#3-30
ust Ignore the Rampant Depression, and It Will Go Away.
“‘My first husband... ran around on me... my second husband [molested my daughter, and the day after I first heard] I put my daughter and everything of ours I could fit into my car, and left.’... The next player in her marital round-robin was Giorgio, who drove a white Mercedes Benz convertible and made his living supplying cocaine to some of the wealthiest noses in Montecito.... For the woman who loves too much, her primary disease is her addiction to the pain and familiarity of an unrewarding relationship.”—Robin Norwood, Women Who Love too Much, from the chapter “Dying for Love”
ther casuistry would likely be involved, too. This sophistry fits the specifics of casuistry, since it distorts everything toward what’s the most pragmatic. Since very little in the world is absolutely evil, any problem that anyone causes for anyone could probably be minimized in various ways, and the moral legitimacy of the victim’s response-ability could probably be magnified. With victim correction as a panacea, you’re likely to hear all sorts of sophistry that would do exactly this, and like any sophistry it probably has at least one leg to stand on. If one countered this with balanced statements as to why what happened or the victim’s response-ability for the outcome isn’t morally acceptable, these would likely be treated as if they’re self-defeating, obstructionist, and scaringly manipulative. A goal-oriented person would realize that the goal could best be reached through confidence that one isn’t that much of a victim, and a wholehearted acceptance of his response-abilities. It would seem that if you left yourself vulnerable, you “had it coming.” Some things are so subtle that you can’t miss ’em.
The homepage of All About Depression says, “Depression is a serious health condition affecting millions of people each year. The total cost in human suffering is impossible to estimate. Depression often impairs many aspects of our everyday lives and affects not only those who are depressed, but also those who care about the depressed person. No one should have to endure the painful symptoms of depression since very effective treatments are available.”
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? About 20,000,000 Americans are affected each year, in ways that are this serious. Clearly this isn’t just one huge mass of illusions and delusions, resulting from one of the biological diseases that are parts of the natural order. Yet we treat this obvious social problem as if it were just one huge mass of medication deficiencies, to be solved through mega-medication. Those who want to be more ‘natural,’ could instead try for contrived optimism. For various pragmatic, Objectivist, red-blooded, and forgiving reasons, it seems so natural for us to talk about this problem as originating inside each of the 20,000,000 victims. It seems so unnatural, intellectualist, defeatist, etc., to talk about it as a social problem.”
Where I first noticed this casuistry was concerning codependency.
The above quote from Women Who Love too Much, along with the following statements from Gam-Anon and the group Codependents of Sexual Addiction, aren’t just isolated quips from isolated organizations. Even in self-help groups for women whose lovers or husbands could have any behavior problem whatsoever, including those that couldn’t possibly be called “addictions” or “diseases,” the presumption still is that holding someone morally accountable is judgmental bitter mollycoddle controlling blaming accusatory opinionated utopian defeatist and dispensable, while holding accountable only victims for their failures in taking response-ability for their own welfare is pro-forgiveness constructive self-reliant self-determined persevering self-improving objective pragmatic self-empowering and indispensable. After all, no matter how exploitive and/or abusive is a man’s relationship with a woman, she absolutely could change herself, and absolutely can’t change anyone else including him, which is all that the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer cares about.
The subtitle of Women Who Love too Much, is, When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change. The ladies’ auxiliaries of Twelve-Step groups, such as Al-Anon, would say that the reason why it would be inadvisable for their members to keep wishing and hoping that the addicts will change, is that addiction is a disease, so addicts might as well be not guilty by reason of insanity. Yet the man on the current cover of Women Who Love too Much, looks very intent and probably exploitive, rather than under the sway of a disease like addiction:
In fact, it looks like his selfishness is ambiguous enough that if you blamed him for what he caused, this would seem to be simply your blaming, judgmental, controlling, restrictive, etc., opinion. Yet if you blamed his girlfriend or wife for “letting herself in for trouble” by getting involved with someone that selfish, then that would seem to be giving her hopeful self-help advice. Terribly beleaguered women look here for the hope that all those problems result from defects that are inside of themselves, which they can therefore change.
