Urrrg!!
I stuck around after my Dynamics of Addiction class today, hoping to get some insight into an intake I sat in on yesterday. We never got that far. In the course of conversation with other students who had stayed after, the instructor brought up Senator Craig and wondered about the what addictions this man might be dealing with.
It gave me pause for thought, because I've never really considered the addictive aspect of such behavior: the high he must be getting from the thrill of illicit behavior, the unbridled narcissism of handing a stranger your business card in such an inappropriate context, and the effects of keeping such an enormous secret. Can you imagine the mountain of shame it must take to have a U.S. Senator readily sign a guilty plea? He is 62 years old and his life has just gone straight into the toilet...er...no pun intended. Do you think he's going to head home saying, "Well, it was a good run while it lasted." Not likely.
After thinking about this aspect of recent events, I was telling myself I should feel more compassion for this man. I couldn't. There is a part of me that acknowledges that there is compassion worthy material here. The rest of me is so pissed off at the negative impact this man has on my life, it's just not going to happen. This guy has just confirmed every negative stereotype about homosexuals the moralistic wingnuts hold near and dear to their hearts: they lurk in bathrooms; they are only interested in sexual thrills; they are reckless and morally irresponsible. That doesn't even begin to touch that he is a man of influence and power and he has used that influence and power to make sure that sexual minorities remain second class citizens in this country.
So now my blood is boiling, but given the context of the discussion I have to ask myself, what would I do—what should do—if someone like him ends up in my office? Do I recuse myself because the odds of my developing a compassionate stance toward this individual are not very good? Do I suck it up, keep my mouth shut, do my best to help him (and then go take it out on my supervisor) and hope that compassion wanders in at some point in the process? Do I start out by saying, "I think you should know that I believe you to be a complete bastard, but I will do my best to assist you anyway. Where should we begin?" I'm pretty sure the third option is out, but I really don't know about the first two.
Getting my dander up.
Classes started this week. My first class was on the dynamics of addiction. The first half is taught from a therapeutic point of view by the director of Odyssey House, one of the largest substance abuse treatment facilities in the state. The second half is taught from a medical point of view by a pharmacist. So far it sounds like it's going to be a good class.
The instructor warned us that he believed it was part of his role to challenge us and make us think. He said we were not obligated to agree we him. He just asked that we consider his words. He got right down to business by asking for our theories that explain why Utah is the number one abuser of prescription drugs in the U.S. The ensuing conversation wasn't nearly as interesting to me as my own reactions to the conversation.
Perhaps it is more accurately said it was my reactions to the state of mind I perceived one of the ladies up front to be in that have occasioned much reflection. She seemed very tense. I sit and imagine what is going through her mind and end up all worked up about how defensive members of the church can get. I can understand how they would feel under siege, but sometimes the denial astounds me. It's not the teachings of the church or the culture that has built up around that belief system that contributes to Utah's status as the #1 consumer of anti-depressants and the #1 abuser of prescription drugs. It is merely weakness of the individuals in question. The message cannot be flawed. Some members of the church will try and claim that the teachings of the church have been misrepresented. Folks, I grew up in the church. I was 33 years old before I left the church. I am well aware of what is taught. Whether or not an individual personally subscribes to all that is said in Sunday School is another matter entirely.
Still, it bothers me that it gets to me like it does. On the one hand I can sympathize with their plight. I understand what it's like to have folk generalize and criticize a group to which one belongs. On the other hand I have endured such generalizations at the hands of members of the church often enough that I have a hard time working up a lot of sympathy.
Don't get me wrong. I have as many positive stories about members of the the church as I do negative ones. There are three very LDS ladies in my program that I absolutely adore. It doesn't really bother me too much when folk talk about their personal relationship with the church and its teachings; not even when that relationship dictates they behave in a way that I find reprehensible. On the other hand, when folk try and defend an institution by which I feel so personally slighted it really gets under my skin. I wish it didn't, but I still haven't figured out what to do with all the frustration I feel that ends up aimed at the Mormon church one way or another.
And so it goes.
When H and I first split up, my neighbors across the street went out of their way to be nice to me. We both had girls about the same age and they spent a lot of time playing together. As they got older, they played in the same sports leagues went to the same schools and so on. I ran into my former neighbors on a fairly regular basis. They always made a point of coming up to me and saying hello, making small talk, etc.
At some point that changed. I noted the change and thought it strange, but didn't think much of it. I figured they were busy with their own lives and just didn't have time for someone on the periphery or something along those lines. However, sometime after the change I was talking with my girls and telling them they should be judicious when choosing with whom to share the information that their father is gay. My oldest informed me that she had already told a couple of her friends, among them the daughter of my former neighbors. Suddenly things started making sense.
It happened again tonight. I was down in AF for a band concert. Afterward I was standing with H and the kids when who should walk up, but the wife. Of course she was very friendly with H, cooing over H's new baby, yatta yatta yatta. I was completely ignored. Not only did she not speak to me, she did not even look at me or in any other way even acknowledge my presence.
Everyone has their limits. Still. I wanted to believe they were better people than that.
Serendipity?
Notwithstanding that some qualities are unique to a pyschoanalytically oriented approach, much of its healing potential is shared by therapists of all sorts. Although my attitude about this derives from personal experience, it is compatible with some very stringently conducted research. Analyzing the work of of Luborsky et al.(2000), Messer and Wampold (2002) observe that the current emphasis on "empirically supported treatments" is based on a discredited medical model an has contributed to an empirically unwarranted devaluation of the experiential, psychodynamic, and family therapies. They further conclude that specific, symptom-targeted strategies are effective "only insofar as they are a component of a larger healing context," and that (as we have known for a long time) more variance in outcome arises from differences among therapists than from differences among treatment approaches.
...It makes little sense to teach students how to deal effective with the easiest clients, leaving them to learn by the school of hard knocks how to work with more challenging ones—all the while suffering from vaguely defined guilt that they are breaking textbook rules.
...there are some things students need to know that are even more basic and fundamental to psychoanalytic practice than how to interpret transferences and resistances or how to understand the working-through process or when to consider ending treatment. They need to know how to maintain their own self-esteem, how to behave in a way that is both professional and natural, and how to protect their own boundaries from the incursions that their more desperate clients insist on attempting. ...I also know that beginners need specifics and are not helped by vague statements to the effect of "It all depends."
...applicants to most social work programs know better than to tell their prospective teachers that they want to be therapists instead of administrators or social activists. Large segments of the public believe that therapy is about blaming one's parents, avoiding personal responsibility, and rationalizing selfishness. Therapists are neither well organized nor temperamentally disposed to battling their disparagers. So I am trying to give moral and conceptual support to trainees who, despite all these circumstances, know that psychotherapy is the project to which they want to commit the rest of their working lives.
...Perhaps it is more accurate to to say that my vision of science encompasses clinical lore as a legitimate source of knowledge in addition to what can be learned from controlled studies. I deeply believe we need to be just as respectful toward more poetic, metaphorically expressed, experience-based clinical theory as we are toward more highly controlled research.
...Because of the American affinity for the new and revolutionary, psychoanalysis in its youth was too often uncritically embraced here; now in its maturity it is too often uncritically dismissed.
...Despite my strong feeling that we need to do lots more research on psychotherapy and to pay attention to what researches have already established, I have learned much more from passionate practitioners than from dispassionate researchers.
(my emphasis)
Oh...I like her.