Some more thoughts on therapy abuse…

Easter 2007 at the country-side, chocolate-cake with whipped cream and fruit.

In the shower: my relatives in the working-class (which I have had most contact with and have had further contact with, and where we played very freely when we grew up, as we did at home, but not at my paternal grandparent's home really) would never think of entering a therapist’s office…That is out of question. And earlier it was even more out of question. defenses (and denial) can take different expressions?

Not least was it so in my parents’ generation and earlier. Reading books could give one a lot of strange ideas, and working with creative things was no real occupation! And you shouldn’t think “too much”.

My youngest uncle is born 1935 and his wife is one year younger…

Helga was educated social worker, and she got her mom’s house in Santa Monica when her mother died, and thus she was seen as the rich and wealthy house-owner, who could afford paying expensive fees.

Michelle wrote that the sect-members she referred to (what Carol L. Mithers has written about in “Therapy Gone Mad…”) belonged to the middle-class; they were intelligent people, of whom many had Academic exams and was used to thinking.

How was this enslaving possible Michelle wondered? She thought that the patients through regression to childish helplessness obviously lost their ability for critical thinking or that they entirely directed the critics at themselves.

The people whom had come to the therapy-center to learn to perceive their feelings had been held away from exactly these true actual feelings instead, because their therapists had no use for those.

The members at the center had been exhorted to strict critics of their parents and at the same time been hindered refinedly seeing their contemporary extortionists through.

When the truths were revealed they became aware of that they had told the most intimate details about their childhoods and sexual lives in the “therapy-groups”, but that they had buried their true feelings and thoughts about the therapists behaviors inside instead. They had never really spoken with the other sect-members either. The patients’ lives were strictly controlled, day and night.

And they got a lot of perverse commands; couples who loved each others too much was ordered to have sex every day, so they should get enough of each others. People who didn’t’ really like each others were forced to intimate relations etc.

Michelle thought that regressive therapy-forms offer a certain favorable soil for these things. A human being suddenly thrown back to childish dependency can’t integrate her childhood. Only grown ups can do this with the help of a therapist who follows his patients and supports their independence, and who are not holding them in a childish dependency.

This dependency is the soil in which the illusion that the therapist can give a grown up human being all she lacked with her mother (and father) when she was a (small) child: being mirrored, understood, unconditionally loved (and given true, genuine respect, which is something a client has all rights to demand and expect!?).

If the mother is capable of this she has protected her child from being exploited later.

But expecting that shortages are possible to be taken back with a guru is self-delusion. It only leads to dependency on promises which can never be fulfilled, because the sect-follower isn’t a child any more and the guru isn’t his/her mother (or father) from the beginning of life. In spite of this this illusion is kept alive in many sects and religions.

Michelle writes that knowing this maybe can be of help to Helga; that she isn’t the only one who have done this experience (or been such a fool!) and succeeded to free herself from the confusion.

And I thought on the article I linked and quoted from yesterday (about the woman who was exposed to incest from she was 7, or earlier, till she was 14, and how her life had turned out later): how can it be to read this for the one that hasn’t been able to deal in the same way as this woman? How do newspapers nuance what they write? Are they “nuancing” things rather?? The Societal Denial again? Because I wonder if not more people have been exposed to things than we want to believe? Many more? Maybe almost all of us, but to different degrees. Some are less harmed, others more??

And - can a sexual abuser come to believe that what he (she) does isn't so harmful??

"See how she dealt with it!!!"

Minimizing and belittling the damage?? Which is absolutely intolerable and wrong!!! I guess most of those who have succeeded in their recovery would agree that the damage could have been undone, and the struggle to recover has taken so much of their time and life...

Also see the article "Compassion Gone Mad" by Heather Mac Donald.

And it was someone who wrote:

“I’m wondering why after many adult children finally say:

“Ok that’s enough! I’m done!”

and then they walk away and have little or nothing to do with the abusive parent after that, but they continue to or begin abusive relationships with others.

I know a woman who refused to speak with her dad because he molested her, but then started dating a man who was very mean to her and treated her like she was nothing.

He used her for sex just like her father did and abandoned her and then would come back just to hurt her.

After I stopped seeing my mother I became very friendly with a very mean woman who screamed at me when she got drunk I also dated a man who was mean and acted pretty much like my mother.”

Is it because they haven't actually worked things through (and this is certainly not easy or easy made)? And recovery isn't about solving things on a symbolic level??