Are you licensed? What degrees do you hold?

I carry no state issued licenses or academic accreditation related to my psycho-spiritual counseling practice. Instead, I work with clients one-on-one under private contract law. That means I don’t accept insurance.

While none of my clients have a problem with this, the subject of academic degrees and state issued licensing is something that many in the public do have an interest in regarding those they hire for professional services, so I should address this.

It seems like common sense to ask about licensing with someone who is offering a public service, especially one where safety is involved. But there are many fields where academic training and licensing is commonplace, while the standards for holding such a license clearly do not insure quality or safety.

In our current day, some of the most destructive examples of incompetence and criminal negligence come from licensed professionals and the institutions and corporations they work for. The truth of this statement will be obvious to most readers.

The third most common way to die in the United States is medical malpractice. Lawyers have to go through extensive schooling and testing, yet they are almost universally distrusted. Americans are the most medically treated people in the world but are also the most physically and mentally unhealthy people in the first world. We could go on and on.

Our current day experience shows us that licensing and academic credentials are not a reliable indicator of competence, safety or trustworthiness. We also do not see licensed professionals calling out their colleagues for abusing pubic trust or the licensing associations properly policing their trades. We see the opposite.

In an article called “Psychiatry’s Control-Freak Medical Model Versus Healing and Healers”, Bruce Levine discusses how our current psychiatric paradigm has failed us due to “control freakism” and a complete misunderstanding of healing. Psychiatrists are trained to see healing like a mechanic sees a rusted muffler or a computer programmer sees a broken code. A broken part needs to be cut out and a replacement pasted in.

But the human psyche doesn’t work that way. Healing is an organic life process that requires the healer to create an inter-personal environment that helps the client’s psyche accept what is and relax into healing. As Internal Family Systems therapy teaches us, the mind is a multiplicity closer to a community or family than a computer that needs an update or a machine that needs a part replaced.

Since most people who are trained to be healers have themselves been hurt and are in need of healing, for them to be competent, they must become self-healers before they can be successful assistants to others. But this is probably the exception more than the rule in the current day.

While there are some incredibly talented self-healing elders alive today, many of whom hold licenses and multiple academic degrees, they will likely tell you that their college education only accounts for a small percentage of the experience and training they use in practice.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us in the same place we were in for all of human history before professional licensing began a century ago. Reliability and competence is discovered through personal experience with the provider, word of mouth, public testimonials and frankly, intuition.

A license or academic credential is indeed an indicator of one’s drive to understand and practice in a field, and that is useful input, but it’s just useful input. If we were able to remove the incompetent or dangerous license holding practitioners from the professional trades, we might find that there are as many or more unlicensed but truly competent tradespeople in business today.

Attorney Robert Barnes believes that professional licensing should lose its status in our society and “truth in advertising” laws should stand in as a replacement for the failure of the licensing associations to insure safety and trust. A service provider that lies about their results is subject to a lawsuit. You cannot lie about the efficacy of your practice.

Regardless, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), is as true today as ever. One should not trust wild quick fix claims found online or the latest internet guru but neither should one blindly trust the licensed professional in an office at a medical complex.

In fact, many will testify that while the internet guru didn’t deliver, at least they didn’t hurt them. Often the reason why people turn to internet gurus is precisely because they have been hurt by licensed professionals. “By their fruits ye shall know them” is another very appropriate maxim.

By the way, I do not consider myself an internet guru! I am a dedicated self-healer with a natural talent for simplifying complex ideas and communicating them to others. I am naturally empathic and I have a drive to help other human beings heal and evolve. I offer my time and experience as a helper to other self-healers on the path to psycho-spiritual wholeness.