#3-13
“The act of helping or improving yourself without relying on anyone else”—Definition of self-help from the WordWeb Online dictionary, which means that self-help advice for those whose problems are unambiguously caused by others, would be advice on how those people could help themselves without relying on anyone else, and improve themselves in whatever ways would empower themselves to take care of themselves best
“I look for a great new concerted effort under the leadership of our State to solve the dark and largely unknown causes of mental illness.”—Governor Dewey of New York, in his acceptance speech of 1946
ll this is often referred to as “self-help,” since the whole idea is for victims to solve their own problems by helping themselves, and no one else helps. The who in the personal response-ability remains consistent even when the what and the how could be wildly variable, as could be seen in self-help books for the wives and girlfriends of unquestionably butthead men. Since self-help comes with the presumption that if you agree with it you’re respectably independent-minded and if you don’t you’re choosing to be powerless, that’s a basic idea behind victim correction as a panacea, that irrespective of any of the specifics on how the problems came about or what it would take to solve them, if the victims don’t correct themselves in whatever ways would let them best take response-ability for their own welfare, they might as well be old-fashioned women telling a self-help guru that they’d rather just remain passive. It seems that either you do whatever it takes to succeed, or you don’t. Everyone wants to believe that they’re right, but the question of who was able to achieve what, is objective. When the weak believe that they’re right, this seems scaringly suppressive
If you’re overpowered, you might think that power does matter. His having more power than you, is what determined the outcome. Yet if you act as if this fact does matter, you could seem to be playing the victim role, manipulatively using victim-power, self-defeatingly acting passive, etc.
The book When Madness Comes Home by Victoria Secunda, also about how family members could diligently deal with their own families’ problems, says that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV says that affective disorders affect 20% of the American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, and substance abuse disorders affect 27%, to let the family members know that they certainly aren’t alone in their problems. This book is a guide to how seriously mentally ill people’s family members could best take care of their own families’ problems. You’d think that the message in those statistics, would be that these rates are so excessive that we’d better treat these as social problems. Yet the message that the readers were to get, is that they certainly aren’t alone as they proceed to take care of their own families’ problems. Any awareness of how these constitute social problems, would not only distract, but also dishearten these diligent caretakers.
This has to include academic psychology as well as pop psychology, since these conceptions of personal responsibility seem all-important. Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Health Care in America, the Final Report of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, under Goal 5, Excellent Mental Health Care Is Delivered and Research Is Accelerated, says, “As concepts of recovery and resiliency become key principles in mental health care, education and training programs must incorporate these concepts in their curricula, training materials, and experiences.” If those principles become key principles, then they’d have to overshadow anything that could make people less resilient. For example, The Prayer of Saint Francis says, “Lord, make me an instrument of your Peace. Where there is hatred, Let me sow Love. Where there is injury, Pardon. Where there is doubt, Faith. Where there is despair, Hope. Where there is darkness, Light. Where there is sadness, Joy.” Acting as an automatic instrument which supplants even the most warranted hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair, and sadness; with love, pardon, faith, hope and joy; would lead to recovery and resiliency. The light that would replace the darkness, therefore, had better not make the objections seem warranted. This constitutes our routine coping skills.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Action without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, is meaningless.” If people’s recovery and resilience are what’s corrected, then it’s the victims who get corrected. Not only that, The Executive Summary defines “recovery” and “resilience” in a special box, as follows:
In this Final Report…
Recovery refers to the process in which people are able to live, work, learn, and participate fully in their communities. For some individuals, recovery is the ability to live a fulfilling and productive life despite a disability. For others, recovery implies the reduction or complete remission of symptoms. Science has shown that having hope plays an integral role in an individual’s recovery. [According to that definition of “recovery,” a functioning alcoholic could qualify as recovered.]
Resilience means the personal and community qualities that enable us to rebound from adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other stresses — and to go on with life with a sense of mastery, competence, and hope. We now understand from research that resilience is fostered by a positive childhood and includes positive individual traits, such as optimism, good problem-solving skills, and treatments. Closely-knit communities and neighborhoods are also resilient, providing supports for their members.
