A Family Cut-off as a Gift of Love

 

In my second book for psychotherapists, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, I discussed how therapists can uncover the hidden motives for dysfunctional behavior patterns by looking critically at what patients say about them as well as by looking at how the patient behaves while saying it. Ambiguity is inherent in all languages; any sentence and most words can mean two or more different things. Sometimes they can mean seemingly opposite things. To get an idea of how this can mislead you, take a look at clues in crossword puzzles. In one New York Times Sunday crossword, the clue was “unlocked.” The answer was “bald.” With patients discussing family issues, I usually found that the seemingly less obvious answer to the question of what something means turns out to be the right one. Thinking about that possibility then shaped my further questions.

I came across a good example where such might be the case in a recent column by advice columnist Dear Abby.

DEAR ABBY: As a young mother, I endured a difficult marriage filled with domestic abuse. In the midst of that turmoil, I struggled to be the parent my children needed. They are adults now, and I find myself distanced from them. It pains me deeply to know they want nothing to do with me. I can't help but feel I ruined their lives, and the weight of that thought is unbearable. I miss them dearly and long for the chance to reconnect and heal our relationship. I'm at a crossroads and unsure of how to move forward and mend the bonds that have been strained. I deeply regret my past mistakes and want to make things right, but I'm uncertain where to start. Thank you for your guidance. -- LOST

DEAR LOST: … I wish you had mentioned why you think you "ruined your children's lives." Were you physically or emotionally abusive? Did you abandon them? If that's what happened, reach out. Apologize and offer to join them in family counseling if they are willing. It might be a healthy first step toward reconciliation.

Of course we have no way of knowing for certain the reasons behind the cutoff between the writer and her adult children just from this letter. Most people, if they had to guess, would guess that they are angry at her for not protecting them from their abusive father.  I’m sure those kids would be somewhat angry if that were the case, but if I had to guess, I would say that it is not the main reason for the cutoff.  I would suspect that instead there’s a little “pathological altruism” going on here.

Mom’s letter practically reeks with references to the mother’s guilt over her parenting failures (“I can't help but feel I ruined their lives, and the weight of that thought is unbearable”). Usually in cases like this, I would strongly suspect that the mother flagellates herself for her failings in front of them quite a bit whenever she sees them, just like she does in a letter that might be published. They may feel that Mom's misery is their fault. They may avoid seeing and communicating with her to avoid making her feel even worse than she already does. Staying away from her would then seemingly protect her from some of these “unbearable” guilt trip she puts herself through.  They might think they are doing her a favor with what is called “A gift of love.”

Unfortunately, the children avoiding her like this does her more harm than good. She’s already feeling a ton of guilt anyway, and now she’s now cut off from her children to boot! And as much as the kids dislike Mom,s overwhelming guilt, they really would like a better relationship with their mother. As a therapists, I worked with patients on strategies for empathically addressing such interactions and putting a stop to them.

Book Review: The Origins of You by Vienna Pharaon

 

My “Unified Therapy” psychotherapy model, which I’ve been writing about since the publication of my first book in 1988, is meant to treat people who engage in repetitive self-destructive and self-defeating behavior, particularly in relationship contexts. You know, like people who marry one alcoholic or narcissist after another. While looking at their past is essential – in fact I look back three generations to find out why my patients, and their parents and grandparents, act the way they do – what’s even more important is what goes on in the present.

I found that people were acting out roles in their families to stabilize their parents, not for selfish reasons, and were suppressing who they really would want to be if left to their own devices. We all have a tendency to do this due to the effects of an evolutionary process called kin selection. We can choose to do otherwise, but if we do we become subject to terror when our families invalidate us.

Family roles are something modern day therapists pay almost no attention to, so when a book comes out that addresses dysfunctional behavior that dates back to family processes in childhood, I’m keen to read it. The Origins of You by therapist Vienna Pharaon is such a book. She looks at her clients' repetitive dysfunctional behavior in their relationships  as a way for them to feel safe because of earlier interactions with parents. She looks for ways that people do things like act like doormats in relationships – or go to opposite extremes and constantly try to dominate other people.

