How to Complain About a Therapist in the UK

Complaining is a choice, not a duty

Before looking at the how, it is worth sitting with the whether. Some people complain because they want the therapist held to account. Some complain to protect future clients. Some complain because putting the experience on record matters to them, whatever the outcome.

Others decide not to complain at all, because the process feels like more than they can carry right now, or because their energy is better spent on their own recovery. That is a valid decision too. Choosing not to complain does not mean what happened was acceptable, and it does not mean you failed anyone.

It also helps to know what a complaint can and cannot give you. A professional body can investigate, impose sanctions, and in serious cases remove a therapist from its register. It cannot order an apology that feels sincere, undo what happened, or repair the trust that was broken. If what you most need is repair rather than accountability, a complaint may not be the route that gets you there, and knowing that in advance can save you a painful disappointment.

Why this is more complicated in the UK than it should be

Here is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of all this. In the UK, the titles counsellor, psychotherapist and therapist are not protected by law. Anyone can use them, with or without training.

Because of this, there is no single government regulator you can complain to about a counsellor or psychotherapist. Instead, most reputable therapists voluntarily join a professional body, such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, known as the BACP, or the UK Council for Psychotherapy, known as UKCP. These bodies hold registers accredited by the Professional Standards Authority, they set ethical standards for their members, and they run complaints procedures.

The practical consequence is simple. Your route to complaining depends entirely on which body, if any, your therapist belongs to.

There is one exception worth knowing about. Psychologists are different. Titles such as clinical psychologist, counselling psychologist and practitioner psychologist are protected by law, and the people who hold them are regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council, the HCPC. If the person who hurt you is a registered psychologist, your complaint goes to the HCPC through its fitness to practise process, not to the BACP or UKCP.

Step one: find out who your therapist answers to

Look at any paperwork you were given at the start of therapy, such as your contract or initial letter. Look at the therapist’s website or directory profile. Most registered therapists display their membership body and their registration number.

Then verify it. Both the BACP register and the UKCP register can be searched online by name. There are other reputable bodies too, including the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society and the British Psychoanalytic Council, each with its own complaints process. If you are unsure which register applies, the Professional Standards Authority keeps a list of all the accredited registers it oversees.

If your therapist belongs to no professional body at all, the honest answer is that there may be no professional route for a complaint. This is one of the quiet harms of an unregulated field, and it is not your fault for not checking earlier. Most people reasonably assume that anyone practising must answer to someone. If what happened may have been criminal, such as sexual contact, assault or fraud, that is a matter for the police regardless of any register, and it deserves to be treated as one.

The advice to speak to your therapist first, and when to set it aside

Both the BACP and UKCP suggest raising your concern with the therapist directly before making a formal complaint, since some problems can be resolved that way and a formal process is stressful for everyone involved.

For some situations, this is fair advice. A misunderstanding about fees, a session that landed badly, a comment that stung. Speaking up can resolve these, and a decent therapist will receive that feedback with care.

But if what happened left you feeling unsafe, or the therapist holds power over you in a way that makes honesty impossible, you are not required to go back into that room. The BACP asks you to explain either how you tried to resolve the issue or why that was not possible, and feeling unable to face the person who harmed you is a reason, not a failing. You are allowed to protect yourself first.

Complaining to the BACP

Talking it through before you decide

The BACP runs a service called Get help with counselling concerns, which offers confidential guidance by telephone and email for anyone worried about their therapy or their therapist. You can use it to ask questions and understand your options without committing to anything. For many people, this is a gentler first step than a formal complaint form.

If your therapy came through an organisation

If your therapist worked for a counselling service or agency that is itself a BACP organisational member, the BACP asks you to complain through that organisation’s internal procedure first. The service provider can tell you how. If that route fails or feels unsafe, the BACP process remains open to you afterwards.

Making the formal complaint

Formal complaints go through the BACP’s Professional Conduct Procedure. You complete a complaint form, available online through the BACP complaints page, or as a document you can post. The complaint needs to describe behaviour that may breach the BACP Ethical Framework, and the BACP can consider conduct outside the therapy room too, such as criminal convictions or other inappropriate behaviour.

A few limits are worth knowing in advance. The BACP cannot take on matters that belong in the courts, most matters under live police investigation, complaints about a member’s involvement in ongoing Family Court proceedings, or anonymous complaints in most circumstances. If the events happened more than three years ago you can still submit a form, and an independent panel will decide whether it is in the public interest to consider it.

What happens after you submit

The BACP will contact you to confirm they have received your complaint and to talk you through the process. A case manager reviews every complaint to check whether, if proved, it would mean the member failed to meet professional standards. More serious matters go to an Investigation and Assessment Committee, a panel of three independent people, and the most serious cases can proceed to a hearing.

The BACP’s own guidance says the full procedure can take twelve to eighteen months. That figure deserves to be said plainly rather than buried, because it shapes what you are signing up for.

