The Recovery Movement
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We are beginning to witness a mounting
backlash against the recovery movement in general and recovery-oriented
psychotherapy in particular. In response to a heightened awareness that absent,
shaming, neglectful, abusive, or overcontrolling parents have created a nation
of dysfunctional people with suffering self-esteem, detractors are having a
field day.
The publication and promotion of Wendy Kaminer's book, I'm
Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help
Fashions, is the latest and perhaps most visible manifestation of this
backlash. Her work in particular, recently highlighted and excerpted in the San
Francisco Examiner's Sunday Image magazine cover story (June 28, 1992),
"Hooked on Recovery: The Tyranny of the Self-Help Movement", draws on
long-standing, patriarchal methods of social control: sarcasm, cynicism, shame,
misinterpretation, blame. "Basically, reveling in how Mommy ignored you in
order to discover self-esteem makes little sense for most people, says Wendy
Kaminer, a lawyer and Radcliffe College social critic (as reported in the Press
Democrat newspaper). Her book "mounts a scathing critique of the recovery
movement's extension of victim status far beyond its original cohort of substance
abusers," says Mark Muro in his newspaper piece in the Press Democrat.
Says Kaminer in Image: Exaggerating every foible, bad habit and complaint,
taking our behavior out of our control and defining us as adult
children...encourages invalidism. Calling the recovery process self-help
doesn't change the way it tends to disempower people."
In rising to the challenge of confronting the recovery movement
-- a growing social movement that threatens the stability of the established
social order due to the personal transformation of large numbers of people --
the media leads the charge, launching a barrage of cover stories attacking what
Newsweek (February 17, 1992) labeled a "feel-good movement" and what
Time (February 3, 1992) blamed for everything from the fraying of our social
fabric to Japan's increasing economic dominance. Harper's (October 1991) writer
David Rieff complains that so many people are joining the recovery movement
that they are destabilizing "establishment" values, replacing them
with a "politics of victimhood," (as reported in Common Boundary,
May/June 1992). Rieff describes the growing recovery movement as an
"outbreak of self-pity among the affluent classes," and cites this as
evidence that recovering people are childish, out of touch with adult reality,
and unable to accept the misery of life. Rieff's prescription? "What this
nation needs is a little stoicism" he says (as reported in the Press
Democrat, May 18, 1992). "Look, life is hard; you do not escape its
rigors; much of it involves struggle, and pain, and 'abuse,' and I say thank
goodness for that. For most of us, except those who've been literally
brutalized, shutting up and overcoming adversity provides the ultimate dignity
and surest route to sanity," Rieff maintains.
The kickback against recovery and recovery-oriented therapies
also includes prominent names in the therapy world. Jungian analyst James
Hillman adds his point of view that psychotherapy as a whole is actually
causing our social breakdown, not healing it, due to his view that therapy
emphasizes turning people inward, away from the world and its problems. In his
new book, (We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting
Worse, as reported in New Age Journal, May/June 1992), Hillman questions one
cherished therapeutic notion after another: Is childhood trauma really the
primary source of our pain as adults? Could our fascination with healing our
wounded inner child be robbing us of our vitality and power? Is the idea of
personal growth an unhealthy fantasy?
In a similar vein, Washington D.C. professor of psychiatry Steve
Wolin argued in a plenary address at the 1991 American Association for Marriage
and Family Therapy conference in Dallas (as reported in Family Therapy
Networker, May/June 1992) that survivors of all kinds of abuse are better
served by therapists who emphasize the strengths that they have acquired as a
result of adversity. Wolin says, "In the damage model, children are
passive and without choices to help themselves. As a result, their inevitable
fate is to be wounded and to grow up as damaged adults." He proposes a view
of survivors as people who have been hurt and bear scars, but who also have
been "challenged by the family's troubles to experiment and to respond
actively and creatively." Wolin also states that "Powerlessness is
not what someone who's grown up in a troubled family needs to hear about. He
needs to hear about resilience and pride, and taking responsibility for one's
life despite it all." (as reported in the Press Democrat, May 18, 1992).
Strategic family therapist Cloé Madanes echoes Wolin's critique of the adult child
movement, especially the pitfalls of support groups. "A group of incest
survivors won't talk about how good they are at ballet, or writing poetry --
they will talk only about the abuse and become fixated on it, says Madanes (as
reported in Family Therapy Networker, May/June 1992).
Perhaps above all else, says Mark Muro (writing in the Press
Democrat), these and other critics "worry that the vogue of 'recovery'
assumes 'sickness,' and so glorifies frailty of mind rather than resilience.
The critics "contend that talking about what your parents did to you has
become a disease as much as the pain itself. Whatever happened, they ask, to
good old stoicism, and the self-respect won by emphasizing one's plucky
independence, not one's dependence and illness?"
