Introduction

The path to meaningful and lasting mental health recovery starts with understanding some of our most challenging experiences in a way that resonates emotionally and revises the stories well tell about ourselves.

For almost FOUR YEARS I have been seeking understanding, asking questions.

I wrote to CAMHS art therapist, Sally Mungall, reasonably and politely, to ask for her help in understanding what had gone wrong in therapy and why she had misrepresented me to her clinical cohorts and leadership at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, lied about me to colleagues at CRISIS and CMHT and lied to my face. I wrote under advisement of her own regulatory body, the Health and Care Professions Council and because my formal complaints made through the Patient Advisory Liaison Service had been met with obfuscation, obstruction and dishonesty. Sally Mungall chose to avoid her professional responsibility and, instead, called the police.

Why?

The Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman, during their investigation into my complaint about CAMHS, Bramblys Drive, Basingstoke, invited me to submit any questions that hadn’t been answered by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. I SUBMITTED 72 !!! The PHSO then replied, informing me that they were not going present even ONE of my 72 questions to the Trust.

Why not?

I have worked with four different psychotherapists while trying to recover from the harrowing experiences of CAMHS, Bramblys Drive, Basingstoke during 2021 and 2022.The benefits of therapy haven’t always been immediately apparent and the lessons learned have been slow to embed. Nevertheless, there remain significant obstacles blocking my path to mental health recovery, one of which is my desperate need to understand what went wrong in ‘therapy’.

The questions ‘why did things go wrong’ and ‘why did a trusted mental health care worker betray my trust’ have surfaced with all four psychotherapists and been met with the same exasperating answer. ‘You will probably never know.’

This feels intolerable to me.

I need to know. I need to understand. I need insight.

‘Insight building is an essential aspect of psychotherapy that can help clients better understand themselves, their experiences and their relationships. It is a process that helps clients identify patterns of thinking and behavior contributing to their difficulties. Through psychoeducation and skill building, the therapist teaches fresh strategies and coping mechanisms to tackle problematic patterns and substitute them with healthier alternatives.’ - https://www.nami.org/complimentary-health-approaches/the-power-of-insight-building-for-people-with-mental-illness/

Insight is one of the processes of change in psychotherapy.

The most common modality or way of working in each of those four therapeutic relationships has been, more or less, based on the ‘7 stages of therapeutic process’, the  person-centred therapy that maps how people grow from self-protection to self-trust. I’m not sure exactly where I am in that process but I know I am a long way from stage 7, the fluid, self-accepting person who is open to the changes that life presents.

My amygdala response to my harrowing experiences while under the therapeutic care of Sally Mungall felt very much like walking through a jungle and being attacked by a tiger. I walked away from that attack with my life (just). The pain from the bites and scratches still hurt and now I’m acutely aware that the jungle is inhabited by other tigers.

I want to understand why I got attacked by that tiger so that I can minimise the likelihood of similar attacks. In the meantime I hide in a cave and stand guard at the entrance, my own teeth bared and claws unsheathed. It still feels like a jungle outside.

TRUST ‘Trust—or the belief that someone or something can be relied on to do what they say they will—is a key element of social relationships and a foundation for cooperation. It is critical for romantic relationships, friendships, interactions between strangers, and social groups on a large scale, and a lack of trust in such scenarios can come with serious consequences. Indeed, society as a whole would likely fail to function in the absence of trust.’

The undermining of that core belief has had serious consequences

I trusted somebody in a position of power, in my case a mental health worker, making myself exceptionally vulnerable.

I got mauled.

Now I am very much trapped in a ‘trauma response’.

Healing trauma begins with acceptance, apparently.

‘ACCEPTANCE’ was the cornerstone advice offered by Viv Cowdrill, consultant clinical psychologist at Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust. Her words resonate with almost mantra-like introjection but they still make me angry. There is a mountain between acceptance and where I currently stand.

SO.

In the absence of real answers and as a foil against persistent frustration I will attempt to formulate a Theory of Everything.

As with any theory, this will involve a systematic and rational form of abstract thinking about a phenomenon and the conclusions derived from such thinking. It will involve, wherever possible, contemplative and logical reasoning and will be supported by processes such as observation and research. 

I will be drawing upon all the evidence available to me including medical records disclosed to me and to my daughter.

I will also take into account the considerable ground covered with the four psychotherapists with whom I have worked: Isobel Brooks, Mahwash Gaba, Clara Long and Dr Jackie Preston.  

Then of course there are the many academic papers and books that I have read on the subject. Some of the more notable titles on display on my bookshelves include The Revealing Image and Desire And The Female Therapist, both by analytical psychotherapist and art therapist Joy SchaverIen.

Quora has also provided valuable information, especially on the subject of Transference, Counter-Transference, provided by widely respected professional psychotherapists like Dr David McPhee, Natalia Perevalova and Antonieta Contreras.

I will map out this Theory of Everything over the coming months, starting with the revelation informed by reading the document identified as ‘megan 1365700 – 02.09.2021 case disc following first appointment.pdf’ which was completed by Sally Mungall between 14.00 and 14.20 on the 2nd September, 2021 immediately following her first meeting with me. That revelation being,

‘Strong countertransference of feeling violated by the intrusiveness within the room’.