#3-31
All Must Take Care of Themselves
“Each chart demonstrates how addiction, whether to a mind-altering chemical or to an unhappy relationship, ultimately affects every area of the addict’s life in a progressively disastrous way.”—Robin Norwood, Women Who Love too Much, from the chapter “Dying for Love,” the one that centers around Margo’s marriages to an adulterer a pedophile and then a dope pusher, so what each of these men chose to do was just “an unhappy relationship,” and how they affected every area of her life in a progressively disastrous way, seems to be the effects of her own diseased self-defeating desires.
“I’ve heard that we don’t necessarily gravitate toward what is good for us; we gravitate toward what feels like home.... Today I know I don’t have to be anywhere but in the present moment. I also know that my Higher Power is always there for me and that nothing is bad unless I make it so.”—Hope for Today, a daily reader that’s Al-Anon Conference-Approved Literature, for March 21
he victims would get blamed when this doesn’t work in resolving the problem inside of the victims if not outside in the material world. On the main Victim Correction as a Panacea webpages, I tell of how cognitive therapy evolved from Behaviorist psychology. Both treat clients as if they’re blank slates on which well-adjusted personality traits are written, Behaviorism through positive and negative reinforcement, reward and punishment, and cognitive therapy by telling people to choose to think about what happens to them as a very well-adjusted person would. That’s what “works.” And cognitive therapy is far more able to fit the distorted worldview of victim correction as a panacea than is Behaviorism, since it requires learning from experience so the learning must reflect what reality is, but cognitive therapy could teach even someone with the worst experiences, to “think positively.” In order for Behaviorism to train someone not to be afraid of something, such as dogs, he’d have to see examples of this that aren’t fearsome, but cognitive therapy could train someone to think positively about his future no matter what happens to him. And other ways in which each of the millions of Americans with depression, must pragmatically deal with their own problems, follow this same pattern, that the only thing that really seems to matter is that those with the problems must take response-ability for their own welfare as well as possible. That’s what Objectivism is all about, that if a problem is yours, that’s objective, but even the worldliest moral responsibility is subjective, so could be called scaringly manipulative.
That book Working in the Dark, Keeping Your Job While Dealing With Depression, by Fawn Fitter and Beth Gulas, and published by Hazelden, begins, “Depression is as common as a cold. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, it hits one in every ten Americans—almost 19 million people—in any given one-year period.” The text on the back cover begins, “Each year, eleven million Americans experience a major depressive episode. Keeping a job while struggling to regain health is one of the least talked about but most difficult aspects of recovery from depression... until now.”
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? Not only are all those millions of depressed Americans expected to work in the dark whenever they are able, but this is said without apology? Sure, even if people have to deal with a social problem of this magnitude, each individual affected could be told that the more resilient and perseverant he is, the more likely he’d be to succeed. Yet I’d think that this would come with some admission that those who do this would be making the best of a certain social problem. Yet, as usual, as you could see from the title, this book is simply about dealing with ‘life on life’s terms,’ even if in your society, ‘life’s terms’ are that depression hits one in every ten Americans—almost 19 million people—in any given one-year period, and each year eleven million Americans experience a major depressive episode.
“This book is published by the Hazelden addiction treatment center, which very much believes in AA philosophy. That would mean that they’d believe in telling addicts’ family members that they simply must accept what the addicts do due to their addictions, since their diseases made them do it. Since depression is a disease, it would make just as much sense to tell depressed people’s family members that anything that depressed people do or fail to do due to their depressions, they did or failed to do due to their diseases, so family members must accept them. That would include if any depressed person doesn’t work! Any family member who’d object to that would be told, ‘But you’d be silly if you blamed him for what his disease made him fail to do!’ Yet addiction allows for more choice than does depression, since plenty of addictions end by the addicts ‘hitting bottom’ and therefore choosing to stop, but depressions can’t end like that. Obviously the standard by which we judge diseases that cause destructive behavior, is different from the standard by which we judge diseases that cause weakness and passivity! This is just as, as Paula Kaplan wrote in They Say You’re Crazy, in the 1990s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was considering adopting the diagnosis of ‘Paraphilic Rapism Disorder,’ which would have decreased the responsibility of rapists, and ‘Self-Defeating Personality Disorder,’ which would have increased the responsibility of those who seem to show signs that they have subconscious attractions to trouble, which, by definition, can’t be proved or disproved! In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if for this reason, the only diagnoses involving supposed subconscious desires, which respectable psychologists still put faith in, are those that would assume that people subconsciously choose to be weak for ‘fun’ and/or profit. What else would you expect in a society with rampant depression?”