She addresses five needs from which these behaviors arise, which she says derive from what she calls “origin wounds.” She notes that her clients who had previous therapists often had not mentioned them. The needs which lead to these origin wounds are:

1.       I want to fell worthy.

2.     I want to belong

3.     I want to be prioritized.

4.     I want to trust

5.     I want to feel safe.

After review their childhood history, she uses a lot of popular techniques which are basically supposed to lead to behavior changes after insight into these wounds is achieved, and then has her clients monitor their behaviors for those which lead to conflicts, communication problems, and lack of boundaries. Then they talk about what changes need to be made.

The author claims a fair amount of success doing this, which I don’t doubt. She talks about emotionally abusive parents and a little about physically abusive ones, and domestic violence in the family. But not very much about severe physical abuse and neglect or child sexual abuse which families have refused to acknowledge. In my experience, clients like those who follow the recommendations here would be subject to massive invalidation by their families, which I found eventually and (almost always) undid any positive changes they had made from the type of therapy described in the book.

To her credit, the author does say that these problematic patterns are learned in the family and passed down to subsequent generations. And that the parents also have their own origin wounds, with which I totally agree.

But there are two issues that I (but almost no other therapists) have with her ideas. First, aren’t these people really aware at some level of what they are doing, even when they won’t admit it - even to themselves? Second, are they really protecting themselves, or are they altruistically sacrificing themselves for their parents?

On the first issue, the author does seem to come closer to my point of view in the text and with a couple of her clients. She mentions that a dysfunctional path “is easily recognizable, but sometimes hides in plain sight.” A client named Amir could clearly describe what he was doing but claimed to have no idea why. A long time ago I came to the conclusion that people are not stupid or blind about this, but acted as it they were. To understand what’s going on in my view, check out these posts on a groupthink process called willful blindness.

On the second issue, it’s hard to believe that clients are acting this way because they are protecting themselves, when the patterns are obviously bring them much pain. (There is one selfish motive mentioned above: the phenomenon of existential groundlessness). But as I have said, they are sacrificing their own needs to help maintain family stability.

Which also means that the process going on with the parents continues well into adulthood. The author seems to know this on some level but does not talk a lot about the response of their parents to new changes in the client’s behavior, so it’s hard to judge if she thinks this happens very often. Near the end of the book she does mention only briefly the risk that her clients maybe be “judged, shamed, rejected, or even disowned.”

In general, the author describes these patterns and how to conceptualize them very well, along with techniques which may lead to significant behavioral changes in some families where massive invalidation is far less likely that in those producing offspring with severe personality disorders. 

Willpower, Groupthink, and the Disease Model for Everything

Columbine School Shooting, public domain 

When addicts say, "I can quit using any time I want to," people usually laugh at them and accuse them of being "in denial." I, on the other hand, believe they are telling the truth. Since they are admitting they don't want to quit, they aren't denying anything. Of course, the big question is why they don't want to quit. It can't be because the substance is making them feel good. They are generally some of the most miserable and unhappy people around.

So maybe they have some genetic defect that causes a “disease” that impairs their self control? While it is true that genetic tendencies can make someone a bit more or less likely to engage in certain behaviors, the majority of these effects are relatively small. 

If genes were causing the problem, one wonders how 12 Step Programs, which are based on religious conversion techniques that demonize people’s ability to make good choices for themselves and ask people to surrender to group norms and do what they are told, would ever succeed. Last I heard, changing your religion does not lead to major changes in one’s genome. Or its physiological effects.

I suspect the group’s views and where their ideas come from have something to do with the addict’s problems. Before they quit, they are proving the group’s opinions about the evils of willfulness, and after they quit they are proving the group’s belief system once again, but in a different way.

And is it really true that they can’t control their urges? Does an alcoholic actively engaged in drinking and driving usually take a big swig of Jack Daniels just when a cop pulls up in the lane next to them? Well, I suppose some might, but I suspect that such individuals are again going out of their way to prove their group’s idea that their willfulness is creating their problems. But most will keep the bottle hidden. So I guess they can control their urges even while intoxicated with their favorite beverage.