The key principles are how pragmatically self-reliantly and forgivingly one deals with his own problems. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines amoral as, “neither moral nor immoral; esp : being outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply,” and, “lacking moral sensibility.” To hold people responsible for rebounding from adversity trauma tragedy threats or other stresses, in general, is outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply, and lacking moral sensibility. Though “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen,” might sound like a satire of what’s wrong with pop psychology, if “resilience” is defined as rebounding from “adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other stresses,” then when those stresses come from others’ sinfulness, the optimal resilience would mean taking as Jesus did this sinful world. Quite possibly, if you did take as Jesus did this sinful world, you’d recover totally, and if you didn’t you won’t, and you’d certainly want to recover totally. Even if affective disorders affect 20% of the American population, anxiety disorders affect 25%, and substance abuse disorders affect 27%, then those people and their family members had simply better learn the most effective ways in which they could deal with this. Though self-help might sound so good that those who object to its basic principles would therefore seem mentally unhealthy, your natural common sense should tell you that self-help regarding problems that one person cause for another, would hold the victims response-able, since even the most worldly ethical responsibility would be others-help. Self-help can’t make a balanced assessment of who is personally responsible for what, since not all legitimate personal responsibility would help oneself.
The section of the report that discusses Goal 5, is all about, “The mental health field has developed evidence-based practices (EBPs) — a range of treatments and services whose effectiveness is well documented.” No matter how much evidence proves that a certain traumatic experience that our culture accepts as normal, actually contributes to the unnaturally high rates of depression and anxiety disorders, that wouldn’t matter. What would matter is what has been proven to help people recover from it (at least recover enough that they could keep functioning), and be more resilient in the face of it. This does have a big advantage over pop psychology, that the affirmations that it tells people to believe in weren’t proven effective, while the ideas that cognitive therapy tells people to believe in, were. Yet the scientific version of self-help would have to include the same imbalances of responsibilities that the non-scientific version does. Both versions must strain gnats and swallow camels. If you’re the one who has to do the recovery and resilience, then no matter how morally responsible someone else was for your problem, you’ll be more resilient if you don’t care. Also, the more that you correct any inefficiencies in your recovery and resilience, the more recovered and resilient you’ll be. The only social factor that would be taken into account, is whether you live in a nice folksy neighborhood. Those other social factors involve what one must resiliently recover from, not what would foster resilience and recovery.
Then again, the average American might be able to see, in the Achieving the Promise programs, the magnitude of our society’s victim-correction. The help that this program is to do, would be financed by the government. To say that the people with the problems had better just resiliently recover from them, sounds reasonable. To say that in the many cases where the people can’t afford to pay for treatment, the guv’mint would have to, could very easily sound unreasonable. , with that we’d have to finance to get fixed! Then we could see the magnitude of the social problem, rather than seeing each person separately with his own personal problems.
When you’ve seen other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? Am I supposed to just figure that my problem, or my family’s problem, is simply my or my family’s problem? Am I supposed to figure that as I deal with a culture that produces such rates of depression and anxiety disorders, my own recovery and resiliency would be key principles in how my situation would be treated, since education and training programs had incorporated these concepts in their curricula, training materials, and experiences? Sure, that might be a reasonable approach in a culture that doesn’t produce very high rates of depression and anxiety disorders. Things go wrong in every society. But to say that even in a society with these social problems, each person’s problems are to be dealt with through self help, i.e. that if it’s your problem then you’d better just help yourself by dealing with it? Must I proceed as if others’ greater power doesn’t matter, and only my serenity courage and tactical wisdom do?”
This is very much along the same lines as John McCain’s response to The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008 failing to pass in the House on September 29, after Nancy Pelosi blamed Bush Administration policies for the crisis, “Now is not the time to fix the blame, it’s time to fix the problem.” Don’t find blame; find a solution, is crucial to self-help psychology, both pop psychology, and professional approaches that teach resiliency, getting socioemotional problems under control through medication, etc. And regarding the financial crisis of 2008, this would hold whether the solutions in question would be government bailout programs, or the economic meltdown being allowed to happen, and then everyone affected would have to focus their attention on fixing their own problems. In fact, since the bailout could only do so much in dealing with this problem, plenty of individuals would still be left with plenty of problems that they’d have to fix. No matter how much greed was responsible for causing them, the greedy had the power to cause them, and the victims don’t have the power to prevent them but do have the power to work to fix them. They can’t change others’ greed, but can change the effectiveness and efficiency of their own reactions. The same would go for anyone else who suffered the consequences of anyone else’s greed or other sinfulness.