As plenty of ads for antidepressant medication say, it really is very unscientific to assume that depression simply is a weakness of character. Yet if depressed people are expected to just keep working, whether their depressions are mild moderate or major, then it could still seem that if they don’t just buck up and deal with their depressions, their characters are to weak to deal with their own realities. As long as your culture considers you to be personally responsible for doing something, then if you aren’t adequate to do this, lose the battle, fail, and come up short with big consequences, you’d seem to be an irresponsible and inadequate, loser and failure with very consequential shortcomings. If you don’t adjust to this, adapt to it, function with it, fit in with it, and feel content with it, you’d seem to be a maladjusted maladaptive and dysfunctional, misfit and malcontent. Many depressions are bad enough that the person can’t just keep on working, but since there’s no objective standard for how severe is too severe, many would want to be optimistic that the sufferer could have succeeded if only he tried hard enough. And in all cases in which someone can’t work because of his severe depression, he’d still have the stigma of being an unemployed loser. You’d think that a social problem that includes 19,000,000 Americans to some degree, and 11,000,000 Americans seriously, would make people realize that we’d better treat this as a serious social problem, rather than just something that each sufferer must deal with separately. Though those affected by any social problem would each be affected in different ways, because of differences inside each sufferer, your natural common sense should tell you that if you talk about big social problems like that, then you’re blaming the victims.
The Hazelden center, which treats addiction, is especially influenced by the main role-models of self-help in general, Twelve-Step groups. Hazelden also publishes a book Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Recovery Meditations for Hard Cases, by Barry L., which includes in one of its meditations, “‘Why me?’ is a question without an answer. The unauthorized program corruption of Taoism, ‘Shit happens,’ is all the answer there is.... As the turkeys say, ‘Thanksgiving Happens.’” That goes one step beyond, “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,” that even if one gets killed and eaten, oh, well, shit happens. No matter what caused any worker’s depression, she’s supposed to just keep working in the dark, since mature turkeys deal with the reality that Thanksgiving happens. That’s all the answer there is. Addicts reluctant to accept this sort of “maturity,” are therefore deemed “hard cases.” After all, just imagine how much easier an adversarial society would run, if everyone in it figured that no matter what happened to them, they’re simply going to have to courageously change whatever they can, and serenely accept whatever they can’t.
And speaking of cognitive therapy in one’s career, while the following deals with an added risk factor, it shows how the current psychological zeitgeist of correcting victims, must follow the patterns of our culture’s ideas of unconditional personal response-ability, though these conceptions are the same as the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression. The following sort of logic would even more readily be used to create positive attitudes regarding the routine causes of our rampant depression.
The chapter on suicidality in Psychological Treatment of Bipolar Disorder, edited by Sheri L. Johnson and Robert H. Leahy, tells of how those with bipolar disorder that includes manic and/or depressive episodes, really do have reason to fear that at any time they could lose what they’d achieved in their careers, their relationships or marriages, etc., due to an episode. Therefore, their fears along these lines have to be accepted as based in proven reality. Since suicide tends to be based on hopelessness, this reality-based hopelessness is something that suicide prevention would have to deal with.
