Mick Cooper is a leading voice in contemporary counseling psychology, known for his work at the intersection of psychotherapy and social change. A Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Roehampton in the UK, Dr. Cooper is both a researcher and a practicing therapist, exploring how psychotherapeutic principles can contribute to broader political and societal transformation.
As a co-developer of the pluralistic approach to therapy, Dr. Cooper has been instrumental in advancing a model that prioritizes shared decision-making, client preferences, and integrative therapeutic practice. He serves as Acting Director of the Centre for Research in Psychological Wellbeing (CREW) and is an active member of the Therapy and Social Change Network (TaSC). His research focuses on humanistic and existential therapies, client engagement, and the role of psychotherapy in fostering personal and collective agency.
Dr. Cooper’s latest book, Psychology at the Heart of Social Change: Developing a Progressive Vision for Society, examines how psychological theory and practice can be leveraged to create a more equitable world.
In this interview, he speaks with Mad in America’s Javier Rizo about the intersections of therapy and politics, the importance of pluralism in mental health care, and the future of counseling psychology as a force for progressive change.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.
Javier Rizo: I’d love to explore the different areas of your work. Some people might see them as quite distinct, but I’d be curious to hear about your journey—how you became interested in these different areas and how you see them as connected.
Mick Cooper: Like many people involved with Mad in America, I come from a progressive background. My parents were both politically active, engaged in issues of social justice and the broader question of how to create a fairer, more equitable society—one where rights and freedoms aren’t reserved for the privileged few. That foundation was deeply influential as I was growing up, even as my own politics evolved over time.
When I went to university, I knew I wanted to do something that contributed to society. I was drawn to psychology and eventually moved into the world of counseling and counseling psychology. But even as I worked with people one-on-one, those social justice concerns remained integral to my practice.
I was particularly drawn to person-centered and humanistic approaches, especially person-centered therapy, because of its emphasis on the value of the client’s voice. It challenges the idea that the clinician is the sole authority and instead prioritizes listening to clients and taking their perspectives seriously. Rather than a hierarchical model, it assumes that people have the capacity to address their own problems when given the right conditions. My work on relational depth and the development of person-centered and existential therapies has been rooted in this idea of a more collaborative, non-hierarchical relationship—one that centers the client’s voice and experience.
In both my practice and my writing, I’ve tried to articulate these social justice elements. But beyond that, I’ve also grappled with the larger question: How can psychology contribute to addressing the profound inequalities and marginalization we see in the world? That question became particularly urgent for me during a period of personal reflection, when I asked myself what I truly wanted to say while I still had the opportunity. I realized that my deepest passion is exploring how psychology, therapy, and counseling can contribute to a more socially just, caring, and cooperative world.
That commitment remains central to my work. While most of my research focuses on mental health treatment, psychiatric institutions, and psychotherapy, I’m also deeply concerned about the broader state of the world. I read the news every day—wildfires in the U.S., conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, poverty in the UK and beyond, and the staggering wealth inequality between a small elite and the millions struggling to get by. The question that drives me is: How can the work we do in the therapeutic field contribute to addressing these challenges?
My latest book, Psychology at the Heart of Social Change, is an attempt to articulate ways in which psychological discourse and practice—particularly within the humanistic tradition, where I’ve always been most involved—can make a meaningful contribution. Thinkers like Carl Rogers have long suggested that psychology has a role to play in fostering social transformation. Of course, therapy alone isn’t enough. Economic and political changes are also crucial. But I believe psychotherapy has something valuable to offer, and I hope we’ll discuss that further.
Ultimately, I see my work as a continuous thread—bringing social justice concerns into the therapeutic world, and then considering how the therapeutic world can, in turn, contribute to broader social justice efforts. Many people in psychology, psychiatry, and therapy care deeply about these issues, but the demands of daily clinical work can sometimes make it difficult to engage with them on a larger scale. As my career begins to wind down—or perhaps not—I feel a strong urgency to contribute something meaningful before it’s all over.
Javier Rizo: You’re talking about the role psychology and psychotherapy can play in progressive politics, and I’m curious about your own journey. How did you first get involved in humanistic psychology? It’s an interesting field—both mainstream in some ways and marginalized in others. How did you find your place in it?
Mick Cooper: As an undergraduate, I first encountered the work of Carl Rogers, the American psychologist who wrote primarily in the 1950s and 60s. Rogers was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, and his ideas represented a major departure from the expert-driven model that dominated psychology at the time. He emphasized the strengths, wisdom, and knowledge that clients themselves bring to therapy, developing what he initially called a non-directive approach in the 1940s, which later became client-centered therapy.
Rogers’ work wasn’t just about therapy—it extended into social change. In his later years, he became deeply involved in peace movements and mediation efforts, even bringing people with opposing views together in Northern Ireland to foster dialogue.
Reading his work as a student had a profound impact on me. What stood out was his challenge to professional authority and his insistence that clients are the experts on their own lives. His humility as a clinician was striking, and that humility became a central value for me. But what resonated just as deeply was his emphasis on authenticity—the idea that we often present a persona to the world that isn’t true to who we really are. Like many people in their early twenties, I read that and thought, Wow, that’s really true. On a personal level, it meant a great deal to me.
These ideas intertwined with my political background as well. One of Rogers’ core principles was unconditional positive regard—the belief that every person has intrinsic worth and should be accepted without judgment. This resonated with the progressive values I was raised with. But at the same time, I noticed a contradiction in the political discourse around me. My parents were quite radical in their politics, advocating for equality and fairness, yet I sometimes saw deep judgment toward those who held different views. Their vision of equality seemed to apply at an economic level, but not always at a psychological level. In Rogers’ work, I found what I saw as a deeper form of progressivism—one that valued people as equals not just in material terms, but in their humanity.
As you mentioned, Rogers occupies an interesting position in psychology—he’s both widely recognized and, in some ways, marginalized. Surveys of American psychologists have identified him as the most influential figure in the field, even more so than the developers of CBT. His ideas about the importance of the therapeutic relationship are now so embedded in the field that many therapists don’t even recognize them as uniquely person-centered anymore—they just see them as fundamental to good practice.
That said, psychotherapy research has moved beyond Rogers in some important ways. We now have a much better understanding of different methods and techniques that can help people. I believe Rogers would have welcomed that progress. He was never rigid in his thinking—he was always open to new insights.
However, in my experience, certain corners of the humanistic and existential therapy world have at times been quite dogmatic. Some practitioners seem to treat what Rogers or early existential therapists wrote in the 1950s as if it were set in stone. Ironically, the human growth movement—dedicated to the idea of change and development—has stagnated in some ways. Meanwhile, other approaches, like CBT and third-wave therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), have continued to evolve. That’s one reason they’ve been so successful.
When we developed pluralistic therapy, we wanted to bring those humanistic principles into the 21st century. The core idea behind pluralism is that there are many effective ways to help people, and therapy should be tailored to each client’s specific wants and needs. Rather than prescribing a fixed set of techniques, we emphasize collaboration—talking with clients to understand what works best for them. This builds on Rogers’ client-centered principles, but in a more flexible, integrative way.
The pluralistic framework values a wide range of methods—from CBT to psychodynamic, existential, and humanistic approaches—recognizing that different clients need different things. And sometimes, that means using quite directive techniques. We’ve done research with young people in therapy, and many of them want direction and guidance. That preference should be respected rather than dismissed. Listening to what clients need and responding accordingly is at the heart of this approach.
Javier Rizo: You’ve really highlighted the aspects of psychotherapy—especially humanistic psychotherapy—that inspire you and connect with your political values. I wonder how other therapists have encountered the political potential of psychotherapy. Do they recognize it? Your book begins by discussing the neglect of psychology within progressive politics, but I wonder if the reverse is also true—has this political vision been overlooked even within humanistic psychology itself?
Mick Cooper: I think the U.S. is leading the way in this area. There’s been some outstanding work on multicultural and social justice competencies for decades now. When I speak with colleagues in the UK, I often encourage them to read the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies developed by Ratts and colleagues in 2015. In the U.S., there are people in the counseling field who now talk about multicultural and social justice work as a “fourth” or even “fifth force” in psychology. It’s a hugely important movement.
The work of Mad in America also fits into this broader tradition, following in the footsteps of thinkers like R.D. Laing and others who have challenged the power structures of psychiatry. In the UK, colleagues like James Davies have taken a similarly political approach in their critiques of psychiatric systems and power imbalances.
However, in mainstream clinical and counseling psychology—and in psychotherapy more broadly—the political dimension often remains implicit. I do believe it’s there, though. You can see it in Rogers’ work, in the respect for clients, in the emphasis on the therapeutic alliance and the fundamentally collaborative nature of therapy. Most therapists I meet have an underlying progressivism in the way they work with clients. But translating that into a more explicit engagement with politics and social justice has been a slower process.
I think part of the reason for that is practical—therapists are focused on their work, their clients, making a living. There hasn’t always been the time or space to extend those values into a broader political conversation.
That’s one of the reasons we set up the Therapy and Social Change Network (TaSC) in the UK. There’s been a lot of interest in it—people have really engaged. We’ve had great discussions online and even organized a conference when the war in Ukraine began, raising money to support Ukrainian psychologists. Many people in the field want to contribute to this kind of work. I haven’t encountered much resistance to it.
That said, there are some small groups—especially in the UK—who push back against these ideas, framing them as “wokeism gone mad.” Their argument is that therapy should simply provide a neutral space for clients, not engage with politics. They’ll ask, “Why are you bringing politics into therapy? Why would you tell clients how to vote?” But I think those perspectives are fairly marginal. There have been a few books written from that viewpoint, but I don’t sense much energy behind them.
Overall, I believe the field is moving in the direction of greater awareness and engagement with social justice issues. The challenge is finding the resources and time to fully integrate that awareness into practice. Training is a key issue—bringing these discussions into the education of therapists, counselors, and psychologists.
Professional bodies are already on board with this shift. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) has developed strong competencies and guidelines on these issues. The UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) recently held a conference focused on politics and social justice. And within the British Psychological Society (BPS), the new chair has been very active in pushing these conversations forward. It feels like an open door—many people are eager to explore these links between therapy and social change. The question is how to do it in practice.
One area where the U.S. has been doing important work is around broaching in therapy—the idea that a therapist might explicitly invite discussion of a client’s identity. For example, saying something like, “This is a space where we can talk about your experiences as a Black person, as a woman, as someone who is gay.” The intention is to signal that these conversations are welcome and important.
But I think the next step in this work is to explore its complexities. When is broaching helpful, and when might it not be? When does it create space for a client, and when might it feel imposing or unnecessary? These are the kinds of nuanced discussions we need to have, and they require time—time to reflect, time to study, and time to evolve our approaches.
Javier Rizo: Yeah, historically, psychotherapy hasn’t really been a discipline that explicitly grapples with the political dimension…
Mick Cooper: I’d push back on that a little. If you look at figures like Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and Eric Berne—who developed transactional analysis—you’ll see that many early psychologists and psychotherapists were quite progressive. Adler’s work, for instance, was deeply rooted in social justice and the question of how to build a more equitable society.
There’s actually a long history of engagement with these issues. The journal Psychotherapy and Politics International has been running for many years. And of course, there’s the work you’re doing, what Mad in America does, and the legacy of people like R.D. Laing, who wove together psychology, psychiatry, and politics in profound ways.
That said, I agree that this hasn’t always been the mainstream thrust of psychotherapy. But there are significant movements—liberation psychology, community psychology, and other emerging fields—that are explicitly working at the intersection of therapy and social justice.
So, while there’s still a lot of work to be done, I actually feel quite optimistic about this area. And I don’t feel optimistic about much these days—but on this, I do.
Javier Rizo: You’re right—there have always been strands of this thinking within the field, even going back to its beginnings. I can imagine Freud would have had something to say about this as well. We’ve been discussing psychotherapy as a discipline, but I’d love to hear more about the specific principles that you see as applicable to progressive social change. Given your framing of the “world on fire,” how do you think some of the practices we use as therapists could actually be implemented in the real world?
Mick Cooper: Earlier, I mentioned unconditional positive regard, but I think the phrase radical acceptance captures it even more deeply. One of the most important things we can take from psychotherapy is its understanding of how to relate to others—not just on an individual level, but on a broader social and political scale. A politics rooted in radical acceptance isn’t about shaming, criticizing, or putting others down—it’s about valuing people.
One of the ways we can implement this is through social and emotional learning programs, which are already well-supported by research. If we were to roll them out more widely, children from a young age would learn to listen, empathize, and understand not only their own emotions but also those of others. This would help them grow into adults who can engage in dialogue, work through conflicts, and interact in cooperative, caring ways.
