Category: Therapy Harm
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Lawful but awful
There’s a gap between what is lawful and what is right. With the therapy harm I experienced, I’ve learned that a clinician’s conduct can be wrong on several levels and still fail to trip a regulatory wire. I should preface this by saying that my complaint is still before the regulators, and she may yet…
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Why intent is irrelevant
When therapy harms a client, the first question people often ask is whether the therapist meant to do it. It’s the wrong question. Intent matters when we are judging a person’s character. It doesn’t decide whether the practitioner did their job safely. The Psychology Board of Australia’s current code of conduct says that ‘in law…
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The Last to Know
I first saw the plan for ending my therapy in writing over six weeks after shit had well and truly blown up in a dumpster fire. By then the decision had been made and the people around me had been told. I was the last to know. I asked my therapist for transparency. Explicitly, two…
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The Inferior Option
Today is the first day I haven’t sat with documents open on my screen, going over them with a fine-tooth comb. My OT asked me to look for the little glimmers. This is one. This is what progress looks like now. When you’ve spent three years with a therapist slowly becoming the centre of your…
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I Don’t Know What I’m Feeling
I don’t know what I’m feeling. I can’t access the depth of it, so it feels like there’s nothing overly deep there. For three years my feelings were inverted and invalidated. Now I just feel empty. When I do find something, it sits in the pit of my stomach. It fluctuates between sickness and heartache.…
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Countersigned
Everything I have is now with the people whose job it is to make objective judgements about it. The weeks I have spent trawling through documents to compile my notification can stop. I should feel relief. Mostly I feel the opposite. A case officer has been assigned to read it. My first reaction was to…
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Finding My Voice: Not Living in Survival Mode
The last few months have been some of the hardest I’ve been through, not really because the relationship with my psychologist of three years ended, but because of what happened after. The clinic has tried to stonewall me. Every request I have made for real accountability has received the same treatment: pull up the drawbridge,…
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The Neoliberal Elixir
I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with the wreckage of therapy harm. Nobody in my life has had their trust taken apart by the person they paid to keep them safe, so the advice defaults to the only script anyone has: maybe you should talk to someone about it. The official prescription for…
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The Bureaucratic Colonic
I was handed another file of bureaucratic bullshit the other day. Well, I’m torn between bullshit and gold. On the one hand, the contents are complete shit. On the other, it’s more grave-digging gold. I would have thought Damage Control 101 said to sit down and get your story straight first. Apparently not. Apparently damage…
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The 20-page Alibi
When my therapist produced a ‘Treatment Summary,’ it read as though she was operating entirely on standard, hierarchical clinical risk models. In that traditional playbook, the calculation is fairly straightforward: you overwhelm the vulnerable client with a dense, highly pathologising, professional-looking document designed to make them feel small, clinically ‘unmanageable,’ and ultimately too exhausted to…