he Tragedy of Victim Correction as a Panacea~
Whether or not you live with an addict, etc., whatever you must do to take care of yourself, is whatever you must do to take care of yourself. That’s why self-help in general tends to admire Al-Anon, The Serenity Prayer, etc., and this self-reliant ethos. The only thing that really matters is what you do and don’t have the power to change. Since Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA who wrote much of their Big Book, was a stockbroker around the time of the Great Depression, one could call this The Great Depression Stockbroker’s Approach to Self-Responsibility. Literally and inevitably, whatever anyone’s life is (including during the Great Depression), is “life on life’s terms,” “reality,” “life’s challenges,” etc., for him. Likewise, you’d simply have to deal with whatever consequences of 2008’s run on the bank, “Our entire economy is in danger,” would affect you, including the consequences of the government’s strong reluctance to “control” the businesses it should have been regulating adequately and “great, great confidence in our capital markets and in our financial institutions.” That’s how people in trouble must take care of themselves self-reliantly, so intercultural studies have consistently found that self-blame as a symptom of depression, anxiety, etc., is unique to Western and Westernized people. Depressed people who’ve lived outside of the modern West have tended to feel paranoid, but modern Westerners, whether depressed or not, tend to figure that even if someone did “get you,” that would mean only that you lost the battle so you’re a loser; you must “look at yourself” so you could independently resiliently and resourcefully find a solution to your problem. Self-help means that if it’s your problem then you provide the help, which is why self-help for people in trouble in general has really taken to the AA-Al-Anon approach, so “Archie” is more than just emblematic of self-reliant self-empowerment for people in trouble in a society with rampant depression. Bush also talked about faith in our economic “resilience” regarding the financial crisis of 2008. This gutsy and self-responsible moral bankruptcy, “Care only about whether you can change it,” is de rigueur. What personal problems don’t have to be taken care of this unconditionally, where the only thing that really matters is what oneself can or can’t change? If your back is against the wall, you must serenely accept this fact. Neo-Conservatives would love this folksy “perception management.” Self-reliance seems to be The Great Liberator. Freedom from government and other “control” is a sacred American tradition, but endurability isn’t. Aggressiveness seems ineradicable, and our objections to it seem eradicable. The moral bankruptcy is a tragedy in the ancient Greek dramatic sense, meaning that if all that victims could care about is whether or not they can change things, moral bankruptcy and immunity from accountability would inevitably result. As can be seen in Nietzsche, the weak could easily seem to be the dangerously ones, since everyone’s beliefs regarding what they deserve are shaped by their own , and the weak can exercise their supposed only in ways that would seem mollycoddle, “dishonest” and “ignominious,” whereas red-blooded strength is “honest,” proud, and at least forgivable. (We must appreciate all the hidden dangers of unchecked “victim-power.”) “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” could happen to anyone.
Sure, A Dictionary of Psychology defines blaming the victim as, “A pervasive tendency to assume that a person who has suffered a misfortune must have done something wrong to deserve it. It is explained by the just world hypothesis.” Yet it should be obvious from any self-help that victim-blaming is most important when someone must self-motivatedly take response-ability for injustices. This must be as pervasive as the injustices that must be courageously changed. Victim-blaming gets things done, since the victims are motivated to do them. Whatever matters in the real world, matters in the real world. Whatever is reality, is reality. The basic idea is that the weak should become more self-responsible and the strong should be forgiven, and then, realistically speaking, things would keep functioning efficiently. As Dr. Thomas A. Harris wrote in the preface of his I’m OK—You’re OK, “To many people [psychiatry] is like a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there,” but Al-Anon-style psychology-psychiatry, neo-Buddhism (which self-disciplines the yin but not the yang, “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” so could also be called Yang Buddhism), is productive, does produce contrived serenity courage and self-responsibility, whereas telling addicts’ family members, “You’re OK, even if his addiction really bothers you,” wouldn’t: mindless formula, mindful victims. This prevents victimhood. Defiance of this could be labeled as ignominious uppity untermensch , not “maverick” defiance. This mental health treatment is all-natural. Your feeling bad about anything would hurt only yourself. Everyone must adjust. Blinders bring serenity. For everyone, functioning productively and resiliently is all-important. Any fear could be dangerously problematic. To function in the real world, you can’t be horrified. This spirituality is the ultimate radical religion, which you must interpret literally. If the economy collapsed in 2008 because of a few people in the financial sector making risky loans or panicking during the crisis, all of those who’d have suffered the consequences would have had to have taken care of themselves, too; either they’d keep “looking at themselves,” or they’d fail in life since they wouldn’t recognize their own inadequacies.