That’s not to say radical acceptance means condoning harmful behaviors. It’s not about saying racism, homophobia, or violence are acceptable. Rather, it’s about recognizing the fundamental humanity in each person. Very few people do harm simply for the sake of being bad. People certainly engage in destructive, self-destructive, and antisocial behaviors, but as therapists, we understand that these often stem from unmet needs—frustrations, traumas, or deep-seated struggles.
Radical acceptance means recognizing that, at the core, human beings are striving for the same fundamental things—connection, self-worth, meaning, pleasure. We don’t have an inherent evil inside us. And if we start from that understanding, we can develop ways of engaging with each other that move us toward cooperation rather than division. That’s the foundation for creating a world where more people can get more of what they need, more of the time.
One of the ideas I explore in my book is Game Theory, which teaches us about the power of cooperation. We live in a world where cooperation isn’t optional—it’s essential. Climate change is a perfect example. We exist in an interconnected system where one nation’s decisions on fossil fuels don’t just affect them—they impact everyone. Without global cooperation, we end up in destructive cycles.
This is where psychology can help—by fostering a politics of understanding rather than a politics of blame. It’s about moving away from demonization and toward collaboration. And at the core of that shift is developing a mindset of radical acceptance—recognizing the humanity and intrinsic value of others.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. One of the biggest challenges is holding onto radical acceptance while feeling anger, fury, or grief about injustice. When we see harm being done, it’s difficult to still recognize the humanity of those responsible.
In Psychology at the Heart of Social Change, I wrote with progressives in mind. My argument is that a progressive politics rooted in blame—one that operates from a stance of we’re right, you’re wrong—is ultimately self-defeating. If we want to build a world based on respect, empathy, and understanding, we have to take the first step. And that’s incredibly hard. I struggle with it myself. But I also believe it’s a pathway to hope and possibility—and right now, we desperately need both.
When you look at psychological theories and research, there’s remarkable consensus about what human beings fundamentally need. Across different models, relatedness and connection emerge as core human needs.
People thrive when they have meaningful relationships. Studies show that those with strong, intimate connections experience lower levels of depression and anxiety, and even have better physical health. The impact of good relationships is profound.
But often, our ways of seeking connection are indirect or self-defeating. We compete with others, try to prove we’re better, or push people away out of fear. In therapy, much of the work is helping people untangle these patterns—helping them understand what they truly want and guiding them toward healthier, more effective ways of getting there.
For instance, someone may deeply crave intimacy but also fear being hurt, perhaps due to past relationships. So, they keep people at a distance, avoid vulnerability, and suppress their emotions. As a therapist, you recognize why they’re protecting themselves—it makes sense. But you also invite them to consider other possibilities. Maybe they can try letting someone in, just a little. Maybe they can take small steps toward trust. Therapy provides a space for people to explore these choices in a way that feels safe.
This same principle applies to society at large. If relational needs are so central to well-being, then we have to ask: What can we do as a society to cultivate meaningful human connection?
Of course, relational needs aren’t the only needs we have—people also need autonomy, freedom, and self-esteem. But one of the things I discuss in my book is the idea of synergies—situations where different people’s needs can be met together rather than in opposition.
Relational needs, in particular, have incredible synergy. Unlike individualistic pursuits—where one person’s success might come at another’s expense—connection is something that can be mutually reinforcing. The more one person feels close to another, the more the other person feels close as well. Love, care, and deep relationships create a ripple effect of fulfillment.
In writing my book, I found myself coming back again and again to relationality. The idea of relational depth—that profound, meaningful connection between people—holds enormous promise, not just for individuals but for society as a whole.
If we could build a society that prioritized relational and communal needs over individualistic ones—if we could shift away from the relentless pursuit of self-esteem and competition—we might create a world where more people have more of their needs met. There is so much untapped potential in relationality.
That, for me, is the real hope.
Javier Rizo: I hear you that relationality is central to this vision of a more egalitarian society. But I can’t help thinking about the challenges of doing this kind of relational work, especially when people have deep material and ideological investments in undermining others’ well-being for their own gain. This happens in so many areas—take climate change, for example. How do we motivate people to engage in dialogue when there’s such a vested interest in not having that dialogue? How do we even get people to that point?
Mick Cooper: A colleague of mine, Kirk Schneider, who works in the existential-humanistic field in the U.S., has been developing these kinds of dialogues—bringing together people from very different positions to actually talk to each other. I think that kind of work is really important.
But how do you do it? I think one major reason people avoid dialogue is that they don’t believe they’ll be truly heard. They anticipate being shamed, dismissed, or disrespected. If, from a progressive standpoint, we can embody a more empathic stance—conveying a genuine willingness to listen—it might encourage more people to engage.
I completely understand that some perspectives are deeply offensive, and that there are times when people don’t want to hear them. But at the same time, responses like cancel culture, however understandable, can push people into a defensive stance where they feel there’s no space for conversation. And when people feel shut out of dialogue, they’re even less likely to listen.
At the end of the day—and this might be a controversial thing to say—the Musks and the Trumps of the world, however horrifying their behaviors may be, are still human beings. They have needs for connection, for self-esteem, for material security—but also for being heard. That doesn’t excuse their actions, but it does mean that if progressives want to lead change, we need to think about how to create a culture where even people like them might feel there’s space to engage, rather than feeling they’ll be instantly condemned.
Public discourse, especially on platforms like Twitter/X, is so steeped in shame and antagonism. And shame pushes people apart. The more people feel shamed, the more they dig in, the less they listen.
Of course, none of this is easy, and I wish there were a simple solution. I feel desperate for one, especially given how urgent these issues are. Climate change, for instance—the latest data on rising global temperatures is absolutely terrifying. The urgency is real. But if that urgency fuels even more blame, criticism, and division, I worry that it will only be counterproductive.
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be clear boundaries, clear demands, and clear expectations. But I think these need to exist alongside a broader cultural shift—one that fosters empathy, understanding, and a willingness to engage. If we want to create a compassionate world, we can’t do it through means that are unempathetic or unkind. That only breeds more discord, more antagonism. If the goal is a more cooperative, compassionate world, then the path we take to get there has to reflect those values as well.
Javier Rizo: I’m thinking about what you’re saying in terms of changing the nature of political discourse. Do you have a sense of the social conditions necessary to actually get people to that point? There’s so much conflict—especially in contexts like class struggle, where labor unions are in direct confrontation with employers. How do you get people in power to even want to come to the table in the first place? Where does your vision fit within the present and the future?
Mick Cooper: It really is difficult. I think part of the way in is engaging with that fear. In conflicts where mediation has worked—like in Northern Ireland—it wasn’t just about military solutions. It was about bringing people together to talk about their needs, to articulate what their communities want, and to find solutions that meet the needs of both groups. If people believe there’s no chance they’ll be heard, they’re less likely to engage in dialogue at all.
Political strategies and pressures are absolutely necessary—many people are working on that front. But alongside those efforts, if we can also create ways for people to listen to one another and develop deeper mutual understanding, then over time, we may be able to foster a culture where these kinds of conflicts become less frequent and less intractable.
Javier Rizo: Yeah, the hope is to instill these values—really inviting the other in, really trying to understand. It’s clear to me how psychotherapy embodies that in practice, and I hope more people can engage with these principles, whether by experiencing them in their own therapy or carrying them into their lives. And for therapists, maybe that means becoming more engaged in social work.
I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today and for sharing your thoughts on connecting psychotherapy and social justice. For those who are interested—whether they’re therapists, clients, or just people curious about these ideas—what are some ways they can engage more with your work?
Mick Cooper: Thanks, Javier. Well, there’s the Therapy and Social Change Network (TaSC)—we hold seminars and discussions, and we have links with similar work in the U.S. I’d really encourage people to look at the multicultural and social justice competencies developed in the States, which have been a major effort to integrate social justice concerns into therapy. Of course, there’s also Mad in America and other organizations that raise important questions about power structures in psychiatry—those are great starting points for exploring these issues.
Another important figure is Michael Lerner in the U.S., who, like me, has been thinking about radical acceptance in politics. In the UK, we’re seeing more groups emerging and more people engaging in these conversations, though it’s still in very early stages.
Some of the questions you’re asking—like how to bring people in power to the table—really highlight how much work remains to be done. The honest truth is, I wish I had a better answer. But I think part of building a more emotionally literate politics means being able to acknowledge when we don’t have easy answers. Instead of pretending certainty, we need spaces to think together about how to move forward.
Right now, we’re not at the stage where there are well-established groups with clear agendas on these questions—we’re still in the formative phases. I wish we were further along, but the reality is, we can’t rush it. A culture of radical acceptance won’t emerge through force, self-criticism, or frustration that things aren’t moving fast enough. It’s just like in therapy—self-acceptance doesn’t come by beating yourself into it. It often happens slowly, in layers, in waves. And sometimes the first step is accepting that you don’t accept yourself yet.
The same applies to this broader movement. We’re at the beginning stages, and that’s okay. I’d really encourage people to visit the TaSC website, see what’s happening, and consider getting involved. We desperately need more people stepping into leadership roles, engaging with these questions, and bringing psychological insights into the larger social justice conversation.
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As a survivor of psychotherapeutic abuse and malpractice of conservative and “progressive” professionals alike I have come to the conclusion that “progressive” psychologists and psychiatrists like Mick Cooper suffer from a behaviour pattern that is known in individual popular psychology as the battered wife syndrome.
This is a label for the phenomenon that folks who are being abused by a loved one don’t manage to accept the cruel and aggressive disposition of their abuser and leave. But instead go back and try to help the abuser better themselves again and again.
A strategy that is understandable because it allows the victims to not feel the pain and realise the losses in the wake of the horrific abuse they have experienced. But also a strategy in which these folks get stuck and is technically a dead end because only an abuser is responsible for his violent behaviour and only they can decide to stop their abusive patterns and change.
Historically psychiatry’s rise into the power center of the “bourgeois” modern world came with the rise of the medical field at large into a part of the ruling class and the new order. What “progressives” are trying is to undo being part of the ruling class without giving up their privileges that come from being a part of the ruling class. This endeavour is hopeless, it has been tried for decades and it has brought nothing but failure after failure. All the while horrifc abuse in any branch of psychotherapy and psychiatry went on and was never adressed.
The good news is that unlike these “progressive” mental health professionals in their trauma bond with psychiatry/clinical psychology people with serious challenges to their mental health don’t need psychiatry and psychotherapy to be reformed. What they need are alternatives that have no ties at all with these fields. Fields that have proved themselves not only a total failure to help people with their challenges but also with a more than 200 years old unacknowleged history of horrific abuse of their patients/clients.
These alternatives exist already. And as soon as one gains insight into the reality described above, lets go of the hope to find support within the psychiatric field, and allows the pain in, the alternatives that are individually suitable start to jump right into your face one after another.
Psychotherapists need clients – but nobody needs a therapist. Trust the process.
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“What “progressives” are trying is to undo being part of the ruling class without giving up their privileges that come with being part of the ruling class.”
Thank you for highlighting the hypocrisy of this approach.
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“Psychotherapists need clients – but nobody needs a therapist.”
BEST COMMENT EVER!!!
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Lina, thank you for mentioning the way the dynamics in so-called “therapeutic” relationships resemble those in the battered wife syndrome.
It helps me understand why I kept going back, despite my deeply felt misgivings about a system I had always been quite leery of.
It’s disturbing how modern culture grooms people to depend on those trained to take advantage of them, especially in matters of so-called “mental health”.
I’m not sure why, but something tells me that power and pain will always be the elephants in the room….
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My pleasure, Birdsong.
Unfortunately, I have so much experience of being harmed and violated in psychotherapy that I became a master at understanding all aspects of it.
I was able to understand that I had been continously harmed in several psychotherapeutic settings since I was ten years old because the therapists became more aggressive the better I was doing thanks to alternatives like yoga, meditation, and self-help groups. Resources that I had opened up for myself.
I then tried to teach them what I had found out what really works for me to get better and didn’t realise for a long time that they didn’t want to know and couldn’t. I am glad I was able to then see the corruption of the psy field and just walk away.
The personal stories that I have read here on MiA from people with similar experiences were extremely helpful and I don’t know whether I would have managed to escape the field without that resource.
Then the above mentioned pain set in. Over the next one or two years when coming to terms with the decades of psychotherpeutic abuse that I had experienced I almost lost my mind. But I soon understood that every wave of pain wasn’t as intense as the one before and that my mental health was slowly recovering.
It is now five years in July that I was able to escape this cult like system of abuse and I am of course not fully over it. Sometimes I am afraid I’ll never be but then I see that I am making progress everyday and I am satisfied.
