And What Science Can Do About It

 #11

 

 

 

“The                   
positive energy
of this                 
         conference
    was wonderful”

—on a postcard for The 2nd North American Conference On Fathers Behind Bars and On the Street

 

Go to Page 10

 

 

y own first encounter with victim correction as a panacea took place during the Reagan/Thatcher era, when this sort of thinking first became very popular.  This involved the idea of codependency, which reflects many of the trends of the Reagan-Thatcher era.  A conjectural, tenuous logic was used to blame the victims of undoubtedly sinful, if not criminal, behavior.  Though codependency is supposed to come from desires to caretake, play the martyr role, live a melodrama, etc., I attended a group for women all of whom were diagnosed as codependent, and none of whom expressed any self-defeating desires.

Just before this I read, in Antidepressant Treatment—the Essentials, by John H. Greist, MD and Thomas H. Greist, MD, a book on how general practitioners could give their depressed clients better medical treatment, from 1979, says, “According to National Institutes of Mental Health figures, 20,000,000 people or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population suffers from a serious depressive disorder in any given year.”  To say that as doctors treat the million of Americans who suffer a serious depressive disorder in any given year, they should know this rate since it would help the doctors treat each individual as if their depressions simply are their problems, completely ignores the fact that this involves an unnaturally high rate of helplessness, happening to millions of people, year in and year out.

 

The original source cited by this, was Depression: Behavioral, Biochemical, Diagnostic, and Treatment Concepts, edited by Donald M. Gallant, MD, and George M. Simpson, MD.  Its preface begins, “Depression is the most common emotional disorder, afflicting approximately 50 percent of North Americans and western Europeans at one time or another; the depressive syndrome is the presenting problem in approximately one half of all admissions to psychiatric institutions.”

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?  That’s one heck of a social problem!  I’ve seen enough depression, that I could at least come close to imagining how big it is!  Yet it seems only natural to approach this problem as if it’s to be controlled through mega-medication, or maybe through millions of these people learning to have optimistic outlooks.  Since the causes of this aren’t absolute power, it seems only natural to figure that if anyone doesn’t deal with them as if they’re simply life’s vicissitudes, then that’s just his whiny, resentful, manipulative, judgmental, etc., opinion.”

 

 

That’s what really opened my eyes as to what our normalcy leads to.  Despite all the preachings and admonitions that you might hear about how “everyone knows” that certain problems are just the normal imperfections of life and/or human nature, so of course you’re simply going to have to deal with them and you’re playing dirty tricks if you don’t, the fact remains that some of this normalcy is outside of the threshold of human endurance.

And, of course, the whole question of codependency very much involves the fact that the intent of the addicts is a lot less severe than are the consequences of the addiction, which is the whole reason why so many people think that it shouldn’t be too difficult to “save” the addicts.   The more that you’ve been close to this sort of ridiculousness, the more that you could relate to:

At the time that the following happened, I’d already heard plenty of chronically depressed guys express plenty of guilt feelings, which stemmed from their authoritarian religious upbringings.  As I listened to all the self-responsibility in connection with diagnoses of codependency given to women who weren’t masochistic, it reminded me of those guys’ guilt feelings.  I kept getting the impression that the only way that guilt feelings could accompany feelings of helplessness is if someone had been taught, by cultural conditioning or otherwise, to be self-responsible when dealing with your own problems no matter what caused them.  And sure enough, soon after I read that intercultural studies have consistently found that depressed people who’ve lived in developed areas 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.  For example, the book The Anatomy of Melancholy written in Elizabethan England by Robert Burton described the typical depressive of his era as, “He dare not come in company for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him, derides him, owes him malice,” and otherwise as suspicious, jealous, fearful maybe even terrified, and solitary. 

A webpage of the World Health Organization document Conquering Depression, Historical Background, includes:

Much of what is known today about symptoms of depression and related disorders was described by the ancient Greek and Roman physicians who coined terms like ‘melancholia’ and ‘mania’ and noted their relationship.  In the fourth century BC, Hippocrates made an early reference to distress and melancholia.  He described melancholia (black bile) as a state of “aversion to food, despondency, sleeplessness, irritability and restlessness”. Later, Galen (131-201 A.D.) described melancholia manifesting in “fear and depression, discontent with life and hatred of all people”.  Subsequent Greco-Roman medicine not only recognized the symptoms of melancholia in the form of fear, suspicion, aggression and death wishes, but also referred to environmental contributions to melancholia as immoderate consumption of wine, perturbations of the soul due to passion, and disturbed sleep cycle.  Many of the original Greek texts on melancholia were transmitted to posterity through medieval Arabic texts in which connections between two major mood states were suggested, and the causes of the disease were speculated to be interactions between temperament, environment and the four humours (i.e. wind, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile).

If the average Westerner were to see someone reacting to his own helplessness by acting irritable, malcontent, hateful, suspicious and aggressive, the typical Westerner would probably respond as if this is aggressively self-serving, so instead he should show some personal responsibility for his failures to courageously change (and prevent) what he could have, and serenely accept what he couldn’t.

If a woman diagnosed as codependent since her husband is an addict or its functional equivalent, naturally she’d feel like a victim.  Yet when she’d go to meetings patterned after Al-Anon, she’d be told to stop blaming others and start looking at herself, as the following Al-Anon Approved Conference Approved Literature tells alkies’ kids to do:

 

(For more on this comic and how it applies to everyone, click here.)

 

Of course, she’d also be told that she shouldn’t feel guilty, only look objectively about how she’d better be smart, determined, resourceful, etc., enough to deal with her realities.  Everybody needs a moral compass, and that’s theirs.

         

Malignant Sadness, the Anatomy of Depression, by Lewis Wolpert, says “It is somewhat ironic that in earlier times there was not always the stigma attached to depression that there is today, and that the melancholic thought of himself as a rather superior being.”  Chances are that if an alkie’s wife told an Al-Anon meeting that life with him made him feel as Elizabethan-era depression felt, and she didn’t just briefly mention this important fact, those at the meeting would respond as if this was a sign that she has a big ego, that she: expects the world to be as she’d have it, is a manipulative control freak in that she supposedly gets her thrills by controlling him manipulatively, is determined to “save” him, thinks she deserves more than what she won, is self-righteous, is judgmental, engages in self-obsessed resentment anger and fear, wants others to feel sorry for her, is manipulatively victim-posturing, is having a pity-party, is abdicating her response-ability for her own welfare, is making excuses for her own failures, is relishing her own martyrdom, etc.

 

 

As Al-Anon’s One Day At A Time In Al-Anon says, “We finally understand how this self-will has actually contributed to our distress.”  (About this sort of logic, Agent Orange says on his website, on his The “Us Stupid Drunks“ Conspiracy webpage, which also includes Al-Anon’s teachings on its members supposed character defects, “So, ladies, if you actually want your husbands to quit drinking themselves to death, you are some real sickos...  You need to do Bill Wilson’s Twelve Steps to Buchmanism, and get down on your knees and confess all of your sins,” and, “The lady says, ‘Let’s see now...  The biggest flaw that is creating so much trouble for me is my husband’s suicidal drinking...  It bothers me, watching him kill himself.  I guess I’d better do the Fourth and Fifth Steps again, and list and confess my sins some more...’”  Actually, this isn’t a general, “Us Stupid Spouses of Addicts,” but a very specific, “Us Whiny Spouses of Addicts,” which has very specific implications on what character defects the spouses seem to have.)

