The Irish debate is often presented as a choice between a statutory regulator that values observable competence and a professional body that values depth, personal therapy, and ongoing supervision. That is too simple. CORU and ICP are doing different kinds of work. CORU defines a public protection threshold for entry and accountable practice. ICP articulates a professional formation tradition. For experienced practitioners, the sensible task is to hold competence, reflexivity, autonomy, identity, and client safety together.

The central distinction is between regulation and formation. This blog first sets out what the two Irish systems actually say. It then examines the assumptions each system makes about the therapist, supervision, personal therapy, authority, and public protection. The final sections return to the practical question of what is proportionate for experienced practitioners.

• The argument in brief
• Why this is not just a technical dispute
• What CORU actually says
• What ICP actually says
• A comparison of the two systems
• A systemic deconstruction
• Supervision and retrospective practice
• Personal therapy and experienced practitioners
• A more defensible Irish position
• Questions for practice
• References

The argument in brief

CORU and the Irish Council for Psychotherapy are sometimes discussed as if they were competing authorities offering two versions of the same rule. They are not. CORU is a statutory regulator. Its published Standards of Proficiency for Psychotherapists and Criteria for Education and Training Programmes for Psychotherapists establish threshold knowledge and skills for entry to the register and requirements for approved education. ICP is an umbrella professional body. It protects a disciplinary identity, sets professional expectations through its member organisations and modalities, and acts as Ireland’s awarding body for the European Certificate of Psychotherapy.

This difference matters for the question of supervision and personal therapy. CORU’s published standards require professional development, critical reflection, supervision, feedback, peer review, attention to personal involvement, and management of wellbeing and vicarious trauma. They do not contain an explicit requirement for personal therapy, and they do not prescribe a universal supervision frequency or a named retrospective format. ICP goes further on formation. Its current public description of the ICP psychotherapist says that psychotherapists are required to undergo intensive, long term personal psychotherapy, ongoing clinical supervision, and a professional code of ethics. Its supervision framework links ongoing supervision to membership, accreditation, and reaccreditation, with modality specific implementation.

The evidence does not allow either side to claim a simple clinical victory. Supervision research is most supportive of therapist learning, feedback, self awareness, and competence. Direct client outcome evidence remains uncertain. Personal therapy has credible experiential and developmental pathways, but its evidence is mainly qualitative, self reported, and vulnerable to selection effects. The case for therapy as a universal ongoing condition of professionalism is therefore stronger as a professional formation argument than as a demonstrated client outcome intervention.

MY POSITION For experienced practitioners, ongoing supervision should be routine, specific, and sufficiently independent to permit candour. Retrospective supervision should be available as one method of reflective review, matched to purpose and risk. Personal therapy should be strongly normalised, accessible, confidential, and used readily when the practitioner’s own history, distress, relationships, health, or emotional responses are affecting practice. Attendance at personal therapy should not be treated as proof of competence, and supervision should not become a disguised fitness process.

 

Why this is not just a technical dispute

A systemic reading starts by asking what problem each institution is trying to solve and what relationships it creates while solving it. CORU is accountable to the public through a statutory framework. The Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board has responsibilities for registers, education and training, a Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics, and standards of performance. Its language is therefore concerned with public protection, threshold competence, professional accountability, and proportionality.

ICP speaks from a different location. It is concerned with the integrity of psychotherapy as a distinct profession and with the conditions under which a therapist is formed. Its public language gives more weight to time, depth, personal therapeutic experience, ongoing supervision, modality, and professional culture. Its current public message, including the phrase Beyond Compliance, is a response to the fear that statutory regulation may flatten psychotherapy into a list of minimum behaviours.

Neither position is self sufficient. A statutory threshold can protect the public from unsafe practice, but it cannot by itself create mature professional identity or guarantee reflective depth. A formation tradition can preserve tacit knowledge and the disciplined use of self, but it can also turn customary practice into a test of belonging without showing that the test improves clients’ lives. The issue is therefore not whether regulation or tradition is correct. The issue is how each system uses authority, what it makes visible, what it leaves out, and how it responds to uncertainty.

