Season 2 Episode 1: Harm in Therapy
What if therapy does harm? Many people have had harmful experiences in therapy, and harm can happen even if the therapist stays within ethical guidelines. In this encounter, we dive deeply into what constitutes harm and discuss whether the person-centred approach is immune from causing harm (spoilers - it’s not).
Rachael (she/her) speaks to Erin Stevens (she/they), a therapist, supervisor and trainer who primarily works with people who have had previous experiences of harm in therapy.
Rachael writes: I relished the opportunity to encounter Erin and their valuable work on harm. A key component of our encounter involved considering client-centred understandings of harm. We also spoke of the importance of sitting with client experiences of harm as we would with any other area of experience.
During our encounter we reflected on Erin’s own experiences of harm as a client. Together, we explored how person-centred theory can be subtly and overtly weaponised as a harmful process and the different ways in which harm is perceived across time and contexts. One area that will stay with me is how we sit with our potential, as therapists (person-centred and across modalities) to generate harm and what it means to encounter, with empathy, a therapist who has generated harm rather than one-dimensionally perceiving them as ‘the bad therapist’.
Overall, we considered it an oversimplification to solely conflate harm with complaints to membership bodies; harm can be more subtle, insidious and harder to define. Having said that, I’ve found the work of Adah Sachs and Valerie Sinason exploring the experiences of therapists who have received complaints from clients very helpful in not ‘othering’ and in opening myself to this complex area of encounter.
Harm is a rich area for ongoing person-centred dialogue, and this came through strongly in our encounter. I hope there can be more spaces for considering harm from intersectional perspectives. Thank you, Erin, for so generously sharing your process.