214. Too Buddhist, Not Self-Hating Enough: Counseling Whistleblower Suzannah Alexander
About this episode
Suzannah Alexander discusses her experiences as a counseling-education whistleblower and critiques the current state of counseling education in America.
In this episode, I sit down with Suzannah Alexander — counseling-education whistleblower, writer of the Substack Diogenes in Exile , and now organizer with the National Association of Scholars. Suzannah enrolled in a Tennessee counseling master's program after 25 years as a stay-at-home parent, only to discover that what was being taught wasn't psychology at all. It was demographics, identity politics, and what she eventually came to call a totalitarian philosophy dressed up as "multicultural competency." We unpack the moment that broke her trust in the program: when she described the Buddhist practice of the non-self — focusing less on your own identity so you can extend loving kindness toward an aggressive client — three separate professors told her, within 48 hours, that this was "invalidating to other identities." She was ultimately deemed unsafe for practicum because she hadn't sufficiently absorbed the program's values around whiteness, privilege, and cultural deference. From there, the conversation widens into the structural picture. Suzannah walks us through CACREP, the accrediting body that's been quietly building a near-monopoly on counseling education, the ACA Code of…
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