Individuals who have experienced the extreme, all-encompassing symptom episodes of bipolar disorder often retort that it is foolish to plan a future, because their mental illness can interrupt and sabotage all such plans at any time. One patient described his dreams as a “house of cards” that was difficult to construct but easy to collapse. Another likened herself to the mythological character Sisyphus, whose efforts at rolling the boulder up the hill were a repeated act of futility, as the rock would roll back down every time, again and again, into perpetuity. Thus, patients may view the technique of future imaging as an invitation to tantalize themselves with hopes that can never come to pass, or cannot last. The sentiment can be summed up by the plea, “Don’t make me get my hopes up—it’s too risky and hurtful!”
Therapists can acknowledge that bipolar illness has indeed been known to dash people’s positive plans for their lives. Thus, it is understandable that patients would be hesitant to hope, dream, and plan once again. However, there are things patients can do to reduce the risk, minimize the potential damage, and increase the probability of some success. Note that the above sentence is couched in terms that are antithetical to a depressive, hopeless, all-or-none view. The question is not whether or not it is worth trying to create a better future. The question is how to increase the likelihood that life can improve, in spite of the bipolar illness.
OK, the first important point: What could suddenly come crashing down, isn’t just “people’s positive plans for their lives,” but all the work and other sacrifice that they made to build what they had to build. Anyone with a PhD in psychology should be able to understand that if all the time that he’d invested in getting his degree, suddenly wasn’t worth much since he could have significant episodes of a mood disorder so potential employers couldn’t have much faith in his ability to work consistently, that would be more than just his positive plan for his life not panning out. Yet such awareness wouldn’t fit the sprightly optimistic norm of cognitive therapy.
It seems very easy to tell us that we should defer gratification and invest some real effort and/or money in our achievements. The whole theme of William Ryan’s classic book Blaming the Victim, was that at the time it was written, it was trendy even among progressives who wanted to help the poor, to believe that the cause of poverty is that the “culture of poverty” is irresponsible, which includes a lack of a sense of responsibility for building careers through deferred gratification.
Yet even those who’d be very aware of the importance of deferred gratification, could be very unaware of the importance of getting the gratification. It seems very easy to lecture poor people that they should practice more self-discipline in deferring gratification. It would seem un-American to insist that these very same poor people be able to count on getting the gratification. It would seem that all must accept whatever they win or lose.
Which leads to the other important point: Needing one’s efforts and sacrifices to build his career, to be more than such a crapshoot, isn’t an “all-or-none view.” If anything, calling that an “all-or-none view” is in itself all-or-nothing thinking, since that would hold that those with significant bipolar episodes, have to feel hopeful about making the sacrifices to try to build a career, or they might as well have no hope. Chances are very good that each of these people would have another disruptive episode at some time. One of the things necessary to “increase the probability of some success,” and this book has a whole chapter on this, is that others express as little critical emotion to those susceptible to bipolar episodes, as possible. If those others do express the critical emotions, then it could seem that expecting them not to do this would be repressing their emotions, that no one could count on others to be “nice,” etc. All would agree that our economy works on the basis of survival of the fittest, and any disease that would cause that much disruption would make one as unfit to survive as if he were too undisciplined to practice deferred gratification. Certainly if, before those psychologists had gotten their PhDs, they knew that they had a health condition that could at any time disrupt their careers, they wouldn’t have thought, “As long as I could reduce the risk, minimize the potential damage, and increase the probability of some success, that would be good enough for me to get my PhD. Either I’d appreciate my partial chances of success, or I’d have an all-or-nothing attitude, so maybe I should learn to think right.”
Sure, in a society with rampant depression, all sorts of things would be crapshoots. Yet to assume that one engages in all-or-nothing thinking if he doesn’t accept the level of risk that those with disruptive episodes of mood disorders would have, really does make one wonder how cognitive therapists assess how hopeful the average person around us, should feel about the normalized risks which cause our rampant depression. If one is among the 19,000,000 Americans who have depression this year, so he must must “work in the dark,” then no matter what realities caused this, it would benefit him to think positively. Even if he talks realistically about the dangers that cause this rate of depression, it could still seem that he’s engaging in all-or-nothing thinking, since either one does have enough hope to make the necessary sacrifices with the sort of confidence that motivated achievers have, or he doesn’t.
