Didn't run...
And there have been lots of things I've said that I should do, or will do, and then thought better of it! Not phoning the police when my son was extremely violent was one. I didn't know what was on the other side, would he be arrested, get a criminal record? But doing something different when it is obvious that something different has to be done isn't stepping into fight, flight, running. Overall there has been more a kind of standing my ground, and accepting the alternatives going on.
Throughout this blog I've said that I'm going to do things and decided not to. Getting published for one, probably not wise. I have far more control here on Blogger and Substack. But a paper or a journal feels more mainstream.
It would be a different audience!
To be honest I've no idea what I'm talking about, I don't read print. I think the places I was thinking of offering my story to are pretty niche. But, I don't know! So that's easy to let go of!
Another thing I didn't do. I didn't contact the police to find out what the therapist had handed over. He gave them the paper communication that I sent with the usb (containing the recordings of two sessions, and the transcripts). He had underlined a sentence in neon green! Probably the sentence that said "I know you asked me not to contact you again but..."
Did he give the police the recordings of our sessions? He would have broken the therapy contract by doing that. I got the feeling that he had a passion for law and so the answer is probably no. I hope that he did though. I like the idea of others being able to hear how well he portrayed outrage, and moral indignation. I'd like to believe that others would hear how far from a therapeutic response that was... My privacy isn't the issue, how dangerous his bad therapy, is - is the real issue here.
Nor did I ask for the contact details of the solicitor.
Nor did I try writing again to UKCP after their AI (or standard!) reply. By not continuing, by not asking, I chose to disable my desire to do to the therapist what he did to me, because no good comes from increasing another person's fear and stress.
But I don't feel that I made the right decision. Simply because he is a person who didn't weigh up the consequences of making a complaint against me. He didn't ask for alternative modes of conflict resolution. Nor did he give me any warning.
I had the impression that the police in charge of my interview were not impressed by the waste of their time required to deal with his complaint. And no, I didn't ask any questions when they came round to tell me that it was all over.
Systems are used to sift information to find evidence that their rules have been breached. Making a sensible appraisal of the truth of things, matters. The police were powerless once a complaint of harassment had been made.
Law though...
A repeating theme in all my writing; systemic power dynamics and habitual epistemic injustice cause harm. Systems created to heal, create a culture that accepts and perpetuates unequal power dynamics - and therefore their ability to resolve situations or to heal becomes questionable - in the domain of mental health in particular.
My role is simple.
To do better...
Mental illness haunts us, frightens us, and fascinates us. Its depredations are a source of immense suffering and often embody threats, both symbolic and practical, to the very fabric of the social order. Scull, Andrew. Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry and the Mysteries of Mental Illness (p. xi).
Disorder is a powerful concept. It is difficult to drill down into what it actually means. I stick with reframing it as a response. But the fear encountering disorder engenders is something else. It is a primal dread. Through out history this primal energy source has be magnified, to justify acts of cruelty and injustice.
The therapist positioned me as transgressive. Apparently I was out of order - disordered - and therefore a threat, because my feelings for him might actually have been a response...
So it is important and wrong that the therapist's version of this story is missing. Resolution does not come from shifting right from wrong, alone. It comes from fitting the narratives together in a way that creates a better ending. A more fair and reasoned ending. All aspects of the situation need to be open.
I think his recourse to law points to him being a person who wants order to be imposed and forced upon disorder. I'm pretty sure he'd disagree with that, but actions speak louder than words. Mental illness is framed as a disorder, not as a response. Eros can be disordering. My son's mental illness sure was disordering!
But neither mental illness or Eros are disorders. They are human responses...
Being within a system that can't allow the disruptive meanings to be explored creates the potential for explosions. The system uses the almost inevitable explosion, as the patient screams and fights to avoid ECT, as the rational for coercion and control 'See, only someone who needs ECT as much as you would fight!'
The therapist had decided correctly that Eros is potentially disordering, and so he did the one thing guaranteed to create disorder. I've made the argument many times to support how the therapist's positioning of my feelings as alien to the therapeutic frame - almost ended my life. I've also made the argument that Eros (client's side) is very likely to be a plea for deep relational depth, a need so difficult to acknowledge when their experiences were so profoundly painful to render them now, literally unspeakable.
Nevertheless I remain unconvinced that in my case there wasn't a lot more going on, more reasons why I felt as I did - related to his other life, to who he is.
I will never know.
And...this is where I am.
Didn't run!
Not running.
Comments
Post a Comment