Psychofraud Quotation #1:
CBT relies on a patient buying the therapist’s perspective of the patient. Good psychotherapy exists where the opposite happens: psychotherapists are trained to understand the patient’s perspective. In CBT the patient must therefore be ‘socialised’ [made to believe in and comply with] the CBT model in order for it to have any effect; thus paralleling the religious fundamentalist who declares the sinner must accept the dogma to be saved. CBT does not respect the individual’s original point of view and need to make sense of his/her experiences.
Psychofraud Quotation #2:
You’ll know what passive-aggression is if you’ve ever come away from a conversation feeling bad about yourself without knowing why. This can take the form of a variety of manipulations that begin to undermine your confidence in your own experience. . . .
It is of course worth reading Psychofraud‘s complete posts – they say a great deal of what I have been saying about Reeducation, and more concisely – and her complete blog for that matter. I have never gone to classic CBT but I believe many people here are CBT influenced now, whether they claim to be CBT-ites or not.
Orange Quotation:
Al-Anon, the A.A. auxiliary for the other family members, is itself a good candidate for the title of “spiritual disease”. It practices battering, just like a cruel, vicious, wife-battering husband:
First, the husband is friendly and loving, but then he turns on his wife and threatens and beats her.
Just when the wife is ready to leave, the battering husband reverts to being loving and reassuring, telling the wife that things will be better in the future and that he didn’t really mean it and he loves her.
Then, when the wife stays, the husband soon reverts to attacking and beating her again. Then, just when the wife is ready to leave, the battering husband reverts to being loving and reassuring again.
Eventually, the battered wife is so paralyzed by confusion and fear that she doesn’t know if she is coming or going.
A.A. and Al-Anon foist the same back-and-forth routine on their victims:
First you are good, then you are bad, then you are good, then you are bad…
You are powerful, then you are powerless. First you are powerful and responsible for your own fate, and responsible for your quitting drinking, and then you are powerless and your will power is useless…
You are not responsible for what was done to you…. Then you are guilty of all kinds of defects and sins… Then you are not responsible… And then you are guilty…
First it’s a disease over which you are powerless, and then you are a sinner who is selfish and self-seeking and manipulative and dishonest and self-centered….
In the Al-Anon 3rd Step, “God” supposedly loves you so much that He will take care of your will and your life for you, and solve all of your problems forevermore, just because you demand that He do so. That builds up your ego and gives you delusions of grandeur where you imagine that God is your butler, waiting on you hand and foot.
But then the 4th through 7th Steps, where you make long lists of everything that is wrong with you, and dwell on it and confess it all to man and God, just continue the routine of having an angry alcoholic father constantly criticizing everything that you do, tearing you down, destroying your ego and your self-respect, and making you feel guilty about everything.
It is really worth following the link and reading what Orange says in the passage of which this quotation is only the beginning. Like Psychofraud, he says much of what I have been saying about Reeducation in the past year and a half, but more concisely. I recommend his entire book.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I know a group of men who all belong to the same AA chapter. They are miserable most of the time. I used to think it was because they were ex heavy drinkers, but now in the light of what you say here I’m wondering if they aren’t suffering from belonging to a cult.
I had an alcohol habit at one time years ago. I stopped drinking for six months and kicked it. Now I drink occasionally. Last night I poured myself a half glass of wine and decided I didn’t want it after all and poured it in the sink. If I had associated such behavior with “sin” and weakness, I don’t think I could be a happy person. If I had to go to some meeting and say I had been tempted by alcohol, I could get all wound up about my behavior. If someone said to me once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, that would keep preoccupied with alcohol, I think.
But I may be naive. I’m not an addict type.
Similarly, Adult Children of Alcoholics and Alateens cannot abstain from being children of alcoholics; once you are born one, you’re stuck with it for life. So ACOA literature has a funny new statement:
Anyone who comes to ten meetings has begun an irreversible process of recovery. Everything in that person’s life becomes part of the recovery process, regardless of how chaotic it looks or feels.