Question	CORU	ICP	Systemic reading
What kind of authority is this?	A statutory regulator with public protection responsibilities and threshold standards for entry.	An umbrella professional body whose member organisations and modalities set and monitor detailed professional standards.	The two authorities are not interchangeable. Their legitimacy comes from different relationships with the public and the profession.
What is supervision for?	Professional development, critical reflection, feedback, peer review, safe practice, and management of professional responsibility.	Monitoring, educating, developing, and supporting practitioners, with ongoing supervision linked to membership and accreditation.	There is convergence on supervision, but ICP provides more professional infrastructure and explicit continuity.
What is said about personal therapy?	No explicit personal therapy requirement appears in the published Standards of Proficiency or programme Criteria reviewed here.	Personal therapeutic experience is part of formation. The current public page describes intensive, long term personal psychotherapy for ICP psychotherapists.	CORU regulates observable capability and conduct. ICP treats self experience as part of becoming and remaining a psychotherapist.
What does this mean for experienced practitioners?	The standards are expressly a snapshot at entry, not a complete set of standards for practice after entry.	Ongoing supervision is part of continuing professional membership and accreditation, while detailed requirements sit with modalities.	Experienced practice requires maintenance, calibration, and challenge. It should not be managed as if it were initial training.
What is the evidence base?	The regulatory documents are standards and criteria, not outcome studies.	The professional position is grounded in disciplinary tradition, experience, ethics, and training standards, with limited direct outcome evidence for universal personal therapy.	Both systems need empirical feedback about benefit, burden, inequity, and harm.

 

What CORU actually says

A threshold for entry rather than a complete career model

The first corrective is easy to miss. CORU states that the Standards of Proficiency define the threshold knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to enter the register. It also states that they are a snapshot at entry and are not standards for practice after entry. The Criteria for Education and Training Programmes are likewise aimed at ensuring that graduates achieve the standards for entry. This makes it a category error to read the published standards as if they were a full maintenance framework for a therapist with twenty or thirty years of practice.

The standards nevertheless contain more than a narrow list of technical skills. They require the practitioner to identify limits, seek advice or referral, act in the service user’s best interests, take responsibility for professional development, critically reflect on practice, recognise the impact of personal values and life experience, and seek professional development, supervision, feedback, and peer review. They also ask the psychotherapist to manage personal emotional responses, vicarious trauma, self care, and burnout prevention. The text recognises conscious and unconscious dynamics in the therapeutic process and in supervision, and asks the practitioner to manage personal involvement and contribution.

THE IMPORTANT CORU POINT CORU does not say that the therapist’s personal life is irrelevant. It says that the professional must recognise and manage its impact within an accountable framework. This is a different regulatory move from requiring a therapist to be in personal therapy.

 

Supervision as responsibility without a fixed recipe

CORU’s language supports supervision as part of professional responsibility. It does not, in the published documents reviewed here, specify one frequency, one format, one supervisor identity, or one required technology. Nor does it name retrospective supervision as a distinct method. The standards are compatible with retrospective review because they require reflection, feedback, peer review, and supervision. Compatibility is not the same as prescription.

For experienced practitioners, this is both a strength and a limitation. It leaves room to match supervision to modality, caseload, risk, work setting, and career stage. It also leaves the meaning of routine supervision to employers, professional bodies, insurers, supervisors, and practitioners. A broad standard can protect proportionality, but it can also permit a thin interpretation in which supervision becomes a periodic signature rather than an active site of professional inquiry.

The silence on personal therapy

Across the published CORU Standards of Proficiency for Psychotherapists and Criteria for Education and Training Programmes for Psychotherapists, the phrase personal therapy does not appear. That is an observation about the documents, not a clinical judgement about the value of therapy. The documents do require attention to wellbeing, personal values, life experience, personal emotional responses, vicarious trauma, and personal involvement in the therapeutic process.

