Here is complaint #2. The documents themselves explain the situation fairly well. I ask you to particularly note where the therapist admits she doesn’t talk about her background, techniques or methods once the client has agreed to work with her. So essentially she baits and switches her clients. It’s not like she tells clients “Now that you have agreed to work with me, I am going to use techniques and methods that we have not discussed. And I’m not going to tell you what they are or when I’m using them. That OK with you?”
Also, notice that she provides no evidence of currently being a practitioner at the therapy school or even of the therapy school still existing. (It doesn’t. I checked. The phone number is out of service and the website is down and has been for at least two years. But even when it did exist, it was just an office in a suburban low-rise block, and the courses were one weekend a month for 9 months or so. The school itself was not accredited in any way. I can’t find any information about the founder other than that for a little while he taught part-time at a local university. Actually I think he is dead now.) All she says is, effectively, yeah, I’m still a “clinical faculty member” at that school. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that every graduate of the school is also a “clinical faculty member” of it.
The therapist’s comment about her actions being consistent with her principles, including “proper practice”, I find especially galling. She never did any kind of assessment with me, never discussed therapy goals or a treatment plan, and never even offered those as an option, yet they are ALL considered part of best practice in psychotherapy. They are part of the standards of practice of the Agency no less! But she didn’t do them, and she thinks that’s OK. The fact that I think it is not OK is irrelevant. Nice, eh? No surprise that she didn’t mention the irrelevancy of my thoughts and preferences at the start of therapy.
I suspect that the only reason the therapist is so frank in her letter is that she counted on 1) the secrecy of the complaint process and 2) that the committee would be biased towards her.
Anyway, take a look, do your own thinking and form your own opinion. Then let me know: would you hire this person as your therapist?
Wow, I did read it and this women’s logic is so convoluted. Ironic the complaint has to be pegged on something like informed consent. Because her extremely mean-spirited, undermining personality was the real core of the issue.
I have the radical idea that the first yardstick in a therapeutic relationship is –would it be a respectful removed from a clinical context? Clearly her manner with you wasn’t the slightest respectful. Glad you recognized this and got away. It echoes problems I had with therapists and their attempts to manipulate me into staying with them.
Perl’s “up his sleeve” quote is beyond the pale.
Thanks disequilibrium. I just saw your comment tonight, not sure how it slipped past me.
Funny thing is, the therapist came across as a warm, kind person. She definitely had that demeanor. As harsh as her remarks sound in the letter, the delivery itself wasn’t harsh. So the undermining was very subtle – more like concern-trolling. Like how a mother might say to a daughter “Are you sure you want to eat that slice of pie, dear? I thought you were watching your weight.”
Now that I’ve read up on her particular therapy specialization, I can see how the indoctrination would lead her to really believe that she was really being helpful. If her assessment is that it’s better for me not to know that she’s using techniques, so that I won’t use my habitual defenses against them, then that’s OK in her book. Perls the guru makes it clear that the *client* certainly doesn’t know what’s best for them.
But I’m not going to let her off that easy. She knew she was withholding information that she rightfully should have provided, because it was in *her* economic self-interest to get and keep me as a client.
I watch about half of that Joseph Zinker video you referenced in your statement. That was enough. What a crock. Talk about patriarchal –the therapist is true north there to right all the client’s untruths. What’s wrong is right.
Traditional gestalt therapy as practised by Fritz Perls is pretty controversial. The ‘Gloria tapes’ are widely circulated and you can compare Perl’s method with that of Ellis and Carl Rodgers. There was more than a touch of the showman about Fritz Perls and his own personal life was a mess. It seems likely that he never resolved his own issues and was using his therapy as a way of unleashing his demons upon unsuspecting clients (also getting clients to have sex with him). If you get a chance to look at (at least one) biography of Perls you can see that during his time as Esalen (then a hippie style place) he was an unlikely guru. Two highly vulnerable participants there were mocked by him during his ‘counselling circuses’ and later committed suicide. He was a nasty piece of work. However, at the time, his abrasive and direct approach was so different to the Freudian style of analysis that he was heralded as something of a genius. Personally, I think he was a nutter and incredibly sexist.
See this very good critique on his counselling method which the author has desribed as a style of domination. Yes – domination, subjugation and control.
Click to access humanismo_1.pdf
From what I have read about your therapist’s approach – she could be the same gestalt therapist that I saw! Very similar style – baiting/goading/switching/blaming/gaslighting/confusing. All very strange. Why don’t these people get jobs in interrogation or something? I only had about half a dozen sessions with mine before I realised that she was playing mind games. What was really worrying was that she never responded genuinely to me. She would either be countering what I was saying, which lead me to doubt myself, or she would react but not share the reaction with me. For instance, on several occasions I saw her sniggering after I had shared something with her or she would make an inappropriate comment like: ‘listen to you’ in a patronising/sarcastic tone of voice.
I was thinking she might be the same therapist but I know for certain where mine studied and the place is still going. So I guess you have to put it down to two things – bad therapy and also gestalt therapy which I happen to think is fundamentally flawed although, having said that, there are ASPECTS of it which can be useful if incorporated responsibly into an overall therapeutic relationship.
What is worrying to me is that there seem to be a lot of bad therapists about which isn’t really surprising as anyone can be a counsellor in the UK – you don’t need any qualifications. Plus there are no proper character checks to weed out the psychopaths/sociopaths and others with personality disorders or those who are just plain NASTY!
I’m in Canada, so it’s doubtful we had the same therapist. But since we had similar experiences, it can probably be chalked up to the Gestalt training. Plus I would guess that Gestalt attracts a certain personality type in the first place – and not a healthy one!
Dear TIAC,
Reading your complaint #2 was very sad for me. There was so much that was similar to my therapy experience over 25 years ago. To the best of my knowledge, my therapist was neither Cognitive nor Gestalt, but Feminist. Yet there is so much in your account that is similar to my experience: the lack of informed consent, the unwillingness to discuss, the “you are wrong” attitude, the interpretations, the sense of things being tossed at me, the lack of continuity from session to session, so much that just doesn’t make sense. It leads me to believe that these therapist attitudes/behaviors are common in therapy, across a wide variety of types of therapy. It’s hard to say how much is the therapists’ personalities, and how much the attitudes/behaviors are promoted (or at least reinforced) by the customs of the profession. It is indeed sad to see that things haven’t really changed that much in over twenty years. Caveat emptor.
“Caveat emptor” – absolutely! Yet the therapy industry presents itself as being the one that you can trust implicitly. And if you don’t, why, there’s something wrong with you that only lots of therapy can fix!
I’ve only have to glance their literature to see its condescension, how the profession reduces human beings to lab rats with pathologies. I’ve yet to encounter anything in those books that relates to helping another human being make her life better. And I’ve yet to converse with a therapist who doesn’t artificially inflate his knowledge and “powers.”