Posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 4:04:12
In reply to Inequality in therapeutic relationship - Trouble, posted by Dinah on February 19, 2002, at 9:49:21
Dinah,
I thought we were talking about power, now you post a thread about inequality.
Meaningful discussions can sometimes start bumpy but once we all define our terms, it becomes easier, and radically reduces misunderstandings.Yeah, the relationship is totally unequal, as you so eloquently describe, you can give 100%, the clinician gives whatever s/he feels is therapeutic. It's a unique, almost bizarre set-up, a human relationship unlike any other. So we want to be informed, we want to be free agents, we feel vulnerable. But I don't equate feeling vulnerable w/ disempowerment, or being stripped of ones agency or any of that political jazz.
I don't hold w/ the conventional wisdom about the power differential. I'm not talking about the complexities of involuntary commitment, or sexual exploitation or any of the terrible things men have historically visited upon the truly vulnerable. I consider these extreme cases, and the draconian laws that enforce them have been vigorously challenged for 30 years, both inside and outside the profession. These activists have been ostracized, lobotomized, imprisoned and quite possibly murdered, so I can understand a little hysteria surrounding the issue. A little hysteria. By people who are affected by it, NOT by white, priveleged, upper-middle class feminist idealogues w/ an axe to grind. I hate these people, and their insidious social influence over the laws, customs, education and art that I OWN, that are meaningful to me.I am sickeningly well-schooled in Womens Studies, going back 20 years, b/c there was a time I thought it could prove illuminating in my understanding of the human condition. I've kept about 15% of my education, the other 85% I consider sheer perfidy. Perfidy! So I hit that abuse website and immediately recognized the rhetoric. The sex obsession. It's so pervasive, in that bodice-ripping repressed suburbanite sort of way-
This man is a brute, and you are vulnerable, this man is powerful, and you are quivering, you're in danger!!! (But you need him, oh cruel fate you so desperately need him.) If the only pdoc in town is a lech then sure, you're screwed, and then we gather resources and get his license revoked. This is not the norm. It's hugely damaging, but to imply that it's immanent creates a climate that starts the therapeutic relationship off on a bad footing, w/ a presumption of guilt.The words on that website! Therapists as corrupt. Therapists don't THINK about the client's personhood, don't ruminate, don't lay awake nights worrying about clients... this reminds me of so many things, including my stupid, ignorant colleagues who insist that Alzheimer's patients have no inner awareness that they're losing their minds. The real truth is that these individuals have never earned the trust of a single Alz. patient, and are thus clueless about their inner experience. They started w/an unarticulated fixed belief about dementia, and nothing in their experience challenged it, ergo it must be true. This is lazy. (Tangent, sorry.) My point though, is that if I was a therapist I wouldn't be giving my self-styled enemies the time of day, much less access to my professional torments.
Every idea on that webside is a feminist hatching, the rhetoric did not exist 50 years ago. And IMO neither did the "feelings" it engenders, which is why I can be fairly pitiless regarding them.
If the word feminism would have appeared once I'd be alot less intense about this, but they've come a long way, baby from the early second-wave feminist writings when you'd see the word therapist divided as such: the rapist.Personal vignette:
Seventeen years ago, just starting therapy, I'd been giving the silent treatment the first few sessions, and when I finally decide to break the ice I begin by saying:
There's nothing stopping me from picking up that lamp over there and smashing you over the head with it.
And the rapist goes:
Yes. And I could do the same to you, but I'm not going to.
You know those words turned my life around (and she was a STUDENT!)
Anyway, just felt like throwing that in I guess!
At the risk of sounding like a 1950s red-baiting McCarthyite I'll admit I do believe in conspiracies and I also believe that nice well-meaning collaborators often unknowingly support them. Maybe the individuals who put up the abuse website are genuinely good-hearted reform-minded idealists. Maybe they don't have anything to compare these ideas to, and they sure sound compelling and important, sounds like there's a real problem to warn the public about. So they tack up these excerpts from popular texts, not knowing anything about the dogmatism that gave rise to them. If "the rapist" showed up, in a book by abuse expert Susan Forward it might give these do-gooders pause. The rapist is long gone. Why? I'm serious. What happened to the rapist?
The rhetoricians have softened the stridency into a language of high moralism. I believe we are all moralists to some extent, and it's kind of a disease. Absolute Moralists are easy to spot-they speak as if their morality is so virtually assimilated that there's no need for any philosophical accountability, any more than we have to cite Copernicus when we marvel at the beauty of a setting sun. Only a Neanderthal would question the march of progress. Any backtalk means you're obviously in favor of abuse.
This is how bullshit creeps into our culture. I'm the monkey wrench. I throw my lot in with maladjusted historians, critics, writers and adolescents, give me somethinig to analyze, down to the ground, and I'll be happy. This is not to minimize or reshape anyone's terrible experiences. I'm just not looking at that. I'm looking at another piece of the puzzle. It's not as soft and womanly as I wish I was, things just didn't turn out that way, character-wise. But if we all had your sympathetic manner, you wouldn't be so special.
Ok, time to wrap.
I've never been scared of a therapist, but I am now and always have been afraid of psychiatrists. This seems reasonable to me. Every now and then I go in there and make my pdoc prove to my satisfaction that he's not plotting to commit me, I try to trick him into revealing secret plans and the whole nine yards, and we do that dance 'til I leave reassured that it's not going to happen. I hope I am always on guard concerning people who have coercive potential over me, and I recommend that attitude to anyone who has a major mental illness.BUT, when you find a pdoc you can trust, and you hammer out a long term relationship w/him, that paranoia had better lessen, if it doesn't then IMO there's a big problem w/the patient's head, a rigid belief that prevents her from perceiving accurately, and no doubt this is global functioning w/ everyone, not just her provider.
I have no idea if you're still w/me, and if I find that you bailed out I won't throw myself on the railroad tracks, I gotta big head swarming with railroad tracks.
love, trouble
poster:trouble
thread:18481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020214/msgs/18553.html