Posted by Dinah on August 5, 2004, at 11:13:03
In reply to Re: Munro: Vulnerability, posted by Kali Munro on August 4, 2004, at 21:34:03
Thank you for your reply. :)
I'm afraid that Shadows may have put things more clearly than I did. I was using Dr. Bob's words more than my own. He believes that what happens is academic debate, or I believe what he said was that such statements were clinical in nature and therefore not uncivil.
What happens is things like:
Someone posts a positive experience about analysis or EMDR and a poster says on that thread or a thread nearby that EMDR or analysis is nothing but a way to line a therapists pockets and produces a link to Skepdic.com to prove it. That anyone who thinks they were helped by EMDR or analysis was only helped by the passage of time or the placebo effect.
Someone posts that they are thinking of giving a card to their therapist on their anniversary to express their gratitude, or is planning to tell their therapist about their loving (or sexual) feelings for their therapist. Obviously this is a sensitive topic for many, and most of us try to treat it reassuringly, with references to "In Session" and assurances that it is common enough and a well trained professional won't be unfamiliar with the phenomenon. But someone might come along and say how inappropriate that is, that it's a business relationship, that people ought to get a real life, etc. If they go farther and call the poster a stalker, they'd probably get an admin action from Dr. Bob. But if they say that a therapist might consider such actions stalking, Dr. Bob might well let it go.
Now this one involves me, while the others don't. Several people on the board have been open and vulnerable enough to disclose that they have anything from well defined ego states to DID. I made the mistake of letting a poster know that this was a sensitive topic to me, although I do not have DID, when the poster asked what MPD stood for. The poster didn't even know what MPD stood for, but said poster went to the trouble of looking up what MPD was and posting a thread about how it was a fictitious disorder induced by therapists, that patients were either misled or mistaken (to put it politely) and that it couldn't possibly exist and here are the links to Skepdic.com (and a few others) to prove it. Admittedly, the post was on a new thread, but I'm not sure it would make a difference to Dr. Bob if it wasn't. This poster also made some references to posters posting under several names because that's what people who mistakenly believe they have DID do. To my knowledge, no one on the board who has been diagnosed with DID posts under different ID's, and the suggestion seemed part of an overall attitude towards DID that Dr. Bob considered civil, but that probably was responded to with feelings of hurt or distress by people on the board who had been open and vulnerable enough to disclose something that they might not have told more than a handful of people in their lives.
Dr. Bob considers these clinical discussions. I don't really, especially if the poster has no particular desire to debate, which many really don't, because they're unwilling to concede that any other possibility exists. Some even state that openly.
(Incidentally, the accreditation question involved one poster stating that another poster was a therapist in training, and Poster X saying that he knew that there were institutions that handed out degrees for money, but that were usually caught and lost their accreditation. I'm paraphrasing a bit here. Dr. Bob apparently thought this was civil.)
So again, my conclusion is that one shouldn't be open or vulnerable on this board unless one has a thick enough skin to receive these type of replies, given that Dr. Bob considers them civil. And unless Dr. Bob is willing to enforce a rule that if you ask that people not post certain types of replies on the thread you disclosed on, you don't really even have limited protection on those threads. And my guess is that Dr. Bob would be unwilling to enforce those requests. And even if he did, the poster could just post one thread down. So I see no solution.
I'm sorry this is so long, but it saddens me that people need to be so cautious about self disclosure on a board that is effective only when people self disclose. I consider that one of the most valuable functions of Psychological Babble is to let people know just how normal it is to have these various feelings and experiences. But again, I think it's a function of Psychological Babble achieving a certain size and availability on Google. It means more posters, which is good, but the atmosphere necessarily has to change.
poster:Dinah
thread:373945
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20040717/msgs/374349.html