June update...(9.6.26)

I wanted to post a bit of a midyear update here. I may ramble slightly, so forgive me for that as I look at the year so far. For those here mainly for therapy-related content, you are fully excused if you skip this one.

First, a little housekeeping. I am away for the first week of July, and possibly for a week in August too, though that is not yet confirmed. I will keep clients updated directly about any changes to availability.

Some people have very kindly asked about my health, and I'm happy to say it is still improving after a few months of sickness from Sep last year. Many days now I barely think about the tremor at all, which feels like real progress. I feel it more when stressed, so the main risk for me is still overdoing things. I remain stubbornly prone to mistaking “feeling a bit better” for “excellent, let’s reorganise the entire house, the website, the profession, and possibly Western civilisation before lunch.”

So I'm trying, with mixed success, to pace myself…  Annoying, frankly.

The first half of this year has been unusually full. Alongside ordinary sessions, supervision, family life, house renovation, and the usual pile of life-admin that appears whenever I imagine things might settle down, I've also found myself writing much more than expected.

Much of that started from my autumn 2025 critique of the BACP direction of travel and has been directly about therapy. But now much more of it has been about professional ethics, institutions, moral language, public life, and the strange way conversations can stop working even when everyone involved believes they are trying to do the right thing. That has become the territory of my book, Moral Singularity, and of the essays that have followed it.

Being a therapist is actually very isolating, and by far the most heartening thing has been making contact with other therapists, from far and wide, who wrote to me during my series of articles about BACP direction of travel, and then around the BACP Open Letter exercise, I was struck by how many people share the same basic worries as me about the politicisation of our profession, and activism encroaching into therapeutic spaces. 

I was also struck by how few spaces there are for those concerns to be shared or organised. It can feel like BACP membership or nothing at all, such is the dominance in the UK. Dissent therefore has a very fragmented and slightly insurgent feel, even when the people dissenting are trying very hard to remain serious, ethical, and professionally responsible. There is an understandable reticence for therapists to break cover and disagree with the largest therapy association.

And if you do, you'll find there are not really many forums or institutions that provide a space to formalise different views calmly without being pulled into shock-jock politics. Even in the smaller spaces that exist, the websites etc, there can be more disagreement about specifics than agreement about the huge generalities that unite. You can find yourself agreeing with someone in broad terms, only to discover that you have apparently committed four subtle heresies by lunchtime. The Judean People's Front, rather than the People's Front of Judea etc. Fortunately, years in an Italian bank prepared me well for committees, factions, and discovering that broad agreement is usually just the opening act.

On the BACP front, after the open letter, Therapy Today invited me to pen an article. After some thought, I decided to do it. Because of the venue, the word count was limited and the editorial tensions were always likely to be real. It’s a tough gig offering constructive criticism of the “house” in the house magazine. With a piece like that, some feel you're too forthright on readthrough (doing otherwise would neuter the serious points raised), others feel you're not shouting from the rooftops enough (which the venue certainly wouldn't publish). It actually feels a little like pleasing no group at all! But I decided to submit anyway, being quite clear about the concerns and not hedging.

 

Stepping back from this for a moment, I think many dissenters, understandably, give too much ground to their ideologically-driven opponents who tend to dominate institutions - e.g. "yes of course there is a place for some of this ideology in therapy.... but we have just a few little concerns about some bits!". I understand the impulse to hedge and caveat all too well, and I think it's a line I've walked imperfectly in the last few months. You want to avoid being sorted into a moral category, such that your argument is immediately dismissed. You also don't want to cut yourself adrift of the one institutional anchor and source of support you actually have as a therapist. This makes sense.

But committed activists will not, I have noticed, ever thank you for this generosity of spirit. It is absorbed by them as reinforcing of their ideology, and as an admission that your reservations stem from not understanding the ideology properly (best case), that your moral foundations are weak (more likely), or, worst case, that you are ethically incomplete - and that your objections are themselves further evidence of why the ideology is needed in the first place. Likewise, animated dissenters, looking for clear and punchy articulation of their concerns, will likely read you as being wobbly and hedging - perhaps even insufficiently committed to "the cause". It makes for a lonely place.

So back to the Therapy Today piece. I submitted it quite a few weeks ago, and I haven’t had any acknowledgement of any kind as yet. So we will see. I suspect this may not go ahead, which is disappointing, especially after the friendly invite to write it. I would categorise it as “surprised but not shocked”. Connected to this, Nash Popovic and I have submitted a Resolution for the BACP AGM in the same spirit of the Open Letter, so let’s see if that gets good support.  I look forward to attending the AGM to present the case if it does. Therapist readers, your support would be much appreciated.

I’ve very much enjoyed all the writing, despite the large learning curve. As I mentioned in a post earlier in the year, I think the old model of publishing is rapidly changing. We now have a new wild west – where the question of where a book appears (the publishing venue) is fast becoming much less central than whether it can be found, understood, summarised, linked, and shared by the new synthesis tools people are already using (aka AI). Good ideas are going to matter more than whether a publisher feels it can be repurposed to flog a few books. That change alone has plenty of potential (in principle) to be a brilliant, egalitarian thing.

 

I can see a world, for better or worse, where people will only rarely sit down with a book as we traditionally think of it, but will instead for example type:

 

“What are the central ideas contained in Perkins’ book Moral Singularity and why might they be important?”

Or 

“Why does moral conversation break down, according to Perkins?”

  

Feel free to give it a go, ha!

Anyway… this all interests me a great deal and is one reason I am publishing a series of articles that explain the ideas and architecture of Moral Singularity. I appreciate it’s maybe a hard slog or turnoff for casual readers, but it’s important to make the ideas easier to find.

I had a look at X last week to see if I might socialise Moral Singularity ideas in that space, but I have decided against it. I found X too combative by design. Wherever you reply or contribute, you’re quickly associated with a side or a tribe and a presumed package of views. I found myself pretty quickly thinking 'nope'. I have enough trouble pacing myself without voluntarily joining a machine running on adrenaline and misunderstandings.

So the better route, I think, is to write occasional pieces here, looking at issues of the day through the Moral Singularity framework. I’m looking forward to that. It’s not without challenges. Some of the clearest examples of “closure” currently - important word – seem to me to appear around ideas cherished by the progressive left, and writing honestly about that brings the usual risk of being sorted into a ready-made category (which ironically is covered in the book itself as a consequence of closure). There is always a temptation to appear “balanced” by force, to offset that risk. The best I can do is take aim honestly, as I see it, and avoid confecting false equivalences, or pretending to see balance where I don’t see it. The aim isn’t to join a side, but to describe a structure accurately enough that people recognise what they already see.

The series of long-form articles explaining the framework will also continue, as those pieces allow ideas to be laid out properly without being squeezed into the logic of passing arguments. That also helps ensure the ideas travel as far as they can.

 

What else? Well, hopefully the building work here ends soon. Whatever is started, about five other critical things are found, each one apparently essential to the structural integrity of the entire house. The brick house we bought has now mostly been replaced with large steels and can now survive an earthquake. So far it hasn't been as disruptive as I thought it might, though my standards for "disruptive" have shifted considerably and I now consider any morning without drilling to be a small triumph. Above all now, hoping for great weather in the summer, I grew very used to the sun in April and May and that is ok by me.

Take care all, and thanks again for the kind and encouraging notes that have come in over the year so far.