     

When you consider that Robert Blake grew up in an abusive home, and that before he had his relationship with Bonnie Bakely he painted “The Mata Hari Ranch” on the outside of his house, Mata Hari having had been one of history’s great manipulators of men, one could diagnose him as codependent, without needing any conjectural reasoning.  If a woman grew up in an abusive home, paints “The Casanova Ranch” on the outside of her house, and later—surprise, surprise—gets into a bad romantic relationship with someone who characterologically cons women, people would have no problem telling her, “You let yourself in for it, since that’s what reminds you of when you first experienced love.”  The fact that Blake also says that other women he’s had relationships with also seemed intent on conning him, would further support the diagnosis that he keeps “letting himself in for trouble.”

Yet due to the strong feelings that cheer for Reagan’s conceptions of personal response-ability, we now tend to see interpersonal conflicts in terms of individuals who either succeed or fail.  If rampant depression plagues your society, it would seem only natural to discuss the affected in terms of how this social problem could be taken care of in terms of mega-medication, or otherwise fixing something inside of the individuals.  A woman (especially one who grew up in a dysfunctional family) could be diagnosed codependent, simply because she keeps getting into romantic relationships with the same sort of problem men.  It would therefore seem that she has a subconscious attraction to that kind of problem.

Both victim-blaming, and an awareness of why it doesn’t really make sense, became very obvious during the Reagan era.  As Ayn Rand wrote it Atlas Shrugged, “Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence [as she would define how people would naturally deal with what existence naturally is].  But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him [as she would define ‘doctrines’].”  If the only alternatives are a state economy, or a self-responsibility that sometimes must involve unfair self-blame, then you’re monstrous if you don’t choose the unfair victim-self-blaming.  Not only that, if we did have a system that cared about what’s fair and what’s unfair, people could get what they wanted by cooking up enough sophistry to “prove” that they deserve it, rather than by actually deserving it.  In order for our economy to produce what needs to be produced, we simply must have it so that people don’t get what they need unless they deserve it, but we can’t make sure that if they deserved an opportunity to get it, they’d get the opportunity.  Whatever jobs are available at an above-poverty wage, are whatever jobs are available at an above-poverty wage, and if there are more people who deserve these jobs than there are these jobs available, then that’s just too bad.  We’re simply going to have to accept economic bubbles and busts as if they might as well reflect the free market giving people what they want and deserve, etc.

If we treated  20,000,000 Americans, or approximately 15% of the U.S. adult population, suffering from a serious depressive disorder in any given year, as a social problem, this would let people get what they wanted by playing the victim role, but that doesn’t mean that  20,000,000 Americans suffering from a serious depressive disorder in any given year, isn’t a social problem.  If you’re one of the 20,000,000, it should be very obvious what this would mean for you.  And no matter what the financial meltdown might teach us about the harm that the strong could cause, and about how the weak are mostly not to blame for their own weakness, we still must motivate people to try to succeed, and accept that fairness would cost too much.  The magnitude of this depends on whatever reality requires in a society with rampant depression and anxiety disorders, so there can be no limits to this.  Things simply have to keep functioning.

 

 

William Ryan’s classic book Blaming the Victim, from 1967, was about blaming [urban] poverty on a supposed “culture of poverty” which goes against a good work ethic.  (Nothing is said about what might cause rural poverty.)  Yet those who are the most likely to blame the victims for urban poverty, are also those who are the most likely to insist on the parameters that make for unfair victim-self-blaming.  Of course the reason why poor people would want to move out of poverty and all the helplessness that entails, isn’t that they have a good work ethic, but that our economy gives them an incentive to work in order to move out of that helplessness.  Yet the only way that every poor person who wanted to work his way out of poverty, could, would be to have a planned economy that would make sure that we had enough above-poverty jobs.  If you expected that, you’d seem monstrously anti-freedom, yet if you don’t expect poor people to work their way out of poverty by having good work ethics, you’d also seem monstrously anti-freedom.  In the real world, this simply is how all questions of victim-blaming must be settled, since we all simply must have an impetus to try to do what needs to get done, without any excuses being allowed in the end.  Like everyone else, the poor must be motivated to try to avoid poverty (and not just through good work ethics), but can’t be guaranteed that if they deserve middle-class jobs, they’ll get them.

The following is from the March 12, 2009 episode of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360:

COOPER: David, the Pew Foundation released a survey, a pretty surprising survey.  Nearly eight in 10 people polled said they believe it’s still possible to get ahead in the current economy. Where — what do you think the optimism comes from?

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It’s interesting, Anderson, because the facts don’t bear it out so much.

You know, the same — the same group has found that about 42 percent of Americans who are born on the bottom rung of society wind up there a generation later.  They stay on that bottom rung.  Only about 6 percent make it up.  We have — it’s a problem of what’s so-called sticky floors.

But this survey shows that most Americans still believe that there is upward mobility, that they can make it through hard work, through thrift, you know, living well, disciplined work.

That’s an encouraging sign.  It means that — and I think it’s partly — I think it’s partly the Obama effect.  I think that he has been a — had a — sent a — sent a very encouraging signal to minorities, to blacks, and to Hispanics.  And I think that helps to bolster these numbers.

Of course, one must ask if that’s really that encouraging, if it means that eight in ten Americans could blame even those who don’t make it up in this economy, as if they had better chances of success.

Of course, victim-blaming has gotten even more subtle than that.  That is, it seems that just because someone was undoubtedly victimized, wouldn’t mean that the inadequacies of his reactions weren’t to blame for letting his problem happen. continue, or bother him.  Not only that, he could be blamed for intentionally letting his problem happen continue or bother him, on a conscious or unconscious level, since that would allow him to get what he wants through a hidden agenda.  The main hero of Hitler Nietzsche and Wagner was Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote in The World as Will and Representation, “The concept of good is divided into two subspecies, that of the directly present satisfaction of the will in each case, and that of its merely indirect satisfaction concerning the future, in other words, the agreeable and the useful.   The concept of the opposite, so long as we are speaking of beings without knowledge, is expressed by the word bad, more rarely and abstractly by the word evil, which therefore denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case,” and, “Wrong through violence is not so ignominious for the perpetrator as wrong through cunning, because the former is evidence of physical strength, which in all circumstances powerfully impresses the human race.  The latter, on the other hand, by using the crooked way, betrays weakness, and at the same time degrades the perpetrator as a physical and moral being.”  And, of course, if even your honest, assertive beliefs that you had been wronged reflect your SELF-WILL, then cunning of some sort could be attributed to even them.   As modern psychology would put it, The World as Will and Representation means looking at the entire world in terms of accepting ineradicable human aggression, and how victims could adjust to it through cognitive therapy changing how they represent their experiences to themselves, and if they don’t then that’s their manipulative SELF-WILLS at work.  One could also blame the victim, as in the stereotypical blaming victims of crime, even without thinking that the victim consciously or subconsciously chose to let the victimization happen, though even there, one could follow the victim-blaming with, “And now that you know how you could prevent problems like this, if you choose to ignore what I’m saying, then you’re choosing to ignore advice on how you could empower yourself, so you’re choosing to let future problems happen!”  As Rick Perlstein wrote in Nixonland, The Conservative Movement originated to counter the Civil Rights Movement, in the early 1960s, and often, instead of claiming that blacks are inferior, claimed that the civil rights movement’s claims of victimhood were manipulative control tactics that would violate the freedoms of everyone else.

