Complicated.

Description

I did three private sessions with Alice and Kerrie in August of 2018. Important as the experience was for me and grateful as I am, there were as many pitfalls in their boundaries. During my final integration session with Kerrie I had my eyes closed during a process. When I opened my eyes Kerrie said she had been recording me and showed me on her phone that there was an audio recording in her voice memos of the process I had been doing. Kerrie said she would send me this recording, which I never received. I didn't want to have the recording, though; I really wanted this recording not to exist. This was an issue of consent and boundaries: I didn’t consent to being recorded and I wasn’t aware that I was being recorded. There is a significant amount of trust that goes into this work and Kerrie recording me without my consent fractured that trust. This breach of trust has adversely affected my desire to work with them in the future and I wish it hadn’t happened. For the sake of their future clients, I hope that Alice and Kerrie will amend their practices and the consent document that their clients sign to include the facilitator’s responsibilities and boundaries in addition to what the document already indicates about the participant’s responsibilities and boundaries. The consent document doesn't delineate any of the facilitator's responsibilities, only the participants' and given the lack of boundaries exemplified by this incident I sincerely hope that Alice and Kerrie will amend that document to better protect their clients. Separately from this, I had a troubling conversation with Kerrie before a session. Someone who does integration in a separate setting had said to me that all illnesses are the result of an unconscious choice, which anyone with a background in clinical medicine/research (which I have) knows to be both patently false and essentially blames people with any kind of illness for their illness. This is both inaccurate and harmful. When I expressed to Kerrie how disturbing I found that statement, she said that she believed that statement to be true. She then used my autoimmune disease as an example and said that I must have wanted to have this autoimmune disease for some reason. I found that extremely concerning. No one with any illness deserves to be blamed for their condition under any circumstances, let alone by someone they're going out on a limb to trust *and* paying thousands of euros to provide a service that is nearly impossible to access. I really wanted this relationship to be a positive and enduring one and to be able to work with Alice and Kerrie in the future but they absolutely must reevaluate their practices and intentions for the sake of their clients.