I am able to sit on longer and longer silent mindfulness retreats and just sit through the pain of these experiences one tiny bit at a time. I have great teachers who have dealt with similarly painful liberatory processes and who have therefore tought me how to do it. The key is to go slowly.
When I asked myself why my former therapists were not able themselves to leave such a corrupt field of work behind them and how they were able of harming their clients without noticing it, I realised that for them similar processes are going on.
I learned that it is normal that young psychotherapists are harmed and abused in their training psychotherapies themselves (Someone has put that fact up on Wikipedia. Thanks! That was helpful) Thus, they are themselves stuck in a trauma bond with their therapists and the oppression at the heart of the field.
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Lina, it’s wonderful you found such helpful alternatives to psychotherapy. I know how hard and scary it is to walk away from the mental health system. It’s one heck of a journey to embark on alone.
I’m uncomfortably familiar with the unpleasant reactions you received after informing your psychotherapist(s) of things that worked better for you. The unfavorable responses you faced are ones I’m familiar with.
I’ll never forget the time I was “in session” with a psychiatrist who became enraged when I finally got up the courage to tell him that I got more out of chatting with random people at the Costco across the street from his office than I did sitting across from him in what was essentially a staged encounter. And I was pleasant about, it too! It felt great to sit up and finally say what I felt was true for me. You’d think he would have been happy for me.
Most of the psychotherapists I’ve seen weren’t much better at concealing their anger when faced with what seemed for them to be an almost existential threat. It was obvious they found my matter-of-fact truthfulness threatening to their sense of who they thought they were.
For most people I’d chalk up such defensiveness to them simply taking things too personally, but not in these situations as I’m pretty sure most of these people find refuge in being chronically dissociated, or, as you so aptly put it, “…they are themselves stuck in a trauma bond with their therapists and the oppression at the heart of the field.”
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Thanks, Birdsong. Yes, it was truly hard and scary to walk away. Especially, because I didn’t know whether it would work out.
At the same time the decision was easy. I knew I’d rather not make it being independent of psychotherapy than allow the abuse and malpractice to go on and becoming a broken person who watches herself with the eyes of their deluded psychotherapist.
In those years I chatted with several long time users of psychiatry who had experiences with psychosis in a self-help-group where I went to find help how to deal with my dissocial and delusional and highly abusive mother.
I found that they had adopted just such perspectives on themselves and had given up themselves. They got extremely aggressive against me when I tried to find help among them about how to adress the abuse and harm that I was experiencing whether it was from the side of my mother, a psychiatrist, and the rest of my family, or from the side of my psychotherapists.
I think that these discussions were crucial for me to understand that psychiatric abuse instilled in patients (and “progressive” clinicians alike) something very similar to the battered wife syndrome.
I am glad you were able to walk away too!
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Lina, I’m sorry you didn’t find fellowship or at least a modicum of caring and kindness from the self-help group. It’s unfortunate the way so many people internalize some version of psychiatry’s “broken brain” narrative. I try to understand their seeming willingness to so easily forfeit their agency. Then I remember how easy it is to fall into psychiatry’s medicalized rabbit hole. It seems most people would rather do that than explore the things that most likely had a hand in shaping how they feel and react to the world.
I believe everyone should be free to choose their own way of dealing with things — as long as they know there’s more to “mental health” than psychiatry’s doomsday narrative.
But most of all, I applaud your perseverance in finding what works best for you.
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I am having a hard time reading this discussion. Well of course Carl Roger’s, and also Rollo May and other white males And the old word was eclectic not pluralistic.I thought DBT was an awful reaction to Dr . Linahen’s own life and career.
This is not new thinking is using a different vocabulary for the same old same old. In the Roman Catholic framework one of the wisest sayings and begun as a joke is that the grace from the liturgy was lost as soon as people left and got in their cars and tried to get out of the parking lot first.
Trauma along with no vertical thinking and creative thinking is lost in the time either before or after the old one hour therapy.
Complex human problems need the acknowledgement of complex solutions requiring new frameworks and frameworks. Flashbacks are not linear. One can get one in the mall when a song is played on the PA system. One can be back in time because of a certain scent or smell.
All the human senses and other forms of sensation are in a complex card or chess game within one human. I would think this is also part with the other species on this planet and possibly the earth itself.
I appreciate the effort but let’s be real here when one defends oneself with but my parents were open minded thinker the dice has been put in play.
We need to open ourselves to the vast beautiful and oh so complicated and complex number of worlds we live and walk through every day. Human civilization deep deep diversity and at the same time deep deep similarity.
Charles Kingsley an old Victorian wrote several books for children. He was very anti Irish in ways and isms but he did try and in The Waterbabies he has a paragraph on the importance of adults admitting to children they do not know. In At the Back of the North Wind he highlights a young boy’s short life lived in poverty. In his Princess and Curdie books he highlights mines and enchantments and hope.
Only one small not well known human. If he created these universes what can we do to create universes of healing? The old trope of beginners mind might help.
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“Complex human problems need the acknowledgement of complex solutions requiring new frameworks and frameworks.”
Take heart. This may seem like the truth, but it is not.
It’s just what we’ve been led to believe by THE VERY PEOPLE who have A VESTED INTEREST in keeping it the “mental health” racket going.
It’s like being in a relationship with someone who keeps confusing you, and then keeps you thinking solutions are impossibly complex, when all you really need is an awareness of what’s TRULY going on.
In this way, politics IS personal.
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The best solutions make things feel simpler, not more complex. One of the sure signs that the DSM is off base is the ever-increasing complexity of the system over time. Not to mention the ever-increasing numbers of “mentally ill” according to this system.
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I think you have to like creating confusion to work in “mental health”.
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I don’t agree. I think the system is organized to create confusion, and a lot of folks are simply confused. There are a small but powerful number who DO enjoy creating confusion – otherwise known as “narcissists” in their own parlance. These folks are in charge of the big decisions (opinion leaders) and support and create the system as it is. They are the ones who put out the propaganda and attack those who dare to challenge the “status quo.” Such people do absolutely exist at the lower levels of organization (the system itself attracts such people), but there are plenty who want to do the right thing and are simply confused by the propaganda and peer pressure within these organizations. There are also rebels “behind enemy lines” who do really good work and deserve credit for doing so despite the pressures and discrimination they face.
It is simplistic to assume ALL “mental health” workers have anything in common. It is absolutely not supportable to assume that creating confusion is a goal of all or even most “mental health” workers. I think most of them are more confused than we are!
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Thank you very much for unconfusing me, Steve.
I think what I was trying to say is this: to me it seems you’d have to like being confused in order to work in a system built on confusion, because if you don’t, you’d probably go insane. I know I would.
That being said, I’ve been shown no reason to doubt that most “mental health” workers are more confused than we are.
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I am talking from experience here. I was inside the system with a totally different philosophy than those who were running the show. I was not confused particularly, but I was certainly disheartened by the kind of pressure and discrimination I experienced when I failed to “get with the program.” A lot of it was simply isolation – folks were “He’s an anti-med guy” and ignored many of my comments and observations. I was able to fight for clients in specific situations and provide something that others did not, but it was pretty exhausting. At a certain point, I realized I was supporting an oppressive system by even participating, even if I was doing some effective damage control, and decided I had to get out of there. But I would not say I was confused. Just annoyed, disheartened and infuriated!
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Clarification: to me it seems you’d have to have a high tolerance for confusion in order to work in a system built on confusion, because if you didn’t, you’d probably go insane.
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Steve, I’m sorry I sounded so disparaging. My fury at how things are run in the mental health system just gets to me sometimes.
Thank you for doing what you did for as long as you did. I can only imagine how horrible it must have been having to function in such an invalidating environment.
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I felt I was doing good things. When the bad outweighed the good, I had to stop. But I really respect those who are in the trenches or behind “enemy lines” because people need help NOW and it’s the only way I know those in the system can get support.
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I’m sure you were doing wonderful things. I have great respect for those who are in the trenches or “behind enemy lines”. I just wish there were more people dedicated to changing things.
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Me, too!
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🙂
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Really good. “Of course, therapy alone isn’t enough. Economic and political changes are also crucial.” Crucial. These are huge, pervasive systems in need of fundamental change (or replacement), but it’s nevertheless crucial that they fundamentally change (or get replaced). Otherwise, we can expect more of the same.
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Last night I watched the movie Don’t Look Up. It’s about an impending asteroid collision with Planet Earth. It stars Leonardo Di Caprio. Mark Rylance acts in the film also. High Strangeness Experiences is a term often coined in Extra Terrestrial Literature. I like it. It allows for the peculiar, ineffable, weird, exotic, synchronistic, bizarre, other worldy experiences to have a grain of possible truth. I could fill a book with my own High Strangeness Experiences. I used to feel satisfied that I was channelling the spirits of poets. My writing improved fantastically. I even won a prestigious literary award. I was certain I was being guided by Shakespeare, amongst others. I still believe this. I don’t even like Shakespeare. I’ve never read his opus. But maybe he liked me. Stranger things have happened. His ghost. Occasionally I spectate some thespian video related to Shakespeare. Recently Mark Rylance was acting in a drama Wolf Hall, or it’s sequel. I felt like sending that actor a postcard mentioning how I knew Shakespeares ghost personally. I felt sure that ghost will have been aware of Mr Rylance’s epic acting in The Royal Shakespeare Company. This is where Mark and me might have both had High Strangeness Experiences. A gusty candle, a flapping curtain, a floating page, a runnel of wet ink.
Two decades ago I was given a message from the beyond that Holy Wrath was coming because humanity could not stop polluting the planet. I understood it to be coming in various forms. One of those involved five meteors, small ones, hitting the ocean and causing tsunamis. I object to the notion of Holiness and Wrath, so I flung those words out and now see cosmic events as just being random, not pitiless punishments. Most planets are polluted by stuff that makes them uninhabitable. I have nevertheless carried the five meteors prophecy for two decades, long before the film Don’t Look Up was begun. Before the pandemic, I had to use up spare money by staying at a very wealthy hotel for a night. My schizophrenia was terrible but I arrived on time to find the hotel deserted. My focus rapidly attended to how preposterous my dowdy clothes were for an expensive hotel. I became obsessed with trying to mimic posh people as I didn’t want the guarded butlers to spot my schizophrenic humble dishevelled inner self and throw me out. A comedy of errors ensued. It was not until the breakfast in the opulent dining room that I realised why the hotel was so empty. It was full of massive security police protecting Leonardo Di Caprio, who had the hotel more or less to himself, minus the mad lady in bedroom nearby, myself. I believe that my own handlers in the spirit realm, my own protection detail, will have floated through to that movie star’s bed chamber and whispered into his ear about five meteors coming, small ones, to which he might like to make a blockbuster about a great big meteor in future, to help people get used to the possibility of such a random event. Calm them all, so to speak. Was I guided to be in that place and time, in that hotel, by my spirit folk? How odd is it that two meteor buffs would share a hotel? As for Shakespearean Mark Rylance being in the same movie…
High Strangeness Experiences seldom get a lookin in mainstream psychology or therapy. Gestalt Therapy is very open to the reality of intuition. A phrase in this article says “how to relate to others”. I find it a bit odd. If we accept we may never truly know an individual, as if they are a golden being unknowable, then we must ask them to reveal themselves as if they are the only authority on themselves. Until they do so we cannot possibly “relate” to them. Not unless we are bullying them with our own judgement of them. If we can accept “High Strangeness Experiences” maybe we can let people stay Highly Strange in a beautiful way.
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Politics in therapy is a terrible idea when therapists already have too much power.
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As a contributor to MIA, thank you for your balanced perspective on the best and worst of mental health care. I have been a mental therapist for more than fifty years. No one is without fault, nor is anyone perfect. If there will be a positive social change, it must come from respectful, constructive dialogue between practitioners, journalists, and mental health critics. Otherwise, we are all in trouble. We live in an age of intensifying groupthink, permeating all societal sectors. My views have changed since I recently published two articles in MIA. I hope we can all keep an open mind. The world depends on it.
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Generally speaking, among the MOST CLOSED-MINDED people I’ve met, are psychiatrists, psychologists, and “therapists” of all kinds….it wasn’t until I ditched the so-called “mental health” folks, that my healing truly began….. What’s the point of a “good” therapist, in a BAD, BAD, BAD profession?….
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“If there will be a positive social change, it must come from respectful, constructive dialogue between practitioners, journalists and mental health critics. Otherwise, we’re all in trouble.”
WTF??? We’re already in more than enough trouble thanks to the groupthink of most practitioners, journalists and so-called “mental health critics”.
And btw, what’s wrong with taking seriously the many personal stories RIGHT HERE ON MIA?