 

 

This is the same sort of logic that, starting in the late 1980s (The trends concerning male-female relationships in the early 1980s involved the sort of traditionalism that you’d see in Fundament Christianity.), was applied to women victimized by their boyfriends and husbands.  In this case, the victims were blamed for not necessarily wanting to be in such martyrdom-filled relationships, but for supposedly subconsciously “letting themselves in for it.”  This can’t be proved or disproved, but the victim who seems codependent should want to accept this notion, since it gives the hope that she could solve her problem, and would tell her how she could end some very serious problems in her own life.  Claims that you’re attracted to something or other subconsciously, though you might not realize it consciously, would usually be greeted with skepticism.  The old logic that if you disagree with this diagnosis then that’s just your conscious mind being in denial, would seem ridiculously unfounded.  That is, unless the diagnosis is of codependency, which aims to save people from tortuous circumstances.  In cases like that, jumping to conclusions seems necessary, since most people in desperate circumstances can’t really know a lot of what they’d have to act on, for certain.  This sort of victim-blaming, which would say that the victim really is to blame though subconsciously, looks a lot better than both the sort of victim-blaming that says that the victims’ conscious choices are to blame so the victims are blamed very literally, and the sort that would say that though others are completely to blame for causing the problems the victims are to blame for not preventing or fixing them well enough, which is obviously morally bankrupt.

As David Rothkopf wrote in the Washington Post on March 29, 2009, ever since 1980, Americans tended to believe, “The efficient markets would tell us what and who should succeed.  Here in the most powerful country in the world, Republicans and Democrats alike bought into the philosophy.  The values of business—profit above all, wealth as the prime measure of success, short term over long term—became society’s values.”  Yet, “Then it all came undone.  Bubble after bubble burst, in emerging markets, technology and real estate.  The gap between the richest and the poorest started to rival historical extremes.”

Frank Partnoy’s book Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets, copyright 2003, so even then certain dangers were obvious, discusses whether or not the foreign currency markets in the 1980s fit the economic theory of the “efficiency of markets.”  “The consensus among economists during the 1970s and early 1980s was that financial markets were efficient—that is, market values generally reflected available information.  Economists loved to tell the story of the finance professor who refused to pick up a $20 bill lying on the ground, arguing that it couldn’t actually be there because if it was, someone would have picked it up already.”  It seems that this should tell us what and who should succeed, since figuring that winners should win and losers should lose is so simple.

What this calls “efficiency,” is actually closer to accuracy, that since all those greedy traders would take advantage of any prices being too low or too high, by buying or selling more and thereby push the prices to the right level, so the prices would accurately reflect what they’re supposed to be.  Of course, even this accuracy isn’t really accuracy, since it reflects what traders consider to be the value of things.

This book goes on to talk about how in the 1980s, it was legal for currency traders to manipulate the currency markets. The results of this on the countries whose currency are valued like this, should be obvious, but this wasn’t what this book considers to be an inefficiency of the markets:

Krieger began trading with a flurry, right where he had left off at Bankers Trust.  Soros was having a bad year, and Krieger began placing very large currency bets—and winning.  Soros had bet nearly a billion dollars on the British pound, but Krieger thought the pound would decline.  Krieger reversed the position, and bet against the pound.  A single trade with Chemical Bank was for more than $1.8 billion.

According to public reports, Krieger’s trades were so substantial that they alarmed officials at the Bank of England, which contacted Soros, just as the New Zealand officials had contacted Charlie Sanford of Bankers Trust.  But according to Krieger, he spoke to officials from the Bank of England every day, and they were delighted that someone in the market was betting against the pound, which they believed was overvalued.  (Recall that if a country’s currency declines, exports become cheaper, which helps the economy.)  The London press began reporting on the size of Krieger’s trades, and after a few months both Soros and Krieger had had enough. Krieger said he made $42 million trading for Soros, of which he should have been entitled to 10 percent, but he didn’t want to continue working for Soros until the end of the year.  Krieger left his $4.2 million on the table, and experienced another fifteen minutes of fame after he resigned again, this time citing “personal interests.”

The level of Krieger’s 1987 profits was not sustainable, for him or for anyone else. A few currency traders made money betting on the directions of particular currencies during the early 1995, including George Soros, but these traders eventually ran out of luck.  In the end, the efficient markets theorists were at least partially vindicated.  Many of the opportunities for huge profits trading currency options had disappeared.

So what seems to have made the foreign currency markets “inefficient” at that time, wasn’t that traders could push the currency prices in directions that would affect entire countries in whatever ways they’d end up affected, but the “opportunities for huge profits trading currency options” that resulted from some of the prices not being accurate for a time.  Caring about inefficiencies such as how this would affect entire countries’ economies, would make the usual economists’ calculations of costs versus benefits seem totally off-base.  Therefore, it seems only natural to write about inaccuracies of prices and big risks posed to all countries’ economies, as if the inaccuracies were what constituted the inefficiencies.

The same would go for an awareness of what contributes to our rampant depression and anxiety disorders, which would be more costs that aren’t currently a part of the cost-benefit analyses of, “As long as everyone tries to win, and in the end we simply accept that if you win you’re a winner and if you lose you’re a loser, then this will efficiently motivate people to do what they must.”  It seems only natural for an ad for antidepressants to say, “Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw.  It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression....  Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults,” as if of course this consists of either 34,000,000 rather severe character flaws or 34,000,000 rather severe medical conditions, and treating this with mega-medication would solve The Problem.  This means, of course, that it would seem that if any inefficiencies exist regarding our rampant depression, they’d be the fact that after the depressions already exist then not treating them would mean added problems, not that what caused the depression is too high a cost.