Why might a statutory regulator avoid a universal personal therapy requirement? One reason is proportionality. A regulator can assess whether a practitioner can practise safely, recognise limits, manage risk, and respond to feedback. It is much harder to assess the quality or necessity of a private therapeutic process without intruding into confidentiality. A second reason is autonomy. A professional may have a legitimate need for treatment, development, cultural support, spiritual care, medical care, or other forms of help that are not reducible to one approved therapy. A third reason is validity. Attendance is observable, but attendance is not the same as therapeutic benefit, reflective capacity, or safe practice.

The systemic limitation of an individual standard

CORU’s standards do recognise the impact of organisational, community, and societal systems on health and social care provision. Even so, regulatory language eventually returns to the practitioner’s responsibility to manage workload, wellbeing, boundaries, and professional conduct. This is necessary for accountability, but it can individualise problems that are partly produced by the service system: unmanageable caseloads, inadequate consultation, insecure employment, poor access to specialist care, isolation in private practice, and cultures that reward endurance rather than openness.

A systemic reading therefore asks a question that the standards alone cannot answer: what supervision ecology, workload protection, peer infrastructure, and organisational accountability must surround the individual practitioner if the individual is to manage risk well? Telling a therapist to care for their wellbeing is not equivalent to creating conditions in which that care is realistically possible.

What ICP actually says

Professional formation and disciplinary identity

ICP’s public position starts from psychotherapy as a distinct profession with its own depth, training, language, and ethical culture. Its current training information describes accreditation as generally involving at least seven years of education and training, with a primary degree and four years of part time psychotherapeutic training. It presents the European Certificate of Psychotherapy as an international benchmark and locates detailed responsibility with the relevant member organisations and modalities.

This is not a single uniform standard in the same sense as one statutory document. ICP is an umbrella body. Its public ethics page states that professional bodies are responsible for ensuring that accredited and pre accredited psychotherapists follow ethical and practice guidelines and for managing complaints through agreed procedures. Its current pages describe three broad disciplines and member organisations, while the 2015 position paper records a set of minimum European and Irish formation expectations. The phrase the ICP position therefore needs to be used carefully. It is a composite of umbrella principles and modality specific rules.

Supervision as an ongoing professional infrastructure

ICP’s supervision page is explicit that supervision is different from training, personal development, and line management. It describes supervision as an essential part of maintaining competent practice and states that members of professional psychotherapy associations are required to receive ongoing supervision on their client practice as necessary for maintaining membership. A current supervisor report is mandatory for accreditation and reaccreditation within the modalities.

ICP gives supervision several functions: monitoring, educating, developing, and supporting the practitioner. Its public guidance also expects a supervision contract to clarify confidentiality, suitability, theory and method, process and content, frequency and duration, notes and fees, goals, rights and responsibilities, evaluation, alliance fractures, competence limits, anti discriminatory practice, and the handling of poor or incompetent practice. It describes supervisors as needing appropriate training and supervision of their supervision. That is a richer infrastructure than the broad supervision language in the published CORU standards.

THE IMPORTANT ICP POINT ICP treats supervision as part of the professional system that sustains practice over time. It is not merely a remedial response to difficulty, and it is not the same as personal therapy. That distinction is particularly valuable for experienced practitioners whose work may be fluent while still becoming narrow, isolated, or over certain.

 

Personal therapy as formation

ICP goes further than CORU on personal therapeutic experience. Its current public description of ICP psychotherapists says that they are required to undergo intensive, long term personal psychotherapy, ongoing clinical supervision, and to abide by a professional code of ethics. The 2015 ICP position paper described a minimum of 250 hours of personal psychotherapeutic experience, or an equivalent individual or group process, within a total training framework of 3,200 hours over at least seven years. It also described regular supervision of clinical practice and additional post training practice and supervision for full accreditation as specified by individual modalities.