And of course, as I have previously pointed out, animal models of alcoholism are generally poor because scientists can’t seem to find any rats that hide the bottles. And the bottles that people hide are almost always found eventually. Usually  by spouses and family members. Imagine that.

Another point: Non-academic people in the addiction discussion also talk a lot about how co-dependency and enabling spouses and relatives are part of the problem in someone’s addiction (see Al-Anon), but somehow today’s scientists seem to think these other folks have nothing to do with the addict's problems. Really?? In what alternate universe?

I find it impressive how today’s psychology academics seem to go to any extent to avoid looking at dysfunctional family dynamics as a major cause of behavior that is destructive to one’s self or others. For another example, look at speculation about the causes of the recent spike in students committing mass shootings at schools. If the role of the parents is looked at at all, it seems that their only role is giving their kids access to weapons and ignoring danger signs, but not in creating the environment conducive to motivating their children to act that way in the first place.

Now of course having access to assault weapon is a prerequisite for committing these crimes, but what about the literally millions of homes in the United States in which such guns are found? If the presence of guns were the only problem, these shootings would have been going on at the current frequency for the past decades and decades.  For a similar reason, even overt child abuse alone cannot explain the shootings, as the vast majority of abused children do no such things. There has to be other things going on in these families. What, for example, are the parents saying to these kids and to each other, and how are they reacting in general to kids who start to have fantasies of violence? 

One of the Columbine shooters in the above picture literally collected an arsenal of weapons in his house prior to the act. When interviewed by the press, his mother said she didn't know about it. I wonder how the shooter interpreted the fact that his mother apparently pretended to not even notice the obvious.

No one seems to be asking these essential questions. Sad.

Blame, Guilt, and Family Dysfunction

public domain

 

When I discuss family dysfunction, the question of “who’s to blame”– the adult children or their parents – frequently arises. Emotions then tend to run wild. I believe this is the wrong question. The fact is that all family members are beans in the same soup, acting out patterns that have been building up for generations and are being passed down. The right question should always be, “How do we FIX this?”

The question of blame is often the subject of vehement defensive reactions by the community of parents in the US, who gripe about anyone who engages in“ parent blaming” and “parent bashing.” They want to believe that they have absolutely nothing to do with their children’s problems, which they like to think are all genetic or all caused by peer groups at school.

Many mental health practitioners have sided with these nonsensical ideas. I’ve written before about a time when, at a nearby child and adolescent psychiatric hospital, juvenile delinquency and even suicidal thoughts were blamed entirely on heavy metal music. That way, parental guilt could be assuaged so they would pay for their kids to get “treated” for listening to Judas Priest. Well, at least until their insurance ran out.

So are these folks saying that even physical and sexual abuse by parents has nothing to do with children’s insecurities? Or their acting out? Even here, the answer seems to be a sort of yes – people falsely opining that the incidence of this abuse is actually minimal and that almost all of these accusations of such are false. Really?

It is true that if a therapist makes a parent feel guilty, they are less likely to look critically at their own parenting practices or seek help, so therapists have to figure out a way around this paradox. My therapy model attempted to do just that with patients who were adult children facing this conundrum.

I have also written about the massive increase in recent years in parental guilt caused by cultural changes in gender roles. In reaction, this has led to an epidemic of so-called helicopter parenting. That this type of interaction is a major correlate of adolescent depression, which means probably with the rate of suicide as well, has been recently demonstrated in studies (for example: Wattanatchariya K, Narkpongphun A, Kawilapat S. The relationship between parental adverse childhood experiences and parenting behaviors. Acta Psych. 2024(243).  While correlation and causation are two different things, I believe on the basis of my wide clinical experience that in this case these studies are indeed about causation.

Another complication of parent guilt was described in the 2/27/24 column by advice columnist Carolyn Hax.  A mother described herself as being wracked with guilt because her teenage children suffered from anxiety and depression, despite her and her spouse loving them immeasurably and doing their best every day to support, listen to and nurture them. Ms. Hax of course tried to tell her that she did not screw up because “kids everywhere are having an extraordinarily difficult time right now” and that “depression and anxiety are way up, stress is up, mental health resources are strained, and schools are overburdened, underfunded and understaffed.”