While you can’t tell her to serenely accept his destructiveness since it’s a symptom of an addiction, you can tell her to serenely accept his destructiveness since no matter how much he could change it, she couldn’t. According to the zeitgeist of The Serenity Prayer, the only question that someone beset with a problem could legitimately take seriously about it, is, “Can I change this?” From that would follow plenty of casuistry, such as her thinking self-responsibly, “If I kept wishing and hoping he’d change, this, and therefore I, would be self-defeating,” “That’s just the way that he is, so I’ll have to just take it as a given,” “If I’m an airhead like the woman silhouetted on the cover of Women Who Love too Much, then that’s the problem, and it’s not the sort of problem that one would take as a given,” and, “I’m optimistic, so I believe that if only I’d..., better than I actually did (For example, I could have been less airheaded; there’s always room for improvement.), that would have eliminated my problem.”
Of the three husbands of Margo, the woman whom the “Dying for Love” chapter refers to, none of them were addicted to anything, and while the pedophile could be said to have been compelled by a disease, the law certainly doesn’t treat pedophiles as not guilty by reason of insanity. These men made some very grave choices, but these choices are treated as if they might as well be the toxic properties of inanimate chemicals, which their wives chose to abuse and therefore they’re the only ones who are morally responsible. This is just as logical as treating the 20,000,000 serious depressive disorders each year in the USA, as something that’s simply the responsibility of the sufferers.
The book, also says the following, mainly in the “Dying for Love” chapter:
“For the woman who loves too much, her disease is her addiction to the pain and familiarity of an unrewarding relationship.... No matter how sick or cruel or helpless her partner is, she, along with her doctor or therapist, must understand that her every attempt to change him, help him, control him, or blame him is a manifestation of her disease, and that she must stop these behaviors before other areas of her life can improve. Her only legitimate work is with herself.”
“To avoid her own feelings she is literally ‘fixing’ with a man, using him as her drug of escape.”
“A woman who uses her relationship as a drug will have fully as much denial about that fact as any chemically addictive individual, and fully as much resistance and fear concerning letting go of her obsessive thinking and high emotionally charged way of interacting with men.”
“To wait for someone like Margo to figure out on her own that she is a woman who loves too much, whose disease is becoming progressively severe and may very well ultimately cost her life, is as inappropriate as listening to all the typical symptoms of any other disease and then expecting the patient to guess her condition and her treatment.”
“Usually the help she seeks involves turning to someone else, perhaps a professional, in one more attempt to change her man. It is crucial that the person to whom she turns helps her recognize that she is the one who must change, that her recovery must begin with herself.”
“Sadly, the vast majority of women like Margo will choose to continue practicing their addiction, searching for the magic man who will make them happy, or endlessly trying to control and improve the man they are with.” (Note: This is about “women like Margo,” women whose husbands most certainly should be both controlled and improved, so this isn’t about women who claim to be victims where this could be in doubt. The law certainly doesn’t seem pathological when it tries to control and improve pedophiles, drug pushers, or the like. Also, to say that these women are guilty of trying to control and improve the man they are with, reflects moral relativism becoming extreme enough to be amoral absolutism, since caring about moral responsibility seems to be mollycoddle machinations. Here we have the Wagnerian standard that’s typical of modern psychology being influenced by German culture, that trying to stop such criminal behavior, constitutes choosing to “control” the criminals.)
“Facing your own problems means that, having let go of managing and controlling others and of the games, you now are left with nothing to distract you from your own life, your own problems, and your own pain. This is the, time when you need to begin to look at yourself deeply, with the help of your spiritual program, your support group, and your therapist if you have one.” (Once again, this is about “women like Margo.”)
This really is no different from saying that depression is a serious health condition affecting millions of people each year, but no one should have to endure the painful symptoms of depression since very effective treatments are available. Sure, that much depression constitutes a grievous social problem, but if you treat them as if their problem is inside themselves, then they could solve that problem. Concern about the social problem of depression, would only distract and dishearten them. Therefore, their only legitimate work is with themselves.