The rationale is coherent. Psychotherapy is relational, and the therapist is part of the instrument of treatment. Personal therapy may expose the practitioner to the vulnerability of being a client, reveal habitual ways of managing closeness and conflict, deepen sensitivity to rupture and repair, and create an embodied appreciation of how power is experienced in the consulting room. For systemic practitioners, it may also illuminate loyalties, coalitions, boundaries, family narratives, and the way a professional can be recruited into a particular position.

The caution is that formation rationale is not the same as causal outcome evidence. The current ICP public wording does not, by itself, specify one weekly or universal post qualification schedule for every experienced therapist. Nor does the 2015 position paper establish that attendance at personal therapy causes better client outcomes. The professional argument may be strong while the clinical evidence remains incomplete.

What the research can and cannot support

The research literature is more useful when it is separated by claim. Supervision, personal therapy, and professional regulation are not one intervention. They have different purposes, different power relationships, different outcome measures, and different possible harms.

Claim	What the evidence supports	What remains uncertain
Supervision improves therapist learning	Systematic reviews and trials support plausible benefits for competence, alliance skills, self awareness, self efficacy, and use of feedback.	Effects are heterogeneous, evidence quality is often low, and the strongest controlled studies involve students or trainees.
Retrospective review is viable	Recent trials found delayed video or verbal report supervision can be useful and was not clearly inferior to live supervision in simulated training contexts.	There is limited direct evidence with experienced practitioners, real clients, complex systemic work, or urgent risk.
Personal therapy can influence practice	Qualitative syntheses and studies with experienced therapists describe self awareness, humility, empathy, boundary awareness, vulnerability, and relational learning.	The findings are mainly self reported and do not establish that mandatory or ongoing therapy improves client outcomes.
Personal therapy is a universal marker of professionalism	The proposition has a coherent formation rationale and is embedded in some professional traditions.	Attendance cannot demonstrate competence, fitness, or ethical maturity. It may also create coercion, inequity, confidentiality problems, or poorly matched treatment.
Experience reduces the need for supervision or therapy	Experienced practitioners may need different forms of support than trainees and may use supervision more collaboratively.	Lifelong development research does not support assuming that experience removes risk. Isolation, drift, overconfidence, cumulative exposure, and role confusion remain live concerns.

 

The strongest current synthesis of supervision and patient outcomes found promising effects on competence and alliance but low or very low certainty and no reliable overall improvement in patient symptoms. The personal therapy literature offers credible mechanisms and lived experience, with much less causal evidence.

A systemic deconstruction

A systemic deconstruction does not mean taking sides. It means locating each position in a network of relationships, authority, identity, risk, resources, and feedback. It also means asking what each position may defend and what it may unintentionally reproduce.

How CORU positions the therapist

CORU positions the therapist as a professional whose decisions can affect service users and who must therefore be able to practise safely within legal and ethical boundaries. The therapist must know their limits, seek help, recognise personal impact, respond to feedback, and maintain professional development. The regulatory relationship is primarily between the professional and the public, mediated by the register, standards, education providers, employers, and formal procedures.

The strength of this position is that it makes public protection and accountability explicit. It does not require a regulator to decide which personal therapy is authentic or whether a private therapeutic relationship has been sufficiently deep. It offers the possibility of a least intrusive standard that focuses on observable capability and conduct.

The risk is that the therapist can become an isolated unit of responsibility. If the surrounding system does not provide time, safety, consultation, and psychologically safe challenge, a standard about managing wellbeing may be experienced as a demand to absorb systemic strain privately. The standards contain a systemic awareness, but implementation must determine whether that awareness changes service conditions or remains a statement about individual responsibility.

How ICP positions the therapist

ICP positions the therapist as a participant in a relational and professional formation system. The therapist’s personal history, emotional responses, embodied experience, unconscious dynamics, and use of self are not peripheral to practice. They are part of how the work is conducted. The professional relationship is therefore not only between therapist and public. It also includes the training community, modality, supervisor, personal therapist, professional body, and the inherited culture of psychotherapy.

The strength of this position is that it recognises what cannot be fully captured by a competence checklist: tacit knowledge, relational timing, humility, the experience of dependency, the management of power, and the capacity to remain open when a client’s story challenges the practitioner’s preferred account. It also recognises that experience is not only accumulation. It is an ongoing process of reflection and reorganisation.