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I and many others do take very seriously the many personal stories RIGHT HERE ON MIA? GIVE OTHERS A CHANCE TO UNDERSTAND YOUR DILEMMA WITHOUT HYPERBOLE.
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What’s wrong with hyperbole?
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Hyperbole means exaggeration to the point of meaninglessness.
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It’s pretty hard to exaggerate the harms committed by the so-called “mental health” industry.
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Thanks, Birdsong. I find your comment and some of the other responses to this interview reassuring.
The suggestion that wider engagement and reform within systems of power and with the individuals who serve these systems as being not only possible but welcomed seems naive at best and would leave already vulnerable populations open to further injury and exploitation. That’s why criticisms like these are relevant.
Group-think is about assimilation, with its goal being the annihilation of self, conscious independent thought, critical thinking and a deadening of empathy for every other human being on the planet.
While a human-centered approach sounds good in theory (and I don’t disagree), in practice it’s not as if “the horrifying behaviors” referred to during the interview are limited to specific individuals or members of a particular political party or group.
Instead, it’s about systems of power and the decisions being made by people in power about other human beings whose lives are as valuable as any other and yet suffer without having had a voice in the decisions being made about their lives. This includes literally billions of people in ‘other’ parts of the world as well.
In an ideal world, a genuinely person-centered approach would be two individuals, or possibly a *small* group of individuals, voluntarily coming together without any hidden agendas or power imbalances existing between them and making decisions that affect their *own* lives, without causing unnecessary harm or dehumanizing anyone.
Every truth-seeking philosophical, religious, spiritual, and intellectual perspective worthy of serious consideration has, in some way, made similar points about the corrupting influence of groups, systems and institutions of power. Reality isn’t hyperbole.
To engage meaningfully includes being able to peacefully disagree and thoughtfully challenge faulty assumptions about the world we live in . . . without creating new power imbalances or resorting to violence.
“There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that “the crowd” received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.
“For “the crowd” is untruth.” ~ Soren Kieerkegard
None of this is intended to dehumanize *anyone*.
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Thank you, Tree and Fruit. I find your comments truly compelling.
I also think trying to change the mental health system is naive for all the reasons you so eloquently stated.
P.S. Thank you for saying that reality is not hyperbole.
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“P.S. Thank you for saying that reality is not hyperbole.”
You’re welcome, Birdsong.
I was also thinking how irony, cynicism or even sarcasm can be ways for us to express our frustration, with the last option admittedly not always being the best or ideal way to communicate.
I grew up in the ‘hood’, so every once in a while, as a counterreaction to some extreme situation, I privately do this, always separating message from messenger and without wishing anyone harm.
It has a clarifying effect and immediately helps me to cut through all the gaslighting and subterfuge and stay sane in an insane world. It’s a part of who I am.
Since I haven’t yet figured out how to consistently reply to specific comments that don’t have “Reply” as an option without interrupting the continuity of the thread, I want to share a synchronicity with you related to one of your and Nick’s recent exchanges.
I woke up this morning thinking of a favorite quote:
“That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
One of my favorite books (and I have a lot of favorite books) is “Wittgenstein” by H.L. Finch, an author who has a beautiful way of simplifying complex thoughts.
There’s a video on Wittgenstein I like too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcF-XoF2HFc
Life is symbolic. Language relies on symbols that can be easily manipulated to convey meanings absent of Truth.
Without casting any stones, in the past I’ve sometimes been guilty of this too.
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I think it’s always worthwhile for professionals and patient advocates to personally engage with and sometimes challenge individual therapists, doctors, nurses, aides and other caregivers who work within these systems.
Years ago, I would sometimes write letters to the State documenting specific issues related to improper record-keeping, unlawful increases in monthly fees, intentional over-medication and other issues, always working closely with our local Ombudsman.
All of my complaints were investigated and found to be justified.
In the end, and though the facility was fined for their violations, and certain procedures were put into place, I realized it hadn’t made much of a difference and may have done more harm than good.
So as far as appealing to people in positions of power to address systemic issues in a meaningful way, I’m doubtful.
Training is necessary and important, but what happens after training when no one is looking?
In the end, it will always come down to individual choices and caring and paying attention to what’s going on with other individuals and all around us and in all of the hidden places.
There are things that can’t be taught or externally imposed or impressed upon someone.
To be fair, it was mostly about the owners rather than the caregivers who were, for the most part, very conscientious. But not all of them.
A single individual can still do great harm.
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“There are things that can’t be taught or externally imposed or impressed on someone.”
That’s why I think seeking professional has the potential of ending up counterproductive.
There’s great harm in encouraging people to think that having a degree means someone knows what they’re doing.
The exchange of money just adds more “political” chaos to an already imbalanced relationship.
When all is said and done, how can you trust people trained to keep their true feelings and identity a secret?
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Correction: That’s why I think seeking professional help has the potential of ending up counterproductive.
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I agree. A degree isn’t a guarantee. Individuals with an online presence sometimes make themselves known through social media, if we know what to look for.
As far as seeking professional help, I’ve found the exceptions prove the rule.
The director of our local Ombudsman was as discouraged and frustrated as I was with the system and its professional caregivers. He was a good guy who was underpaid, overworked and dependent upon a small group of older volunteers (ombudsman) to be his eyes and ears and legs. He took my calls even after my mother died and wanted to personally intervene to help me get back some money we were owed.
I already mentioned he offered me a paying job, which surprised me considering his budget and my lack of ‘qualifications’. I think he recognized a kindred spirit in me and knew I was motivated by wanting to do right by people who were without power or a voice, seeing as how I’d also advocated on behalf of other residents over the years.
Something I probably mentioned in another comment was that my husband and I lived within walking distance of the board and care I found for my mother, so I was able to visit her every day, sometimes several times a day and occasionally at night, when she needed extra reassurance.
My husband took care of her too and was a regular visitor. He did a lot of her shopping; there were so many things we had to take care of and pay for out of pocket that weren’t covered by her rent. It was a lucrative business.
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John McKnight’s “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits” reviews some of the history of marketized relations, including the medical industry, supplanting autonomous social relations among people who become subject to professional monopolies of knowledge as power. The ultimate goal of capital is to commodify, and control, all life.
Science in general doesn’t exist in a vacuum value-free of ruling power. In modern mythology of enlightenment and progress, science serves as the opiate of the masses, beyond religious ideology. So called human sciences like psychology serve to socially engineer subject populations into compliance with the death march of ‘civilization’ under class rule. Myths of mental illness manage us for population control within generalized conditions of abuse and trauma, which remain obscured under rule by experts treating individualized ‘cases’ and ‘patients’ uprooted from communal traditions providing any alternative to the enforced social system.
Even the human-centered theory and practice of Carl Rogers is fair game for insidious methods of mind control to manufacture consent and thus pervert its healing potential. (And when you next hear warning of drinking the kool-aid, remember that Jonestown’s victims were killed, ‘suicided’, shot by bullets or with posionous injections, to cover up ‘cult’ links to the CIA’s MK-Ultra program.)
The most liberating and egalitarian option is to deinstitutionalize and decentralize the knowledge-power apparatuses of rule, and restore people’s power to form our own more human alternatives of care and compassion, in communities that live and learn and love far beyond the machinery of production and profit under which we suffer. Accordingly, a primary purpose of any professional dissenting to the managerial role s/he plays in the present relations of power over us is to abolish the basis for the existence of her/his own caste.
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Has Mick Cooper (or Javier Rizo for that matter) looked at Deleuze & Guattari work? Although written in the 1970s (and it shows), they are now coming into focus in addressing politics in psychotherapy. Their books on capitalism and schizophrenia go the heart of what’s wrong in the world. However their writing is so difficult to understand and what we now need is a group of scholars able to translate their work.
Now that cognitive science is entertaining the notion that we have “extended minds” (or “extensive minds”) (e.g. I feel my wheels on the road when driving (i.e. I am one with the car when driving), or that you miss seeing the guy dressed in a gorilla suit who walks into the middle of the scene, when you are busy counting the number of time the players pass the ball); it is inviting us to see we are not “independent minds” (or brains) encased in skulls, but “extensive” identities.
D&G talk about “Bodies without Organs” which is their way of talking about what is commonly called being in the “flow”, which is to be encouraged as it is a way of resisting the excesses of capitalist culture which is now out of control, and destroying the future for everyone. Having an extensive mind you become more aware of how capitalistic culture is disciplining you (a la Foucault) and/or corrupting you.
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I think what you describe boils down to gaining perspective on how much the immediate environment affects (or not) an individual.
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…in other words, it’s a matter of stepping back to get some perspective on how your surroundings may be influencing your state of mind.
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I checked out your website, Nick. In addition to a Wittgenstein synchronicity (which I mentioned to Birdsong in a comment I left earlier today), I discovered another interesting coincidence.
Last year, and before I discovered this site, as I was waking up I ‘dreamed’ the following message:
“No as the gift is nous” . . . or was it “Nous as the gift is no” . . . I couldn’t remember exactly, maybe it was both.
I assumed it had something to do with choice and the importance of exercising greater discernment and self-agency in choosing to say no to wrong things. After reading on your website what you’d written about negation/apophatic theology, I recognized another layer of meaning, one that seems to support my original understanding.
I’d been thinking about a choice I made decades ago, when I was much younger, and how confused and naive I’d been. It was the first time I ever remembered feeling spiritually connected to someone in a way I’d never felt before. In retrospect, and because it transcended anything I’d ever experienced, it was my first real EXPERIENCE of God’s loving presence in my life and what was possible between human beings once we understand how connected we are to one another.
Meister Eckhart spoke about this same connection between romantic and divine love.
I imagined the relationship to be something that it wasn’t, and yet this negation and disillusionment provided an opening. Good things came of it, in spite of my mistake and probably because of it.
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Talk about undue influence…
Navigating therapists’ inclination for bias is difficult enough without having to worry about them inadvertently(?) looking to saddle you with their own political agenda.
And don’t think for a moment that only a few would give it a try…
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Have you heard the saying that the “political is the personal” – in other words therapists are political now – but what would you prefer a therapist who denies their politics or one that acknowledges them and is transparent about them?
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I’d prefer never to see a therapist of any kind.
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…and as a therapist I prefer not to see anyone who doesn’t want to see me.
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My goodness, that’s generous of you!
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Why is that generous Birdsong, or are you being sarcastic? If so, why??
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I’m sure you’re capable of answering those questions yourself.
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Birdsong, did I do something to offend you, is that why you are being sarcastic? If so I apologise. But what did I write specifically that offended you?
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Nick, while it’s true that “politics is personal”, it’s highly unethical for therapists to use therapy as a place to air their own political views – asked for or not.
It’s for a client’s advantage for therapists to keep in mind that psychotherapy is primarily designed to assist people in various states of emotional distress and confusion – an unusual arrangement that can and does set the stage for the person with more power (in this case the therapist) to strongly influence vulnerable people needing a sympathetic ear.
This creates fertile ground for therapists to take advantage of susceptible people already unsure of themselves no matter how ethical or conscientious the therapist.
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…all the more reason for therapists to behave responsibly.
IMHO.
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Hi Birdsong
I will provide some examples – take narrative therapy and anorexia nervosa – the narrative therapists are attracted to ‘externalising’ anorexia as a discourse rooted in the patriarchy, and following Johnella Bird might ask,”what kind of relationship do you want with the patriarchy” (this is called ‘relational externalising’). Somewhat similarly some psychoanalysts these days are attracted to the idea that the ‘unconscious’ is more the social environment rather than a repository of conflicts as Freud proposed. Erich Fromm published in 1955 ‘The Sane Society’ saying society is obviously “mad” as evidenced by its propensity to have wars on a regular basis. Fromm was critical, similarly to Foucault, of our idea of “normalcy” – it is a distorted mirror that most look at themselves with.
I think it is unethical for therapists not to look at what’s called the “social unconscious” as it is that which is at the root of our psychoses and neuroses – otherwise they can be accused of supporting capitalism or the “craziness” that is driving the misery.
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Nick, you bring up some very good examples regarding the “social unconscious”.
With that stated, I still think it imperative for therapists to let clients lead the dialogue, especially these days when words like “capitalism” and “patriarchy” are so politically charged, meaning therapists ought to respond to people’s psychological dilemmas in ways that help lead them to discover their own attitudes, beliefs, views, and feelings, etc., not the therapists.
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Yes – that is why I mentioned Johnella Bird’s ‘relational externalising’ – which asks the question “what kind of relationship do you want with [say] patriarchy?” – which has more of a Levinasian ethic to it [Levinas was a philosopher who claimed that ethics comes first – and in this case the client leads the discussion].
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Thanks. Sounds like useful and interesting stuff….
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Nick, I tend to look at things more socially/culturally than politically, especially when I’m considering psychological things, although I wouldn’t deny that these are inextricably intertwined.
