Counselor Advocacy Coalition
Our Mission: Healing belongs to the people — not to licensing boards, insurance companies, or accrediting bodies where non-clinical staff have decided who gets to practice it, what they can call it, and which traditions count as legitimate.
The Counselor Advocacy Coalition is committed to the decolonization of healing and the protection of those who practice it — fighting for fair process for licensed clinicians within the system that exists, and for the depth, indigenous, and spiritually integrated traditions the credentialing apparatus has pushed to the margins.
Advocacy 1:
Board Directors Must Be Clinical
In the event of a board complaint, board staff are the only people a clinician interacts with before their hearing — they define the alleged breaches, select what evidence the board sees, and recommend the consequences. The entire framing of a case is set by non-clinical staff. Across the nation this is standard practice. A clinician will not speak to a single clinical board member until they are standing in a public hearing.
State medical boards frequently require a licensed physician as executive director. Behavioral health boards have no such requirement — anywhere in the country. A comprehensive review of all 50 states found board directors include a former housing finance administrator with a master's degree in geography, a licensed funeral service practitioner running six unrelated boards simultaneously, and a director holding only a bachelor's in social work — below the minimum educational requirement of the clinicians she regulates
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Help is Here:
Board Case Clinical Advocacy and Support
When a complaint is filed, clinicians face an overwhelming, costly, and entirely non-clinical process alone — often without any organized support or clinical guidance. We offer confidential clinical and ethical case evaluation to help clinicians understand where their work is strong, where it is vulnerable, and how to articulate the clinical rationale behind their decisions. We also provide peer support, community, and guidance for navigating a process that was never designed for the people it governs.
Clinical and ethical case evaluation is offered on a fee-for-service basis. To inquire about working together, reach out directly at admin@yourstarswithin.com
The sleepless nights, the fear, the isolation of fighting to explain clinical decisions to people who have never sat with a client. We are trained in compassion, in therapeutic relationship, in the careful tending of another person's truth — and then thrown into an adversarial public process where everything we say can be used against us, and none of our training prepared us for any of it. No one told you this was part of getting licensed. We're here because you shouldn't have to do this alone.
Advocacy 2:
Reclaiming the Depth of Counseling
Counseling, therapy, and healing interventions have always encompassed a wide range of modalities — long before the state decided to own the language. A person trained in a depth psychology program has as much right to the words counseling and therapy as someone credentialed through a CACREP pipeline.
The schools that trained practitioners in the full depth of human experience — Jungian, Rogerian, existential, humanistic, transpersonal — have been systematically closed or hollowed out not because they produced bad clinicians, but because the credentialing apparatus made their graduates economically unviable.
Rogers' person-centered therapy. Jung's analytical psychology. Frankl's logotherapy. Perls' Gestalt therapy. May's existential psychology. Every one of these approaches was developed by a clinician who would not meet the licensure requirements of most U.S. states today. The system that now governs the profession would not have licensed the people who built it.
Advocacy 3:
Decolonization of Psychology and Healing
Indigenous and traditional healing practices predate Western psychology by thousands of years — and were functioning, effective, and culturally rooted long before the DSM existed. The medicalization of human suffering has taught people that something is wrong with them rather than recognizing their natural response to an unnatural world.
Dancing, art, ceremony, plant medicine, community ritual, and connection to the earth are not alternative treatments — they are the original ones. We advocate for the recognition, protection, and legitimacy of indigenous and traditional healing practices that were never the state's to regulate, criminalize, or replace.
Healing has been practiced by human beings for as long as human beings have existed. The DSM is one map of the psyche — not the only legitimate one. Before there were diagnoses, there were healers. Before there were licensing boards, there was wisdom. The state didn't create healing. It just decided to own it.