Abuse in therapy, groups, among individuals…

photo taken November 26,2006 (with a digital-camera from work).

Hmmm, writing further... More about abuse in therapy, groups, lists, forums, among individuals...

From “Group Conformity - Factors That Increase Group Conformity”:

"’Individuals who have generally low self-esteem are more likely to yield to group pressure than those with high-esteem... If individuals are led to believe that they have little or no aptitude for the task at hand, their tendency to conform increases’ The Social Animal, Aronson, page 21 [reviews of this book here]./…/

[Elliot] Aronson cites experiments that show this effect, again a universal social human effect, it is not one just restricted to certain personality types.”

Sounds cult-like, and guru-like…

Addition March 18: Hmmm, what did I mean? Low self-esteem makes one vulnerable for landing in cults and sects? Aptitude means "anlag" or "fallenhet"in Swedish. I.e., you don't believe in your capacities and ability? Who stole this capacity? How? And were we born this way? (I don't think so though).

From “Intellectual Abuse”:

“It turns dreadful results into across the board successes by redefining success! It redefines abreaction and catharsis to mean "non connected" feeling, when the real meanings of these words does not exclude the feelings being real or connected. It turns the story of the Center for Feeling Therapy around, so that no responsibility is taken by Janov for the people he trained and influenced, and uses the story to divert attention from problems that have happened and still may happen in "real" primal therapy. Like scientology, it is confusing intellectual abuse that is manipulative and misleading.

It is intellectual abuse because every few years they hail the therapy that they now do as "light years behind what was done before." After difficult periods or negative reports, they reinvent primal therapy by calling it "advanced primal therapy." However, in my experience it was not much better than old primal therapy, and even suprisingly similar in some ways (but different in other ways) to what I read about the Center for Feeling Therapy (in Insane Therapy, Ayella and Therapy Gone Mad, Mithers). The readvertising as advanced scientific primal therapy is again misleading and confusing to people. This repositioning may also occur in the future./…/

It is disturbing because that precise subject, epistemology, is part of the subject philosophy, and Janov tells his followers that 'the beginning of philosophy is the end of feeling' (citation needed, it is in several primal books, and in Journal of Primal Therapy) which basically is giving the message that you will lose your feelings (and chance to heal and become real) if you learn philosophy (basically if you think too much about it). It is also interesting that the subjects of love and ethics usually fall in the realm of philosophy [that about not being too intellectual!?].

The intellectual abuse in Janov's works has led to such things as people dropping out of college, dropping out of their profession, becoming psychoanalytically judgmental, incurring many opportunity costs, developing poor logic (unfalsifiable explanations for everything you can think of), developing a poor outlook, reducing ambition or even suicides.”

This occurs in other forms of therapy too!?

You need to have a lot of self-awareness? To avoid abusing? But lack of self-awareness is no justification either? That you are damaged doesn't grant you discharge from responsibility.

But you are entitled to have higher demands on therapists (and other people in power or authority positions of different kinds) for instance. But noone is allowed to abuse a person whether he (she) stands below OR above!??

When I scrolled this blog yesterday I read the label "En spik i foten"... Yes, that about that there is always someone that has had it worse than you... So when do things count for some people (maybe seeming privileged)? Maybe never?

And abuse is never justified, no matter who performs it or to whom it is performed!??? Whether he/she is much or less harmed, "privileged" (what is actually being privileged? What would be really privileged?) or not privileged etc.?

And intellect/intelligence isn't only bad... It can be a good thing used right!???

From “Self-justification”:

“Basically, wherever you find yourself, no matter how ridiculous, people will look around for cues to justify what they have just done, how they got there and the reason they feel the way they do.