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Nick, I just read a bit about Emmanuel Levinas and am pleasantly surprised because to me ethical responsibility is a pretty big deal.
His “Ethics as First Philosophy” makes him sound as though he might be a philosopher I could actually respect.
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Hi Birdsong
Yes Levinas is cool in my books. He approvingly quotes Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima (in The Brothers Karamazov) who says “everyone of us is responsible for everyone else in every way, and I most of all”. (“I most of all” because in recognising one’s responsibilities to others it puts even more stress on oneself) Wittgenstein also approved of that quote. Levinas says we have an infinite responsibleness for every person, only limited by our responsibility for others. So only my responsibility to others limits my responsibleness to you.
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Levinas’s thoughts on infinite responsibility remind me of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (love your enemies, do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and his parable of the Good Samaritan (love your neighbor as yourself).
Wittgenstein’s thoughts on how language is used makes me wonder what he would have to say about psychiatry’s “DSM”.
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I’ve published papers on Wittgenstein and mental health.
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Nick, I looked up and found two articles written by you. One is called “Wittgenstein and the Red Queen: Attuning to the World and Each Other”, and the second is called “Wittgenstein and the Tikanga of Psychotherapy”. I was surprised to find them both readable and engaging. I look forward to finishing both!
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Hi Birdsong – there is lots more if you put in google “academia.edu + Nick Drury”…..
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Nick, thanks for letting me know! 🙂
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You seem to be pushing politics in the therapy space, something I consider not only untherapeutic but also highly unprofessional.
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Hi Birdsong,
It seems that you are making the mental health field into a political issue. The anti-psychiatry movement has been going on for a long time. Serious dialogue is still needed. I don’t think this is unprofessional, unethical, or unprofessional. Correct me with a reasoned argument if I’m wrong. I do think it is irresponsible and tragic that many suffering people will follow your advice and not seek out therapeutic help when needed. I am glad I sought out my beloved therapist after my suicide attempt. Your response to that article in MIA was to claim, without foundation, that there is no such thing as a excellent therapist, only excellent human beings. I invite Nick Drury and others to review my previous articles published in MIA. Peace,
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Michael, I’m delighted you found the help you needed when you needed it.
Nevertheless, I think express myself reasonably enough; if what I say sounds political to you, so be it.
I also think people are intelligent enough to decide for themselves whether or not to seek professional help.
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Michael, there is such a thing as irreverent humor.
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I am sorry Michael I haven’t time to delve into the MiA archives to find your previous comments – but I will keep an eye out for your subsequent postings. And like Birdsong, I’m delighted you found the help you needed when you needed it.
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Birdsong, I am well aware of irreverent humor. This is also called disingenuous.
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Perhaps you should cultivate humor of some kind.
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This comment isn’t directed at you, Nick, or anyone in particular, but I would like to add my own thoughts and feelings about the intersection of politics and therapy, in that they probably differ from others who’ve commented.
The influences that have most affected my mental health, and that have sometimes left me feeling hopeless and despairing, are both personal and impersonal and can’t really be separated.
It’s lonely and frustrating to live in a world where instead of truth-seeking most of us have been conditioned to seek out information that confirms our natural biases and beliefs and to (consciously or unconsciously) make choices that seem to offer us the greatest potential benefit without considering those who would suffer unjustified harm and sometimes death.
Most people take for granted that I’m as excited as they are about participating in a political system where, as they see it, we’re still given the option of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices… when for me, a vote would only legitimize the system itself and make me complicit in causing more harm than I already am.
On the other hand, I understand why people living on the edge and in desperate situations or in smaller communities, sometimes vote based on specific issues that affect their wellbeing and survival, and for candidates who promise to address these issues.
If I were to see a therapist (which I won’t), how could I share any of this, since more likely than not they’d hold a particular political position very different from mine and be influenced by an intellectual and ethical perspective I find not only alienating but condescending.
A friend, after one of our long discussions, shared my perspective with her Buddhist therapist, with “Right Action” (that causes no harm) being part of the Noble Eightfold Path.
She said her therapist quickly dismissed my perspective as being influenced by propaganda.
I’m not singling out Buddhism, btw. My friend’s therapist could just as easily have been a Catholic or Presbyterian or even a Quaker, Socialist or Communist. To each their own.
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“The influences that have most affected my mental health, and that have sometimes left me feeling hopeless and despairing, are both personal and impersonal and can’t really be separated.”
Tree and Fruit, for what it’s worth, my thoughts and feelings align with yours 100%.
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It’s worth a lot. Thanks, Birdsong.
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🙂
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It wouldn’t matter if my therapist shared their political views with me or not.
The kind of support they’d be able to provide would still most likely be influenced by their conditioned beliefs, which would limit their ability to clearly see, hear, challenge and provide support in a holistic way that wasn’t solely about me or them, or based on worldly ideas about what constitutes mental health.
Most therapists probably aren’t thinking in terms that include our connections to one another through a greater field of consciousness that’s beyond geography, brain and intellect, false gods and choices.
I’m not against therapy. It’s just not a good fit for me.
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Sometimes I wish I could feel at least somewhat sanguine about therapy, but whenever I try to, I feel as though I’m betraying myself.
That’s never a good fit for me.
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I’m sorry, Birdsong. I can understand why you’d be wary.
Recently I’ve been reading “Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption” by Jungian analyst, Donald Kalsched.
I love books where I can randomly open to any page and usually discover something both relatable and that leads me to make other connections, without my having to begin at the beginning of the book and reading straight through.
It’s amazing how ‘therapeutic’ it can be to read about other people’s struggles and efforts to find healing, with healing not being synonymous with cure.
I’ve also learned to separate the message from the messenger. Sometimes I can and other times I can’t. I feel this way about most Jungian authors and even Jung himself.
For the sake of anyone else reading this, it’s worth repeating I’m definitely not against therapy in and of itself.
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Thank you, Tree and Fruit, but I’ve come to see my wariness as a gift.
I love good books, too! I looked up “Trauma and the Soul” on amazon. It sounds wonderfully fascinating, but right now a bit out of my price range.
Sometimes I think there ought to be more therapists with a spiritual orientation, but then I remind myself what a hornet’s nest spiritual matters can be, especially with people some of whom are already primed to go on an ego trip.
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Wariness can be a form of discernment. It’s good to be cautious and to vet things, without accepting people or their words at face value. I’m blessed in that my intuition usually kicks in at some point, either immediately or based on more information and/or exposure.
Not sure how someone would vet a potential therapist. Or if there’d be a way to have a one-on-one conversation where specific questions could be asked and answered. I have a feeling the kinds of questions I’d have in mind wouldn’t be addressed directly.
About the book . . . I don’t know where you live (or what your particular circumstances are), but some libraries carry books like the one I mentioned; out of curiosity, I just checked and ours does.
Over the years, our library has allowed me access to videos, music, books and even a free movie channel on our Roku TV.
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I found a YouTube video of Mick Cooper demonstrating a Person-Centered therapy session, using an actor playing the role of his female client. There are two versions; I watched the one with added commentary.
Throughout the session, the ‘client’ described two different relationships and her frustrations in both, one professional, one romantic. She detailed various ghosting, breadcrumbing, minimizing, unverifiable excuse-making and other unpredictable, undependable “childish” behaviors she’d been experiencing and had experienced in the past with other men.
Her other frustration was based on a lack of support and excuse-making she’d experienced professionally, on the part of her boss and coworkers who could’ve supported her but hadn’t, obviously because they weren’t able to recognize the significance of these behaviors and didn’t see a problem.
Watching the video, I felt a growing sense of frustration but continued to watch until the end. To be fair, the client did eventually seem to realize she wanted more from her romantic relationship(s) during her session, which was something.
I came away with the sense that no matter how well-intended and empathetic the therapist was personally, he *seemed* unaware of the dynamic that gets set in motion in narcissistic relationships and the ways in which they intentionally create greater imbalances of power and confusion within relationships.
The therapist encouraged his client to share her feelings with her romantic partner and to ask for what she needed. He wasn’t suggesting that change was possible or even likely, but from my perspective the suggestion wasn’t helpful.
Though there are always exceptions that prove the rule, I suspect any efforts made on the part of the client’s romantic partner as a result of her asking would likely have been temporary and even worse, terribly misleading.
This is true in both personal and impersonal relationships, within cultures, society at large and its systems. People generally show us who they are and what they’re willing to give and/or are capable of through their actions.
This isn’t a critique of Person-Centered therapy in general, since I have no way of knowing if this is typical of this approach or not.
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Tree and Fruit, wariness is definitely a form of discernment. I also think it a form of intuition – something that if I’d paid proper attention to when in “therapy” would have saved me years of needless suffering.
Moreover, I’ve come to the conclusion that vetting a therapist is a waste of time because my intuition tells me that therapists are trained in evading questions they’d rather avoid.
But all this is moot now that I’ve learned I don’t get anything out of talking to people who are afraid of also confiding in me because in my opinion that’s the only way to have an honest relationship.
As for the video, I think the most helpful thing would have been for someone to inform the person about narcissistic dynamics.
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“As for the video, I think the most helpful thing would have been for someone to inform the person about narcissistic dynamics.”
Yes, that too. In my case though, I would’ve first wanted my therapist to ask me to share a little about myself and what it was like growing up, helping *me* to make the connection between my unmet needs and poor relationship choices . . . immediate and intense mutual chemistry is usually not a good sign or the basis for a healthy relationship.
During my one very brief experience with therapy, when I told the therapist about some of my then-boyfriend’s inconsistent and untrustworthy behaviors and how I thought I ought to stop seeing him, she asked in a judgmental tone why I always wanted to leave relationships rather than work on them.
She barely knew me. So I’m not sure which relationships she was specifically referring to since I’d only had two boyfriends and the first one ended things by ghosting me, then continued to drift in and out of my life for the next few years saying he’d made a mistake.
The therapist didn’t seem to understand repetition compulsion and why someone would continue to become involved in unhealthy relationships with friends, romantic partners, coworkers, etc. who took more than they gave and were inconsistent, with impaired empathy for others.
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I think my biggest takeaway in relationships, which was reinforced throughout my life beginning in childhood and in my one experience with therapy, is that if someone isn’t capable of or willing to empathize without being asked, then there’s usually no point in asking unless I need to prove it to myself.
I’m not unique in that way. Reading people’s comments has made me realize that a lot of people feel similarly, falling all along a continuum and for a variety of reasons. It’s much lonelier being with people who don’t see us than it is spending time alone and getting to know ourselves.
It’s easier to share in a space like this than it is to share with people I’ve known all my life who never really knew me at all, except in glimpses or bits and pieces.
Something I hadn’t consciously realized until now is the connection between intelligence and mental health challenges. I’m old and tired and not nearly as sharp as I used to be; sometimes I find myself having to read someone’s comment several times to make sure I’m not missing anything.
It’s a poetic way of meaning-making and of seeing the world in a way that reaches beyond the usual ways of seeing.
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“In my case though, I would’ve first wanted my therapist to ask me to share a little about myself and what it was like growing up…”
From what I gather that’s standard procedure.
This for me is where “therapy” starts to go sideways because the moment a client starts revealing personal information (most) therapists automatically start making unflattering assumptions that enhance their illusion of proficiency.
Most therapists seem to think their training makes them more “qualified” to listen whereas I think this just makes them more unreasonably sure of themselves.
As for repetition compulsion, I consider the “therapy process” a highly curated form of repetition compulsion — on the part of therapist!
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As for empathy, one of my biggest takeaways from therapy was learning much I disliked receiving it from someone trained to show it on cue.
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Luckily for me, the therapist I saw didn’t make any attempt at real or fake empathy.
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Don’t know how I could have forgotten those types.
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There’s also impaired or selective empathy, which like a lot of things exists along a continuum and spectrum.
Let’s say I witness or know of someone who’s engaging in or supporting acts of violence against an innocent person or specific group of people, either directly or indirectly. While I wouldn’t wish unnecessary harm on the ‘perpetrator’ or the individuals who support the violence —again, either directly or indirectly— my empathy and sense of frustration for those who are being unjustly harmed will be fully engaged and felt more acutely.
Related to this, I’ve been reading more about Mick Cooper’s political views, referring to his own words and writing.
His perspective comes across as being rooted in and more concerned with maintaining cordial relationships with and unconditional positive regard for so-called ‘progressive’ individuals who hold positions of political power and in treating them with kindness . . . than he is with the millions and possibly billions of individuals on this spinning planet we all inhabit, but who are without a ‘vote’ or voice and the life and death decisions being made about their lives.
https://mick-cooper.squarespace.com/new-blog/2019/12/6/counselling-psychotherapy-and-politics
Lesser evil is still evil.
