Learner
Therapist (49) … How much is a performance failure worth?
Torrey Orton
October 19, 2014
“A
misunderstanding can be a good place to start….”
…I wrote to a prospective client 19 years ago in concluding
my response to her justifiable irritation with my proposing to charge her for
something she had not imagined was chargeable. I went on…
“I am sorry that we have a misunderstanding
about fees, though on reflection I am not surprised. Please accept my apologies
for my contribution to that misunderstanding.”
It has been a principle of mine to acknowledge
mistakes, even perceived failures, in my professional life (and personal, too,
often enough). In therapy, it seems to me essential to do so since relationship
failures are the stuff of mental health matters and those failures often thrive
on unacknowledged misdeeds by the more powerful over the less. Learning to
acknowledge and ask for acknowledgment of perceived mistakes / failures is an
essential capability outcome of useable therapeutic development. It cannot be
learned when the pressure is on not to fail and not to acknowledge.
I concluded that
“The only charge for a service that has not
been perceived to be rendered can be nothing at all.”
I have occasionally run into colleagues who explicitly
counsel non-acknowledgment of perceived errors or missteps in therapy, and I
gather my professional organisation counsels that as well (perhaps an infection
of negligence suit paranoia in both cases?). It seems to me that counsel is a
recipe for a paranoid process which is the enemy of professional development.
The latter depends on conducting real practice undertaken for real purposes and
discovering that my judgment failed the patient’s need(s) at a certain time.
And the repair of failed efforts is usually a matter of slight adjustments of
tone and timing, which can only be practiced in real time.
So I added that
“Therefore
I am returning your cheque.”
One of my colleagues, my professional supervisor, has
with reason proposed that I do not make mistakes. That I do what I thought best
at the time and so they cannot be mistaken. An interesting line of approach
since it recognised that I do do what I think best at the time, and not lightly
so. Perhaps a call for more acknowledgement of successes?
And I closed with
“I look forward to working with you at any
time you may find useful in the future.”
This may seem a strange offer, but I still feel it
stands up to my understanding of best practice. This aspect has to do with not
assuming that an error is a death notice to a relationship. I have insisted on
making similar offers at times since then, even where the patient who bore my
mistake(s) was more mistaken than I.
My founding assumption is that it is always my
responsibility to ensure that all the relationship Ps and Qs are dotted and
crossed. It is my capacity for relationship design and execution that is what
patients are buying, and in that sense any mistake is mine first, even if it
was theirs. When their mistake is unexpected or, the reverse, it is perfectly
expected as a result of a design and /or implementation malfunction, it’s my
mistake.
By the way, the cost was only $80 lost income. A small
price.
