The Canceling of the American Psychotherapist

 

In my review of the book, The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff, I focused on a cultural shift on college campuses that has often led to an environment characterized by political correctness rather than free and open debate between opposing viewpoints. Groups have even turned on their own members for deviating ever so slightly from a “party line.” I discussed how this is one way that groupthink can manifest itself.

A  new book by Lukianoff and Schlot talks about how this situation has apparently gotten much worse, and has spread to other educational institutions and vocational venues such as journalism.

One of the most problematic ideas of groupthink on campuses has to do with the so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) philosophy. Of course, diversity, equality (of opportunity, not of outcome), and inclusiveness are virtuous and wonderful things when applied to individuals with all of their family and historical influences and experiences. Unfortunately, this has now morphed into defining people entirely by their ethnic group. Members of groups are either ALL victims (ALL black people) or ALL oppressors because they may have benefitted in some  way from their “advantages” (ALL white people). 

Apparently except for Jews, who have been just about the most oppressed group for the longest time over history but also somehow counted some of the world's most successful people among their numbers. This obvious rebuttal to “Critical Theory” has been solved by some people by seeing Jews as White colonialists, while by others seeing them as Colored. Whichever is convenient. These people are still trying to figure out how to classify Asian Americans who aren’t white but who are who also more successful on average than other American groups.

This is in fact exactly the opposite of what Martin Luthor King preached! He spoke of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

But no matter. The primary reason that I am reviewing this book is because this type of thinking has now spread to psychotherapy teaching programs! Your problems all now seem to originate, not from your family or personality or genetics, but from the fact that you are either an oppressor or a victim, according to your group identity, and you need to admit it! As the authors say, “It’s not about your problems. You are the problem.”  

Everything wrong with people is seen through this lens. Therapists are now lecturing patients who have “incorrect” political views. “Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies” has even been endorsed by the American Counseling Association. The American Psychological Association is beginning to follow suit. They endorse, for instance, the idea that the repression of feelings of males typically seen in many cultures (who, say, won’t cry), often modeled by parents, is an example of traditional masculinity invariably being “toxic.”

The authors of the Cancelling book believe that these approaches are counterproductive. They can cause patients to see themselves only as helpless victims, and discourage people who are automatically assumed to be perpetrators from seeking help. How do these therapists reconcile themselves to the fact that, in 2020, 70% of completed suicides were “privileged” white males (according to the American Suicide Foundation).

When I first read the chapter about psychology programs I was a little unsure how common this was, since I hadn't heard about it. But then I saw an advertisement for a book for therapists in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine. It was called Decolonizing Therapy by a PsyD named Jennifer Mullan. I quote from the ad: "Ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege (as a therapist, client, or both), and shying away from understanding how we may be participating in oppression is irresponsible." 

Well, I do believe a therapist has to understand what each family may have experienced in this regard to understand certain shared intrapsychic conflicts that are seen within a given family - but each family is unique. And hopefully the therapist is not acting out blatantly racist attitudes. To assume all white therapists are doing this is what is irresponsible.

Anyone who disagrees in some graduate programs is in high danger of being “cancelled” by fellow students. One student said the environment was so mean that a student who lost a family member to COVID was afraid to tell anyone lest they be told that they were crying “white tears” and lectured about how people of color were the real victims of the pandemic!

Now of course it is true that many people have been severely traumatized  by racial or group experiences and that such trauma can lead to psychopathology, but that is not the same as saying that other factors might not be equally or even more important.

This is a perfect example of one key feature of Groupthink: either/or or black and white thinking. No context, no subtlety. I recently had a negative personal experience with that type of thinking with psychology interns I used to lecture to. This one didn’t involve oppressors vs. victims, but there was a certain similarity in its misclassification scheme. And it’s something brand new.

I used to lecture them about borderline personality disorder (BPD). The interns came from the University of Tennessee Health Science center and another group of interns from the Memphis VA. Now admittedly I did discuss some of my own, outside-the-mainstream ideas, but I also discussed other current psychotherapy paradigms and theories about the disorder. 

After I retired, I was still invited back every year to give the talk. Then suddenly the person in charge who called me to do this stopped calling. It took me two or three years to find out why, but I finally was able to corner her. First the VA, and then the UT interns said they no longer wanted lectures about doctor’s individual practice experiences (mine was over 35 years), but only from people who did literature reviews or active researchers! 

This same type of thing was happening on my Psychology Today blog. One post I wrote was rejected because, they said, it was an opinion piece not based on research - when most of their posts are NOT research based. They just, for the first time in years, didn't like my opinion. So I stopped posting.

As readers of my blogs know, the literature in both psychotherapy and BPD is weak - and that's being generous. It is characterized by false assumptions, the fact that whole schools of therapy are evaluated but not the individual interventions which comprise them, the ignoring of many obvious impacting factors, and clinically-useless correlations between certain symptoms within one diagnoses or between two of them. People with a lot of clinical experiences in this area are a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than researchers. 

The interns even wanted solely literature-based reviews a about the treatment of transgendered patients, which has barely begun as a subject for any studies at all!

If a therapist is more interested in politics and your ethnic group than in you, drop them ASAP and find another therapist.