All problems must be resolved. Attention must be systematically focused on how any victims (who are the most motivated to do this successfully), could most effectively take response-ability for their own welfare, since thoughts about right and wrong would be unpragmatic manipulative and judgmental opinion. Alateen isn’t extremist. Treating victims as victims seems so old-school, mollycoddling. The way that the Iraq war resulted so automatically from the whiny claims that Americans were victims of WMD, shows the great danger of manipulative victim-power. Moral relativism (“Your morality is culturally biased!”) becomes amoral absolutism (“Your morality is biased toward believing that you deserve better! Shame on you!”). Blame the victim, and you’ll get well-motivated self-reliant and anti-judgmental results, solutions. That’s the only thing that really matters (especially for those with big problems). In the real world, some things work and some things don’t, and whenever those who are morally responsible won’t take physical responsibility, cult-like neo-Buddhism would work much better than would moral responsibility. Don’t be pessimistic! In all situations, this is what it takes to win, so everything except “Can I change this?”, should be ignored, is for weaklings. The ignominious banalities of life, aren’t issues. This might not look sociopolitical or socioeconomic, but this is just cultural norms and expectations, along with social pressures, determining who is personally responsible for what in certain interactions, and those of the society at large tend to find the same unconditionally self-correcting platitudes inspiring. Very little of what could counter our rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc., would sound or feel gutsy, so very little of it could sell. (Endurability wouldn’t make good Populism.) Frank Buchman, leader of the Oxford Groups, the club on which AA and then Al-Anon was based and which is now called “Moral Re-Armament,” said, “D’you know Heinrich Himmler?... Say, you ought to know Heinrich. He’s a great lad.... [Hitler] lets us have house-parties whenever we like.” Anyone who’d love the Nazis, couldn’t help but love victim-blaming, targeting weaknesses (as in whiny) of character, etc.
For an exemplary alkie’s kid who looks like Archie, to preach, “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, should seem like wryly Kafkaesque theater of the absurd, but instead that seems very pragmatic and honorable. His group’s leaders are just trying to help him take care of himself better, which he really needs, and this would also help anyone else in trouble. No self-responsibility for victims sounds nice, but all victim-blaming that isn’t illogical could help the victims by improving their chances of success in the future. For everyone, not just a-holes’ families, realism means accepting that others won’t do what they’re not motivated to do. The only difference between those who Al-Anon corrects and everyone else, is the situation they’re in, and “self-responsibility” and “self-help” would mean the same things in any other situation where, to the same degree, you can’t change others’ actions but can change your own reactions. No matter what any Al-Anon or Alateen members, or those in equally desperate situations, may whine about, self-help psychology could respond, “But to look at yourself instead of blaming others would benefit you, by changing what you can and accepting what you can’t!” (Being in denial about the unconditionality, could make you more serene and courageous.) That’s reality, not victim-blaming. This doesn’t intend to blame or criticize you or be morally bankrupt, just make you more well-adjusted and spiritual. After all, the more that anyone judging such situations tried to be fair, the more unfair he’d be, since no one would solve the problems. Certain things simply have to get done, by those who are the most motivated to do them. Sometimes in life, the pragmatists must stand up to the weak. As Al-Anon shows, and self-help for everyone admires, unconditional acceptance and adjustment toward anything that you’re helpless to change, would always lead to peace and confidence—serenity and courage. (That’s a strong character.)
As Miranda says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “O brave new world, that hath such people in it.” Those who most believe in this sort of unconditional self-responsibility are good, hard-working people. (As the Wikipedia webpage on Phil Gramm begins, “Gramm often noted in his political campaigns that he had repeated three grades in school but had overcome his academic deficiencies by hard work.” He’s a proven maverick.)
AA is avowedly anti-intellectualist and pro-self-responsibility. Unconditional and resilient, “can-do” self-responsibility like “Archie’s,” is what made America great. Self-blame is the can-do attitude for people in trouble, “If only I can... better, I can succeed!” If it weren’t unconditional, it would allow cowardice, inadequacy, excuses, faking problems, un entitlement, maladjustment, dysfunctionality, etc., and we mustn’t be naïve about this. In a society with rampant depression, everyone could have an excuse for failure, and such cowardice saps productivity. Self-responsibility along the lines of the law of the jungle works (and worked very productively in the nineteenth century), if you make it work. Losers lose and winners win. The weak can be so unfair. Like any other reductionism, if you listened to many victim correctors’ insistent solutions to peoples’ problems, these solutions would all say basically the same things: change the specifics of one solution to the specifics of any other, and the one could sound just like the other. When reality requires that these expectations go to the point of a reductio ad absurdum (as in “Archie’s” case), then that’s what reality (and self-motivated self-reliance) require. Even if this requires more Stoicism than some Stoic saints had, if that’s what reality requires, then that’s what it requires. (These saints’ self-control shows that it’s possible, and Al-Anon-style self-control isn’t moralistic.) Such unconditional Stoicism can eliminate all misery, the worst of which could have caused big problems. Some ideas sell, some don’t, and this one sells. Which would you rather be, right, or happy? To the uninitiated, victim-blaming would seem bad rather than pragmatic, for 15% of the American adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year wouldn’t seem to be among the diseases that are parts of the natural order, etc. This is the same sort of logic that led to Phil Gramm calling America a “nation of whiners,” etc., that has the same unconditionally red-blooded, resilient, exhilarating, hard-working and character-building appeal to it! (Of course, the huge financial crisis that followed that, should have indicated that those on Wall Street were much bigger whiners, dangerously so, but they’re übermenschen.)