The risk is that formation can become gatekeeping. Personal therapy may be treated as evidence of maturity rather than as one possible resource. A tradition may confuse its preferred route with the only legitimate route. The therapist may feel pressure to disclose, comply, or remain in a poorly matched therapy to demonstrate belonging. These risks are not arguments against personal therapy. They are arguments for independence, consent, cultural fit, transparent purpose, and a strict separation between personal treatment and competence judgement.

The institutional relationship as a professional system

The transition to statutory regulation creates a system in which state authority and professional authority are renegotiating their boundaries. CORU represents the public mandate to regulate. ICP represents the profession’s claim to define its identity and protect the conditions of serious practice. It is reasonable to infer that both institutions are responding to threat as well as opportunity: CORU must demonstrate that regulation is proportionate and enforceable, while ICP must demonstrate that regulation will not erase the discipline it has spent decades forming.

This creates a familiar systemic pattern. One part of the system emphasises minimum standards and public accountability. Another emphasises depth, identity, and professional autonomy. Each can overcorrect. A regulator can become too narrow and procedural. A professional body can become too protective of tradition. A mature settlement would make the disagreement discussable rather than converting it into a test of loyalty.

Who is missing from the argument

Both positions speak about protecting the public, but the public is not a single voice. The relevant system includes clients, children, families, couples, communities, supervisors, employers, educators, professional bodies, insurers, and the practitioners themselves. In systemic work, the client may not be one person. There may be several service users with competing accounts and unequal power. In separation and court adjacent work, the professional may also be subject to legal, organisational, and safeguarding pressures.

The key test is therefore not whether supervision or therapy is present. It is whether the system can detect error, invite disconfirmation, hear client experience, protect confidentiality, recognise impairment, and act proportionately when risk appears. Attendance is a weak proxy for that capacity. Reliable feedback and transparent routes for help are stronger.

Supervision and retrospective practice

The earlier question about retrospective supervision sits comfortably inside this Irish comparison. CORU does not prescribe retrospective supervision as a named format. Its standards require critical reflection, professional development, supervision, feedback, and peer review, which leaves room for delayed review of notes, transcripts, recordings, or detailed process accounts. ICP’s supervision framework also does not require one universal retrospective method, but its emphasis on reflexivity, contract, feedback, alliance, competence limits, and ongoing review can accommodate it.

For an experienced practitioner, retrospective supervision can be especially useful when the clinical task is to slow down a fluent response and examine how it came to be. This may include the sequence of a family conversation, a couple’s escalation, a coalition that developed around a separation dispute, the therapist’s position in a multi agency system, the experience of a child, or a moment when the practitioner felt unusually certain, rescuing, irritated, detached, or compelled.

Supervisory question	Why it matters for experienced practice
What did the client or family experience, not only what did the therapist intend?	It brings client voice and relational effect back into a professional account that may otherwise be organised around intention.
What alternative formulation could also explain the sequence?	It tests expertise against disconfirming possibilities and reduces the risk of habituated certainty.
How did power, culture, language, law, organisation, or family structure enter the room?	It prevents a complex system from being reduced to individual psychology or therapist technique.
What information became available after the session?	It links supervision to outcome, feedback, safety, and what the system actually did next.
What belongs in supervision, and what belongs in personal therapy or occupational care?	It preserves the distinction between a work focused inquiry and a confidential response to the therapist’s own needs.
What action follows from the reflection, and when will it be reviewed?	It prevents supervision from ending with insight that does not change practice.

The limits that must remain visible

• Retrospective review cannot replace immediate action on safeguarding, serious deterioration, acute risk, medical need, or fitness to practise.
• A therapist account is not a transparent record. Memory is selective, and professional identity can shape what is remembered, shown, or omitted.
• Recordings and transcripts can deepen process observation, but they introduce consent, privacy, storage, access, and data protection questions. They may also change how clients and therapists behave.
• A supervisor who is also an assessor, employer, or gatekeeper must explain role, confidentiality, and escalation routes. Otherwise the material can become less candid precisely when challenge is most needed.
• There is no sufficient evidence for one universal supervision interval or one required delayed format for every experienced therapist, modality, caseload, or service context.

