Manifesto of CARPEA
This text sets out where we stand. It says what we observe, what we refuse, and what we intend to achieve: that the accompaniment professions become, at last, properly held professions, and that a growing share of the way our society takes care of itself stops unfolding in the blind spot. A professional ambition, then, and a social one. It is written in the name of a founding collective now taking shape, and it calls for commitment: it is open for signature to those who recognise themselves in it.
What we observe
Every day, in France, people are accompanied by someone who is neither a doctor, nor a psychologist, nor a teacher. A mentor helping an entrepreneur not to lose her way. A coach working on a career goal. A hypnosis practitioner supporting a change. A psychopractitioner accompanying someone through a difficult passage. A supervisor keeping a professional from being left alone with their blind spots. These appointments run into the millions, and yet they take place almost without witnesses.
These acts resemble one another more than we tend to think. They all rest on a working alliance, a stance held steady, a reading of the situation before any intervention, the steering of a process over time, and an ability to reflect back on one's own practice. These are skills: they are learned, they are checked, they are lost when they go untended.
And yet these occupations do not really exist. Not as professions. There is no protected title, no recognised pathway, no obligation of supervision, no enforceable requirement of continuing professional development. Anyone can, tomorrow morning, declare themselves a coach. Nothing prevents it, and nothing publicly distinguishes the person who has honed their practice for ten years from the person who took a weekend course.
This absence is costly, and it costs everyone. The people being accompanied first of all, who have no reliable way of knowing to whom they are entrusting an often difficult moment of their lives. Serious practitioners, who carry the burden of their own legitimacy alone, rebuild it client after client, and find themselves confused with practices they disavow. Schools, which invest in demanding frameworks with no shared standard to set that work apart from a catalogue of promises. Institutions and funders, who buy accompaniment without any language to describe its quality other than in hours and euros. And it costs, more quietly, everyone: where trust is not equipped, distrust governs, and distrust is a poor engine for a society.
What we refuse
We refuse to let accompaniment remain an empty word that each person fills as they please, and whose vagueness benefits first of all those with nothing to prove.
We refuse the war of chapels. Coaching, mentoring, training, hypnosis, NLP, supervision, presence-based practices: each current has built its schools, its vocabulary, its points of pride, and often its distrust of its neighbours. This fragmentation has never protected anyone. It has only kept the field from speaking with one voice when it should have.
We refuse the purely defensive response. Guarding against abuses is necessary, but an occupation that defines itself only by what it is not, not care, not therapy, not consulting, never becomes a profession. It stays an in-between.
We refuse the idea that a diploma is enough. Competence in accompaniment is not an acquisition, it is an upkeep. It degrades in isolation, it warps without an outside view, it ages without vigilance. A professional who is no longer supervised and no longer trains is not an experienced professional: they are a professional taking risks with other people.
Finally, we refuse the posture of self-proclaimed authority. No structure, no school, no federation can decide alone what a practitioner is worth. That is precisely why we propose an alliance, and not one more house.
What we affirm
Accompaniment is a profession, not an added grace. It has an object of its own, supporting a person in work that they alone can do, an identifiable body of skills, a progression, an ethics and conditions of practice. What it lacks is not substance: it is recognition.
There is a common foundation, and it can be demonstrated. Beneath the diversity of methods lies a shared architecture, from the relational foundation up to mastery and transmission. A first reconstruction of it has been made, by analysing a corpus of training frameworks. This first state is the starting point of the work, not its result: it will have to be tested against other frameworks and other practices. It will be released to the commons, revised publicly, and will belong to no one.
Progression makes the dignity of the work. A practitioner is not a fixed point. They enter as a beginner, they become autonomous, they sometimes become expert, and some go on to transmit. Making that progression legible, for the practitioner themselves, for their peers, for the public, is the condition of a profession that respects itself.
Ethics, continuing professional development and supervision are not options. They are the three requirements that run through every level of the work and that separate a professional practice from an improvised one. They must be written, binding, and verifiable.
No one qualifies alone. A profession is held by several voices: those who train, those who practise, those who are starting out, and those who study. A field that lets one of these voices decide for the others condemns itself either to corporatism, or to theory cut off from the ground, or to the pure market.
What, at bottom, we want
A better-held profession is not a matter for professionals among themselves. When someone goes through a bereavement, a burnout, a turning point, a doubt that keeps them from moving forward, they increasingly turn to a practitioner rather than to a doctor or a loved one. This shift is vast, and it is silent. Millions of decisive moments now play out in consulting rooms, video calls and rooms rented by the hour, without society having truly taken the measure of what happens there.
We believe this work deserves to be done well, and that it deserves to be recognised as work. Not out of corporatism, but because the quality of an accompaniment is paid for, in the end, in lives left a little less alone or a little more damaged. A public that knows who it is turning to is a public better protected. A professional who no longer has to prove their legitimacy at every appointment is a professional who can finally work. A field that speaks a common language is a field that institutions can finally take seriously.
That is our horizon, and it is twofold. Professional: to give these occupations the substance, the progression and the safeguards that make a profession. Social: to ensure that a growing share of the way our society takes care of itself stops unfolding blind, exposed to the most skilled at selling rather than the most solid at accompanying. We are not writing this text to protect an occupation. We write it because a society that accompanies its transitions badly pays for it elsewhere, later, and at a higher price.
What we commit to
- Recognise a common languageAdopt the Competency Framework as a shared reference for describing what a practitioner can do, without giving up their method or their own identity.
- Make progression legiblePublicly describe the level expected at each stage of the path, from beginner to transmitter.
- Uphold a written ethical requirementAdhere to an enforceable code of ethics, known to the person being accompanied, with a real avenue of recourse in the event of a breach.
- Make supervision a condition of practiceAnd not a response to failure. No practitioner should work over the long term without a third party who looks at their practice with them.
- Maintain competence after the diplomaBy recording the development activities actually carried out rather than merely claiming them.
- Name the boundary of care and honour itUnderstanding a situation is not diagnosing a disorder. Referring on to a health professional when the situation calls for it is not an admission of weakness: it is an act of competence.
- Confer instead of competingOn what falls to the general interest of the field: the safety of the public, the quality of training, the recognition of these occupations.
- Work in the openPublish the texts, the criteria, the revisions and the disagreements. An alliance that deliberates in secret is worth no more than the disorder it claims to correct.
What CARPEA is not
It is not a professional order: it has no vocation to bar anyone from practising. It is not a school: it will train no one. It is not a union: it will defend no economic interests. It is not one more method, and it will take no side for one approach against another.
It is a place of consultation that produces shared references, and that accepts being judged on the quality of those references. That is all, and it is already a great deal.
A call
To practitioners at the start of the path
You are looking for a place and you don't yet know where you stand. CARPEA exists first so that your progression is recognised as you make it, and not only on the day you finally become "someone".
To experienced professionals
You have carried this work for years, often with no guarantee other than your reputation. You are the ones who know what the work truly demands. With you, this framework will be right. Without you, it will be wrong.
To schools and training bodies
Each of you has built a serious framework and you know what it cost. We are not asking you to give it up, but to make it legible in a shared language, and to accept being looked at.
To learned institutions
These practices unfold largely beyond the gaze of research. We need your rigour, including when it unsettles us, so that this framework rests on something other than professional convictions.
We do not claim to hold the right answer. We affirm that it is time to pose the question together, and to write it down.