My own codependency group turned men’s destructive choices into another inanimate object, a falling tree, saying that if you saw a tree falling toward you, you’d naturally get out of the way, right? If you don’t, then you must have wanted what resulted. In another book, I saw others’ destructive choices that might hurt you, treated as if they’re the same as a fierce windstorm coming towards you. The Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “anthropomorphism” as, “an interpretation of what is not human or personal in terms of human or personal characteristics,” and victim correction’s approach to the real causality of problems could be called “de-anthropomorphism,” meaning, “an interpretation of what is human or personal in terms of non-human or non-personal characteristics,” such as interpreting men’s choices to have affairs, molest, sell dope, etc., in terms of the toxic properties of drugs that their wives abuse.
A story told by an AA speaker, which probably started out as an Al-Anon story, goes as follows: An old man is walking down a road, when he suddenly sees, in the middle of the road, a poisonous snake. It tells the man that it’s ill, and promises the man that if he takes care of it, it won’t bite him. He says no, that he doesn’t trust the poisonous snake, but it insists that it won’t hurt him if he takes care of it. So he picks up the snake, and tucks it inside his jacket. Then, when it feels better, it bites him. He picks it up, throws it away, and then asks it why it bit him, when he promised it wouldn’t bite someone who’d help it get better. It then looks at him with a crafty look, and tells him, “but you could tell just by looking at me, that this is the way that I am.”
This reflects what are seen as the responsibilities of both those diagnosed as codependent, and the dangerous but sick people who they want to help get better. A poisonous snake has traditionally been a symbol of evil, but here it’s a symbol of the way that problem people inherently are, so those who associate with them had better not expect them to have any human volition or responsibility. Though their lovers and spouses didn’t intend to let themselves in for trouble, they still should have realized that that’s just the way the problem people are, so the victims are still the only ones who are held responsible for the outcomes. This is certainly pragmatic, since in all situations the only people who they could change are themselves, this socially-sanctioned moral bankruptcy is bound to lead to craftiness, or at least a lack of responsibility, on the part of those who cause the problems.
And since this is a matter of sophistry, you could be that if someone’s spouse didn’t obviously have his behavior problem until after they were married, the innocent spouse wouldn’t be blamed. Maybe he had a subconscious codependent attraction to someone he could sense had a tendency toward trouble. Or, at the very least, one can hold that no matter what happens to anyone, he’s simply supposed to deal with his own realities, just as one would if he suddenly saw a tree falling toward him. That sophistry would figure that you’re unrealistic if you care whether someone had advance warning that someone else was a problem, since the real world offers no guarantees of informed consent, and your responsibility has to be the same as if you did have advance warning.
Such sophistry can often go both ways. For example, if the person who’s causing you a lot of turmoil, is addicted, you must accept that he can’t help it because of his disease, though the law doesn’t treat addicts as if they’re absolutely not guilty by reason of insanity. If the person who’s causing you a lot of turmoil is not addicted, you must accept that you can’t change him. If there’s now no way for him to undo the harm he’s done, you’d have to understand how helpless he is, though the law doesn’t automatically excuse everyone who’d undo what they did, if they could, but now they’re helpless to. If he could now undo the harm but he chooses not to, you must accept that you can’t change him. And, of course, if you don’t accept or understand what you must, you’d seem unrealistic, maladjusted, etc., though the law seems robust and healthy when it refuses to accept or understand the same things.
Once a codependency group has accepted this zeitgeist, it could find sophistry for each situation as to why this logic would have a leg to stand on, or maybe sophistry that would seem logical in every situation. After all, the Gam-Anon chapter of the GA handbook says, “It is also apparent that underlying the recovery programs of both Fellowships are similar assumptions about Behaviorist psychology...,” which, in practical terms, means being programmed. The same would apply to learning how to deal with anyone whatsoever, whether addicted or not, though the logic to make this seem morally pertinent rather than just pragmatically pertinent would differ from situation to situation.
