Community Guidelines
This is a short set of tPCA community guidelines, designed to consider our meeting spaces, such as the WhatsApp community, the local groups, the special interest group (SIG) meetings, face to face and online training; encounter and conference spaces.
Who can join these spaces?
Our community spaces, local groups and special interest groups are for tPCA members only. To access these requires membership of tPCA.
Our conferences, encounter groups and online training may be available to non-tPCA members at the discretion of the event organisers. If this is the case, you will need to demonstrate as a therapist that you either have, or are eligible for, registration with one of the recognised counselling registration bodies (BACP, UKCP, NCS) or have retired in “good standing” from said body, in order to attend.
For non-therapists and for therapists who might have queries or questions about eligibility, please email
Guidelines for attendees
We recognise that counsellors are human beings and that at times, there may be personal and theoretical disagreements between those present. We do not seek to prevent that - discussion around topics can create growth and understanding. We would like to consider how such disagreements and conflicts might be managed.
When engaging in the community spaces please:
- Avoid making personal attacks
- Avoid using derogatory language
- Remember that people come from different backgrounds and experience and may have different understandings of a topic than you do
- Respect basic human rights
- Remember that this is a place where you are interacting in your professional capacity (you are a member because of your profession)
- No ‘isms’ (racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, classism etc). If this happens in the WhatsApp community, failure to adhere to this will result in a warning and potential removal from that community space.
- Remember - in the WhatsApp community, you can contact a community or individual group administrator about the community/group itself, if you feel you can’t speak within the group. Administrators may do the same.
- Please don’t contact non-administrators outside of the WhatsApp community space without gaining explicit permission first.
If you are removed from the WhatsApp community you are not automatically removed from anywhere else- you remain a tPCA member and able to access our other events in the usual way.
Research proposals
We do not accept research proposals from people who are not active members of the community. The community is built on what we cocreate, not (solely) what we get from it.
If you are a member of our community, and you have a research advert or poster that you would like to share in the group, please email a copy of your advert, plus the alt text for the poster to
We reserve the right to choose not to promote projects.