An ACOA recruiting pamphlet
Say what? That is nonsensical psycho-babble. Just go to ten meetings, and everything will be magically, irreversibly, fixed at some later date?
[emphasis mine]
This, above, sounds remarkably similar to my father’s version of Christianity, which he once again expounded recently. It seems that certain people have a psychological need to believe that no matter how chaotic things around them may seem, that everything is actually in a process of improving. hmm. So, this was precisely the viewpoint he announced to me, and the need to connect chaos with ‘god’s will’ must be very strong.
oh, I was trying to emphasise the sentence that spoke about chaos.
—
Anyway, the example my father gave was of meeting a black Zimbabwean in Australia, who had to leave Zimbabwe to get an education overseas. My father saw this, for some reason, as a sign that things were generally improving, because, he could not have imagined a black Zimbabwean getting any sort of education in the past.
My father also thinks that global warming may be the key to certain kinds of improvement — prompting space travel.
He believes his own erratic and angry outbursts are signs of “love” for those at whom he is angry.
And so on…
Anyway, my father seems to bunch all of his sense of angry impotence together under an umbrella principle of fatalism, and call this his “Christianity”, which, he asserts, has been his guiding principle throughout his life. And if I laugh at this — because this principle of chaos is so highly damaging psychologically as well as materially (global warming as inspiration??!) — then I am put into my place for not being sensitive enough to my father’s system of belief. He tells me I am being hurtful (telling me this in public is his way of manipulating me to make me feel guilty about criticising a hugely destructive edifice of dysfunctional psychology disguised as a religion. If I was having the same reaction in private, he would launch into me with a lot more hate — with much a greater force of “chaos”, the principle of which he embraces.)
A friend of mine has identified a type of person – the “chaos addict.” I am not as good at noticing these people right off as she is – that is, when she introduced the term, I was not as good at it as she is.
But it is useful.
I am very hungover today, because I drank yesterday (as the Japanese would say) various many wine. The reason for this was that alcohol seems to be the one effective treatment I’ve discovered for menstrual pain (I cannot tolerate painkillers these days, as my stomach is too weak for them).
The chaos approach seems to work for some people who perhaps feel psychologically naked within more intimate relationships than those generated at work. They feel that if they can throw up a storm of dust around them, suddenly they are not so ugly — they are redeemed by the blanket of confusion that surrounds them.
Home remedies: beer is good too, I find, because of the bubbles. It has to be good beer though.
Chaos: it also keeps everyone else off balance.
The idea that everything is always improving is a way to encourage quietism, I think. Also, the idea that things are improving *despite* chaos puts a great burden upon the individual: you should be able to live normally in chaos, shield yourself from its effects, and so on. Or so I find.
This thing about how global warming will get us into happy space colonies seems to be on conservative/Christian talk radio here. There are quite a few who believe it.
Actually, I think my father’s idea is that things are improving in direct relation to chaos. Now, I like I said, I think he is drawing a direct emotional inference from his own feelings, which might go like this:
“When I am forced to be orderly and disciplined, I feel nothing but self hatred, and a sense of personal ugliness. I only do the orderly behaviour because I have to — because the boss that stands over me has all of the control. However, when an event starts to turn to chaos, I feel, somewhere deep within my belly the sense of revolutionary possibility. There is a hint of freedom from my perpetual servitude, in the air. But I cannot embrace that revolutionary promise, because it is sinful for me to do anything on my own behalf. However, chaos does give me a sense of flight from what I otherwise have to put up with. And, and…..The Lord is good! So, it is the Lord who creates the chaos, in order to make me feel better! Praise be to him! And, sometimes when I go a bit nuts and let rip at the wife or act out in some crazy way, that is not me, because I wouldn’t dare to do such a thing. That, too, is the Lord who redeems us through his glorious and spiritual chaos!”
…oh yes, and the Lord assures that he puts our chaos to good use. Actually it advances civilisation.