The alkies aren’t controlling Al-Anon members in the authoritarian, paternalistic, anti-freedom sense; that’s just the way that life sometimes goes. We all must adjust to our realities. That’s inherent to life. To end the description of each and every traumatic experience with, “So now I’m supposed to just shut up and deal with this reality, since doing so would benefit me,” might sound like the punch line of a sick joke, but the bottom line must always be pragmatic and well-adjusted. That’s how victim correctors are supposed to operate, since correction is good, and a lack of it is self-defeating. This is the language of letting go. AA slogans such as “Anger is one letter short of danger,” would apply, but “Easy does it,” wouldn’t. Unless what happened was so extreme that this would sound untenable, trying to correct the person who caused the problem, even assertively, could very easily seem or suggest: unrealistic, unreliable, others-helping, naïve, stupid, conditional, optional, half-hearted, limited, judgmental, troublemaking, “on principle,” moralistic, unattractive, sophistry-rewarding, altruistic, controlling, whiny, mollycoddling, intellectualist, philosophical, pathetic, resentful, maladjusted, negative, blaming, subjective, unproven, emotionalistic, manipulative, passive, etc. Trying to correct the person who has the problem in ways that would help him “take care of himself” better, could very easily seem or suggest: realistic, reliable, self-helping, natural, wise, necessary, vital, steadfast, limitless, forgiving, peace-making, pragmatic, trendy, marketable, achievement-oriented, “getting on with life,” self-empowering, gutsy, achievement-oriented, down-to-earth, material, proud, competitive, well-adjusted, hopeful, solving, objective, self-justifying, practical, self-reliant, active, etc. And if what happened was extreme, then the worse was what he did, the more that expecting him to take moral responsibility for that much could seem draconian, naïve, etc.
Victim-blaming can’t make traumas worse, since victims can’t be counterproductive, dysfunctional, maladjusted, defeatist, negative, whiny, unaccepting, demanding, etc. Those who are trying to defend themselves from this (Defend yourself from personal response-ability for your own welfare? Horrors!), could feel uncomfortable expecting others to take such banalities seriously, but the end result of the banalities is rampant depression, anxiety disorders, etc. Whatever happens that contributes to these gargantuan social problems, “Oh, well, that’s life, and the victims probably could have stopped the damage,” so even conspiracy theorists could feel very safe with this massive devastation. Al-Anon would probably say that the reason why it would expect members to accept whatever alkies do is that their disease of addiction makes them not guilty by reason of insanity (Addiction, a disease of people’s motivations, might as well be as involuntary as Alzheimer’s, and disease might as well equal total helplessness.), but if a non-addict caused a member a big problem, the only things that would really matter would be the victim’s serenity and courage. “That’s just the way that human nature is,” “That’s just the way that this sinful world is,” “Boys will be boys,” “That’s just the way that he is,” etc., imply the same level of fatalism and serene acceptance as does, “That’s just the way that addicts are.” This unconditionality would apply to the self-help and self-responsibility in handling any problem whatsoever, since whatever the real world requires, the real world requires. Coping with reality requires that the realities be interchangeable. What could possibly keep victim correction in check, limiting self-responsibility to what’s reasonable? Just think of all the resentment, self-righteousness, wimpiness, etc., that moral clarity would lead to. As one could see in how domestic violence was once minimized, destruction within the family, especially if from the husband, is considered especially banal, personal, excusable, understandable, natural, inevitable, etc., and these minimizing labels come from the usual “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” social norms. If only the weak took care of themselves better... All that you’d have to do is not care, and primitivism could happen so easily.
