Shattered: Deception, Betrayal, and Therapist Malpractice – a new book by Maura Muir

The following is a guest post from Maura Muir about her recently published book, Shattered: Deception, Betrayal, and Therapist Malpractice.

Shattered: Deception, Betrayal, and Therapist Malpractice is the story of the havoc one unethical therapist can create. It details how I became aware of the misconduct, the personally catastrophic results that stemmed from it and the lawsuit I brought against her.

When her actions led to my husband’s psychotic break and criminal domestic violence, I took legal action to protect my daughter, myself, and any future victims. The book focuses on over two crazy years I spent as a plaintiff in this bizarre malpractice suit. Nothing made sense until a brave man stepped forward to help me. He knew the truth about the therapist as he was married to her. He even knew the secret my husband had hidden for twenty-five years. My husband’s personal betrayal set the stage for all the professional betrayal that followed.

The book is a suspenseful legal and family drama stemming from trusting the wrong professional who, while a well-qualified, insurance approved PhD, was conscienceless. Underneath her mask of professional normalcy, lurked a dangerous woman. Unlike most civil defendants, she got increasingly menacing as the case progressed.

At first, my daughter and I were just collateral damage, but like most people with severe narcissistic personality disorder, the therapist went on the offense after she was called out on her behavior. Thus, we became the target of her narcissistic rage and a campaign of intimidation from her and her puppets, as well as her behemoth insurance company. As her behavior devolved, a mind-numbing stream of other predatory professionals from both the legal and the mental health field emerged. Eventually this escalated to assault, death threats, arrests and newspaper articles.

It’s a cautionary tale of good, or at least average, meets evil; a normal person placed in an abnormal situation. The evil involved not only the therapist but a culture of systemic legal corruption that re-victimizes the victim and endangers children. This is what happens when you thwart the hidden agenda of a severe narcissistic psychopath in a corrupt southern town. I did have a reasonably good outcome, so I’m told, and mostly held on to my quirky sense of humor and my sanity.

I was unwilling to further endanger myself by reporting the criminal activities and additional professional misconduct I witnessed. So, this book is an attempt to warn the public, in lieu of that. I don’t feel the behavior I saw is limited to the numerous crooked people that crossed my path, hence I’m not attempting to ‘out’ any individuals. It was so flagrant and widespread I feel sure this is the ‘cultural norm’ in my locale. The coyotes, alligators and sharks aren’t the only predators to be wary of in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Human professionals can be far more dangerous.

Everything in the book is true, but names and some other identifying characteristics have been changed. All conversations are substantially accurate, and any pejorative quotes are verbatim. There was no need to create any drama, the real experience had more than enough. At the outset, I couldn’t find any first-person accounts from a civil lawsuit plaintiff, nor similar stories of this combination of mental health professional misconduct. So now there’s at least one.

Shattered: Deception, Betrayal, and Therapist Malpractice is available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle editions. For more information about Maura and her book, check out her website at therapist-misconduct.org.