Anyway, I have to say that it is really painful for me to watch another human being experience this. He is too weak to embrace a real revolutionary proposal, but he can sense the freedom in it, and exhausts himself battering his mind against the cage.
OMG your father is like my X, except that my X is an atheist. And it is indeed painful to watch. The revolutionary potential in chaos, that is it – “all that is solid melts into air” – that is what they like.
My X is actually quite sensible and reliable in actual crises – hurricanes and such. The problem is that he also likes to create crises.
Well I have a lump in my throat today, because this manner of behaviour is so hard to watch for me.
I think my father would be sensible in the time of a physical crisis, but he tends not to have interpersonal skills beyond the minimum — and it is actually very dangerous to show any weakness in his presence, because he will create an absolute crisis out of that, if he can, by attacking madly and mercilessly.
Yes – and this was my error in Reeducation, showing weakness. And yes – it is very hard to watch, especially if one has feelings for the person, which it is difficult not to have for a parent.
***
Note to self: Reeducation was simply about learning to accept and function with abuse, and that was it. I might have known, had I had more information about abuse at the time, by the mere fact that my mind fogged over. If you are in an abusive situation or relationship your mind fogs over, I have heard and have also found. As Tom the blogger puts it: “waves of disorientation.”
The purpose of abuse is to destroy the self and for years I seemed to observe life as if through a glass. I think what I did was split myself, so that something unharmed could be saved for later. The abused and now abusable person was the one who walked abroad. We would communicate with each other so as to try to get things done, but the unharmed one could not come out of her glass cage, because something strong had to be saved, and so integration was not possible. But, with both halves having figured out what to protect against and what its signs are, we can rejoin again.
***
A friend called for advice last night: was what was going on with her real estate agent normal? In a business sense it was not entirely easy to tell, there are a lot of factors, but I figured it out just by listening to how this normally very solid person was feeling about the situation: disoriented and thrown off balance, *and wondering whether she had gone crazy.* I said: if that is how you are feeling, then this situation is definitely abusive, no matter how rational the agent may sound. Dump her and get another.
It was odd because this friend is not normally vulnerable to such things. She is also better at business than I am. But even to me it was clear that the business deal being proposed was not a good one, and I am sure my friend would normally have seen that. It was as though she had been psychically mugged or something … and as I say, I could tell what the dynamic must be just on the basis of the way my friend was feeling.
That is the advantage of having studied abuse. I wish more practitioners had, but despite all that is said about it, most of them are in fact working to cover it up or justify it, IMHO.
Ho detto.
Well, I also experienced some splitting, but it was more of a deliberate and conscious decision to do so. It was like I had such emotional pain throughout my body, that I could no longer digest my food. I half digested it, but suffered from chronic wind and bloating, because of the anxiety I had within my body. So, to solve this, I determined that I would no longer feel my body. I would distract myself with intellectual ideas, and simply not feel it (so as to stop the cycle of emotional distress affecting my digestive system and in turn perpetuating general distress).
So, I actually succeeded in creating a partial separation of consciousness — my past severed from my present and my aspirations for the future. Gradually, and oh so gradually, the digestive symptoms abated.
And recently I have been strong enough, in the new self I created, to go looking for the old self. And now, this is going to sound really weird, but I have just undone the split between the old, wounded self and the self I’ve been living with. It’s like moving your stuff into the rooms of a house that you choose never to visit on principle. And the weirdest aspect is that the memories of the old self are prone to deny that I have the kind of power that I have commanded for myself. It is fearful and has to be convinced. Very strange. And it wants to know “who are you?” And “What am I to make of this lifestyle you are now living?”
Yes, this is very strange. But on the positive side, I am able to relax more, with a baseline rhythm that generates from myself. I don’t need to fill every moment of the day with some obsessive activity because I feel that there’s a part of myself that is missing, any more.
“It is like moving your stuff into the rooms of a house that you choose never to visit on principle.”
…Yes indeed.