My fear is that Ms. Hax’s advice for her to stop beating herself will fall on deaf ears. As I have described in previous posts, parental guilt has become more widespread, and parents often feed into the guilt of other parents – especially if the parents try to set limits with their kids instead of helicoptering. I can recall other families giving us a hard time when we wouldn’t give our kids away at college unlimited funds to do whatever they wanted.

Besides stopping parents from setting appropriate limits with their kids or disciplining them properly, another big problem is one that I have seen clinically but which is not described in the mental health literature: the kids see their parents feeling guilty all the time even when there is no obvious reason for it, and take this to mean that their parents need to feel guilty. They may therefore act like they are more impaired than they actually are so that the parents can continue to indulge this need. The fact that the guilt remains omnipresent in this situation confirms their beliefs!

In a column the very next day, Ms. Hax answered a letter in which a wife in an abusive relationship will not leave for fear of harming the kids.  The letter says “But I read so much about how kids thrive in stable families and are damaged by splits or divorces other than in highly abusive situations. My partner is not physically abusive but checks a lot of other boxes: yelling, vicious anger  name-calling, silent treatments.”

How anyone can possibly believe that subjecting kids to this sort of abuse is better for them than coping with their feelings about a parental divorce is beyond me. And kids are smart enough to wonder about that themselves. So how do they then interpret Mom’s refusal to leave? Perhaps mom is using the kids as some sort of excuse because deep down she thinks she needs or deserves her husband’s abuse? I know that sounds bizarre, but you would be surprised.

In fact, although obviously I can’t say in this particular case on the basis of a letter to an advice columnist, there may even be an element of truth in this idea. The answer to what might be going on can often be obtained by a therapist using the Adlerian question: “What would be the downside of successfully getting out of this bad relationship?” A common answer: "My parents would blame me and tell me I should go back to him and be a better wife." I kid you not! Maybe because those parents themselves are in a similar relationship. If so, we’d have to find out whether this is indeed the case, and then ask the Adlerian question to the grandparents about why they continue their relationship.

When people feel guilty, it leads to defensiveness, which can lead to fight, flight or freeze reactions which cut off conversations about how to solve problems. Since the problems go back many generations, I have always suggested that we just put the blame on Adam and Eve, and be done with it.

 

 

 

 

 

New Podcast, Part II. Family Dysfunction Effects Not "All in Your Head"

New podcast, Part II, discusses my family dysfunction model in more detail. Your problems with it are not "all in your head."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjG5LbV26ps

The Foster Care to Homelessness Pipeline

 

In a previous post, I discussed one big reason for the increase in tent cities for the homeless: the defunding of critical parts of the mental health safety net. In this post, I’m going to talk about another one: unplaceable foster children who age out of the system.

I was first made aware of this problem by a counselor in Texas. Then I noticed a headline that said much the same thing she described was going on in California. According to the counselor, some residential treatment facilities have recently been closed by the governor of Texas. The ostensible reason was that there were accusations made against people there of abusing children, but instead of fixing that problem, they closed them down.

Unplaced foster children there may now live in unregulated rentals, on the floors of churches, in some donated spaces or in hotel rooms. At one place, girls aged 12-20 don’t go to school, don’t have rules or clean up. The place itself is usually filthy. The girls are also allowed internet access so they often “run away” to meet various men, and most aren’t on birth control.  

Meanwhile, in California, things are just as bad. According to reporting by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, hundreds of Los Angeles’s county’s abused children ended up in hotels like the Biltmore Hotel downtown. In December 2021, the then-director of the city’s child welfare agency quietly struck a deal with the hotel’s operators to house foster youths and their social workers at the cost of $89 a night.

The children placed in the hotels are usually among those with some of the most significant untreated trauma and the gravest histories of violence. Though group homes frequently have security and teams of staff members, children in the hotels have often been supervised by a single social worker, sometimes with scant knowledge of their backgrounds, little training to de-escalate potential violence and no on-site colleagues when things go wrong, according to DCFS policy documents. Assaults on staff members are not unusual.

In two cases, in particular, the kids ran away from an unregulated placement and ultimately died in shootings.