(Cartoon generated by “Build Your Own Meat”)
“Archie” was taught to have great confidence in the self-reliance and self-determination of the individual. Instinctively, Americans would tend to be a lot less offended by Al-Anon-style victim correction, than by the whining and the victim-power that it corrects. That self-help formula feels right, helpful, beneficial, self-empowering, resilient, self-efficacious. Victims’ counselors care about them. This empathy requires correcting them, saving them from their own negativity and passivity. After all, “Oh, you poor thing!”, treats people as things. Victim correctors only want addicts’ kids, etc., to be more self-efficacious, serene, etc. The nescient majority has no problem with this level of victim correction, with just expecting people to “get on with life” despite realities this lurid, which seem to be just acceptable losses. The lower middle class approach is about solving problems self-reliantly and realistically, so we should teach the same self-responsible ideas that it does, instead of the petty bourgeois approach, which is palliative. Coping with reality means overlooking some realities, and such pragmatic and red-blooded cultural norms have to be insistent and unquestionable. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer unabashedly said after Bush admitted that the Iraq-Niger-uranium documents are fake, “Yes, the president has moved on. And, I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well,” a top-notch professional attempt to get the public to conform to letting go regarding Bush’s Machiavellianism. (Fleischer is rebelling from his petty bourgeois family, who obviously can afford not to adequately appreciate why, in the real world, sometimes when others cause you problems it’s necessary to move on rather than whine and intellectualize.) Caring about social problems is so passé, so 1960s, even caring about our rampant depression. In the 60s it was Big Brother AND the Holding Company, but now it’s Big Brother OR the Holding Company, since it seems that either we accept Wall Street excesses or we’ll have Big Brother. During the Vietnam War, defending it by telling opponents to move on, would have seemed morally bankrupt, rather than unconditionally resilient. As Al-Anon shows, it’s possible for pragmatists to expect someone to move on from, let go of, etc., literally anything that he can’t change.
That’s how all cultural conditioning and social pressures work, including that of all those strange foreigners who can’t think for themselves. (BTW, those who think for themselves wouldn’t conclude that for 15% of the adult population to suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, is only natural.) Depression is the only dread disease of which many of the causes seem sacrosanct.
Nothing that anyone in trouble could possibly say, could possibly counter expectations that are based on what the real world objectively requires. No matter what an alkie or any other problem parent might do that could traumatize his kid, he absolutely could change himself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including the parent, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about. A priori, that’s all that you could care about. That mustn’t seem repulsive. You mustn’t really care about “the elephant in the living room” if you can’t change the elephant. If you think that that’s revolting, then that would be very unserene, discouraging, etc. Obviously, that, like Bontsha the Silent, is far from a natural way to think, though it could be called “cognitive therapy” (“Behavior Therapists and Cognitive Behavior Therapists... concentrate on a person’s views and perceptions about their life, rather than personality traits.”), which has been called, “a natural alternative to anti-depressant medication.” The above is the fully-approved outlook, since it’s very effective in preventing depression. All that you’d need to give self help advice, would be a tape recording that says, “It would really do you a lot of good if you changed what you can and accepted what you can’t! That’s just the way the real world works!”, and you’d play that over and over as the person describes his own trauma. Any reasonable alternatives to victim correction as a panacea, could seem too unrealistic, fallible, subjective, passive, defeatist, untermensch, etc., for the realities that one must deal with. Pragmatism leads to happiness. Victim-correctors, therefore, are the ones who really care about victims.
If one were to apply what On Speculation and Manipulation in Therapy says, “When it works, justice is always very particular. It proceeds on a case-by-case basis with a careful weighing of the facts and an equally careful examination of the underlying logic of key arguments,” certainly the specifics of what addicts’ kids must deal with, would argue for someone else being to blame. Yet blaming others wouldn’t accomplish anything, and would divert attention from solving one’s own problems. It’s your problem, so what are you going to do about it? You’d better just serenely surrender to the inevitable. If we showed an understanding acceptance toward everyone, including the people who have the problems and aren’t dealing with them adequately, nobody would solve them, and the victims would be weakened in the long run. For these people to get on track in taking care of themselves, is the only thing that really matters. If everything must be pragmatic, nothing can be sacred. “I’ve stopped blaming others and I’m looking at myself!”, is inculcated humility, expedient and well-adjusted, without coercion or authoritarian obeisance so this is pro-freedom. Even if the reason for the “negative thoughts” that the victim is washing his own brain of, is that he was unfairly overpowered, that wouldn’t be an authoritarian brainwashing, so his sincere opinion could still seem to be dirt that’s to be washed away and replaced with what he’s supposed to believe. The October, 2007 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals includes an article that says, “rigid fidelity may produce an adverse effect,” but for those who must deal with realities like this, rigid fidelity is as necessary as are adequate resiliency and coping skills. Naïveté doesn’t work. Victim-blaming optimistically and determinedly looks for very necessary self-motivated solutions, so, in the words of the Downing Street memo, “the intelligence and the facts” must be “fixed around the policy.”