The thinking about codependency is full of unbalanced suppositions in basically two strains (directed toward mainly women since it would seem acceptable if men didn’t accept being labeled like this) the first being the, “This must be what you wanted subconsciously, since his sinfulness was avoidable,” strain, which is supposed to be the whole idea behind codependency. Groups that counsel those who it regards as codependents, should have criteria that distinguish those who really do want extreme challenges, from those who don’t. To label as “codependent” anyone who didn’t show some sort of desire to nurture troublemakers, or to be a martyr, or to live a melodrama, etc., would make as much sense as labeling as “dependent” someone who didn’t feel unusual needs to depend on others. Cardinal Law certainly had the sort of trust that could be called, “When you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change.” If that’s what defines a codependent, then as long as the man is a butthead, and the woman doesn’t want to be involved with a butthead, but she doesn’t simply give up on him, it would seem that what she’s after subconsciously is to be a valiant caretaker. His stonewalling would seem to constitute her nurturing, though she wishes and hopes he’ll stop. To say that he’d “change” implies that whatever he’d consistently choose to do is simply the way that he is, completely irrespective of whether or not he has a disease like active alcoholism or impulsive gambling, or of whether or not she follows all the rules of assertiveness.
An assertiveness training book from 1975 is titled Don’t Say YES When You Want to Say NO. Typical for self-help books from the Reagan/Thatcher era onward, is that those who say “no,” rather than taking effective action, are codependent. Sometimes, such as in a basically healthy relationship where the other person occasionally expects too much, saying “no” would be effective. On the other hand, most interpersonal relationships in which a self-respecting person would often have to say “no,” would also qualify as “when you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change.” By Reagan/Thatcher standards, assertiveness could seem to be magical thinking, unless you’re saying “no” to someone’s request that you do something for him. If he cared about your rights, he wouldn’t want to do what you’re saying “no” to, in the first place. Therefore, you should just take his quirks as a given, and treat the results of his behavior, as if they might as well resulted from “acts of God,” such as falling trees or windstorms.
Usually, though, that sophistry doesn’t work, since if someone doesn’t want something it’s pretty hard to convince her that he does, so then it’s on to the second strain, “Naturally it’s your moral, morally justified, response-ability to deal with any reality that a butthead may create.” You’d look like a freak if you responded to one of Niebuhr’s followers by saying that you shouldn’t have the response-ability for changing or accepting something, because, absolutely truthfully, you played absolutely no part in bringing it about, or the person who caused it could have easily prevented it, or the person who caused it was evil, or.... According to this, there’s no difference between her wanting to nurture her husband valiantly, and her wishing and hoping he’ll change, since in either case, whatever realities that he’d cause for her are what she’s got, and life means that you have to make the best of what you’ve got. For the same reason, there’s no difference between, “When you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change” and he has no illness but he chooses not to change, and, “The Fellowship teaches its members to accept the compulsive gambler’s behavior as an illness, and to make no judgments concerning self or others.”
There’s basically no way to disprove this objectively. After all, it would seem that survival skills in the real world sometimes require that in the face of sinners we make maximum use of our inner resources. When the going gets tough the tough get going, and if we started making excuses for not dealing with whatever reality presents to us, who’s to tell what the mollycoddles won’t be trying to get away with? The same goes for condemnation of moral responsibility, which I’ve gotten to think of as “antinomie” since it’s an active, enforced version of anomie. Holding your own victimizer morally responsible could be condemned as unpragmatic mollycoddle and unforgiving in all sorts of ways. The Serenity Prayer indicates that the oldest root of antinomie is the old Christian doctrine of Antinomianism, which The Bible Handbook defines as, “the doctrine that under the gospel dispensation of grace the moral law is of no use or obligation because faith alone is necessary to salvation,” “murder no crime, vice no sin, natural morality a snare,” and, “a logical result of Christianity, and in all times [even when the New Testament was written, Jude 4 tells of, “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”], especially during seasons of active belief, it has had to be fought and crushed by the more practical members of society or the Church.” Or, in the words of the Serenity Prayer, no matter what hardship or sinfulness impacts your life, if you don’t surrender your instincts that tell you that what happened has more moral significance than just a hurdle for you to overcome, then it seems that you want the world to be as you’d have it.