Many children are put into the foster system after being removed from an unsafe home. This can mean that children all over the country are entering the foster care system who may have had parents who were drug addicts, abusers, or criminals and are prone to acting out and violence, which makes them nearly impossible to place in foster homes. When they turn 18, they are no longer wards of the state and many are then out on the street.

According to the National Foster Care Institute, after aging out of foster care, approximately 20% of former foster youth will experience homelessness.

Contact with Toxic Parents: Ambivalence Reigns

 

There are a plethora of self-help books out, including the one I wrote (pictured above), advising adult children of toxic parents on what to do. Some recommend cutting them off, some recommend keeping them at a distance, some recommend trying to set better boundaries, some talk about whether reconciliation is possible or not, and a few of them say it depends on the nature of the problems.

My own view, as most of my readers know, is to solve the problem of ongoing toxic parental behavior by researching the family history to identify shared internal conflicts, the reasons for them, and the effect of ambivalent double messages throughout at least three generations on everyone involved. Then, the object is to confront the issue head on by developing various strategies to empathically get past parents’ formidable defenses and come to some mutual understanding of why everyone is so miserable and what can be done to stop repetitive dysfunctional interactions. The goal is not reconciliation  per se but problem solving. Reconciliation and forgiveness is, however, however, a typical byproduct.

The psychotherapy research literature has had very little to say about this. It does come up in opinion pieces in such magazines as Psychology Today or The Psychotherapy Networker.

I think this whole question is a much bigger issue than it appears to be, and is a major cause of self-destructive or self defeating behavior, anxiety and unhappiness. How do I know? Well, a few years ago I started reading newspaper advice columns on the internet from four different advisors: Carolyn Hax, Amy Dickerson, Annie Lane, and Dear Abby. In order to maintain their readership, these columnists have to identify which letters are going to lead to a lot of public interest. If subjects pop up a lot, one might conclude that the problems discussed are very common.

And letters about this issue are exceeding common. People are constantly asking how to solve ongoing behavior from parents that is driving them crazy, whether they should reconcile with parents that have been already been cut off, whether to cut off toxic parents, guilt over a decision already made regarding a cut off, how to set boundaries, whether to reveal a history of child abuse to siblings and children, and how to stand up to parents without being disowned. My count of letters like this in the four columns was 28 in 2021 and 12 through April of this year. And I’m not even counting all the letters from parents who have been cut off by their children for “mysterious” reasons as I described in two previous posts.

Some writers are writing to justify their decisions on this matter, but their ambivalence about whatever decision they have made is just blaring. If they think their decision was so good, why are they writing about it? Some even want to warn people to watch out for therapists who recommend reconciliation, shouting the benefits of cut-offs from the rooftops. Do they think every situation is the same? And why do they feel the need to shout this out by writing to an advice columnist.

As I have said many times, cutting off an abusive parent is better than continued abuse, but those are not the only two options. My book discusses the third option for cases that do not involve significant physical or sexual abuse, and my psychotherapy model is for therapists to help all kinds of cases no matter how severe. The methods are not quick fixes, and the therapy is long term and often either not paid for by insurance or just flat out unavailable, since this therapy model has unfortunately not caught on. So the best solution can be very out of reach.

However, the danger of ongoing cut offs AND continuing abuse and toxicity is that the interpersonal and intrapsychic (in the mind) issues are not resolved but continuously reinforced by ANY family contact and consequently are seldom sufficiently repaired. Not to mention that the risks of passing them on to your own kids is quite high. 

The high degree of ambivalence about making or having made these decisions regarding ongoing contact shows how important family really is to just about everyone

I am Answering Reader Questions about Dealing with Difficult Parents on This Website

ASK David Allen how to cope with dysfunctional parents

Psychwire.com

https://psychwire.com/ask/topics/102htrn/ask-david-allen-how-to-cope-with-dysfunctional-parents

Review: the Netflix documentary Pray Away

 

This post is the second about media describing organizations that practice a hateful form of groupthink. The Netflix documentary Pray Away focuses on gay adult Christians who used to preach and embody gay conversion therapy ideals to other gay adults. They led various organizations with their destructive idea of family, faith, and freedom. (The film is not about gay “conversion” psychotherapy of minors, which is another, even more despicable manifestation of this movement). Many of such people have embraced the idea that homosexual urges are part of a psychological problem, a result of some trauma or of some negative relationship with a parent, rather than something natural.