In writing this article, I want to share my very specific bias:
I love the contribution that the recovery movement and recovery-oriented
therapy is making to people, myself included. As a therapist and person in
recovery, I am grateful for the opportunity I've had during the last 20 years
to grow and become more "myself" due to the increasingly widespread
availability of recovery groups, therapies, and publications. I have been
deeply affected by the work of John Bradshaw in particular. In fact, I have had
the good fortune to work with him personally at the workshops he conducts in
the San Francisco area, providing my own support as a therapist to people who
are participants in these weekend and one-day workshops. And, I have seen the
effects on my clients who have had the good fortune to participate in his
inpatient treatment program in the Los Angeles area. The transformation that
occurs for people who are encouraged and taught how to get in touch with their
"inner child" is profound. I very clearly believe that John Bradshaw
and other well-known recovery authors, are "teachers for our times,"
able to synthesize and articulate for a great many of us how we came to be the
way we are, how psychological factors helped shape our lives, and how we can
develop hopeful and helpful ways to recover more of our true and authentic
selves -- not with the idea of becoming reclusive and egocentric spoiled kids,
but with the aim of becoming the loving, purposeful, and creative human beings
we are meant to be.
As I have been witnessing the mounting backlash to what I have
seen as a very positive and growthful healing movement, I have asked myself
what is prompting this massive kickback to the recovery movement? What forces
are at work that we should be aware of, so we can successfully understand and
integrate this phenomenon, and learn from it? A very helpful perspective has
been provided by Charles Simpkinson, writing in Common Boundary (May/June 1992)
in his article "The Media as Shaming Parent." He suggests that part
of the reason why the media reflects a hostile and shaming stance towards
recovery is a lack of education: "Just as previous generations of parents
did not understand the toxic effects of smoking or the importance of nutrition
and physical fitness, so too, in more recent years, many have not understood
that children have emotional needs in addition to their physical needs for food
and shelter. They have not realized the damage caused by high doses of shame
and criticism aimed at disciplining children and preventing them from getting
'swelled heads.' They did not understand that children (and everyone else, for
that matter) need considerable amounts of empathy and validation of their
selves, as well as hugs and other forms of love and affection, in order to be emotionally
healthy." Simpkinson accurately points out that children who are deprived
of such emotional/psychological nourishment are likely to compensate by being
more self-centered than children who are nourished. As many in recovery know,
when we are denied this necessary emotional nourishment from our adult
caregivers, we turn to various forms of addiction, compulsive, or other
negative behaviors in order to compensate for an oppressive sense of
worthlessness.
Simpkinson also accurately observes that what started out as a
relatively quiet and anonymous effort in small recovery groups or within the
privacy of therapy offices has, in the last decade, reached a critical mass and
has mushroomed into a full-scale social movement, drawing increasing publicity and
attention. He points out that the backlash targets both the purpose and method
of recovery. Acknowledging recovery's purpose involves also acknowledging our
need for psychological nourishment -- "a step that seems to many people
who never got such nourishment themselves self-indulgent and threatening to the
status quo." And recognizing that the method of recovery involves getting
in touch with one's emotional pain is also very frightening and threatening to
people who have built up a defensive structure designed to minimize and deny
such pain. Up until recently, we have had widespread prohibitions in our
culture against getting in touch with these levels of emotional pain (held in
place by guilt, shame, loyalty to one's parents, etc.) and our culture has
instead promoted keeping such pain and rage locked inside. As Simpkinson puts
it, "Anyone who encourages us to dig around in such a potentially
explosive area is bound to arouse anxiety, if not outright hostility."
A similar orientation from a therapeutic perspective is useful
as well: As most therapists are aware, when someone or something upsets the
equilibrium of one's individual or family homeostasis or balance, the system
attempts to regain the original homeostasis. Put another way, when the individual
ego is threatened by new growth, by a change in the usual way of coping with
and managing life, the ego, the "adapted self" we all learned to
develop in order to survive, will respond in ways designed to bring things back
to "normal," even though "normal" may be quite negative.
Many of us have had the experience in therapy of having a client make a
remarkable breakthrough and then have a "kickback" reaction shortly
after in an attempt to moderate the breakthrough. This is a natural and to-be-expected
occurrence in therapy and recovery.
In the same way, our collective ego, the organizing force of
society, reacts similarly to perceived threats to its usual and familiar way of
perception and operation. Our collective ego will utilize whatever defenses are
at its command, including ridicule and shame, in order to prevent the
occurrence and spread of what is perceived to be frightening and threatening.
That's the ego's job, both on an individual and collective level -- to create
strategies to insure our survival as children and as a collective society, and
to defend against anything that might threaten those strategies.