Erich Fromm wrote of Behaviorism, “Behaviorial psychology may be a science, but it is not a science of man. It is rather a science of alienated man conducted with alienated methods by alienated researchers. It may be capable of illuminating certain aspects of human nature, but it does not touch on what is vital, on what is specifically human, about human beings.”
Arthur Koestler wrote, “Both [Watson and Skinner] are engaged in question-begging on an heroic scale, apparently driven by an almost fanatical urge to deny at all costs the humanity of the man and the rattiness of the rat.”
One could say that, just as Humanistic and Existential psychology are the more human, less animalistic, versions of psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy is the more human, less animalistic, version of Behaviorism. Instead of having one’s thinking re-engineered through reward and punishment, it’s to be re-engineered by the person logically realizing that certain outlooks, such as “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would make him more likely to succeed, more well-adjusted, and more serene.
As Sharon Lamb wrote in The Trouble with Blame, “According to this kind of cognitive view of sexual addiction, beliefs along with behaviors are merely appendages of the self, beliefs such as ‘I am a worthless human being’ and ‘my needs can only be fulfilled by sex,’ which can be removed or transformed through therapy. If beliefs and behaviors are to be viewed as appendages of the self, what is left to compose the inner self?” Yet those in trouble can’t afford to care about whether or not they have an inner self, or that their own honest opinions are being messed with. Rather, the empirical proof that backs up cognitive therapy, is that people are able to change their own attitudes and feelings, and that having positive attitudes makes one most likely to succeed. Those who take literally, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” would probably be able to get through their own serious problems, better than those who don’t. Of course, those who are on the other end of The Serenity Prayer, the sinners who cause the hardships, could choose to stem their destructive desires, and not just in the cases of pathologies such as sex addiction. Buddhism is just as successful in getting aggressive feelings under control, as it is getting unforgiving feelings under control, which is just the kind of empirical proof that validates cognitive therapy. Yet it would seems that training someone to get his normal aggressive feelings under control, constitutes re-engineering human nature, while training someone to get his normal “negative” feelings under control, constitutes “positive thinking.” We have here the usual paradigm of victim correction as a panacea, where, if one person causes, or might cause, a big problem for another, then attempts to resolve it by correcting the morally responsible person would seem naïve, controlling, mollycoddle, judgmental, etc., while correcting the victim would seem realistic, self-empowering, red-blooded, forgiving, etc.
Yet with depression hitting almost 19 million Americans, and eleven million Americans experiencing a major depressive episode, in any given year, a lot of cognitive therapy would have to treat victims as objects. Having a positive attitude in many of those circumstances would require Doctrine over Person, the step of the brainwashing process which Dr. Robert Jay Lifton described as being central to the brainwashing process. This is the actual brain-washing, the thought reform, since the person is to wash from his brain his own honest interpretations of the world that disagree with what he’s supposed to believe, and replace them with what he’s supposed to believe. The other steps of the brainwashing process either contribute to the actual washing, get rid of influences that would have counteracted it, or follow from it. If this is done in the goal-oriented fashion of getting rid of warranted interpretations of the world since these would constitute “negative thinking,” then the person would be treated as a machine. He’d also be objectified as a sociopath or addictive personality would objectify those hurt by his destructive behavior, by telling them to just “get over it” (though one could say that since humans can choose to “get over it” while rats can’t, this is the humanistic approach). No matter how complex the situation may be, how balanced and multifaceted were the responses of the person hurt, etc., he’d be treated as an object that’s simply supposed to serenely accept or courageously change whatever hardship, sinfulness, etc., may impact his life.