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Read it. My takeaway: I don’t like people who think they wear halos.
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Thank you for sharing such valuable insights! This article was not only informative but also inspiring. I appreciate the effort you put into making complex concepts so digestible. Keep writing!
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Therapy is supposed to be about helping the client, not the other way around.
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I went to a warm “person-centered” therapist- she was not abusive in the ways I think of abuse—not at all like the horribly abusive psychiatrist of my young -adulthood. Yet, the warm, kindly therapist actually did far more harm, because I trusted her.
When the therapist sitting before you comes from a deterministic theoretical framework- it resides within their being. They may not openly speak of their judgments or the fact that their belief system dictates if you were abused during childhood, you can’t truly be helped, or recover, but that ideology within their spirit seeps out in unwitting ways.
No amount of essays about the problems within the system, or political theorizing will help. The problems lie within the individuals whose spirits are entrenched with the rhetoric of psychological philosophy.
I know that there are those therapists who actually are not entwined with the ideology of their peers- I’ve known one, but these are rare birds indeed and where does one find them? How does one even begin to vet an “expert” to whom they are supposed to
reveal their inner most parts?
I believe the real solution is for those of us who in our distress and despair sought help from this system to loudly tell our stories simply so others will feel emboldened to walk away.
Once the money source is taken away, well, then I believe we may actually see change. If the ability to make a living in this manner were substantially thwarted, well, then perhaps real reflection would ensue. Maybe, that’s a very hesitant “Maybe”, but at least potential victims of the system would be saved from being brainwashed and broken further.
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There are some outcome rating scales which you the client can rate the therapist on – only some therapists actually use them – there is at least 2 types of rating scales – one is outcome rating scales – which you alone assess whether you are getting better – if not, therapists using these are advised that the ethical thing to do is to help you find someone who can help you. The second are called “session rating scales” and that is your rating of therapist and how much they were in tune with you – usually, and this will come as no surprise, high scores on the session rating scales usually correlate with good outcomes as measured by clients.
I would advise asking a prospective therapist if they use outcome measures; and only go to them if they do.
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Welp, thank you Nick. None of my therapists, save for one, ever asked for feedback or outcome measures and I wonder if a large-scale survey was done, how many clients ever actually were asked to assess if therapy was helping.
I reckon I didn’t have very ethical therapists. Thanks for that piece of information.
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“No amount of essays about the problems within the system, or political theorizing will help. The problems lie within the individuals whose spirits are entrenched with the rhetoric of psychological philosophizing.”
Yup. That also happens to be the BEST REASON for NOT seeking help from synthetic relationships.
So, instead of asking whether or not someone uses “outcome measures”, why not ask yourself why you think you need so-called “therapy” IN THE FIRST PLACE???
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One of my favourite stories from psychotherapy is the story of how, in the 1920s Clarence Shields challenged his psychoanalyst Trigant Burrow about the power differential that psychoanalysis has. So they switched positions, with Burrow lying on the couch and Shields sitting in the chair. Burrow subsequently wrote “The analytic attitude and the authoritarian attitude cannot be separated”, and the two of them went on to develop the first group therapy; and one of the aims of this was to overcome this authoritarian attitude. For his troubles Burrow was subsequently kicked out of the psychoanalytic association and his work marginalised. You can read a paper I once wrote on him ‘Trigant Burrow and the social world’ here https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/server/api/core/bitstreams/26063fc8-cd6f-4b65-abce-d611f586bdc8/content
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Nick, you write one heck of a good paper.
Burrow was way ahead of his time, so it’s hardly surprising he was kicked out of the psychoanalytic association.
“Dr. Burrow is that rare thing among psychiatrists, a purely honest man… [S]ubjective honesty, which means that a man is honest about his own inward experiences, is perhaps the rarest thing, especially among professionals.” D.H. Lawrence
That’s just as rare now as it was then.
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Thanks Birdsong. I live in the hope that making people like Burrow better known, the world will change. What’s your big hope that drives you here? – you seem to have more fortitude than I do to keep posting ….
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You’re welcome, Nick. I hope the same thing.
As for what drives me here…well, I like places where people are given the chance to speak their mind about things that really matter. Simple as that.
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And what’s the point of living if you don’t speak your mind?
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…or more to the point: what makes you think you need “a therapist” in the first place???
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“I know that there are those therapists who actually are not entwined with the ideology of their peers- I’ve known one, but these are rare birds indeed and where does one find them? How does one even begin to vet an “expert” to whom they are supposed to
reveal their inner most parts?”
The term “person-centered” is a combination of words used to describe a particular type of therapy, one that doesn’t guarantee genuine insight or empathy on the part of the therapist, or an unconditional positive regard for the unseen realities faced by either their clients or the realities of anyone else, including every other human being on the planet.
Acquiring a degree of political gravitas, or at the very least acceptance among peers within these systems of power, usually means adapting the ideologies of the ruling class. It’s good to read you know someone who isn’t.
This same dynamic can happen in family systems and within groups and communities. There are different kinds of power. Some are creative, inclusive and life-affirming, while others rely on violence and competitive power-over, power-under dynamics as a way to avoid unwanted feelings of vulnerability and/or to escape the inevitability of death.
Coming here, reading comments, sharing experiences and thoughts is a form of therapy. I’m sorry your trust was betrayed, AnnieOakley.
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I only wish I had asked such a question sooner, but I’m really grateful that eventually, I did.
You keep posing questions Ms. Birdsong- those questions may get through to those who have not thought yet to ask.
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Oh, my goodness, AnnieOakley! Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d asked myself that question sooner, too! But I’m sooo happy knowing you finally asked yourself that question as reading your comment made me feel like crying for what you’d been through.
Thank you for telling me to keep posing questions as I dearly hope they get through to those who have not thought yet to ask 🙂
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Uncharacteristically, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly anxious, as if someone or something needed my attention . . . who or what was it?
My mind was filled with conflicting thoughts about the thin line each of us walks as we travel through life, and the series of decisions we’re faced with as we try to make sense of the world and our lives. It was a feeling of existential dread.
Then I remembered a friend of mine from jr. high school and how in the notes we passed to one another during the day, she’d shared how hurt she was by a mutual friend’s lack of sensitivity surrounding a popular boy they both liked but who liked our mutual friend. Her notes were intelligent and thoughtful. She was a deep, sensitive person who was struggling with something likely rooted in another, earlier period in her life and relationship.
I don’t remember how I responded, but whatever it was that I said it must’ve meant something because she began calling me her ‘therapist’ and reminded me not to betray her trust by sharing anything with our mutual friend, which I didn’t. I saved her notes and still have them.
In high school, she fell in with a group of girls I didn’t much care for and she and I lost touch, though we remained casual friends. A few years after we graduated, our mutual friend phoned to tell me she’d committed suicide. I still think and sometimes dream about her. I’ve learned it always means something.
I had another friend, someone who’d experienced a series of emotional and physical traumas beginning as a child when her mother committed suicide. For around 7-8 years, beginning in high school, I’d periodically get desperate calls from her saying she wanted to kill herself. I’d rush over and somehow or other we’d get through it together. Most of the time, I’d end up spending the night.
Finally, I couldn’t handle it any longer. I had a full-time job and was silently struggling with issues of my own. Not only that, I began to feel manipulated; her threats had a histrionic feel to them. Sometimes she’d lie to get attention, something she later admitted to. I loved her and cared about her wellbeing, but I had to recognize my limitations.
My friend found a therapist and began taking several medications. When she reached out to me a few years ago, she thanked me, saying I’d kept her safe. She’s remained on the meds and has led a successful life by worldly standards, which was what she always wanted. She’s continued to see the same therapist for decades. Interestingly, she works in the medical field.
The point of my comment is that I understand why some people need the kind of support only outside interventions like therapy can potentially provide, either temporarily or on an ongoing basis and that it isn’t a reflection of weakness or any defect in character. Hopefully it’s a choice that would involve making an informed decision based on information and sharing provided on sites like this rather than one imposed from outside.
I also understand why some of us need to heal and explore our psyches independently, untethered from the world and absent of therapy. That’s been my way. It seems to have worked for Birdsong, AnnieOakley and others too.
There’s no one RIGHT way for anyone.
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I am sorry for the loss of your young friend.
Regarding your other “histrionic” friend. I’d say that they showed the behaviour of a person with what’s called an emotionally-unstable (Borderline) personality disorder in the psychiatric nomenclature.
It often goes together with a creative streak and/or an urge to help other people. Therefore you’ll find many of them in the medical field. Superficially they seem to be great empaths. However, they don’t make particularly good helpers because in crisis they react emotionally and self-absorbed, and they’re often jealous at those who are in need of their help. They’re the poster-child for covert narcissist abusive behaviours what makes them so dangerous as therapists to their clients. (See Dr. Ramani on Youtube’s Med Circle)
Within the psychiatric field borderline personality disorder is by far the most researched of all psychiatrically described pathological behaviour patterns. Therefore, when you do have it, and don’t receive it as a misdiagnosis – what happens to many women – you are quite likely to be able to find a therapist that can be of some support because the condition is well known in the field and there actually is some good knowledge around as to what is a support for people with “borderline” thinking/feeling/behaviour issues.
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Lina, psychiatrically labeling someone you’ve never met is very unfair, especially for someone who’s having a hard time. Granted, manipulative people do exist—some intentionally so while others are just unaware of what they are doing.
Psychiatric labels dehumanizing.
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My conscience and conscientiousness are kicking in as far as the borderline label, which I’ve never been completely comfortable with. It’s a diagnosis that can turn people who are suffering into social pariahs and exacerbate earlier traumas, without allowing for differences in individuals and their unique behaviors.
I’m having to rethink a lot of things since coming here.
My mother could be cruel and insensitive, but never manipulative, whereas my friend sometimes was.
One of the things that resonated with me as I was learning about borderline characteristics was the spiritual aspect and longing for something transcendent as a response to earlier trauma(s). It was something I could relate to and still do.
I’m realizing this isn’t unique among people who’ve struggled with a range of psycho-spiritual challenges.
I see Birdsong has added her own thoughts.
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Psychiatric labeling leads to stigma and bigotry. Just ask AI:
“Psychiatric labels, while sometimes intended to guide treatment and support, can indeed contribute to stigma by marking individuals as “different” or “broken” in the eyes of society. This stigma can lead to marginalization, social exclusion, and reduced opportunities.
At the same time, psychiatric labeling can enable bigotry, as it may reinforce harmful stereotypes or justify discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. For example, some labeled with a mental health condition might be unfairly judged as “unstable” or “dangerous”, which perpetuates prejudice and systemic inequality. These effects can be particularly damaging in contexts where societal biases–such as those tied to gender, race, or socioeconomic status–already play a role.”
At the very least they’re a sign of disrespect and intellectual laziness, imho.
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Wow, good job AI!
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It surprised me, too! I expected AI to put forth a lot more rhetorical fantasizing in matters psychiatric.
And here’s what it had to say about my new favorite phrase:
“Rhetorical fantasizing” isn’t a widely recognized phrase, but it could refer to the act of using rhetorical language to construct an idealized or unrealistic vision of something. This might involve exaggeration, including overly negative or optimistic hypothetical scenarios that might fall under concepts like “catastrophizing” or “fear mongering”.
Sounds right up psychiatry’s dark alley, if you ask me…
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“Psychiatric labeling leads to stigma and bigotry.”
I agree. Something is only helpful if it helps someone.
Naming or describing particular traits or behaviors, or temporary states, or different ways of looking at and experiencing the world is very different than stigmatizing someone with a diagnostic label.
Reading people’s stories and comments has been enlightening. Recent exchanges and rewatching YouTubes I’d forgotten about have been enlightening.
I’m still not against therapy. There are people who don’t have anyone else they can turn to and trust to talk to. No one at all. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t mean a therapist will necessarily be someone they can trust either. They may or may not be. They’re at risk of receiving a stigmatizing label.
I know some of the therapists I worked with genuinely cared about the young people they were seeing and helped them find jobs and/or supportive housing when they graduated, if needed.
I don’t know what the solution is, Birdsong. Humans are like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike. And there are never any guarantees as far as how we’re going to be treated by other human beings. Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is safe until we know, and sometimes we don’t have a say in the matter.
In a very real sense, there are never guarantees about anything. The most we can do is try to know ourselves and take responsibility for our own choices and behaviors and make a point of treating other people ethically and with respect.
What I do know is it’s not my decision to make as to whether or not someone ought to see a therapist, nor would I ever discourage someone from exercising their free-will and agency in making that particular choice. Even if I disagreed, which I might.
