This post is the foreword, written by Kathleen Mills, LPC-S, for Dr. Dawn Iron's new book, IndoctriNation: How Woke Ideology Hijacked the Counseling Profession. Thought we'd share it with you in hopes you'd find her book worthy of your time.

IndoctriNation: How Woke Ideology Hijacked the Counseling Profession

"Do you feel that our profession is being hijacked by Academia and the accrediting bodies? That they are indoctrinating the next generation of counselors with a far left, Woke philosophy and our professional organizations are complicit? Or that our Generally Accepted Standards of Care are being trashed and re-written based on an agenda rather than evidence-based data, to the detriment of the public?

If so, you're not alone.

If you have been in the counseling field for any length of time, you cannot deny the systemic changes that have occurred in our profession. The slow drip indoctrination of non-evidence based dogma preached by academia, professional organizations, and credentialing entities is pervasive.

Over the past 70 years we have experienced a systematic takeover by those who have nothing but contempt for our patriotism, our faith, our family system, and our US Constitution. Marxist idealogues are deconstructing our freedom of religion, literature, architecture, modern art and free speech. No stone has been left unturned in their pursuit of our national destruction, including our noble profession.

As a veteran LPC-S, CEAP, CIMHP, I have seen dramatic changes in the graduate program curriculum. Orchestrated by self-anointed credentialing entities, they have been allowed to “dictate” academic curriculums in seedy collaboration with our professional organizations.

You may even know graduate students who have been indirectly forced to abandon their religious beliefs, or at least suppress their beliefs in order to complete "the program”. Heaven help them if they question the DEI initiatives or their not so subtle efforts to reshape the Generally Accepted Standards of Care.

Open dialogue and the exercise of critical thinking skills are not allowed outside of the borders of Woke dogma, and a student runs the great risk of failing a class or being expelled from the university for not towing the line. There are countless stories and testimonies of students who have been shamed by professors and subsequently had to change their major or withdraw from the university.

Upon completion of the state licensing requirements, licensees continue to be subjected to a never ending and evolving postmodern wish-list. Licensing boards, professional associations, accrediting boards, conferences, and countless ce opportunities are all seemingly staffed by Woke indoctrinated graduates parroting, even believing, what they have been taught.

The ACA shamelessly promotes a Big Tent club for all counselors (including faith-based ones) and unbeknownst to most counselors (especially the faith-based ones!), the larger organizations like ACA typically promote a radical social justice agenda. That includes gender affirming care, the normalization of sexually deviant behaviors and other liberal efforts not generally accepted by a majority of the majority. And you, their unwitting members, are funding that!

Since when did it become the primary objective of a professional organization or an accrediting body to push a social agenda? Their task is to safeguard the profession and the Generally Accepted Standards of Care from harmful outside influences, not rewrite the GASC, turning it into an "anything goes" ideological handbook written by a relatively small group of unmoored activists.

The Woke narrative has done its work well. You have been lied to. It is a purposeful misdirection to state or imply that you could lose your license should you live your faith or vocally (or in writing) oppose the latest social justice action item. That would include failing to support sexually deviant behaviors, their DEI initiative, or question the gender affirming care “treatment" issued by WPATH, just to name a few."