Formal complaint - again?

I bought this book yesterday: The Psychotherapist and the Professional Complaint: The Shadow Side of Therapy:  Adah Sachs (Author), Valerie Sinason (Editor) and my feelings are incredibly mixed as a result. The book confirms my worst impressions and fears of official complaints; that in the end, the outcome of the complaint process is worse. The situation is never resolved, whilst psychological and emotional damage increase to both parties as a result. I have heard a similar narrative from clients who had complaints made about them. The following disciplinary administered to an employee who has good reasons for their behaviour, who may well feel bullied by their boss leaves the employee traumatised and broken, unable to continue working. Nothing is improved by seeking fault. But a fault finding disciplinary (even when the person giving it doesn't think it is about finding fault) usually undermines and the employee so much that they go off sick, they blame themselves, the situation is impossible. They leave! 

This mode of fault finding occurs primarily because the professional bodies, the companies, the businesses dealing with complaints, have an agenda - to protect their association, their business. A desire to be seen as 'tough on crime and the causes of crime'.

This does not create a restorative justice.

And the book is so right about the needs of the complainant (I certainly agree with these statements):

• A client making a complaint was, and probably still is, hurt and angry. 
• They need their story to be heard.
• They want to have their experience acknowledged.
• And they want changes made to the service, so that no one else suffers as they have.

The problem with the book is, psychotherapy itself. Again I meet the trope of clients being described as replaying their childhood issues. But a complaint is a complaint. Dealing well with distress is our job... 

The book and I agree that the therapist has probably missed the significance of something, while the client was working with them. This something was incredibly important to the client! And this for me is the only aspect of the anatomy of a complaint that matters.

In my case the therapist missed the significance of my fear - I had reason to be afraid of my gaslighting husband - and he missed the significance of my need for open honesty (gaslighting is healed through open honesty). 

The therapist wanted fear and feeling powerless to be located in the past. As if fear and the overwhelming truth of our predicament can be prevented. 

I would argue over and over with the psychotherapist, that we can all be traumatized by events at any stage of life.

His psychotheraputic theory attributes overwhelm to the basic fault as Balint called it. A lack of nurturing in childhood is supposed to leave us susceptible to certain kinds of stress. I don't doubt it. I simply don't believe that knowing why something unhinged us is as important as finding new ways to respond to it. 

But fundamentally psychotheraputic theory is both only theoretical, and certainly irrelevant to restorative justice. 

Again I want to say that there is a theoretical basis to understand the mechanisms of childhood trauma leading to adult anxiety and fear. But if a client's sense of present danger is misread by a psychotherapist who insists on location it in the past, a client seeking sanctuary and calmness is going to feel abandoned, unheard and experience their truth being minimised. 

And this is where the problem starts. Clients can make complaints that are poetically true, complaints that appear as malicious lies even. When the aim is to get to something better for both, the complaint has to be heard and acknowledged by someone else, a neutral other whose role it will be to mediate.

So me - what am I going to do? My complaint is specific - without going into any details suffice to say; the operation was a success but the patient died. My complaint is really against psychotherapy. My complaint is that the psychotherapist's belief in theory led to my re-traumatisation. 

To complain against the therapist would be like complaining about McDonald's for not selling smoked salmon and bagels.

All in all, I'm left feeling numb and disconnected. I belong to a profession that proudly presents insane theory as sanity. I'm asking myself are we all of us so really intelligently stupid? 

My get out clause is that I practice the postmodern therapies, fundamentally solution focus. I use my client's reality. I would not have acted as the psychotherapist acted because the clients words and meanings are where we are - we are not working in 'my' reality. My aim is very simple, I'm inviting you to construct a reality that has more possibility, one that gives you more agency...

So no to the official complaint then, a complaint would bring us both only more pain.

But blogging on the other hand..TBC