Now that I’m aware of this site, I’d probably suggest they do a little reading before making a final decision and leave it up to them to decide.
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“The most we can do is try to know ourselves and take responsibility for our own choices and behaviors…”
Yes, but how do you do that in a world saturated with psychiatry’s misinformation?
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Maybe your question is rhetorical.
But either way, I’d say everyone’s questions will be different and will change over time.
If what you’re really wondering is how you might’ve made different choices related to therapy, my sense is that you made the best decisions you could’ve based on available information and what you believed to be true at the time.
The process is finally winding down, but for a while now I’ve been reflecting on some of my own past choices and how I could’ve chosen differently. If I had though, I would’ve missed out on the valuable lessons my mistakes taught me and insights I gained. I wouldn’t be who I am today.
“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”
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Thank you for your response, Tree and Fruit, but I think it misses the nuance of my concern.
My question wasn’t about personal lessons or philosophical reflections—it was about how one navigates self-awareness and accountability in a world deeply influenced by psychiatry’s misinformation. This isn’t a matter of simply ‘living the questions’ or finding solace in mistakes for their so-called “lessons” as your quote suggests. It’s about addressing the tangible harms caused by systemic falsehoods and the challenges they create in finding accurate information.
Frankly, your response comes across as dismissive of the broader issue at hand and overly focused on personal platitudes. I also find it presumptuous and even slightly insulting, as it seems to imply that I’m seeking consolation rather than a serious discussion. While you may find comfort in such philosophies, they fail to acknowledge or grapple with the gravity of my concerns. I’d like the conversation to remain centered on the very real, systemic consequences of misinformation and the barriers it creates for those striving to make informed choices.
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I was referring to my own lessons involving a romantic relationship between myself and another consenting adult many years ago, before I met and married my husband —without implying anything at all about those who’ve been harmed by the psychiatric system or that anyone is in any way responsible for the intangible and tangible harms they’ve experienced or continue to experience within that system or any other.
We can’t know what we don’t know. I understand individuals seek help assuming they’ll receive it and are sometimes harmed in ways they couldn’t have anticipated or imagined.
Maybe I misunderstood your question, which I thought was more personal, since this site addresses systemic concerns in a way I could never do justice to.
The stories people share help others make better choices, or at least more informed ones.
Based on your many comments, I felt safe in assuming you’d learned something from your experience within the psychiatric system and maybe even about yourself, and that you’d recognize where no offense was intended.
The truth is I don’t know you, Birdsong. And apparently, I assumed too much. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
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To be fair to our discussion, I remembered something worth mentioning.
In response to the recent article “Structural Adversity and Suicide: The Mental Health Field is Asking the Wrong Questions”, your only comment so far has been:
“What is the point of this article?”
From my perspective, the point of the article was very clear in the connection being made between systemic injustices, poverty, suffering and suicide and systemic failures in recognizing and addressing them.
It began with the following two paragraphs, which I’m including for the sake of clarity:
“A new study published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior finds that structural adversity—such as food insecurity, housing instability, and parental incarceration—is strongly linked to suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, and repeated self-injury among racially and ethnically minoritized youth. Led by Patricia I. Jewett of the University of Minnesota, the research shows that youth experiencing two or more of these structural adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) face a particularly high risk.
“These findings challenge dominant psychiatric models that attribute suicide risk primarily to individual mental illness. Instead, the study underscores how systemic inequality, economic precarity, and state violence shape psychological suffering.”
Given the concerns you’ve expressed about my comment and the fact that “these findings challenge dominant psychiatric models”, it might be worth considering how your own comment could easily come across as being “dismissive of the broader issues at hand . . .” and of the tangible harms experienced by individuals as a result of psychiatric, economic and other worldly systems.
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Tree and Fruit, I was well aware of the point of the article. My question was meant sarcastically, meaning it was meant to imply my disgust at something so blatantly obvious.
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“These findings challenge dominant psychiatric models that attribute suicide risk primarily to individual mental illness . . .”
Using suicide as just one example, the overall point of the article and study (in quotes above) seems to be the very same point you and many others on this site consistently try to make, whether in comments or through the sharing of individual stories.
The stories most in need of telling are usually the ones whose causes are most obvious.
I googled my thought and amazingly AI seems to agree:
“The statement “the stories most in need of telling are usually the ones whose causes are most obvious” suggests that narratives that address simple, readily apparent issues are often the most important and impactful to share, as they can spark understanding and action.
Here’s a deeper look at the idea:
Focus on the Core Issue:
Stories that directly address the root cause of a problem, rather than just the surface symptoms, can be particularly impactful.
Promoting Empathy and Understanding:
By highlighting the obvious causes of a problem, stories can help audiences connect with the characters and situations on a deeper level, fostering empathy and understanding.
Driving Action:
When the causes of a problem are clear, stories can inspire action and encourage people to address the issue.
Countering Stereotypes:
By focusing on the “why” behind actions and events, stories can help to counter stereotypes and promote a more nuanced understanding of complex situations.”
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Tree and Fruit, I wasn’t questioning the need for stories. My question was meant as a rhetorical critique, an expression of frustration at them having to be told at all.
There’s a profound but subtle difference between the two.
In the future you might find it useful to dig a little deeper instead of automatically taking things at face value as there’s often more than meets the naked eye.
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Don’t worry Tree and Fruit – you’re only mad as a fruit tree because of society, and the spiritual insight your developing is the sane that’s just waiting for the collapse of the insane which includes your relationships with the insane variety of human beings we call ‘normal’, which roughly means wheezing obese type 2 diabetic on 4 mental health medications facing the constant risk of medical bankruptcy and homelessness. Rather then continuing your relationship with this society until it drives you into a frenzied chicken dance around the shopping mall crying ‘brain – malfunction! Malfunction! Malfunction!’ I recommend you buy some chickens, release them in freedom in your garden, hang out with them so you learn how to be free as a released chicken, then practice becoming a free and released human being, then you won’t say malfunction malfunction or go to psychiatrists or other secret euthanasia enthusiasts in order to become sane and healthy which is of course is an exemplary diagnostic measure of one’s insanity.
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“Lina, psychiatrically labeling someone you’ve never met is very unfair, especially for someone who’s having a hard time. Granted, manipulative people do exist—some intentionally so while others are just unaware of what they are doing.
Psychiatric labels dehumanizing.”
I appreciate you coming back with such a critique of my post, Birdsong. I was expecting it.
However, I am not sure, whether I really use the classic psychiatric nomenclature of the so called personality disorders as labels. I see this nomenclature as a theoretical framework that I try to hold lightly, in a sense that I try to stay aware that it is a medical perspective that pathologizes certain clusters of behaviour patterns.
I have discussed it before here (If not with you then certainly with Steve McCrea): I am not a follower of the “trauma” turn of “progressive”, “feminist” psychiatry and clinical psychology that has advocated for almost forty years to establish a psychiatric diagnosis called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), and has succeeded in Europe.
Why? Because I believe that the behaviour patterns that are described psychiatrically as the personality disorders are actually quite good descriptions of how children’s originally in-born and healthy personality patterns can become more and more rigid and self-defeating when they have to endure repeated violence, abuse and neglect without adequate support. Thus, if this connection would be understood correctly, there wasn’t a need for a new C-PTSD-diagnosis.
I prefer the classic nomenclature over the younger trauma discourse because it offers by and large a more profound understanding of the specific problems of each of the personality types in distress and a more specific understanding of what therapeutic practices and trainings come as a support to each one of the types.
The different schools of psychodynamic traumatherapy in my view don’t seem to work equally well and as “progressives” and “feminists” have hoped since the 1970ies.
The latter was the place where I was made dysfunctional in the psychiatric sense and then further harmed and abused in a total of four therapies from 1990-2020 with a diagnosis of C-PTSD that my “progressive”, “feminist” mother, a psychiatrist had given to me in the first place.
In reality, and starting from my mid teenage years and after enduring a first psychoanalytic therapy from 10-13 years old, I showed very severe behaviour traits of the so called avoidant personality disorder. Just as the experts for that “disorder” recommend, I recovered by using enormous amounts of yoga and meditation, group therapy (self-help groups), and anxiety desensitivization exercises.
Practices, with which I was forced to “self-medicate” because my therapists didn’t take serious my complaints about my severe social anxiety, chronically heightened stress levels, and chronic episodic depression, and claimed that all these problems would miraculously dissolve when they had helped me confront “my childhood trauma”.
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I see the endless infighting regarding psychiatry’s nomenclature as a pissing contest that in the long run mostly benefits the people in a position to exploit it.
Convenience is no excuse for what has proven to be a deeply flawed tool.
“Disorder” is particularly odious as it reduces people to objects, and usually ones of scorn.
Labels or not, it all boils down to an acutely limited and at times mean-spirited way of seeing and dealing with fellow human beings.
P.S. Truly creative and intelligent people, “professional” or not, have no need for psychiatry’s DSM other than to bill insurance companies.
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Are you aware that CPTSD means complex post-traumatic stress disorder?
I believe that I have seen you here in discussions showing a positive regard for psychiatry’s psychodynamic trauma theories.
Meaning that I remember you doing exactly that “infighting” between older an younger psychiatric diagnostic discourses on the side of the self-styled progressives that you accuse me of doing above.
I’d be sorry if I was wrong. But that’s what I remember.
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Lina, there’s a big difference between my showing positive regard for psychodynamic trauma theories and whether or not I believe in the DSM, which I don’t.
Furthermore, I was not accusing you of anything. The “infighting” I was referring to has to do with the horse-trading that goes on between psychiatry’s bigwigs at DSM conferences—an arena well-known for its politics.
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Not matter the language, an undercurrent of cruelty runs throughout psychiatry.
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“Superficially they seem to be great empaths. However, they don’t make particularly good helpers because in crisis they react emotionally and self-absorbed, and they’re often jealous at those who are in need of their help. They’re the poster-child for covert narcissist abusive behaviours what makes them so dangerous as therapists to their clients.”
Thanks, Lina. I appreciate your thoughtful response. I think you’re probably right.
Even before Dr. Ramani, I spent years researching borderline *characteristics*, which same as most things, exist along a continuum and show up differently in people. It helped me better understand my mother’s inconsistent and confusing behaviors, sometimes kind, sometimes raging and cruel. Covert narcissism seems to describe a lot of her stuff and also explains why I was always unconsciously drawn to people with similar behaviors (repetition compulsion). As a child, I internalized a lot of my mother’s black and white thinking about me.
To be fair, I don’t know what if anything my friend was diagnosed with, nor did I ever witness any of the numinous/religious/spiritual aspects I personally associate with borderline thinking/feeling, but your comment has made me wonder if all along that’s been a projection on my part based on my relationship with my mother and needing to see *her* that way.
It’s been more than a decade since I’ve looked at this, but I remember Jean Knox had some interesting thoughts on borderline thinking as did Nathan Schwartz-Salant. Otto Kernberg says narcissism is a defense against Borderline. He has a YouTube video with this same title.
Many of Dr. Ramani’s videos (on narcissism) have been helpful too, always with caveats. It’s always easier to see other people’s ‘stuff’ than it is to see our own.
I still think about my other friend and sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if she and I had remained close. As teenagers we were a lot alike.
Thanks again, Lina.
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“Superficially they seem to be great empaths. However, they don’t make particularly good helpers because in crisis they react emotionally and self-absorbed, and they’re often jealous at those who are in need of their help . . .”
As I thought more about it, I don’t think we can make generalizations like these, which isn’t to say this might not sometimes be true. In my initial response, I was thinking specifically about my friend and not about other individuals who either identify with or have been diagnosed as having borderline traits.
Like you, I’ve also tried to “hold lightly” the theoretical framework used in diagnosis and without viewing them as disorders. We live in a narcissistic world and culture. I think most people’s thinking and behaviors are disordered, including the thinking and behavior of many therapists; they just aren’t aware they are.
Many years ago, I used this lightly held psychological framework to diagnose myself. The traits I most identified with were those associated with BPD, particularly its spiritual aspects. I found it very helpful in understanding my natural inclinations and temperament, and unique responses to childhood traumas. This relationship between our natural patterns and ways of responding to trauma is something you mentioned in another comment, which I appreciated.
What probably helped me the most though, was reading the insights others who’d received this diagnosis had into themselves. Some of what’s been written in the literature and talked about on YouTube resonated and some not as much or at all. I think I’ve always been at least somewhat self-aware and willing to see things from another perspective. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at untangling myself from wrong ideas, relationships and things.
The other thought I had as far as my self-diagnosis is that it didn’t describe my values, guiding principles or “ultimate concern” (Paul Tillich). The narcissistic patterns which are sometimes associated with borderline were always something I recognized in others and made an effort to consciously work on in myself.