‘Leon Festinger organized [the] array of findings and used them as the basis for a powerful theory of human motivation that he called the theory of cognitive dissonance... Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. Because the occurrence of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, people are motivated to reduce it.’ Aronson p.146

The example is given that a smoker will have two different cognitions: 1 ‘I smoke cigarettes’ which is dissonant with 2 ‘smoking produces cancer’. The person will seek to reduce this dissonance either by stopping smoking, or more often by justifying their actions in other ways such as exaggerating the importance of smoking or by dismissing the evidence for cancer. Aronson discusses some interesting statistics that back up his logic on page 147. He goes on to say:

‘Let's stay with the topic of cigarette smoking for a moment and consider an extreme example: Suppose you are one of the top executives of a major cigarette company- and therefore in a situation of maximum commitment...This would produce a painful degree of dissonance: Your cognition ‘I am a decent, kind human being’ would be dissonant with your cognition ‘I am contributing to the early death of a great many people...you might even succeed in convincing yourself that cigarettes are good for people. Thus in order to see yourself as wise, good, and right, you may take action that is stupid and detrimental to your own health [by smoking yourself]" p.149

‘[in 1994 in Congressional hearings]...top executives of most of the of the major tobacco companies admitted they were smokers and actually argued that cigarettes are no more harmful or addictive than playing video games or eating Twinkies!’ (p.149)

So can you see how cognitive dissonance in primal therapy would operate, in both patients and therapists?

For example, with patients if they had the two cognitions ‘I spent a lot of money on therapy’ and ‘I still feel bad, and my life did not change as I had been led to believe’. When this happens the patient will seek to reduce this dissonance, almost automatically. A quick way out of this dissonance is to find any change that did occur and to label that change as a positive change. For example if you quit or lose your job, you say how ‘unreal’ that line of work was. Or if you find yourself doing very little, with little ambition, you would say how so much more rested you are now after therapy. Or if you do a lot now you would say how therapy helped you drain the parasympathetic overload so that you can finally get down to business.

What if therapists have the two cognitions ‘I am a caring person who is helping people" and ”this therapy is not working very well at all?’ How would they deal with that? They would do so by deducing dissonance, that is the usual human response, changing ones actions in cases like these is much rarer. To reduce the dissonance the therapist, (much like the cigarette executives above) may exaggerate the benefits of the therapy to an extreme, and practice what they preach themselves. If the therapy is damaging even, it will not matter, the therapists will have to go and find confirmation that it works or else live in discomfort and dissonance. The studies they chose will be designed to find confirming evidence only, the questions they ask patients will be worded in the form ‘how did therapy help you?’. By finding such testimonial evidence the therapists can then feel better and continue to believe they are caring and are actually helping people. They may be forced to label those who don't supply the confirming evidence they need as deviants of some sort, ‘unreal’ maybe, so that they can continue to hold the cognition that ‘I am a caring person who is helping people’

After providing some evidence of cognitive dissonance reduction on pages 151 to 152, Aronson goes on to say:

‘People don't like to see or hear things that conflict with their deeply held beliefs or wishes. An ancient response to such bad news was to literally to kill the messenger.’ (p.152)

‘I have referred to dissonance-reducing behavior as 'irrational'. By this I mean it is often maladaptive in that it can prevent people from learning important facts or from finding real solutions to their problems.’ (p. 152)

Aronson then shows how cognitive dissonance theory predicts social psychology experimental outcomes better that what you would expect by just using a rational model. On pages 152-153 he discusses the experiment by Jones and Kohler which shows the irrationality of dissonance reducing behavior. On page 153 he discusses the Stanford University experiment with Lord, Ross and Lepper which showed that we do not process information in an unbiased manner. It was on the subject of the death penalty, and the subjects in this experiment rejected arguments that disagreed with their initial position, and the confirming arguments strengthen their initial beliefs. Presenting both arguments polarized the students more than they were before the experiment on the issue. This is not well explained rationally, you would expect them to come out thinking ‘that is a complex issue’ having heard both sides of the argument. What actually happened, polarization is better explained with cognitive dissonance reduction.

Dissonance reduction is even more interesting after a commitment or decision has been made:

‘In short, Ehrlich's data [on advertisement seeking on already bought products] suggest that, after making decisions, people try to gain reassurance that their decisions were wise by seeking information that is certain to be reassuring.’ (p. 155)

After presenting still more data from experiments that support the theory, on page 159 Aronson identifies the importance of irrevocability of decisions. If a decision is not easily taken back, if a commitment is made, ‘it always increases dissonance and the motivation to reduce it’."