Reductionism is key. In whatever respects one is weak or strong, the weak serenely accept, the strong courageously change, and the stronger don’t have to worry about changing or accepting anything. As any self-help counselor would tell you, abstractions are immaterial, and judgmental abstractions are self-serving, so conflicts are reduced to the concrete realities. Ambrose Bierce defined platitude as, “A moral without the fable,” and the self-reliant, self-responsible, morals of victim correction sound a lot better without the fables, which would have told of what the people had to deal with self-reliantly. The central message of any self-help approach for people in trouble is that to help yourself: No matter what caused your problem, you absolutely must focus your attention on correcting yourself, since you absolutely can change yourself, absolutely can’t change anyone else, and absolutely must make your life productive (whatever that requires). The real world requires certain things. Everyone must play their part. The only choice that you have is either you do whatever it takes to deal with your problem, or it doesn’t get dealt with. The only legit question is, “Can I change this?”, so no injustices could seem profound. As long as they happened in the past, they’re past history. Unendurability happens. Addicts’ friends and loved ones are the ones who are motivated to correct themselves, and they need more motivation to: change, empower themselves, accommodate to reality, be well-adjusted and productive. That’s only natural. Everyone, not just fundamentalists, must take this sort of spirituality literally. Focus on self-responsibility. Only the person who has the problem, is reliably motivated to deal with it as well as possible. We could live without moral responsibility (which we can’t count on), abstract principles like morality, etc., but can’t live without victims taking response-ability for their own welfare. Some things are luxuries; some are necessities. There’s nothing paternalistic here, so you could feel free.
Even addicts’ families, etc., are sustainable like this, since naturally everyone is motivated to be well-adjusted and functional—serene and courageous. Homespun fortitude is homespun fortitude. Addicts’ kids shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, guilty, etc., but when dealing with what their alcoholic parents do the kids should look at themselves rather than blaming others, so as they do this they should choose not to feel self-blame, and, of course, simply looking at themselves means simply looking at what they should have done better. Their self-help mentors would simply check to see how well they’re doing in following these instructions. (It’s no wonder that Should Statements are one of the single-mindedly self-responsible cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, or that depressed self-blamers have no gauge of how good is good enough other than, “Am I adequate to deal with my [devastating] realities?”!) If one rationale for victim correction doesn’t work, it’s replaced by another. As “Mary Smith” wrote in her suicide note, “All [my psychologist] could do is nitpick about how I need to feel small + helpless,” though Mary obviously had a gutsy personality, which is typical of the self-empowering “thinking” of victim correction: plenty of all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, and disqualifying the positive. To paraphrase British prime minister David Lloyd George, such alkies’ kids cannot conquer the chasms in their own lives by gingerly taking one step at a time. (As you could see in “Archie” and in all the other self-blame you might encounter, that isn’t just a fear of a slippery slope, of what might happen to you if this goes too far. Naturally, the realities that you’re response-able for dealing with, will go however far they’ll go, and with realism, there’s no such thing as going too far.) Samia Labidi’s chapter of Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, Apostates Speak Out says, “The shackling of women had to be pursued without any letup, otherwise men risked losing control of the situation,” and with victim correction as a panacea, the shackling of untermenschen has to be pursued without any letup, otherwise übermenschen risk losing control of the situation through: untermenschen believing that they’re ENTITLED to better so they’ll stop “looking at themselves,” others pitying them, and these feelings getting more and more compelling since fear, including legitimate fear, is the strongest motivator.
Just imagine how this conception of self-responsibility would look, if people could see how much depression, anxiety disorders, etc., our normalcy creates, including some helplessness that “everyone knows” is just life’s inevitable imperfections that normal people will adjust and adapt to! Much of this is actually beyond the threshold of human endurance, unfit for human consumption!
“We are sleepwalking through the storm.”—Senator Rick Santorum, speaking about how he sees the dangers of Global Jihad, yet this would also apply to our relationship to the social problems that cause our outrageously unnaturally high rates of depression and anxiety disorders
The ladies’ auxiliaries of Twelve-Step groups, such as Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Gam-Anon, would say that the reason for such serene acceptance is that the disease of addiction has impaired their members’ addicted family members so thoroughly, that all should treat them as if they’re basically not guilty by reason of insanity. Yet the law certainly doesn’t treat addicts as not guilty by reason of insanity, and many would be offended if it did. Those who promote this serene acceptance don’t make distinctions, such as accepting the destruction wreaked by those who are actively addicted, as versus accepting clean and sober addicts relapsing. If a non-addicted family member has a destructive defect of character that the other family members can’t change, they’d therefore be expected to serenely accept it, though it didn’t result from being not guilty by reason of insanity. And one could say that the non-addicted family members have an addiction to normal lives, cravings for normal lives, and, therefore, all must accept that their diseases make them need this. Yet the addicts do have the power to satisfy their cravings, and the non-addicted family members don’t. In the end, the only thing that really does matter is power, whether one has the power to change his not satisfying his own cravings, as well as whether one has the power to create problems that others can’t change. This is a big role model for self-help for those in trouble, in general, since the moral bankruptcy of, “I must care whether I can change my problem, and mustn’t truly care about who’s morally responsible for it,” is very necessary for all of them. No book on codependency would limit its victim correction to situations where the victims are victims of addicts and therefore these victims shouldn’t try to change them.