A PROPORTIONATE POSITION Retrospective supervision should be recognised as a legitimate method of professional learning and maintenance. It should be specific, ethically governed, linked to client evidence where possible, and combined with clear routes for urgent consultation. Its value lies in the quality of inquiry, not in the fact of delay.

Personal therapy and experienced practitioners

The argument for personal therapy becomes more persuasive when it is framed as professional formation rather than as a badge. A therapist who has experienced dependency, uncertainty, shame, rupture, misunderstanding, repair, or the loss of control from the client position may bring a different kind of humility to the work. Personal therapy can also provide a protected place to recognise cumulative exposure, grief, trauma activation, relational repetition, and changes in identity across a long career.

The evidence is consistent with these pathways but does not prove them as universal effects. Orlinsky and colleagues found that personal therapy is common among psychotherapists. Qualitative work describes benefits in self awareness, authenticity, empathy, boundary awareness, and the ability to understand clients from the inside. A recent qualitative study of mid career therapists associated personal therapy with generosity, boundary setting, vulnerability, an internal reference point, and sensitivity to what can hurt. These are clinically plausible contributions to practice. They are not the same as evidence that every therapist needs continuous therapy or that clients do better when therapists attend.

The strongest arguments in favour

• It can make the use of self more observable to the practitioner, particularly when personal history is activated by a client or family system.
• It can offer a lived experience of being dependent on another professional and thereby deepen sensitivity to power, pacing, privacy, and rupture.
• It may support emotional processing and sustainable practice where the work includes repeated trauma, loss, high conflict, moral distress, or responsibility for several parties.
• It can expose rigid relational patterns that are difficult to see through supervision alone, especially when supervision remains organised around the case rather than the person.
• It may support professional renewal at transitions such as becoming a supervisor, moving into private practice, changing modality, ageing in the profession, or responding to a major life event.

The strongest criticisms

• The research base is dominated by surveys, retrospective accounts, qualitative interviews, and training studies. It does not establish a causal effect on client outcomes.
• Therapists who choose therapy may differ from those who do not in openness, distress, resources, culture, or professional identity. This makes selection effects difficult to separate from therapy effects.
• A mandated therapy relationship can be compromised by coercion. A therapist may perform insight, conceal disagreement, or remain in an unhelpful relationship because leaving is experienced as professional failure.
• Personal therapy can activate significant distress, trauma, dependency, or family conflict. A requirement without choice, pacing, independent support, and clear boundaries can create harm.
• Personal therapy is not a competence assessment. A therapist can attend therapy and still practise unsafely. A therapist can also use other forms of care and reflection responsibly.
• The cost, availability, cultural fit, disability access, and location of approved therapy can make a universal requirement inequitable.

What should ongoing mean for an experienced therapist

Ongoing can mean continuous attendance without a defined clinical purpose. It can also mean a professional readiness to return to therapy when a sustained purpose arises. These are not the same. For experienced practitioners, a proportionate approach would normalise therapy as an ordinary professional resource while allowing the need, purpose, modality, pace, and duration to be clinically meaningful.

That approach is not an argument for avoiding therapy. It is an argument for taking therapy seriously enough not to turn it into a ritual attendance measure. Where a practitioner’s distress, trauma response, relationship, health, or emotional state is affecting judgement or functioning, personal therapy may be an important part of an ethical response. Where there is immediate risk or impairment, personal therapy must not be the sole route. Formal safeguarding, occupational health, medical, or fitness procedures may also be needed.

THE BOUNDARY THAT PROTECTS BOTH PRACTICES Personal therapy should remain confidential and therapist focused. Supervision should remain work focused and accountable. A supervisor can ask whether the practitioner is fit to continue a piece of work and can recommend help. A personal therapist should not be asked to certify competence or disclose private content to a supervisor, employer, or professional body except through a clear, proportionate, and lawful safeguarding route.