The power in naming can be healing or harmful, depending on who’s doing the naming and why. I used the naming to help me better understand myself and have benefited from it, but I also understand why many others have felt stigmatized and retraumatized by the diagnoses/naming/labeling and treatment they’ve had imposed on them, without having had the benefit of choosing or deciding for themselves.
We can’t force someone to see us, and no one can force us to see ourselves.
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” ~ Socrates . . . But first comes the shock, the shame and regret, followed by the grief and hopefully healing, which isn’t the same as cure.
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Thank you for your interesting reply.
If I got it right, Ms. Ramani doesn’t argue for people with the behaviour traits of the so called emotionally-unstable PS to be on a spectrum but she rather thinks with one of her mentors that there are distinct subtypes.
I am sorry that you experienced a weird mix of cruelty and kindness from the side of your mother as a child.
I dearly had to laugh when you mentioned that even Ms. Ramani is not free from unhealthy behaviours. I actually think that she might be so much into the clinical psychological notion of narcissism since she scores extremely high herself. Nevertheless, I also found her stuff helpful.
In the psychiatric perspective the abuse that I have experienced was what is called family narcissist scapegoat abuse, the theory of CPTSD being the tool for my psychatrist mother to destroy my reputation – what she started before I actually did experience any serious psychiatric ailments.
Of course I don’t think that she was aware of that. However, my mother showed behaviour traits of the so called dissocial PD which nowadays and in the youtube driven and rapidly changing nomenclature is called narcissist PD.
(However, the classic narcissist traits were not those shown in the behaviours of people who tick the boxes for dissocial PS but were theorised upon a different personality type who is obsessed with making themselves admired and – popular – not feared.)
You were mentioning several times the spiritual aspects of the personalities with people whose behaviours can be link to the so called emotionally-instable personality disorder.
To be honest: I have no idea what you are refering to. Could you elaborate?
I am glad that you resonate with the idea that there is innate personality in people (children) which decides what strategies they have naturally at their disposal as a respone to being the objects of violence and neglect in childhood and protecting them on the psychic plane in order to survive.
There is a long but pretty hidden history of the idea of inborn personality traits in psychiatric thought. But nowadays, psychodynamism’s rule is supreme and people who question it are ridiculed and told that they are just reluctant to confront themselves with themselves and “their trauma” in a long-time psychoanalytic setting.
Carl Jung did a lot of work on the idea of underlying inborn personality types. From there, there were broadly two developments. One is the Myers-Briggs. Which I think is too flawed to be of any good use. The other is the nine-type-personality theory which was originally brought forward by the Chilean psychaitrist Oscar Izacho. It was actually this theory which is presented in a very good quality in the work The Wisdom of the Enneagram by the two US psychologists Don Riso and Ross Hudson that played a critical role for me in surviving psychotherapy in the end.
It was a coaching with that psychological approach that gave me the theoretical insight and the intellectual tools that allowed me to understand that I had been misdiagnosed, mistreated and harmed in psychotherapy since I did show severe mental health struggles starting at around 14 years in the wake of being forcefully put into a psychoanalytic psychotherapy at ten.
It was there that I heard for the first time of the so called avoidant personality disorder that, as these two psychologists claim, broadly corresponds to the psychological description of the behaviours of the personality type nr. five (of nine), in the unhealthy ranges of their psyches, and sometimes labelled “the observer”, in the Enneagram theory.
Maybe you’re interested to read up on it. The traits of the people who fulfill the criteria of the psychiatric concept of the emotionally-instable personality disorder are there understood as the lower average to unhealthy behaviours of people with the personality style nr. 4.
The website of the Enneagram institute offers a good overview.
For me the Enneagram was a life-safer because it was just at the same time that in the wake of a severe family crises that was unlocked by the rapidly deteriorating delusional and dissocially aggressive behaviours by my mother I was myself in a crisis and in need of support but received by one deluded therapist after another nothing but one or several claims of me being a personality disorder patient.
Me claiming that my mother, a psychiatrist, was more and more deranged and her aggressive behaviours and abuse towards me at the root of my problems might have added to the denial of what was really going on in my life on the side of these colleagues of her.
The Enneagram allowed me to research very high quality literature on the so called avoidant personality disorder which helped me realise that it were just the practices and trainings that I had used with the most benefit for myself (see above) that these experts recommended themselves. From there my time decades long suffering in the hell of psychodynamism were counted!
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Dr. Ramani’s videos helped me understand, name and identify narcissistic patterns in several individuals during a more recent traumatic experience and at one point, series of ongoing actions/inactions that posed serious threats to safety and health.
These were ‘intelligent’ people I’d always assumed were at least somewhat reasonable, so it came as a shock. My understanding of narcissism has changed a lot over the years. I no longer consider it to be at all rare. Most forms are relatively banal and considered normal and desirable. I realize most people disagree and why.
One of the individuals who wrote about the mystical/numinous and religious aspects of borderline was Nathan Schwartz-Salant in his book, “The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing. The reviews I found on Amazon from readers who identified with borderline traits liked it and found the book to be very healing.
Others have written about these mystical (or shamanic) aspects as well, but it’s been so long since I’ve revisited any of this, I wasn’t able to find the links.
I did find an older link to something about borderline rage though. The article is worth a read and so are the comments. The funny thing is, I didn’t identify with any of the client behaviors the therapist described experiencing in his post, which seemed pretty narcissistic (and/or psychotic?): https://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/borderline-rage/
The only person I ever raged at was my mother and even then, only rarely. For the most part, I’d repressed ALL of my emotions, some of which expressed themselves somatically and not always in a negative way. Dancing was almost a religious experience for me.
Everything changed during my mother’s final years, when all that remained between us was our unconditional love for one another. When she’d look in the mirror and someone would ask her who she was, she’d say my name.
I’m sorry for what you went through, Lina. I relate to some of what you’ve shared and understand how frustrating it is to not feel loved or be taken seriously by anyone. I’m glad you found the enneagram and were able to use it in a way that helped you understand and make peace with yourself.
Coincidentally, at around the same age you were experiencing “severe mental health struggles” after being hauled off in a psychiatric van 4 years earlier, I experienced an atypical or complex migraine which mimicked a stroke (temporary loss of bodily functions and speech) and was literally being carried away by neighbors and driven to emergency rooms periodically for about a month. If given a choice, I’d choose my experience over yours. Again, I’m sorry.
Surprisingly, I had a good experience with a neurologist who spoke with me privately. I don’t remember much but think I may have poured out my heart, sensing his empathy. He called my parents in and had a stern talk with them, but especially my father.
When my father died, I found the note my mother had written him saying my feelings were my feelings and I was entitled to them. It caught me off guard; I hadn’t expected that. They began divorce proceedings shortly after my conversation with the neurologist and because of me, something that probably saved my life. It was easier to handle my mother’s abuse than my father’s.
I think the divorce saved my mother’s life too.
Later in life, I also became interested in the Enneagram! I’ve given away my books but for a while I had quite a collection. I’m a One with a Two wing, but also strongly identify with Four. I see Four as representing all of my repressed creative abilities and ways of more deeply and intimately connecting with the dark and othered parts of myself and with those who’ve felt similarly ‘othered’.
It’s also the space that allowed me to reconnect with my deeper emotions, vulnerability and grief. Vulnerability is narcissistic kryptonite. I may have already mentioned this in one of my earlier exchanges with you, but Otto Kernberg says narcissism is a defense against BPD; maybe borderline states can sometimes be a way for our psyches to avoid more extreme expressions of narcissism.
What you’ve described as being our inborn personality traits, I call our souls. I think I was born knowing my consciousness was eternal and existed beyond space and time. And that I was connected to everyone and everything. It just wasn’t something I could name and articulate until much later in life. My first mystical experience was in a bathtub at around age 5, when I realized I was the same as the water and that every drop contained the whole.
Thanks for responding, Lina. I appreciate everything you’ve shared.
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Thanks for your kind and interesting reply, Tree and Fruit.
I read the article by therapist Joe. I find it very to the point of “borderline rage”. I think I prefer to speak of the emotionally-instable personality disorder though. Borderline is not only often used pejoratively but it is actually outdated.
I won’t use it anymore!
I think that the description is very apt from my experience of being the target of such violent attacks that people with these traits start when something’s going on that bothers them.
I hope you appreciate me being honest. I think you have “misdiagnosed” yourself. If you have selected your Enneagram type correctly as type one you’d be directed to OCD/OCPD and anorexia for people with a low degree of psychological health.
Type four is type one’s so called “stress type”. So they have an inner connection. Maybe you remeber it. At the same time the differences are striking. Type one’s are angry all the time but they’re not aware of it, because they don’t want to be angry. With the type four and whether in the healthy or unhealthy ranges knows that they’re angry very often and they don’t feel ashamed because they feel that their anger is rightful. As a consequence type fours are emotionally expressive, and ones are repressed and rather rigid.
The anger of type one shows as criticism and harshness towards others and often against themselves. They see themselves as exemplary and have problems accepting that others aren’t as disciplined and correct as them when type fours are one of the least principled types of all. And they have big problems with keeping motivation up and follow through.
These are just my immediate thoughts to your answer. You see, the enneagram is important to me. I want to come back to reflect also on more things that you said.
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The article and link to the article used the term “borderline rage”, which is the ONLY reason I used it. But I agree, I don’t like the term borderline anything anymore and understand how stigmatizing and dehumanizing the ‘diagnosis’ can be and why.
One of the reasons I’m no longer drawn to the enneagram is that I found the descriptions to be too limiting and very different depending on who’s doing the interpretation. I related to certain traits in other enneagram types too. Maybe I’m not a One, because I definitely don’t consider myself to be “exemplary”.
I do understand why you’ve found the enneagram helpful in understanding yourself. I once found it useful too, same as I once related to some of the traits associated with that former diagnosis that isn’t really a thing.
When I took the test, I was a very different person. It’s not something I’d rely on now.
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Some family stuff has come up tonight; it’s something I’ve been expecting so I probably won’t be commenting very much if at all for a while. It’s obvious you put some serious thought into your response, and I appreciate it.
I just wanted you to know in case I don’t respond to any additional comments. Thanks, Lina.
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It’s probably important to add that while naming things has helped me better understand a lot of the behaviors I’ve experienced, I also understand that human beings are more than the labels we use to describe specific patterns in thinking/feeling and behavior.
Narcissism, which is essentially a failure to fully empathize with and acknowledge other people’s lives and realities as being just as real and valuable as our own, is a lot more common than most people like to think. We don’t have to have been diagnosed with NPD to have narcissistic traits.
I can’t think of a single person I’ve ever known, and I’m including myself and even Dr. Ramani, who doesn’t have (or hasn’t had) narcissistic blind spots. Our culture and systems depend on it.
Sometimes trying to put someone in a specific ‘box’ makes it harder to just recognize and accept someone isn’t trustworthy and it’s not a healthy relationship.
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Psychiatric labeling is narrow-minded, self-serving, and ultimately stigmatizing.
There’s no good reason for dehumanizing anyone — “narcissists” included.
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Correction: There’s no good reason for dehumanizing anyone, so-called “borderlines” and “narcissists” included.
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I agree.
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I no longer think “borderline” is even a thing. It’s more like a bunch of different traits as a response to various traumas that aren’t better described by other diagnoses. And maybe a way for therapists to get paid.
This seems to be true for other diagnoses as well.
I think narcissistic abuse, whether personal or impersonal (institutional/systemic) and/or being somehow different than others, are the cause of most traumas. Which sometimes get projected onto others in an endless cycle of abuse.
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Unprocessed emotional trauma is what causes most (perhaps all) so-called “psychiatric disorders”; it just manifests in different ways.
People need to let themselves grieve. Psychiatric drugs thwart this crucial step in the healing process.
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“There’s no good reason for dehumanizing anyone — “narcissists” included.”
I agree with you, Birdsong. And without reservation. It’s a point I consistently try to make in my comments. Disagreeing, limiting contact or ending a relationship with someone isn’t dehumanizing them.
My thoughts about the labels used in psychiatry are changing.
I just rewatched Daniel Mackler’s YouTube video “Critique of Borderline Personality Disorder by a Former Psychotherapist”, which is great. I’d forgotten about him until I came across one of your comments in response to an older post.
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“Disagreeing, limiting contact, or ending a relationship with someone isn’t dehumanizing.”
Totally agree. Avoiding manipulative people is matter of self-preservation. It’s why I left behind the mental health system.
So happy you remembered the Daniel Mackler videos. They are second to none in critiquing/criticizing the “mental health” field. My personal favorite is “Is My Therapist Good or Not? 12 Questions a Former Psychotherapist Asks.”
All of them are real eye-openers.
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