The self-help version of those beliefs say that when you have conflicts with others, even if (as in the case of relationships that could be considered codependent) the other person keeps victimizing you somehow, these conflicts should be seen in terms of how you could succeed by resourcefully mustering up whatever power you can to win.  While it may sound strange to say that whether you won or lost in such contests you must have deserved it, you’re supposed to be optimistic that if you were resourceful enough, you’d have the opportunity to win if you deserved to; you really do have self-determination, and shouldn’t think of yourself as a passive victim.  This is far more efficient than caring about who’s at fault, since he’s probably not very motivated to solve the problems he caused you, and you can’t change him, only yourself.  Both Republicans and Democrats would buy into this, since it’s both realistic and respectable.  While such defensive strategies are nothing like expansive business strategies, this really does have to be even more insistent on the materialism, i.e. that no matter what you did or intended, or what he did or intended, the only thing that really maters is the material outcome.  If you don’t adequately: adjust to, adapt to, function in, remain undisturbed by, compensate for, fit in with, and feel contented with whatever happened to you; without: failing, losing the battle, trying to vindicate yourself, evaluating the morality of behaviors, using your best judgment as to whether or not they’re wrong, or acting like a muckraker; you’d seem to be just an: inadequate maladjusted maladaptive dysfunctional disturbed decompensated vindictive moralistic and judgmental misfit malcontent failure and loser who loves to rake through muck.  No matter what bubbles or houses of cards may end up falling apart, people will still be motivated to do only what they’re motivated to do, so we must continue defining personal responsibility like this.  Both the businesslike mentality and the self-help mentality would say that you’re simply going to have to swim with the sharks without being eaten alive, though in the 1960s this idea would have been countered with plenty of sociological facts, i.e., “Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”  No matter how high is the gap between the richest and the poorest, you’re simply going to have to play whatever cards you’re dealt.

The chapter on codependency, of Susan Faludi’s Backlash, talks about the victim-blaming simply in terms of what’s wrong with blaming the victim: “And so it goes for the next hour and a half, each speaker ticking off her troubles and pointing an accusatory finger at herself,”  “Norwood’s self-help plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program, advises women seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls ‘blaming,’”  “[The therapist] was a full-time housewife, she relates, until her husband ran off with her best friend after twenty-three years of marriage.  Then she went back to school at forty and became a therapist.  Now she’s ‘in recovery,’ having figured out what went wrong in her marriage.  ‘I let myself go.  I don’t blame him.  He’s a man just like any other man.  If I had done all this work on me before, maybe he would have stuck around,’”  and,  “ But after ten months in Women Who Love Too Much, she decided to move back in with him.  ‘See, the thing I learned in the group is, it wasn’t really his fault.  I allowed it to happen.’”

What this doesn’t say is the logic behind such victim-blaming, which is pretty unfalsifiable.  Sure, Dr. David Burns, in Feeling Good, defines Personalization, the juggernaut of the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, as, “You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for,” but self-help wouldn’t care who was responsible for what, only what the victims can or can’t change.  That could be said to benefit them, since, especially when women are dealing with impossible men, the victims are the only ones who have a reliable motivation to solve the problems, so they should need this to happen.  Under Reaganomics, for the person who has the problem to care whether or not he was primarily responsible for it, would seem to be: blame-finding, whiny, engaging in victimology and victimhood, passive, intellectualist, philosophical, etc.  If you care about what’s wrong with victim-self-blaming, this would seem to be the sort of intellectualist philosophizing that those who are in trouble so have to take care of themselves better, couldn’t afford.  To stress response-ability for one’s own welfare, rather than moral responsibility, is objective, and doesn’t make us vulnerable to the manipulative sophistry of those who’d try to win by “proving” that they deserve better.  (After all, the subject of the original book Blaming the Victim was blaming the poor in general for their poverty and its effects, and it’s very possible for someone to choose to be a slacker so he really would deserve poverty though he could whine that you shouldn’t blame him.)  Sure, this isn’t supposed to lead to feelings of self-blame, accepting what the problem person did since the victim supposedly let it happen, etc.  Yet since the cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, anxiety, etc., are basically absolutist, “I absolutely can’t change his actions, absolutely can change my own reactions, and absolutely must prevent or solve my problems,” such victim-self-blaming really does have the offensive and dangerous quality that Backlash describes.  Also, when others blame victims, this could lead to their not being treated as real victims.

The August, 2006 issue of Counselor, the Magazine for Addiction Professionals, includes an article, The Accuracy of Clinical Judgment, by Dr. Michael Taleff, which tells of the advantages of psychologists basing their diagnoses on actuarial reasoning rather than on hunches.  This actuarial reasoning, like the reasoning of insurance actuaries, would objectively size up whether or not a client has certain signs of a given diagnosis.  This article then says, “Human judgment is by nature flawed.  We did not evolve to think particularly well.  Our brains evolved more to react (or overreact) and make quick decisions in order to save our skin.  Those ‘over reactions’ and other little thinking problems stay with us today....  Ruscio and Dawes proposed that ignoring actuarial methods gets troublingly close to the unethical.”  After all, The Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association, in rule 2.04, Bases for Scientific and Professional Judgments, says, “Psychologists’ work is based upon established scientific and professional knowledge of the discipline.”  The usual logic of, “only literalist nerds would feel that hunches aren’t reliable enough,” would seem dangerously out-of-place.  If a woman paints, “The Casanova Ranch” on the outside of her house, and later gets into a bad romantic relationship with someone who characterologically cons women, an actuarial test probably would find that to show codependency.  If a woman in a society with rampant depression keeps getting into romantic relationships with problem men, that wouldn’t.  Actuarial reasoning that would determine what someone’s personality attributes really are, would be a great antidote to the habit of attributing to her the personal weaknesses that her desperate situation could make it seem that she has.

Yet there is no way that any self-help advisor would use actuarial reasoning.  If people are expected to deal with whatever realities they must deal with, then it would be pretty hard for their counselors to limit themselves to correcting them only if they have diagnosable and provable quirks.  Even if a client shows no signs that she has tendencies that could be called “mollycoddle” (manipulative tendencies, inadequate self-reliance and self-responsibility, etc.), if she’s in a situation that requires her to show more self-reliance and self-responsibility than she seems to be showing, then she’d seem deficient.  The transcendent spirituality that Al-Anon uses is a main role model for self-help, and Al-Anon would treat alkies’ wives who aren’t well-adjusted to their own realities, as if the problem that they must seriously address is their own resentment.  It wouldn’t matter if on an actuarial test to measure whether they have tendencies toward the Prima Dona, they’d score extremely low.  The alkies’ kids whom Alateen encourages to think, “I’ve stopped blaming others, and I’m looking at myself!” could have any score on an actuarial test that would measure how much their choices really are problematic, yet they’d still be expected to look at themselves rather than blaming the alkies.

One example of a possible diagnostic standard for codependency, is, as given in Treating Substance Abuse, by Frederick Rotgers, John Morgenstern, and Scott T. Walters,

  Codependence has been described as a “recognizable pattern of personality traits, predictably found within most members of chemically dependent families” (Cermak, 1986, p. 1).  Cermak proposed several specific symptoms of codependence: (1) investing self-esteem in controlling self and others in the face of serious adverse circumstances, (2) assuming responsibility for meeting the needs of others before one’s own, (3) experiencing anxiety and distortions of boundaries around issues of intimacy and separation, (4) being enmeshed in relationships with persons with personality disorders or alcohol or drug problems, (5) having at least three from a list of 10 other signs and symptoms, including, (a) using denial as a primary coping strategy, (b) having constricted emotions, (c) experiencing depression, (d) being hypervigilant, (e) displaying compulsive behavior, (f) experiencing anxiety, (g) being a substance abuser, (h) being a victim of physical or sexual abuse, (i) having stress-related illnesses, and (j) being in a relationship with a substance abuser for more than 2 years without seeking help.