What the outcomes can be

If a complaint is upheld, sanctions range from requirements the therapist must meet through to withdrawal of membership, and upheld decisions are published where the BACP considers it in the public interest. One honest limitation sits underneath all of it. Because the profession is not regulated by law, removal from a register does not legally prevent someone from continuing to practise. It removes their credibility, their directory presence and their professional standing, which matters, but it is not a licence being revoked, because no licence exists.

Complaining to UKCP

Starting with a conversation

UKCP encourages people to contact its Complaints and Conduct Team by telephone to talk through the most suitable options before deciding anything. Details are on the UKCP complaints page, along with a plain guidance document written for people considering a complaint. As with the BACP, asking questions does not commit you to a formal process.

What UKCP can look at

UKCP can consider a complaint about any therapist who is on its register at the time the complaint is made. Its process exists to make sure registered therapists have the skills, knowledge and character to work safely, and it will look into cases where a therapist may have been dishonest, behaved in a way that caused a client harm or distress, or breached confidentiality. It can also consider situations where a therapist cannot meet professional standards because of a health problem or difficulties with drugs or alcohol.

Making the complaint and what follows

The formal route is a complaint form, downloadable from the UKCP website and returned by email. Once received, the complaint is assessed to determine whether it falls within UKCP’s remit, and cases that proceed can move through investigation towards adjudication by a panel, with published decisions and a range of sanctions available. UKCP recommends that complaints are raised within three years of the events, or within three years of you becoming aware of the conduct, though this is guidance rather than an absolute bar.

What the process asks of you emotionally

The paperwork is only half the story. It seems only fair to describe the other half.

You will be asked to put what happened into writing, clearly and in order, possibly more than once. For many people this means revisiting the very experience they have been trying to recover from. It can stir everything up again, and it helps to plan for that rather than be ambushed by it.

Your account may be disputed. Therapy happens behind a closed door, and many complaints come down to your word against the therapist’s. Panels understand this, and a dispute over the facts does not mean you will not be believed. But reading a version of events that does not match your memory of them can be one of the hardest moments in the whole process, and it is worth knowing that moment may come.

The waiting is long. Twelve to eighteen months is a significant stretch of a life, and during it the complaint can sit in the background like a low hum. Some people find it helps to hand the process a small, contained corner of their life, perhaps a folder and an hour when needed, rather than letting it colour every day.

And the outcome may not be the one you hoped for. A complaint that is not upheld is not a ruling that you lied, and it is not proof that nothing happened. It means the evidence available did not meet the threshold the panel required. Your experience remains your experience. If you build your recovery only on the verdict, the verdict holds too much power over you. If you can, let the complaint be something you did because it was right to do, with the outcome as a separate matter.

Through all of it, support makes a real difference. That might be one trusted person who knows the whole story. It might be an organisation such as the Clinic for Boundaries Studies, which supports people harmed by professionals, or Citizens Advice for the procedural side. If you are working with a new therapist, the complaint itself can be brought into that work. Nobody should carry a process like this entirely alone.

The fear that nobody will believe you

Many people with strong grounds for a complaint never make one, and when they explain why, it often comes down to a single thought. The therapist knows everything about me. They know my anxiety, my history, my worst moments. If it comes down to their word against mine, they hold every card.

That fear deserves respect, because it is reasoning, not weakness. The therapy relationship was built on you being open while they stayed composed, and it is natural to assume a complaints process will inherit the same arrangement, with them polished and professional and you exposed.

There are some things worth weighing on the other side, though, and they are not empty comfort.

Panels know that therapy happens behind a closed door. They expect most complaints to rest on one person’s account against another’s, because that is the nature of the work being examined. A disputed account is the normal starting point of these cases, not a reason to dismiss them.

Your struggles are the reason you were in therapy in the first place. They are the context of your complaint, not a mark against your reliability. A panel that treated distress as evidence of dishonesty would have to throw out nearly every complaint ever made, and the people who sit on these panels understand that the clients most vulnerable to harm are often the ones carrying the most.

And if a therapist tried to use your private disclosures to discredit you, they would be misusing the very confidence the process exists to examine. Turning a client’s trusted material into a weapon does not tend to protect a therapist in front of a panel. It tends to reveal them.

It also helps more than people expect to gather the small, ordinary records that exist around any therapy. Dates of sessions, appointment confirmations, emails or messages, anything you wrote near the time, or a person you told while it was happening. You do not need a case file. Fragments of everyday evidence, placed alongside a clear and honest account, carry real weight.

One more thing is worth saying, gently. The fear of not being believed is often part of the harm itself. An experience that damages you in therapy frequently teaches you to distrust your own perception, so the doubt you feel about your credibility may be something the experience installed rather than something true about you. The knowledge your therapist holds was given in trust. The sense that it might now be turned against you shows how badly that trust was broken. It says nothing about whether your account deserves to be heard.

If your therapist is a psychologist

If the person you saw is a registered practitioner psychologist, the route is different and in some ways more solid. The HCPC is a statutory regulator, its register can be checked online, and concerns go through its fitness to practise process. Because the title is protected by law, a psychologist struck off the HCPC register cannot lawfully continue to practise under it. The emotional realities described above still apply, including the timescales and the weight of retelling, but the legal footing beneath the process is firmer.