Many of the people interviewed in this documentary fell hook, line and sinker into these teachings while hiding their own backstories of self hatred. They are given screen time to now confess to how all of it was a painful lie. 

The movie profiles several of those people who and acted as advocates to make people "ex-gay." John was a major public advocate for gay conversion who appeared in Newsweek with his “ex-lesbian” wife—and reveals here that it was all a charade. He couldn’t admit, even to himself, to his continuing attraction to other men.

Michael created Exodus, the first gay conversion organization in the late 1970's. The film showed an auditorium full of smiling young adherents to this group under a poster exclaiming, "Join the Movement!" 

Julie became a public speaker as a young woman, with her highly articulate stories about how she had successfully rid herself of her lesbian feelings, with seemingly logical arguments for her past efforts to do so. She did not stop doing this until confronted by certain misbehavior from her former cohorts, and eventually renounced them and married another woman.

Their institutions, similar to the ones described in my previous post about the book Stolen, prey upon people's self-loathing, self-denigration, and desires to be accepted by their families and their churches. Prey away!

The irony here is that the parents who previously rejected these children is that, if in fact homosexuality is somehow a bad choice, and/or is a result of a bad relationship with parents, then the parents who rejected them on these grounds are admitting that they were crappy parents who raised a child who made bad decisions! But as we all know, the definition of the word “contradiction” is: something which such people pretend they don’t understand.

 

Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

 

A startling and fascinating new book and an equally mesmerizing new Netflix documentary look at organizations which are designed to destroy people’s self actualization and their true selves in favor of a particularly monstrous form of groupthink. As the author of Stolen says, attendees were supposed to become like bees in a hive. Both of these groups twisted religion and psychotherapy to the point that they are almost unrecognizable.

One, the one described in the book, was even worse than the other, if that’s even possible, because it attacked and destroyed children: so called “schools” for “troubled” kids. At least the one described in the documentary was aimed at adults who were willing participants.

This post will be about the book, while the doc will be described in the next one. Stolen, was written by a woman who, when she was 15 years old, was a star high school athlete in two sports and an A student—but was nonetheless labeled as a disturbed troublemaker by her highly critical and often absent father and a hyper-religious mother who spent a lot of her time reading the Bible. Gilpin doesn’t describe any physical or sexual abuse in her home, but strongly implies that her parents, particularly her Dad, were verbally abusive and highly invalidating. Her Mom would support her privately but then always side with the Dad when the family was together.

She had started running away when she was only five, and later began partying with high school friends to avoid being home. She was also admittedly very angry and at times returned the father's verbal abuse, and she did dabble in alcohol and pot a few times. But the book doesn’t really describe in detail why she was so angry, although she did accuse her parents of never believing her. Oddly, the parents entirely discounted their own parenting as a factor in her behavior and never seem to wonder what made her like she was. At one point during her stay at the school, her father wrote a letter that said, “I’m glad that you’ve been able to accept that you’re ultimately to blame for your own anger.”

She was suddenly taken away by strangers in the middle of the night and sent to a “therapeutic” boarding school run by an organization called CEBU, which was anything but therapeutic. For the first three months, the teens were made to hike over and over again to a bunch of different campsites in the middle of the woods and were subject to physical abuse, such as being made to keep marching even after the group was attacked by a hive of bees and had multiple stings. They weren’t allowed to shower and were given crap to eat. They were monitored constantly and communication between the victims was highly restricted.

They were then transferred to a high school which had various exercises that were designed after something we Californians were aware of in the sixties and seventies called the Synanon Games, a twisted version of AA. More on Synanon at the end of the post.

During these games the teens were subject to vicious verbal attacks from the people running the school, and also forced to attack one another in the same way. For the high crime of having engaged in a sex act, for example, the girls were called sluts and whores who were desperately seeking attention (because they were starved of it at home perhaps?). With the boys, however, the prevailing attitude was “boys will be boys.” 