It's my sense that the growing opposition to the recovery
movement, as well as to the articulate and forceful presentation of its ideas
and methods presented by John Bradshaw and others, is rooted in our collective
ego's fright at seeing its established social order threatened. As described
above, examples of such opposition are becoming more prevalent and are getting
more press and exposure.
I believe it's important that we pay special attention to our
reactions to the content of this backlash, because the voice of the threatened
collective ego will echo a voice within us, that same voice that, out of fear,
shames and ridicules us for our participation in recovery and growth. It can be
helpful to remind ourselves of why we are doing this work: The purpose of
identifying and establishing a relationship with one's wounded inner child, the
part of each of us that suffered neglect, abuse, and/or enmeshment, is not so
that we can regress and sit around, as many critics suggest, holding onto teddy
bears and giving up any adult responsibilities. The purpose of doing inner
child work, the purpose of bringing up old emotional pain and to allow oneself
to acknowledge and feel it, is to complete the process of the development of a
full and healthy ego. John Bradshaw, in responding to David Rieff's piece in
Harper's, explains that recovery is a process that, in part, involves
"original pain work" -- a way of finding out what happened to us as
children. "This may involve anger at our parents, which must be worked
through, but the ultimate goal is understanding, forgiveness, and
reconciliation, and not exoneration from the consequences of our acts or the
bashing of our parents." Bradshaw points out that Rieff and the media in
general focus only on this phase of recovery work and this leads to the
erroneous conclusion that people in recovery wish to exonerate themselves at
the expense of their parents. But Bradshaw points out that original pain work
is only one phase of growth: Other equally important phases involve behavior
change (ie: stopping the compulsive behavior), uncovery work (embracing
childhood memories, getting reconnected with the emotions and expressing them
in a safe place), cognitive work (choosing values, setting boundaries, etc.),
and, finally, spiritual work through meditation and service (learning to value
one's own inner life and tapping into the still quiet place inside).
These phases of recovery work result in more of a completion of
the process of the development of a full and healthy ego. The development of a
full and healthy ego is a crucial part of living healthfully in the world and
is a necessary aspect of one's spiritual life: As John Bradshaw writes in
Homecoming: "Your ego must be integrated and functional if you are to
survive and cope with the exigencies of everyday temporal life. A strong
integrated ego gives you a sense of confidence and control. Reclaiming and
championing your wounded inner child allows you to heal and integrate your ego.
Once integrated, your ego then becomes the source of strength that allows you
to explore your wonder child: your essential self. Paradoxical as it may seem,
your ego needs to be strong enough to let go of its limited defensiveness and
control (italics mine). You need a strong ego to transcend ego...The
relationship between your wonder child (soul) and your wounded child (ego) must
be healed before you can connect with your essential self. Once you've done
your ego work (your original pain work or legitimate suffering), you're ready
for full self-actualization." (page 257).
This is a major method of recovery work, in my view: to work
through the pain of the past -- by feeling it and letting it be there -- so
that, in time, a more healthy person can emerge. For me, the goal of recovery
work is to free ourselves from the hurt feelings and limitations that seem to
have been imposed on us and that we might be imposing on others. The goal of
recovery work is to free up the energy locked in those hurt feelings and
conflicts so that we can understand life more fully and thus live more
lovingly. The work involved in going through this process is often, if not
always, hard, painful, and often debilitating. It is necessary work.
The healing comes through the feeling -- there isn't a shortcut.
When we feel and learn to accept all the parts of ourselves, especially those
parts of us that we have split off and cut off, Nature itself creates the
healing integration. We know that Nature is doing its work by the results we
experience: a stronger sense of our selfhood, an increased desire and capacity
to live according to self-initiated values, an expanded ability to love and to
serve -- not with the hope or expectation of reward but because such an urge
arises spontaneously. Rest assured: as we continue on this path, these
attributes emerge naturally.
As the recovery movement develops and matures, as increasing
numbers of people world-wide tap into the ways of healing and growth provided
to us through recovery groups and recovery-oriented therapy, we must expect to
encounter the spasms and reflexes of the powerful system of denial constructed
by us, on an individual as well as a societal level. As with all aspects of
ourselves that we might find distasteful or repugnant, it serves us to face
this force with love and compassion -- setting the boundaries that are
necessary, but being mindful of not falling into using the same tools used to
trap us in the past: shame, blame, and condemnation.
Jason Saffer is a therapist
and Co-Director of the Center for Creative Growth. Founded in 1982 in Berkeley,
the Center provides therapy services using the Inner Child and shame-reduction
perspective and methods popularized by John Bradshaw. The Center was John
Bradshaw's Bay Area counseling affiliate from 1991-94. For more information
about Jason, his background, experience, and orientation, please click here.
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