NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/ba/politics/8333

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-27 | 9.0 KB

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From: [e-mail] (richard childers)
Subject: Codependency, False Memories and Cultism
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: The Free State of Dis
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 17:09:53 GMT
Lines: 179


( This is a resend ... the previous post seems to have vanished. )


I was just listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's evening
news, via KALW ( 91.7 FM, San Francisco ), and they had a _very_ inter-
-esting discussion about codependency.

They interviewed a woman named Mary Harvey, a clinical/community psych-
-ologist in Boston, Massachusetts. She's written a book on the cult of
codependency.

In particular, CBC discussed 'false memory syndrome', a situation where
patients create memories of events that never happen. This is a branch
of a larger debate regarding the nature of memory, with respect to Anita
Hill's ten-year-old memories of having been harrassed by Clarence Thomas.
Theoreticians have established that what most people remember is not so
much what actually happened, as much as an edited ( by replay and the
consequent reinforcement of certain areas of concern ) version thereof.
This brings into question Anita Hill's testimony, but does not eliminate
the possibility or even probability that she was telling the truth at all,
as these tendencies towards subsequent editing vary from person to person.

While it has been established previously that people _do_ repress memories
of traumas experienced in childhood, including sexual abuse, it is now
becoming equally established that people are potentially capable of, under
the influence of their psychologist's expectations, _manufacture_ memories
of events which, it turns out, could never have happened.

In reviewing this tendency towards relying too heavily on 'repressed'
memories amongst practitioners of psychology, one group leaps to mind
all too quickly - practicioners of codependency therapy.

                -=*=-

Here is where I begin to make myself unpopular with many women - because
I have reason to agree, and have held this opinion privately for over a
year now. I am not questioning the validity of the statement that 'some
relationships are based upon a mutual need and nothing else and can be
therefore regarded as mutually parasitic and dysfunctional, and should be
discarded' ... and, clearly, if one of the partners is drinking the gro-
-cery money at the corner bar or shooting it up in the Tenderloin, there
is a problem. But codependency has turned into a veritable Women's Chris-
-tian Temperance Union, practicing zero tolerance with a vengeance. ( It
is, however, an independently observable fact that the same counselor
who advises you to shed your SO of ten years because they use, say, pot,
will subsequently go sit on the front stoop of the Haight-Ashbury Free
Medical Clinic and light a cigarette. Talk about a double standard !! )-:

Here's what Mary Harvey has to say :

    - codependency possesses many characteristics of a cult, such
        as have been common throughout the Seventies / Eighties.

        - most cults are either religious or psychological -
            EST comes to mind as a predecessor.

        - most cults blame problems on parents and try to separate
            people from their parents - codependency is, in
            some ways, guilty of this, except that it uses the
            partner as scapegoat instead of the parent(s).

        - clearly, this can backfire, as it is not always applicable,
            and it is in this area that codependency has received
            attention and less-than-rave reviews. it can, as a
            matter of fact, damage things - like love and trust -
            that will not so easily be repaired, perhaps never.

    - she also notes that many of the symptoms of not only womanhood,
        but existence, separate of gender and orientation, such as

        - low motivation
        - low self-esteem
        - tendency towards depression
        - tendency towards lethargy
        - tendency towards indifference

    ... are neither unique to women, nor specifically indicative of
    either harrassment, per se, or repressed memories of abuse - they
    are part of living in the late Twentieth Century, and affect us
    all equally.

    - she also notes that therapists' practices naturally reflected their
        own personal psychology and politics, but that anger at real
        abuses and harrassment women suffered could and did warp the
        judgement of women therapists to reflect a bias against men.
        ( with disastrous results, if the experience of myself and
        a few friends I can think of offhand is any indicator. )

    - she also noted that a focus on the past instead of the future led
        to a lack of constructive solutions, instead a cycle of
        blaming and helplessnes, specifically encouraging the role
        of victim.

    - she summarized by noting that codependency made femininity seem
        downright unnatural.

                -=*=-

Interestingly enough, while this was playing, someone at KALW decided to
overlay CBC's _As It Happens_ with the _Lesbian_Gay_News_, which was very
stupid. It left me with the impression that someone at the station decided
to 'jam' this politically-uncorrect verbage, and I called up and - after a
few retries to get through a very busy number - registered my displeasure.

So much for unbiased reporting. KALW just went down five notches in my view.

                -=*=-

I'm not just speaking as an unbiased observer. I have first-hand experience,
as well as second- and third-hand experience, of codependency and codepend-
-ents. I had a girlfriend of ten years' standing who turned on me and blamed
me for what now appears to have been a consequence of her own family's many
forms of abuse practiced on her as a child by both mom and dad.

Of course, now I have to wonder if this was 'false memory syndrome' ... though
some of it, I learned a decade ago, before she became clinically psychotic,
and so have reason to suspect it is the truth.

Was Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic interested in hearing what I had to
say ? Hell, no. I was destined to be a scapegoat for their Process, and so
it is today, to the agony of all concerned, with the exception of staffers
at HAFMC, I suppose.

And I know of others whom have suffered equally insensitive treatment at the
hands of HAFMC and other facilities sponsoring codependency counselling and
circles. Ask yourself this question - what sort of quality of advice do you
expect to get out of a group of angry women ? Especially if one or two of
them have been diagnosed as borderline psychotic or manic-depressive - and
you don't know which one or two these are, or even that they are so diagnosed ?

Yet here we have victims of codependency, happily gathering together, trading
traumas, trading advice based upon the warped perceptions these traumas have
imposed upon the delicate spirits within ( and I mean that most seriously,
for both genders ), advice which is almost certainly going to cause more
problems than it resolves for the majority of the participants, whom are not
so much true codependents, as much as true victims of the 20th century ...
then scattering, to build their walls of separation and destroy the bridges
of trust so carefully built over the years of intimacy, certain that they are
doing the right thing because it is all happening under the sanction of a
psychological clinic ...

It seems only a matter of time before this is recognized as what it is - pop
psychology at its worst, practiced by the unlicensed and the incompetent -
and HAFMC and similar places are slapped with class action lawsuits by some
team of lawyers representing a coterie of pissed-off partners.

                -=*=-

So, like I said, I do not doubt that codependency - like Freudian, Jungian,
Adlerian, Skinnerian, Rolfian, and other therapies too many to enumerate -
has its areas where it is most applicable and relevant. But, as a consequence
of having been seized on by certain elements of what I will call the Womyn's
Movemynt - and I speak as the second of three children raised by a single
mom, fully aware of what 51% is all about and a one-man anarchofeminist of
no small consequence - and used to further strictly short-term and less-than-
Hyppocratic goals related to promoting an ideal of womanhood that results in
breakups, hatred and pain instead of health and happiness, codependency has
moved from the realm of practice ... to the realm of malpractice.

I am happy to see that others - women with degrees in psychology, decades
of practical experience, and the maturity to resist trendy practices, on
the opposite coast of North America - agree with me.

If anyone else has suffered at the hands of Haight-Ashbury Free Medical
Clinic, or any other San Francisco organization, I would be interested in
discussing it. Whatever your orientation and gender. It is time we stood
together and made ourselves heard.

< sound of anarchofeminist donning fire-retardant long-johns here >


-- richard

--
    "It is obligatory, within the limits of capability, to commend the
     good and forbid evil."     _Kitab_Adab_al-Muridin_, by Suhrawardi

        richard childers        [e-mail]