Gilpin was still a virgin at the time, but was immediately told she was a liar when she said that. She was accused of being a drug addict and an alcoholic despite her limited behavior in this regard. If a student denied being an addict, they were immediately accused of being “in denial.”

If she told the truth, it never seemed to be bad enough for the counselors, so she began to just make stuff up. Clearly she wasn’t the only one of the teens who felt they had to do that. If the teens rebelled, they were punished severely. Once when she threw up she was forced to eat her own vomit. They were threatened with being transferred to an even worse facility, masquerading as a hospital, if they did not fall in line.

Clearly the program was an exercise in degradation designed to stamp out any semblance of individuality. Gilpin said that the more self hating she seemed, the more she was praised for “doing good work.” In reality, both her parents and the school were victim blaming, scapegoating her for her own abuse at their hands. One of her friends there later committed suicide.

Interestingly, even after she “graduated,” she did not tell her parents exactly what took place at the school. At least she did not write about doing so. She described herself as letting her anger with them take over, doing nothing but shouting at them about how f’d up they were for sending her to such an awful place. IMO, in doing this, she was actually providing her parents with justification for their having sent her there in the first place. Protecting them to an extent, just as I suspect she was doing by not describing in more detail in the book the way they had been treating her that made her want to run away so badly.

Synanon was initially a drug rehabilitation program founded by Charles E. Dederich in 1958 in Santa Monica, California. By the early 1960s, Synanon became an alternative community - later labeled a cult - centered on group truth-telling sessions that came to be known as the Synanon Game, a form of attack therapy. 

Attack therapy involves highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group. Attack therapy "attempts to tear down the patient's defenses by extreme verbal or physical measures."

Synanon ultimately became the Church of Synanon in the 1970s. Synanon disbanded in 1991 due to members being convicted of criminal activities (including attempted murder) and retroactive loss of its tax-free status with the Internal Revenue Service due to financial misdeeds, destruction of evidence, and terrorism. It has been called one of the “most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen." Mel Wasserman, influenced by his Synanon experience, founded the CEDU's schools which used the confrontation model of Synanon. 

The CEDU model was widely influential on the development of parent-choice, private-pay residential programs. People originally inspired by their CEDU experience developed or strongly influenced a significant number of the schools in the therapeutic boarding school industry.

When You Can Never Be Content If You’re Contented

 

I could find somebody   new somebody who'd be true

But honey I'm stickin' to you just to torture myself

Say it out loud I'm sick and I'm proud

~ Kacey Jones, “Just to Torture Myself”

Way back in March of 2012, I wrote a post about members of couples who complain about a lack of affection from their long-term partners, and in response quoted advice columnist Amy Dickenson: "In relationships, if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." I opined that, because these people continue to either put up with or needlessly inflict frustration on their partners, then each member of the couple believes the other member of the couple really wants the relationship to continue in its current form no matter how much they may complain about it.

Each member of the couple discounts their own compulsive behavior as indicating that they, too, want the current parameters of the relationship to continue because they are playing a role in their own family of origin that requires denying that they are playing that role. For a fuller explanation, see this post. In actuality, both members of the couple are highly ambivalent about making any changes. They really do hate the current situation, but this negative feeling dwarfs in comparison to their fear of having a better one, due to anticipated consequences to their respective families-of-origin.

Does this state of affairs also pertain to relationships that are chronically and significantly neglectful or abusive, or to those characterized by repeated infidelity, rather than just to those that are merely chronically frustrating? Absolutely. The ability of people to put up with ongoing pain in these situations is impressive. People who do that often act as if they are too stupid or evil to even know that this is what’s going on, but those appearances are con jobs.