Cognitive therapy for depression has the same paradigm as the unredacted Serenity Prayer, and the Prayer of Saint Francis. A person, but not a rat, is able to choose to serenely accept everything that he’s helpless to change, accept hardship as a pathway to peace, take this sinful world as it is, and supplant his own warranted hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair, and sadness, with love, pardon, faith, hope and joy. Yet though one could say that this does reflect what is specifically human about human beings, it certainly doesn’t reflect what is vital about them. No matter how much pragmatism self-empowerment and forgiveness this would give a person, it is still a formula for the alienated. One can’t have an honest opinion about his own travails, only one mechanistically, instrumentally, planned to make him the least dysfunctional. Considering how important it is for those undergoing trials to be as functional as possible, those who believe in this sort of victim correction could very easy be driven by an almost fanatical urge to deny at all costs the alienation and instrumentalism of this approach.
A naturally humanistic response to that rampant depression, would be to treat this as a calamitous social problem. The alienated response would be to figure out how this many Americans could pragmatically keep going to work under these circumstances. Yet treating this as a social problem could seem more alienated, since going to work would keep a person social, productive, and respectable.
Fromm would have been free to call this psychological approach “alienating,” but if a corrected victim drew exactly the same conclusion, that would be strenuously condemned as dysfunctional. And “alienating” isn’t the worst of it; a scientist would also be free to call this psychological approach “allocating personal responsibility as do the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression,” while if a corrected victim said exactly the same thing, that would really seem to be playing the victim role and evading the self-responsible role. This lets l’individu become less alienated by fitting in, but makes the individual alienated from what’s really meaningful and humanistic.
Cognitive therapy suits victim correction as a panacea in several ways, one of which is that, as is shown above, any skepticism that the corrected victim may have, could be labeled as a dysfunctional opinion, no matter how alienated and, therefore, alienating, this would be. Despite the fact that a lot of the cognitive for depression tries to get rid of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, the most pragmatic approach to a competitive adversarial society is to think in a way that’s very similar to these distortions, but not feel the self-blame. That’s where the cognitive distortions came from. Cognitive therapy, but not Behaviorism, could train you to have a goal-oriented attitude toward serenely accepting everything that you’re helpless to change, supplanting your own warranted hatred, awareness of injury, etc.; of “No room for error, and there’s always room for improvement,” which is what the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression boil down to. If Behaviorists had an almost fanatical urge to deny at all costs the dehumanization of their instrumentalism, this could be only intellectual narcissism. There are plenty of other ways of achieving anything that Behaviorism could achieve. If cognitive therapists had an almost fanatical urge to deny at all costs the dehumanization of their instrumentalism, this would be very pragmatic in any situation where being an instrument which mechanistically supplants distress with contentment, would make you far more serene and courageous. How else are you going to get serenity and courage in situations that would naturally inspire hatred awareness of injury doubt despair and sadness, when you most need serenity and courage?
Also, any failure could be blamed on the victim. When it was established that the effects of aversion therapy tend to be temporary, it was figured that Behaviorist theory didn’t do what it was supposed to. Even if a given person never responded to Behaviorist therapy, all that this would mean is that he isn’t impressionable. If in any case of cognitive therapy the effects were temporary, it would be figured that the client didn’t try hard enough, didn’t really choose to think in a well-adjusted fashion. If someone never took to cognitive therapy, it would seem that he chose to hang onto unpragmatic perceptions. After all, many just plain folk in Gam-Anon and other fellowships for addicts’ significant others have chosen to face their problems with spiritual strength and maturity, so letting such things bother you more than you have to, isn’t something that you have to do.
Also, cognitive therapy can be done on a victim’s low budget more than Behaviorism can. Behaviorism requires that a client learn from a tangible reality rather than an optimistic mental picture, so Behaviorism is limited to the provable. With cognitive therapy one could choose to believe literally anything that has a logical leg to stand on. Behaviorism can’t treat some as if it’s the four-letter s-word, which one may not use without looking as if he’s self-defeatingly refusing to correct every last one of his inefficiencies, but cognitive therapy can.
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