This book then goes on to say that though some studies did show that those who grew up in dysfunctional families could indeed tend to have some of the basic tendencies of codependency, and that naturally anyone with a problem spouse will feel anxious and consider “personal responsibility” to mean overcoming the problems that the spouses cause, the book also says, “To date, although there is substantial literature demonstrating that spouses of substance abusers experience distress when their partner is actively using, there are no compelling empirical data to support the full construct of codependency.”  Therefore, this could hardly be called a standard by which someone could use actuarial reasoning to establish objectively what’s the likelihood that a given person is codependent.

Those diagnosed as codependent whom Faludi quoted in her chapter in Backlash about codependency, didn’t fit that pattern, other than, “Hi, my name is Sandra (names have been changed) and I’m a Woman Who Loves Too Much.  I got married to a man who became addicted to liquor....  What is it about me that attracted a sick, dependent alcoholic?”.

But what if, hypothetically, some studies had established that these are the signs and symptoms of codependence?  That would mean that one using actuarial reasoning, would have to figure objectively that one who doesn’t show these symptoms any more than would the average person in that same situation, isn’t codependent.  Yet none of the discussions in the codependency therapy group that I attended, looked at the women in terms of whether or not they showed the symptoms.  Their husbands had the sort of behavior problems that, if you called them “personality disorders” you’d likely seem judgmental, fault-finding, etc., unless the question you’re trying to answer is whether their wives “let themselves in for trouble” by choosing to marry someone with a personality disorder, in which case jumping to conclusions would seem legitimate.  When it comes to the self-protective actions we must take, we must err on the side of caution, while when it comes to moral responsibility, we must err on the side of innocent until proven guilty.  Street savvy would say that anyone who doesn’t take seriously dangers that he can intuit but can’t prove, is dangerously literalistic.

For example, sure, no one could prove that “Sandra’s” attraction to the man she married was an attraction to an incipient alkie, but the bottom line would be that she can’t afford to require certainty.  Also, “being a victim of physical or sexual abuse,” sure is a strange symptom for the victim, but she can’t afford to require certainty that this indicates something about her that she’d better stop.  Chances are that if your intuition tells you that someone isn’t trustworthy but you trust him anyway, self-help philosophy would say that you “knew” that he was untrustworthy but trusted him anyway, which is a sign of codependency.  After all, that’s how street savvy works.

If we were to treat a woman as codependent only if she showed the symptoms, that wouldn’t be erring on the side of caution.  Everyone knows that most unconscious desires are unprovable.  This is why modern psychology has tended away from diagnosing anyone with them.  Yet the fact that unconscious desires to “let oneself in for trouble” are very likely unprovable means that, since we must err on the side of caution, even a conjecture that someone is “letting herself in for trouble” must be taken seriously.  Survival skills can’t demand proof that a danger exists, before one seriously tackles it.  Of course, that means that victims are blamed far more readily than are those who really do cause the problems.  While it seemed perfectly acceptable, even necessary, to use an unproven symptomatology of codependency, anyone who wrote a similar set of symptoms that would indicate whether or not someone keeps acting on unconscious sadistic desires, would probably seem paranoid.  To warn someone that she’s unconsciously out to get herself would probably seem to be warning her of dangers that she can’t afford to dismiss just because she can’t prove them, but to tell someone that he’s unconsciously out to get others would seem extremely accusatory.

 

 

 

One big problem with this is that it depends on intuition, to such a degree that it’s presumed that if you tend to keep getting involved with people who cause you the same sort of problem, you must be sensing intuitively that these people are those who’d cause you the, as Robin Norwood Answers Letters from Women Who Love too Much describes what women who get involved with batterers are supposedly attracted to, “drama, chaos and excitement,” that you supposedly want.  Of course, if your intuition tells you that someone means trouble, you’re supposed to trust that.  In most cases, those around us would think that relying on intuition is simply too feminine.  It may seem unfair to make big decisions based on intuition.  Yet that could be the only protection we have.

One example of this is the first suspicious e-mails from Mark Foley to a teen page, to be made public.  According to the U. S. Department of Justice’s Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Initial Response to Representative Mark Foley’s E-mails to a Former Page, when the page who got these e-mails first forwarded them to “an employee with the House of Representatives,” the page commented, “Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously.  This freaked me out.  But do tell me what you think about it all.  I have one friend thinking I am being paranoid and the other saying that she thinks it is weird that he even asked for my e-mail, much more what he said,” “Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick,” and, “I have freaked out enough tonight, lol.”

This was the page’s intuition.  The most personal that Foley got in those e-mails was, “how are you weathering the hurricane..are you safe..send me an email pic of you as well.”  Therefore, when these e-mails were forwarded to government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, they forwarded them to the FBI, law enforcement decided not to investigate.  The DOJ report said, “Based on our review, we believe that the SSA’s decision not to investigate the matter further did not constitute misconduct, and fell within the range of discretion that she was afforded in her position as an FBI supervisor.”  As that very same supervisory special agent said, the reason why they didn’t want to investigate Foley for criminal activities based on e-mails that didn’t say anything criminal, was, “we’re the big bad government.”  The Report said that this decision was within the discretion of law enforcement, “However, notwithstanding the FBI supervisor and AUSA’s opinions about actions they would have advised at the time, we believe that the e-mails provided enough troubling indications on their face, particularly given the position of trust and authority that Foley held with respect to House pages, that a better practice for the FBI would have been to take at least some follow-up steps with regard to the e-mails,” to protect the pages rather than punish Foley.

Also, “She said that in determining that no investigation was warranted, she relied in part on the fact that the age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16.  She said that she was uncertain how old the former page was, but said she had a recollection that the Crimes Against Children Squad SSA had stated that the former page was 16 or 17 years old.”

The Report says that after the explicit Instant Messages were made public, “According to some media reports, FBI or Department officials had stated to the media that CREW had provided the FBI with ‘heavily redacted’ e-mails,” though actually, all that they redacted was the person who forwarded the e-mails to them, which wasn’t necessary for investigating the e-mails.  “Moreover, as we described above, the redactions in the e-mail did not factor into the FBI’s decision to decline to investigate the matter.”  “However, we determined that two of the three media representatives mistakenly believed, probably based on incorrect information from the Public Corruption Special Agent, that the FBI had sought additional information from CREW and that CREW refused to provide it.  This mistaken belief also was likely passed to other FBI spokespersons and Department spokespersons who discussed the Foley e-mails with the media.  Thus, we believe these misunderstandings may have contributed to inaccurate information being provided to the media.”

This is typical of situations requiring intuition, for the following reasons:

  The page who was freaked out by Foley’s e-mails, sensed through his intuition that those e-mails showed that Foley was dangerous.

  This intuition was enough that anyone who could have been hurt by him and could have avoided him, should have, but not enough that any “big bad” authority figures could have taken any corrective action.  Since that involved interactions between minors and adults who they very much respect, that should have also include increased protection of them.

