerity and structural closure are not opposites. They are the combination that makes the ratchet work.

And in sufficient combination and velocity, they make any framework structurally irremovable by ordinary professional means. The available responses for a practitioner who disagrees are limited to three: exit the institution, comply and absorb the framework over time, or sustain the kind of prolonged structural critique that requires energy, platform, and institutional protection that most practitioners do not have. 

The first option weakens the profession by selecting out its most independent thinkers. The second produces the conviction cascade I described earlier, in which compliance gradually becomes conviction. The third is what a handful of people, including me, are attempting, and I can tell you from direct experience that it is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with the strength of the arguments and everything to do with the fact that the system is designed, at every level, to process your challenge as evidence of its own necessity.

So the question I keep returning to, and don’t yet have a good answer to, is this: what would it take to build a loosening mechanism into a system that is structurally designed to tighten? How do you create conditions under which a profession can genuinely evaluate its own ethical framework from outside the terms of that framework? How do you make it possible for an institution to hear "this might be wrong" without converting it into "this is why we need more"?

I don’t know… But I do know that a ratchet that nobody can see will only ever tighten. A ratchet that has been named and described at least becomes something that can be argued about - even if the argument is difficult and the people inside the mechanism are the last to recognise it. 

That is what I am trying to do here.

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Steve Perkins is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in private practice in Shoreham-by-Sea and City of London. He is the author of Moral Singularity: Life Inside Closed Moral Worlds and Why Moral Conversation Breaks Down (2026), and writes on therapeutic enclosure, conviction cascades, the interpretive ratchet, and the structural dynamics of closed moral systems.

MBACP (Accred)
www.whitestonetherapy.com