A more defensible Irish position

The most defensible position is neither that CORU has made personal therapy unnecessary nor that ICP has proved it universally necessary. The two systems should be understood as complementary but non identical. CORU provides a statutory floor for public protection and accountable practice. ICP provides a professional formation framework that gives greater weight to personal therapeutic experience, ongoing supervision, modality, and identity. Each needs the other’s corrective.

1. Read the CORU standards as a threshold and accountability floor. Do not treat an entry standard as a complete model for maintaining the practice of an experienced therapist.
2. Make the distinction between supervision, personal therapy, personal development, line management, consultation, and fitness to practise explicit in policy, training, and supervision contracts.
3. Require or strongly expect ongoing supervision for experienced practitioners, but match its frequency and method to risk, caseload, modality, context, and career stage. Do not confuse a fixed interval with a sufficient quality of supervision.
4. Recognise retrospective supervision as one legitimate method. Use recordings, transcripts, notes, and therapist accounts where consent, confidentiality, security, and purpose support them. Keep urgent risk pathways separate.
5. Treat personal therapy as a serious and strongly normalised professional resource. Where it is required in training, protect choice, independence, confidentiality, cultural responsiveness, and a non punitive route for discussing concerns.
6. Do not use attendance at therapy or supervision as proof of competence. Judge practice through multiple sources: client experience, outcomes, ethical conduct, reflective capacity, feedback, records, consultation, and transparent procedures.
7. Make the service system part of the accountability conversation. Caseload, workload, isolation, access to consultation, employment conditions, and organisational culture affect whether a practitioner can manage wellbeing and risk.
8. Ask professional bodies and regulators to build an evidence base with experienced therapists and real clients. Measure benefit, burden, inequity, and harm, not only attendance, satisfaction, or self reported insight.

Questions for experienced practitioners

For an experienced practitioner, the most useful question may not be whether one is in therapy or whether one attends supervision at the customary interval. It may be whether one remains open to being changed by the work and accountable for its effects.

• Where have I become fluent enough to stop noticing what I am assuming?
• Which clients, families, cultures, or professional systems reliably pull me into certainty, rescue, avoidance, or opposition?
• What feedback would be difficult for me to hear, and who is able to give it without needing to protect my status?
• What evidence from clients, families, outcomes, records, or colleagues could disconfirm my preferred account?
• Am I taking a work problem to supervision, a personal problem to therapy, or using one to avoid the other?
• What would make my current supervision more candid, more specific, and more connected to what changes for clients?

Conclusion

CORU asks whether a practitioner can practise safely within a regulated system. ICP asks whether the practitioner has been formed, and continues to be formed, within a deep relational discipline. These questions overlap, but neither contains the other.

For experienced practitioners, a mature Irish settlement would hold both questions in view. It would retain CORU’s insistence on public protection, limits, accountability, feedback, and proportionality. It would retain ICP’s insistence that psychotherapy is not only a technical activity but a relational practice shaped by the person of the therapist, personal therapeutic experience, supervision, and professional culture. It would also resist the temptation to turn either supervision or personal therapy into a ritual proof of goodness.

The real standard is more demanding and more humane. Every practitioner should have access to supervision that can challenge practice. Every practitioner should be able to seek confidential personal help without professional humiliation. Every client and family should have a route to be heard when the work is not helping. And every professional system should be willing to examine the conditions it creates, not only the individual it regulates.

Current source note: CORU standards and criteria were published in July 2025. CORU describes the published Standards of Proficiency as threshold standards for entry and states that they are a snapshot at entry rather than standards for practice after entry. The current ICP pages and the ICP position paper were checked on 17 September 2026. Requirements may change as Irish regulation develops.

References

The Irish sources are separated from the academic literature because they perform different functions. CORU and ICP documents set out standards, responsibilities, and professional positions. Academic sources examine mechanisms, experiences, outcomes, and limitations. The references are provided so that readers can follow the evidence and distinguish professional expectation from empirical finding.