Book Review: The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

This highly recommended book addresses an extremely important issue: why the current climate we have in the States is characterized by increased and pathological polarization between various groups and subgroups, with each group vilifying the others. The authors also focus on a cultural shift on college campuses that has often led to an environment characterized by political correctness rather than free and open debate between opposing viewpoints. Groups can even turn on their own members for deviating ever so slightly from a “party line.”

The book is almost a textbook about certain processes that are characteristic of groupthink. Groupthink is when a group of people, in an effort to demonstrate harmony and unity, fail to consider alternative perspectives and ultimately adopts a shared narrative about the world which actively tries to keep out opposing viewpoints. 

Haidt, in a previous work reviewed here, pointed out that when groups of people who know each other share goals and values, this enhances “our ability to work together, divide labor, help each other, and function as a team is so all-pervasive we don’t even notice it.” He adds that “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by prolonged movement in unison that drilling involves.” 

However, sometimes groupthink goes way too far. Even supposedly objective scientists are not immune from overdoing it, which will be the subject of an upcoming book on groupthink in science I am co-editing for Springer.

Group process, in human psychology, is often at odds with our own brain’s ability to be selfish and think about what we want and believe instead of what others want us to want and believe. There is a war between individualist and collectivist tendencies within all of us. This idea is at the heart of my own therapy model, unified therapy. Its roots, in turn, are found in the model of family systems therapy formulated by Murray Bowen. 

His was the first, and is still seemingly the only other, therapy model that recognizes this basic conflict, which is found everywhere in nature. We are biologically programmed to, under certain environmental circumstances, sacrifice our own needs and beliefs – and even our very lives – for our kin or ethnic group.

The book discussed here looks at not only political correctness as an impediment for finding truth in the universe, but what they 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. He attributes this to the adoption by large numbers of people in the Western world, particularly in the States, of what he calls “three great untruths:”

1.      The untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

2.      The untruth of emotional reasoning: always trust your feelings.

3.      The untruth of Us versus Them: life is a battle between good people and evil people.

When I was growing up in the 1950’s, all of the children I knew were out riding their bicycles in the neighborhood, wandering freely over significant distances, and spending much of their time engaged in free play. Many of them walked or rode their bikes to school, and baby sitters hired by parents at night could be as young as 12. What a difference from today, when someone might call the police or child protective services on you for letting a 9 year old walk home from school without adult supervision! 

Ironically, the rate of child abductions and crimes against kids was no different then than it is today, but partly because of pictures of missing kids on milk cartons and also because of widespread illiteracy about probability, today’s parents are downright paranoid.

The effect is disastrous. Human beings are, in many but of course not always, what the authors term anti-fragile. Of course, if trauma is severe or frequent, children often become more fragile and fall apart emotionally more easily later on. However, as the authors point out, if they are not exposed to a certain amount of stressors and challenges, they do not seem to learn to tolerate adversity, adapt to stressful circumstances, and grow up. They get weaker. Some stress is good for you! 

This is a good illustration of what I call the “principle of opposite behaviors.” Two opposite but extreme approaches to life and parenting lead to the very same problem. In this case, people who act fragile. Parents who over-protect their children end up harming them and driving their emotional problems.

My view about the interpersonal processes involved here differs somewhat from that of the authors. I do not think these folks are usually as fragile as they might appear. I think they act that way because they believe that their parents need them to be that way so the parents can feel good about themselves.

Over-protective parenting has become epidemic in society. The authors go into several revealing reasons for this phenomenon, although they do not mention as one of these reasons what I believe to be a major contributor: Over the period from 1965 to today, the change in gender role expectations and the need for two career families has led parents to feel guilty about not being there as much for their kids. They make up for it by being overly solicitous. These guilty feeling are exacerbated by today's culture wars.

One of the odd things going on in college campuses lately stems directly from the parenting changes: the absurd emphasis on “triggers,” “microaggressions” and the need for “safe spaces.” What this means is that both the kids and the adults running the schools think that a kid can be literally traumatized by hearing someone’s conflicting opinion. Not just upset, annoyed or even angry about it, but literally traumatized. Scarred for life!

The professors who don’t believe this to be the case feel intimidated and fearful for their jobs if they challenge this belief, and so they usually remain silent. This has led to something akin to a “speech police.” Speakers are prevented from coming to campus by occasionally violent protesters, and well-meaning professors and administrators have been fired for using the wrong word in something they wrote. The authors give several truly frightening examples.

This culture is completely the opposite of the culture that led to the “free speech movement” at the University of California in Berkeley in the mid 1960’s. Human knowledge advances by the free exchange of ideas as well as challenges to those ideas. That idea used to be at heart of the philosophy of higher education in the United States, but in many cases it seems to have disappeared.

Particularly enlightening – and frightening – is the book’s chapter on witch hunts. These occur when “A community becomes obsessed with religious or ideological purity, and believes it needs to find and punish enemies within its own ranks in order to hold itself together” (p.99). If someone offers any kind of differing viewpoint, they become the enemy. Everything starts to reek of “Us versus Them,” and the idea that people are either good or evil, and everyone seems to assume the worst about almost everyone else.