The statement from COSA is on their webpage, Key Identifying Behaviors meaning how to identify the codependents, which includes none that has anything to do with desires to be at the mercy of, or to help, people with aggressive sex problems, and their The Gifts of COSA webpage, on which they say that these gifts are that they “discover the faith and acceptance to let go of the situations we were once desperate to control, and the courage and strength to grow in matters we once avoided or denied,” (Whenever someone commands, “Let go!” of a thought or feeling, you can bet that this thought or feeling isn’t aggressive, since telling someone to let go of that would seem to be an attempt to re-engineer human nature.) and, “In our relationships, we learn detachment and become more fully present,” nothing about any need to stop desires to be a martyr or to nurture. So what they’re saying is, in essence, “No matter what the sinners do, that’s reality and you can’t change it or them, so naturally it’s your response-ability to deal with it. Get the faith and acceptance to let go of the situations you’re desperate to control, and the courage and strength to grow in matters you avoid or deny, though these situations and matters had to have resulted from a butthead’s outrageous behavior or they’d be irrelevant to our group. Also, become detached in your relationship with him so that you could become more fully present.” (Two of their sixteen Key Defining Behaviors are, “Participate in unhealthy or degrading relationships for fear of being alone?”, not out of a desire to nurture, and, “Engage in sexual activities with your partner that feel disturbing or shaming?”, so what this could accept as a disease is degradation of others. Pedophilia would have to fall under the same absolutist unconditional rubric as impulsive gambling.) The sophistry that would make such beliefs appear to be “gifts,” wouldn’t simply make them appear to be the lesser of two evils. It’s better to be with a butthead and be Stoic about it, than to be with a butthead and not be Stoic about it. This would also make that appear to be a great profound spirituality, as well as something that’s moral in a practical all-American sense.
This second strain of casuistry concerns what’s most pragmatic and goal-oriented, so what seems to matter most is the point of the thinking involved, not the accuracy or ethical validity. In Backlash, Faludi wrote that when someone mentioned to Norwood that some of the case histories in Women Who Love too Much, which were supposed to represent diverse women, were actually from Norwood’s own life, she responded, “I never claimed those were case studies. Some are really fictional. The point is not which parts are me and which aren’t.” This orientation toward what is or isn’t “the point,” rather than what is or isn’t the truth (as in the AA slogan, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”), or what is or isn’t deceitful or otherwise unethical (as in, “Forgiveness is relinquishing the role of being the victim.”), is the thinking behind both victim correction as a panacea. When faced with a devastating problem, the point of how you see it, should be to figure out how you could best deal with your problem. Since all you’re supposed to care about is whether or not you can change anything you’d want or need to, it’s guaranteed that the extent of the sinfulness in “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,” WILL seem beside the point. Or, as Jeffery Skilling would put it, if you care about which of Norwood’s case histories really are about her, you just don’t “get it,” get the idea that what really matters is how you could solve your problems by changing the only person you can.
This can clearly be seen in Dr. Burns’ cognitive distortions of Western depression. Either you’ve got your problem licked or you still have work to do. This has nothing to do with and particularities. You should focus your attention on this. If you’ve got everything 90% under control, that wouldn’t mean that you deserve an “A” grade. You likely must resort to tenuous reasoning. You absolutely can’t change anyone else, absolutely can and must change yourself, and should focus your attention absolutely on doing so. Emotional labels would be put on your success or failure. This is all about what you should must and ought to do better. The labels put on anything would depend on how it relates to your success or failure. For example, the Gam-Anon chapter in Gamblers Anonymous’ handbook says about those who were or are sharing homes with active pathological gamblers who might bankrupt the family at any minute, “We see that with defects of character [the victims’, not the gamblers’] such as self-pity, self-justification, impatience and resentment, we will never find this peace of mind and serenity we seek. Having come this far in our thinking, we become willing to be rid of these stumbling blocks in our progress.” Such particularities as whether or not you currently live with poverty caused by someone else’s present or past gambling, matter absolutely nothing when it comes to the point, the goal, which is peace of mind and serenity. You’d achieve this by impugning all of your own natural but non-serene feelings (not just particularly inexcusable feelings). As The Serenity Prayer makes very clear, it matters absolutely nothing whether or not you were not primarily responsible for the negative external event that you’re now dealing with, only what you might be able to do to effectively change it once it already exists. Thou shalt not differentiate.
If you responded to this moral bankruptcy by bringing up even the most legitimate issues of moral responsibility, you’d probably hear, “The point is not who or what is morally responsible.” That’s abstract, immaterial, so you can’t afford to care about it. Such is why casuistry, which originally meant a form of amoral objectivism, now tends to mean sophistry.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
