If you work in a facility that does restraints and someone gets seriously injured because you refused to go to hands on, you are risking a lot of ethical and legal issues too. Especially because, in my state, restraints are required to at least be authorized by a QMHP (usually the therapist) so you are going to have to be there and have a role anyways. If you feel this way, for god's sake, please don't work in higher levels of care.

I feel like you are just seeing restraints in a negative light. Of course they aren't fun and you shouldn't do them when they aren't necessary, but when they are needed, they are a very important part of keeping clients safe, both physically and emotionally.

As long as the restraints aren't be abused, you are disclosing to clients ahead of time that the facility does restraints and under what circumstances that would happen, you are de-escalating effectively in the moment and you have a solid debriefing, restraints remain a very effective tool for maintaining safety when there are no other options. In some instances, they can support the therapeutic relationship by reinforcing that you are going to keep them safe and that you aren't going to abandon the relationship due to a moment of escalation. The most common issue I experienced after a restraint is that the client thought I was going to be mad at them because of their behavior. It was very rare that a client would be mad at me because of the restraint. And in the rare instances where they were angry, we could usually work it out in the debriefing and we had the groundwork laid ahead of time in that they had full knowledge that restraints were a tool that we used and under what circumstances they would be used.

Alternatively, we did not do seclusions at my site because we didn't think they were necessary and felt that seclusion is actually more traumatizing and damaging than restraints.