  In fact, one could have gotten very insistently emotional both about any “big bad” moral or legal authority going after Foley simply because he was guilty of overly-friendly e-mails, and potential victims who could have avoided him and did know about such e-mails, not doing their best to protect themselves, especially if these victims were above the age of consent.

  The difference between the insignificant redaction that CREW made, and the significant redactions that the FBI said that they made, were so great that if this really were a “mistaken belief,” and “misunderstandings,” the FBI must have a communication breakdown as big as that which led to the certainty that Saddam still had three programs for weapons of mass destruction.  Yet it is very possible that such breakdown sometimes happen.

  Once again, our cultural norms could get very insistently emotional that any big bad legal or moral authority, presume people innocent of any cynical intent until proven guilty.  Therefore, it seems GOOD to see this as just a misunderstanding or mistake, though that would have required a rather big mistake!

Of course, when it comes to holding the victims responsible for their own problems, they wouldn’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty, since someone has to take responsibility for every problem.  Sure, it would seem pretty tactless to blame minors for being sexually abused by respected authority figures.  Yet chances are very good that, especially in the cases of teen girls above the age of sixteen who could seem to have life histories of being abused, the abused could be treated as if they must have “let themselves in for trouble.”

It seems just as tactless to blame battered women for being attracted to men who’d beat them.  Yet the “...Are Battered” chapter of Robin Norwood Answers Letters from Women Who Love too Much, begins, “Here is a working definition of addiction: In spite of ample evidence that something isn’t good for us we cannot stop our involvement with it.  We do not stop, even though we have experienced negative consequences both emotionally (through humiliation and degradation) and physically (through declining overall health and the possibility, occurrence or recurrence of serious illness or injury) and those who best understand our condition (professionals who understand addiction or others with similar histories who are now recovering) tell us that as unhappy and unhealthy as we already are, unless we change our behavior we will get even worse,” and goes on to say, “It is very important to recognize these factors when they are present (as they have been with every battered woman I’ve counseled) in order to move away from seeing the battered woman as a naive victim of a brutal man.  To do so is to guarantee that her treatment will fail....  Actually there are three areas that every shelter and every program for battered women would do well to address with their clients: the client’s definite relationship addiction, her very probable co-alcoholism [Simply because, according to this, 80% of batterers are alcoholic, that’s supposed to mean that 80% of those battered have the mental illness of co-alcoholism.], and her quite possible chemical dependency.”  If a Congressman “groomed” a sixteen-year-old female page so that she engaged in some non-forcible sexual activity with him, and she had a life history of being abused, it could seem sensible, even necessary, to address the likelihood of her having codependent attractions to being abused.  It could easily seem that to treat her as a naive victim of a brutal man. is to guarantee that her treatment will fail.

 

 

 

Dr. David Burns’ cognitive therapy self-help classic Feeling Good, says that the serene acceptance that it inculcates, includes, “There is no such thing as a universally accepted concept of fairness and justice.  There is an undeniable relativity of fairness, just as Einstein showed the relativity of time and space....  Here’s proof: When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?  From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair, he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation.”  What would cognitive therapists regard as an actuarial test for whether a client lets his problems bother him too much?  If any test would give a passing grade to someone in an unreasonable situation who seems too judgmental or whiny to adjust to that unreasonableness, then that test would give a passing grade to someone who is maladjusted.

Once again, this is a matter of survival skills.  Alkies’ kids who have an attitude of, “I’ve stopped blaming others, and I’m looking at myself!” would get through life better than would alkies’ kids who realized who really was to blame.  Those who are up against situations along the lines of, “When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?” and who have a serene acceptance of what they can’t change, would probably be able to solve their own problems more confidently and clear-headedly, than would someone who’d react normally.  If any psychologists counseling such people, did this with an attitude of, “If he doesn’t show the symptoms of overreacting, I’m not going to diagnose him as the problem,” then plenty of Americans who must face the sorts of traumas that lead to 20,000,000 Americans suffering a serious depressive disorder in any given year, would have to face these problems without the sort of Stoicism that would improve their own chances.

The books of prominent cognitive therapist Dr. Albert Ellis, have such titles as, “How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You,” and, “How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything.”  This would also have to include, “When a lion devours a sheep, is this unfair?  From the point of view of the sheep, it is unfair, he’s being viciously and intentionally murdered with no provocation,” if that’s what one’s reality looks like.  It could seem counterproductive to set up any diagnostic criteria for what it means for someone to let his problems bother him too much.  If someone shows an average, perfectly normal, level of tolerance, but he’s in an extreme situation, then no matter how normal he is, it’s himself that he’d better correct.  After all, he absolutely can’t change anyone but himself, and absolutely can and must change himself in order to stop his own strife and lack of confidence.

This very same issue of Counselor, also includes an article about how a Native American program for sobriety, in the Wellbriety Movement, make use of the similarities between AA’s spirituality and traditional Native American spirituality.  In one of these modern practices, the spiritual strengths that are called on are, “Healing,” “Hope,” “Unity,” and “The Power to Forgive the Unforgivable.”  An attitude of “There is no such thing as a universally accepted concept of fairness and justice....,” would certainly help with that forgiveness.  Certainly those living in any society could possibly need the power to forgive the unforgivable, in order to remain well-adjusted.  Yet all societies would also need to limit this moral bankruptcy as much as possible.

Regarding Native American spirituality, Don Coyhis of the Wellbriety Movement wrote, “Inside of every human being are the laws and codes by which we should live.  These laws and codes are communicated to us through a little voice.  When we are still, this voice guides us.”  If this voice inside of us were to hear that, as the Zoloft ads say,

what would that voice say?  That if those who suffer depression due to helplessness, could have changed their problems, they would have, so we’d better just serenely accept them?  Or that there really is such a thing as going too far, and that goes too far?

Researchers could write actuarial tests to see whether one has dysfunctionally low levels of healing, hope, and unification with others.  But how can anyone write a test to see whether a client has a dysfunctionally low level of the power to forgive the unforgivable?  One could only figure that even if the reality that a youngster must deal with is that he lives with an alcoholic parent, if he doesn’t stop blaming others, and look at himself, he’d feel enough resentment, etc., to make him maladjusted and dysfunctional, and, therefore, he has a dysfunctionally low level of the power to forgive the unforgivable.  If he’d score extremely low on a test for Prima Dona tendencies, that wouldn’t matter in the slightest.  Also, the moral bankruptcy necessary to effectively forgive the unforgivable, isn’t going to inspire much hope, and could lead to some pretty distorted healing and unity.

Also, though those who could be held morally responsible are presumed innocent until proven guilty, every problem must have someone taking moral responsibility for dealing with it, so those who seem response-able for their own problems can’t be presumed innocent until proven guilty.  If someone were to insist that some choices that you made which inadvertently hurt someone else, were actually motivated by your subconscious desires to hurt others, this would seem very offensive unless your accuser could conclusively prove that.  Yet if someone were to insist that some choices that you made which inadvertently hurt yourself, were actually motivated by your subconscious desires to be a martyr, play the victim role, play a caretaker role, live a melodrama, etc., then even if this couldn’t be conclusively proven, you could still get the message that you can’t afford to ignore all possible risks to yourself, that couldn’t be conclusively proven.  Someone who did ignore all such risks would end up suffering a lot more than if he used his hunches to recognize the risks to himself.

