Clarification.

Why don't clients speak up when therapy feels off, or when they find themselves feeling hollowed out, almost crippled by the effect of therapy, as they leave the room?

I've thought a lot about this. I remember leaving a session with a different therapist, and my brain had been frazzled. I'd been talking about something that involved the outside world - I think I have written about it in this blog? About how my friend was groomed, literally groomed and about to be abused by her teacher when we were teenagers. She phoned me and I got her out...And how my friend didn't want anyone to know...and how for years, decades I kept my promise to her never to tell. And all the time I presume, he continued to 'work with troubled girls'. 

I put the feelings of my friend above the abuse other girls probably suffered. 

This is awful. 

Speaking about it in therapy left me feeling like a cooked lettuce leaf. I didn't feel strengthened by the person centred approach. And I could never have spoken to this therapist about the therapist before her, whose sessions almost took me to my grave. She was a kind therapist, good at her job which was not to influence how I thought, but to give me a sense of safety and of being heard.

That wasn't what I needed though. But, no blame...

The reason why this memory had come to the surface, and why I was talking about it almost forty years after the event, only become clear as I continued to transcribe the recordings.

Power...

I didn't speak up when my friend was being groomed because my friend was at the mercy of power dynamics;  her life as a functional human being depended on her credibility. What happens when you are a pupil making allegations against a teacher? Could she deal with that? She didn't think so.

And years later, opening the subject of 'mental health issues ' for her employment - any revelation of an entanglement with a predatory teacher could be seen as a proof of her instability rather than a part of the catastrophic collapsing of order and safety, signified by this teacher's grooming...

And this gives the clue as I begin to unravel the reasons for silence.

To understand silence we need to grasp the threat inherent in challenging any power dynamic. And stop minimizing it. For my friend she risked losing education, money, credibility. There was too much to risk. Nothing to gain. 

And of course I respected her emotional bond to this teacher - she went on to live with him while she was at university...He had suffered trauma as a young man, She cared about him. She didn't want him to suffer more. 

And I get it. This is how I feel about the therapist. He suffered as a child, and I care about the adult version of him. 

But, the only way that he could acknowledge the legitimate grounds for my complaint was to try his best to 'kill' my career. Attempting to silence me once I'd said it all. Once the full extent of the error he'd made was finally explicit. He felt harassed. He didn't see himself as responsible... Like all of us, or most, we never want to do harm. But we do it anyway, especially when we feel threatened.

I didn't make an official complaint at the time for two very good reasons. Firstly I believed that the impact of a formal complaint could be lethal. For him. I didn't see how such a thing could do any good. Secondly I simply didn't have the words to describe what had happened. 

This lack of words brings me to the next point.

If I'd understood about hermeneutical epistemic injustice sooner. If the right concept had been easily accessible. I would have felt confident enough to name the problem and define what was needed. 

But the words were not around - so I try to write them here, now for others.

I had the actual words, the recordings of the sessions, I had all the information except an accurate description that would frame the problem, make it understandable - but it still took me years to distil the obvious from feelings into words.

Psychotherapy in particular has a way of making everything the victim's fault. We try to get our clients to feel powerful and know that they are good enough. But often this requires a lot of scaffolding. Rogers '7 stages of therapy' explains how people arrive in therapy blaming someone else, or the world, and then, through self acceptance they let go and learn from the experience.

Carl Rogers was working in the 1959s and 60s. Were people more confident about themselves? In the 2020s every client save two or three, that I've seen over five years, arrives full of self blame. Knowing themselves to be defective, assuming a lack of neuromodulators, neurodiversity, a chronic failure of themselves. People who come to therapy are incredibly responsible human beings.

Freud's language, Rogers language, assumes that we are 100% in charge of our interpretation and perceptions. And that self defence is more common than self attack. I disagree...

So, using the language that doesn't help! 

I suffered as a result of transference, but the concept behind the word transference is inaccurate.

I suffered as the therapist inadvertently repeated my husbands obfuscation of the truth. Far from this indicating a pathology in me, my allergy to obfuscations of the truth resides in the better parts of myself, the parts of me that keep me safe. Let's reframe, my husband's gaslighting was an education. And he is always going to be the person responsible for choosing to lie to me! 

I'm not responsible for people deciding to deny and hide authenticity, honesty. I am responsible for being truthful and showing exactly how much a betrayal harms me.

I'm not even saying that anything should happen to them. I am responsible for refusing to shut up though.

So the concepts of denial and transference as used by therapists might prevent or confuse a client's ability to recognise danger. The other person's decisions, actions are reduced to a prompt that evoked a reaction in you. You are responsible. And now as you try to fathom transference you can't place the wrong in it's rightful place anymore; outside, in the other,  in the external world.

As a mediator I often see this. 

A problem with the more healthy state of seeing oneself as suffering because of other people's behaviour is our cultural habit of diagnosing, pathologizing and prescribing for each other - 'he needs this, because this is wrong with him'.  But this is healthier for the individual than presenting with their own diagnosis, pathologizing and proscribing ( self medication or worse) for themselves.

I mean in mediation as a starting position, the ' he is to blame ' is a lot easier to deal with than, 'its all me I should just give up'!

The next question is, what went wrong with the police? 

I mean who on earth thought that the therapist had a valid claim? The therapist said that I had 'posted things through his door' and he probably appeared very concerned. But, did the police read the letter that came with the recording? Or did they simply focus on that fat, green highlighter line? The bit in my letter he had highlighted where I had said 'I know you asked me to never contact you again...'

No really - did anyone read the whole letter before I was in the police station with my solicitor? 

I will never know. 

And, nor do I have a copy of what I wrote because everything felt so poisonous and radioactive and I kept trying to get away from the pain and fallout. Everything has been deleted except this blog.

Diagnosis and proscribing derive from the medical model, which is hopefully based on the scientific method.  Most systems dealing with problems within and between people rely on pathologizing, assessing, and diagnosing.. fundamentally the abandonment of the individual - instead of looking at systems, power dynamics and then seeking and negotiating a path toward positive resolution or change...

The Black Box is deciphered and closed.

End.