This can easily be seen in two letters recently published in the Ask Annie advice column:

6/4/21. Dear Annie: I have dated a guy for the last six years, always long-distance. I have loved this man with my whole heart. The issue is we have not met each other's families. He has never met my kids and doesn't even want to. He will not acknowledge our relationship on his social media profiles. His parents know nothing of me. We do not spend holidays or birthdays together. We do not go on dates. The last time we saw each other in person was two years ago. He barely even texts me. There is always an excuse as to why he is unavailable. Yet he claims that he loves me. I just don't get it. I want to leave, but I care about him so much. What do I do? -- Mixed Signals

6/5/21. Dear Annie: I met a man about four years ago. We started dating a week after we met, upon his insistence. Well, after we were together a year, I found out that he was messaging with a girl online and had been for several months. She didn't want him. Then, a month after that, I heard he cheated on me with someone from work who was in her early 20s, the same age as his daughter. I confronted him, but he refused to admit he was guilty. However, I've caught him exchanging sexual messages with a couple of other girls online since then. He says he's never actually hooked up with them in person. I guess my question for you is, is it worth trying to keep this man in my life? I love him, and he says he loves me, but part of me is no longer in love with him. If I'm being honest, I've felt this way ever since I heard of his cheating with that young woman. What do you think, Annie: Should I set him on the curb on trash day? My heart is telling me to stay, but my mind is wanting me to tell him to get lost. -- Confused Girlfriend

Of course, in both cases the advice columnist advised breaking off the relationship. In other cases, advice columnists have also recommended psychotherapy if the letter writer couldn’t seem to do that.

I submit that both of these letter writers already knew exactly what the advice columnist would recommend, but are just acting so stupid that they can’t see the obvious. In fact, I would guess that they both will stay in the relationship anyway, giving the partner even more evidence that that is what they really wanted to do all along! I mean, how could they not know what advice they would get. The way they word their letters practically begs for that ever-so-obvious advice.

If I were seeing them in therapy, hearing this would be the perfect opportunity for me to ask the Adlerian question: So what would be the downside of being in a relationship with someone who was actually there for you?

Parenting Critic John Rosemond

In my post of 10/23/18, I reviewed Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. This book looks not only at political correctness as an impediment for finding truth in the universe, but what the authors see as a related issue: why the rates of depression, anxiety, drug abuse and suicide have been rapidly increasing in college-aged kids and others over the last few years.

They document the rise on campuses of efforts to “protect” students from “microaggressions” and the need for “safe spaces” and other such nonsense, assuming that exposure to other opinions and the occasional ethnocentric or racist comment, even offhandedly, is some sort of psychological trauma.

This seems to be the culmination of a major change in typical parenting styles that began in the 1970’s that has been brilliantly documented by psychologist and columnist John Rosemond. He discusses how parents now seem to treat their children as equals whose opinions on and feelings about everything are just as valid as those of adults, and are somehow not reactions to parents refusing to set appropriate limits with them. 

He believes, as I do, that the relationship between the parents should be the most important one in the house, not the relationship between either parent and a child (although of course the latter relationships sometimes have to take precedence). This has the effect of making children act out and actually feel worse about themselves, in addition to not taking other people’s rights and feelings into account as often as they should.

Basically, he is accusing such parents of being chronic enablers interfering with their child’s development of independence and responsibility. He takes a lot of heat for saying this, just as I do (to a much smaller degree since I have a much smaller audience). He is accused of “parent bashing.” When asked about this, he says he is indeed a parent basher and is proud of it.

He blames a lot of these parenting problems on advice from the mental health community as well as their invention of psychiatric pseudo-diseases. Even picky eating has been turned into a mental disorder  - Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID).

Rosemond is one of my heroes. He was kind enough to give me a positive blurb for my book on family dysfunction and mental disorders. He is the author of a quote I frequently steal from him, "Taking responsibility for something and self-blame are horses of two entirely different colors. The former is empowering; the latter is paralyzing."

I totally agree with the vast majority of his opinions.

Of course, there are some areas on which we don’t see eye to eye. He does not write about how cultural developments have led to a lot of the parenting changes of which he writes - e.g., the high prevalence of guilty yet angry parents due to the culture wars. IMO, the problematic changes are not just due to bad advice from the Dr. Spocks of the world. 

He over-generalizes about all psychiatric diagnoses not actually being diseases because they are not accompanied by clear-cut, easily-seen brain pathology. Actually, this is due to our limited knowledge of very complex brain circuitry. And he seems to think that screen time per se is more detrimental to young children than I might think it is, as I focus more on how any damage from too much screen time is more a reflection of what happens when parents do not set limits than it is of any direct effect. 

But no matter. The world needs more people like Dr. Rosemond.