More recently, I’ve realized that the reason why I keep getting involved, in various ways, with the same sort of irresponsible people, is that, as I described on both my My Story webpage and my About Us series of webpages, summarized on my About Us, the Summary webpage, ever since I was a teenager anyone who didn’t have a chronically manic personality, what science calls a “hyperthymic” personality, seemed half dead to me.  In essence, what hyperthymics tend to look like, is the celebrities who attract hordes of groupies, charismatic smart creative and idealistically caring, but also tending to have plenty of artistic-temperament-style behavior problems, such as boozing, doping, irascibility, flamboyant eccentricities, and irresponsibility.  If you surrounded yourself with all of the celebrities who attract hordes of groupies, you sure would tend to associate with people who have artistic-temperament-style behavior problems, so you could very easily seem to have a subconscious codependent attraction to artistic-temperament-style behavior problems.  Yet the only groupies who are attracted to the boozing and doping, are those who want to share the booze and dope.  It might seem strange that the very same hyperthymic person who’s very attractive most of the time,

could also be very problematic some of the time,

but that’s the reality.

The whole idea of codependency is that those who grew up in abusive homes had to adjust to what was the norm in those realities.  Even after they became adults, they keep on thinking and acting in ways that they’d gotten used to thinking of as pragmatic, well-adjusted, tolerant, helpful, etc.  This is the sort of thinking that codependency theory says that these people are to overcome.  Yet this same theory, is based on a premise of, “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.”  While those diagnosed as codependent are to reject the notion that they have to live with and take care of destructive men, these women are also supposed to accept that that’s just the way that these men are.  For the women to expect them to take moral responsibility, assertively stand up for their own rights (other than to say, “No, I won’t do your bidding,” since all have the power to do that independently), would be condemned as codependent attempts to “control” or “fix” the men, codependent desires to attract attention manipulatively and/or melodramatically, etc.  Maybe this was originally based on the fact that addicts have very little self-control, though the law certainly doesn’t treat those who commit crimes because of their addictions as if they’re not guilty by reason of insanity, by reason of their diseases of addiction.  Yet “Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” means taking all of the destructive behavior that you can’t change, as a given, simply because you couldn’t change it.

And, many times, women have had to avoid men who didn’t have abusive or destructive tendencies, but the women’s intuition, or suspicious-looking things that the men did, led the women to think that these men were too high of a risk.

For a convict’s wife who attended The 2nd North American Conference On Fathers Behind Bars and On the Street, to say about it, “The positive energy of this conference was wonderful,” could seem both good and bad by this standard.  First off, one would have to assume that a convict’s wife married him because she was codependent.  Many men from the inner cities have been sent to prison for drug offenses, but even in the inner cities, one could still figure that if a woman keeps getting involved with convicts, she must be attracted to trouble.  One could then say that to find the energy of a conference about making the best of husbands and fathers being in prison, to be positive and wonderful, is good, since it makes the best of what reality is for their wives and children.  At the same time, those who’d find that positive, would be very likely to have accepted a norm which says that mental health and maturity means dealing with the consequences of the men’s unacceptable behavior, resiliently resourcefully and independently.

After all,  the subtitle of the book The Manipulative Child, by Drs. E. W. Swihart, E. W. Swihart Jr., and Patrick Cotter, is, “How to Regain Control and Raise Resilient, Resourceful, and Independent Kids.”  Codependents certainly live up to this stolid standard.  Certainly plenty of kids who wouldn’t be resilient resourceful and independent enough to deal with their own problems, would score low on an actuarial test for manipulative tendencies, but that wouldn’t matter in the slightest.  If those suspected of manipulation were presumed innocent until proven guilty, just imagine how many people could get away with: sneaky manipulative tactics, sincerely believing that they’re entitled to something better (which is very easy to do) and therefore they’re not pulling manipulative ruses, etc. 

Here we have Schopenhauer’s ideology.  If one sincerely believes that what was done to him was bad or evil so he’s entitled to something better, that would reflect his own WILL to some degree, so could be called manipulative.  To say that your feelings that something was bad or evil reflect a striving of your WILL, is to say that that they’re manipulative, reflecting a self-serving hidden agenda that even you probably aren’t aware of.  All you know is that you’re right.  Of course, the bad or evil person’s bad or evil choices, his belief that excusing or forgiving them is what’s right, etc., certainly reflect the striving of his WILL, but it would seem that we simply must accept that that’s the way that human nature is.

While feminists tend to have a big problem with “Boys will be boys,” logic, those who treat codependency would say that this logic would actually be feminist, since it would lead to the women protecting themselves better against problem men, and independence when the women get divorced, even if these divorces lead to “the feminization of poverty.”  A webpage from Johns Hopkins’ school of public health, Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare, says, “The study looks at the factors in these women’s lives that contribute to depressive symptoms, and examines whether these symptoms may prevent the women from gaining employment and becoming independent from welfare.... ‘One challenge facing state welfare agencies is to identify barriers to employment. One such barrier — depression — is high among low-income single mothers,’ says Mary Jo Coiro, PhD, assistant scientist in the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.... Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, yet very few had received any mental health services.”  Many of these women’s situations are the result of exactly that sort of “independence,” since they were married to problem husbands, but the women have independent spirits, so they didn’t let these men interfere with their freedom.  Much of what these women would consider to be wonderful “positive energy,” would seem pretty desperate to most people.

As Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi wrote in her book Backlash, copyright 1991, “First published in 1985, Norwood’s book on female ‘relationship addiction’ became the guiding light to 20 million readers.  More than a year in the number-one spot on the New York Times best-seller list, Women Who Love Too Much [the definitive book on codependency] was the number-one 1986 best-seller in mass-market paperbacks nationwide, the top 1986 best-seller on the Times list for advice books and the most requested book at both Waldenbook’s and B. Dalton’s national chains....  Like so many therapists in the decade, Norwood had an opportunity to observe up close the increasing toll of emotional and sexual violence against women....  Yet, in the end, she proposed an explanation that entirely ignored the social dimensions of these developments and turned the problem inward.  Women today, she writes, are literally ‘addicted’ to men who hurt them....  Norwood’s self-help plan, modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s twelve-step program [through Al-Anon], advises women seeking the source of their pain to refrain from looking beyond themselves, a habit she calls ‘blaming.’”  As British author Douglas Adams wrote, “When you blame others, you give up the power to change yourself.”  Self-responsibility is necessary for victims.