Irish primary sources

Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board, CORU (2025). Standards and criteria. https://www.coru.ie/about-us/registration-boards/counsellors-and-psychotherapists-registration-board/standards-and-criteria/

Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board, CORU (n.d.). About the Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board. https://www.coru.ie/about-us/registration-boards/counsellors-and-psychotherapists-registration-board/about-the-counsellors-and-psychotherapists-registration-board/

Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board, CORU (2025). Standards of proficiency for psychotherapists. https://www.coru.ie/media/jopd3bbx/psychotherapists-standards-of-proficiency-3-copy.pdf

Counsellors and Psychotherapists Registration Board, CORU (2025). Criteria for education and training programmes for psychotherapists. https://www.coru.ie/media/wmwbwmda/psychotherapists-criteria-for-education-and-training-programmes-copy.pdf

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (2015). Position paper on statutory registration and the distinction between the related professions of counselling and psychotherapy. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ICP-Position-Paper-January-2015.pdf

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (n.d.). Ethics and standards. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/about/ethics-and-standards/

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (n.d.). Supervision. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/registrants/supervision/

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (n.d.). Training. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/registrants/training/

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (n.d.). ICP psychotherapists. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/registrants/icp-psychotherapists/

Irish Council for Psychotherapy (2026). Should therapists be in therapy? Unpacking the rift over psychotherapy standards in Ireland. https://psychotherapycouncil.ie/2026/09/should-therapists-be-in-therapy-unpacking-the-rift-over-psychotherapy-standards-in-ireland/

Academic literature

Alfonsson, S., Parling, T., Spännargård, Å., Andersson, G., & Lundgren, T. (2018). The effects of clinical supervision on supervisees and patients in cognitive behavioral therapy: A systematic review. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 47, 206 to 228. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2017.1369559

Bennett Levy, J. (2019). Why therapists should walk the talk: The theoretical and empirical case for personal practice in therapist training and professional development. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 62, 133 to 145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.08.004

Bennett Levy, J., & Finlay Jones, A. (2018). The role of personal practice in therapist skill development: A model to guide therapists, educators, supervisors and researchers. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 47, 185 to 205. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2018.1434678

Bradley, W. J., & Becker, K. D. (2021). Clinical supervision of mental health services: A systematic review of supervision characteristics and practices associated with formative and restorative outcomes. The Clinical Supervisor, 40, 88 to 111. https://doi.org/10.1080/07325223.2021.1904312

Chaturvedi, S. (2013). Mandatory personal therapy: Does the evidence justify the practice? In debate. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 41, 454 to 460. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2012.744448

de Condé, H., Zech, E., & Willemsen, J. (2024). The person behind the therapist: A recall study on significant events that contribute to therapists’ personal and professional development. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 27(2), Article 791. https://doi.org/10.4081/ripppo.2024.791

Edwards, J. (2017). The extant rationale for mandated therapy during psychotherapy and counselling training: A critical interpretive synthesis. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 46, 515 to 530. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2017.1334110

Edwards, J. (2018). Counseling and psychology student experiences of personal therapy: A critical interpretive synthesis. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 1732. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01732

Haggerty, G., & Hilsenroth, M. J. (2011). The use of video in psychotherapy supervision. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 27, 193 to 210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0118.2011.01232.x

Heinonen, E., & Nissen Lie, H. A. (2020). The professional and personal characteristics of effective psychotherapists: A systematic review. Psychotherapy Research, 30(4), 417 to 432. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2019.1620366

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Reference use note: the blog distinguishes professional standards, professional consensus, and empirical evidence. A coherent rationale, a positive association, or a therapist’s endorsement is not by itself proof of

This is a practice blog grounded in the published CORU standards and criteria, current ICP public pages, the ICP position paper published in 2015, and the academic literature listed at the end. It is not legal advice or a substitute for current requirements from CORU, ICP, a modality body, an employer, an insurer, or a safeguarding process.