As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The Power of Negative Thinking, a September 23, 2008 Op-Ed for the New York Times about the 2008 economic crisis, the optimism that our culture encourages could make one believe, “You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can.” Also, “Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a ‘positive person,’ and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster.” Especially when you consider the cultural pressures to be optimistic, many of these mortgage-holders’ beliefs that they could pay their mortgages, weren’t delusional. Not only that, such optimism hides certain truths, such as that those who are relatively powerless are at the mercy of such events that aren’t their fault, causing such big disruptions in their lives. Yet in the business world, contrived optimism could serve another purpose, since as long as one sincerely believes that his risk would turn out well, then he couldn’t be found guilty of doing anything malicious.
The Fine Art of Propaganda, by Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf as saying, “A lie is believed because of the unconditional and insolent inflexibility with which it is propagated and because it takes advantage of the sentimental and extreme sympathies of the masses.” It should be obvious to anyone that the problems of the victims of alcoholic parents (or anything comparable) aren’t inside of themselves. Yet the sentimental and extreme sympathies of Americans tend to insist that one take personal response-ability for his own welfare. If he doesn’t, he could be insolently and inflexibly accused of having “pity parties” and the like. A stolid self-reliance with self-empowerment simply seems good, while passivity simply seems bad.
HBO’s special Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop, showed some brain scans of a recovering crack addict having cravings since he’d just seen some pictures that reminded him of smoking it. The scans showed the intense excitement in the areas of the brain that produce these cravings. This was to show why we must understand even when sober addicts relapse.
Yet the book that accompanies this series, says, “Although women were more likely than men to say that their family member’s addiction had ‘hurt their mental and physical health, as well as their marriage,’ the words that everyone used were powerfully negative: ‘devastating,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘horrible.’” Chances are that many of the times that addicts’ family members have these feeling, other areas of their brains get as intensely excited, in such a way that brain scans could conceivably measure and picture this. Conceivably, you could call these feelings, “cravings for a normal life.” Yet we don’t see TV programs that show us such brain scans, with pleas that we understand that these people need what they need. That’s because, unless the addicts are locked up, they have the power to act out their own addictive cravings, so their acting out is reality. On the other hand, the family members don’t have the power to act out their cravings, unless they’re fortunate enough that they could avoid the addicts without this disrupting their own lives. Sure, if we had medications that could get addicts’ cravings under control, then we wouldn’t have to show understanding toward anyone who otherwise would have been involved with addiction. Yet for now, the fact still remains that we do have to care about recovering addicts’ excited brain scans, don’t have to care about active addicts’ family members’ excited brain scans, and can’t care that what really matters is that the addicts do have the power to act out their desires, and the family members don’t.
The classic question to ask about addicts is, “Why can’t they just stop?”. If one were to ask, “Why can’t they just stop correcting the victims?”, the answer would be, “If we did, the untermenschen could get what they want through manipulative machinations, or, at the very least, would continue to think passively. That’s
claiming to stand up for what’s right, but unavoidably expressing the of those who are claiming to be victims who are entitled to more than what they have.”
With all cognitive therapy, the more impressionable that one is, the more that he could learn to think pragmatically. Al-Anon’s approach was based on AA’s approach, in which the more impressionable a recovering alkie is, the more that he could get rid of his pathological thoughts.
The February, 2002 magazine of the American Correctional Association includes an article, The Globalization of Punishment, which tells of how throughout the world more punitive prison terms for criminals have been globalized ever since the Reagan Revolution, and this has been part of a bigger worldwide change in that “...as individuals have been given the freedom to, as it were ‘take care of themselves.’” This self-help has exactly that same quality. Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher era, you could pretty much count on it that the all-American pundits would have as anathemas, people who didn’t seem to be doing whatever it takes to take care of themselves and take personal responsibility for their own welfare. Few of us can face life with the self-determination of the original white Americans who were mostly economically self-sustaining farmers, but those who’d talk about the horrors of victim correction as a panacea, could seem un-American. This is how victim correction as a panacea judges people.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