Faludi could have taken this one step further, to show how the approach used to treat any supposed codependency actually came not from Twelve-Step groups for addicts, but from their ladies’ auxiliaries, the groups set up to use exactly the same spirituality to teach addicts’ friends and loved-ones how to cope with their realities, such as Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Gam-Anon.  AA’s Big Book says that the reason why their spirituality anathematizes hurt feelings such as resentment anger and fear, is that addictive personalities’ selfishness leads to Prima Dona hurt feelings, so these feelings really are the problem.  In the case of addicts’ friends and loved-ones, however, the addicts are obviously the problem.  The ladies’ auxiliaries must 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,” since if they do their members will cope, and if they don’t their members won’t.

Ironically, while both the Twelve-Step groups for addicts, and their ladies’ auxiliaries, depend a lot on group dynamics, and emotional pressures and satisfactions that come from these dynamics, what they pressure people into accepting, is the sort of response-ability for one’s own problems that many Libertarians would feel uncomfortable with.  Sure, the more sardonic Libertarians would say explicitly that if self-reliantly dealing with your realities means, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” so if you don’t take care of what, objectively speaking, is your problem, then you’re indulging yourself.  Yet, for the most part, all would see how the group dynamics of egalitarian tribes of old, as well as the social instincts that they gave us, includes moral accountability.  When a group makes us feel more secure, this is because, when human nature first evolved, it really did make people more secure, by holding those who caused the problems morally accountable.  Most would see that if anyone isn’t held morally accountable for what he did, he’s likely to have a sense of impunity.

Sure, the dynamics of Twelve-Step groups for addicts do include a good deal of egalitarian moral responsibility.  As Agent Orange shows in his website on how AA gets is support as unquestioningly as do cults, shows, the rate of recovery among AA members, isn’t any different from the rate of recovery among alcoholics who don’t get any treatment, so the group may not even have the benefits it claims.  “After initial discharge, only five patients in the Clinic sample never relapsed to alcoholic drinking, and there is compelling evidence that the results of our treatment were no better than the natural history of the disease.”  Millennia ago, if members of tribes were too prone to impulsivity, others would hold them accountable, in ways that the Catholic hierarchy would call “fraternal correction.”  An AA slogan says, “In AA you could be a part, not apart,” and this membership in the group, at least theoretically, should serve to keep a check on people’s impulsivity.

Yet what the ladies’ auxiliaries hold members accountable for, is their resiliency in dealing with whatever hardship, sinfulness, etc., they must deal with when living with addicts.  When, millennia ago, women who were members of a tribe had gone to a larger group to tell of their husbands causing them egregious problems, only the patriarchal tribes would have told them to respond to this by serenely accepting what they can’t change, courageously changing what they can change as independent individuals, and wisely discerning the difference between what they can and can’t independently change.  If when these tribal members told of the havoc that their husbands were causing, these women were given slogans such as, “We are all victims of victims,” “There are no victims, just volunteers,” “The longer that we think about the bad stuff, the greater is its power to harm us,” “The best remedy for anger is delay,” “The people we hate teach us the most,” “Life is like wrestling a gorilla.  You don’t stop when you get tried, you stop when the gorilla gets tired,” “FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real,” and, “Anger is one letter short of danger,” then the only way that these women would have felt a part rather than apart, would be if the society’s culture was patriarchal, and accepting that boys will be boys was a part of this patriarchy.  If Al-Anon members feel a part rather than apart, as they independently deal with their husbands’ behavior that others should have held morally accountable, then this would only be because our social instincts give us the illusion that talking about such things with a group, gives us security.

Another of Agent Orange’s webpages, this one on propaganda and debating techniques, says,

Bill Wilson gave us lots of good examples of that technique.  In chapter 8 of the Big Book, “To Wives”, the wives of the recovering alcoholics seem to give advice to the wives of other alcoholics:

As wives of Alcoholics Anonymous, we would like you to feel that we understand as perhaps few can. We want to analyze mistakes we have made.
A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 104.

Sometimes there were other women.  How heartbreaking was this discovery; how cruel to be told that they understood our men as we did not!
A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 106.

We wives found that, like everybody else, we were afflicted with pride, self-pity, vanity and all the things which go to make up the self-centered person; and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty.  As our husbands began to apply spiritual principles in their lives, we began to see the desirability of doing so too.
    At first, some of us thought we did not need this help.  We thought, on the whole, we were pretty good women, capable of being nicer if our husbands stopped drinking.  But it was a silly idea that we were too good to need God.  Now we try to put spiritual principles to work in every department of our lives....  We urge you to try our program, for nothing will be so helpful to your husband as the radically changed attitude toward him which God will show you how to have.  Go along with your husband if you possibly can.
A.A. Big Book, 3rd Edition, William G. Wilson, Chapter 8, To Wives, page 116.

Yes, Bill Wilson really would like you to feel that the wives understand as perhaps few can.

The big problem with those quotes is that the To Wives chapter of the Big Book was not written by Lois Wilson or any of the other wives of the alcoholics—Bill Wilson wrote it all.  Lois wanted to write it, but Bill didn’t trust his wife to say the right things, or to get the “style” the way he wanted it, he said, so he wrote the whole chapter himself, while pretending to be his own wife.

What a huge difference that one tiny little fact makes.  That chapter reads entirely differently, it becomes a sick twisted joke, when you know who the real author was.

Not only a sick, twisted joke, but an example of how the moral bankruptcy seen in The Serenity Prayer, which is supposed to be a failsafe way to cope with whatever hardship, sinfulness, etc., is your reality, can be abused by those who cause the problems.  Naturally an addict would want addicts’ wives to believe in victim correction as a panacea!

A piece of Al-Anon Conference-Approved Literature, is a bookmark headed, “Just For Today.”  This then lists some affirmations that members are supposed to follow one day at a time.  The first three are, “Just for today I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once.  I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime,”  “Just for today I will be happy.  This assumes to be true what Abraham Lincoln [who was chronically depressed] said, that ‘Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be,’” and, “Just for today I will adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires.  I will take my ‘luck’ as it comes, and fit myself to it.”

The rest are very similar, including the Prayer of Saint Francis, headed “PRAYER FOR TODAY,” “Lord make me an instrument of Thy 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, and where there is sadness, joy.”  These fears that are to be corrected have absolutely nothing to do with false evidence appearing real, though they might as well have everything to do with it.  Naturally an addict would want addicts’ wives to quietly deal with their own problems like this!  This, when practiced by alkies’ family members, would lead to the distorted version of hope healing and unity, that would result from forgiving the unforgivable.  And these distortion would look exactly like the victim-self-blaming cognitive distortions of modern Western depression, which come from the same cultural norms regarding personal response-ability for one’s own welfare.  And there could be no actuarial tests for inadequacies in forgiving the unforgivable.

The Al-Anon members who do their best to abide by all this, could be simply friends of alcoholics trying to make sense of their friendships, but are more likely to be alkies’ spouses.  They’re the main ones who are to make up their minds to be happy.  They’re the main ones who are to take their “luck” as it comes and fit (adjust) themselves to it (so they’ll be well-adjusted).  They’re the main ones to supplant their own warranted: hatred, awareness of injury, doubt, despair, and sadness, with contrived: love, pardon, faith, hope, and joy.  And they’re the main ones who are to do this for twelve hours, in that it would appall them if they felt that they had to keep it up for their lifetimes.