I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional

[robinturner]

Once in a while I see a book title that plucks my inner lyre with such a resounding thwang that my first thought is "Damn, I wish I'd written that book." Titles like "God Plays Dice" and "A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else", for example. This rarely has anything to do with the content of the book: God Plays Dice deals with probability and prediction, while the second book is a novel about adolescence; both are excellent, but neither are books that I would (or even could) write.

In the case of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, though, it was enough to read a few pages to realise that not only would I have liked to have written a book with that title, I would have written pretty much the same book (though naturally not as well). It deals with the "recovery movement", and the author, Wendy Kaminer, stands in much the same relationship to it as Marat did to the French aristocracy. She was even invited to appear on Oprah as a token non-codependent:

"Try to put aside your experiences in recovery and the way it makes you feel," I suggested to the audience on "Oprah". Think about what the fascination with addiction means to us as a culture. Think about the political implications of advising people to surrender their will and submit to a higher power." People in the audience stared at me blankly.

The point Kaminer failed to get across to the studio audience, and which she makes throughout the book, is that Americans' obsession with recovery from a host of real or imagined abuses, addictions and dependencies through seminars, self-help books and 12-step programs is a cultural poison. Despite its rhetoric of empowerment and horror of dependency, it makes its disciples powerless and dependent:

The first step in recovery is admitting that you are powerless over your addiction and incapable of willing your way to health; the next step is surrendering your will to a higher power. Demanding self-surrender, the recovery movement is essentially religious, not psychotherapeutic, and most closely resembles nineteenth-century revivalism, with a little Christian Science thrown in. Imagine the slogan of recovery - admit that you're powerless and submit - as a political slogan, and what is wrong with this movement becomes clear.

The politics do not stop there, though. It is a tenet of the movement that pretty much everyone is dependant, or codependant, or recovering from dependency, or depending on recovery ... whatever. Everyone is an "adult child" and a victim of something or other, and this leads to a narcissism of misery which obscures the fact that some people suffer a hell of a lot more than others.

There is something niggardly and mean-spirited in the passion with which some recovering codependents point to themselves as victims of abuse, laying claim to the crown of thorns. Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) are like Holocaust survivors, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, John Bradshaw writes offensively. Recovery gives people permission always to put themselves first, partly because it doesn't give them a sense of perspective on their own complaints: parental nagging is not the same as physical abuse and deprivation, much less genocide; vague intimations of unease are not the same as cancer.

Having spent my life in Britain and Turkey, I find some of the vocabulary of the recovery movement rather puzzling, but to my relief, so does Kaminer:

Anne Wilson Schaef, author of the best-selling When Society Becomes an Addict and Co-Dependence: Misunderstood - Mistreated, defines it as "a disease process whose assumptions, beliefs, and lack of spiritual awareness lead to a process of non-living which is progressive." That some readers think they know what this means is a tribute to what George Orwell considered reduced expectations of language.

So if just about everyone (96%, according to one author cited by Kaminer) is going through or recovering from, this "disease process", what's my dependency, I wonder? All bad things are supposed to come from dysfunctional families, but when I look at my own childhood, I can't recall being abused in any way. I was "sexually abused" at the age of four by a girl a whole two years my senior, but I really enjoyed it and if I were to run into her again, I'd be tempted to ask if we could repeat the experience. My father was not violent or an alcoholic, though I suppose in the vocabulary of the movement he could have been described as "distant", in that he never kissed me or told me that he loved me. My Turkish wife found this surprising; I explained that it was because we're British, and the average male Briton would be more likely to need therapy if his father protested his love and gave him a big sloppy kiss.

So what else do I have? I am addicted to cigarettes, but that is, as I have mentioned before, because I am a worm with no willpower (ah, low self-esteem?). If a doctor told me tomorrow that had a 90% chance of developing cancer if I didn't quit immediately, I would be going cold turkey with no need for self-esteem or self-help groups; simple fear would do the trick. I suppose I could call myself a "recovering Buddhist", in that I still sometimes wake up and think that all life is suffering, especially when I've been hitting the booze the night before. And no, I'm not an alcoholic, a recovering alcoholic or an adult child of an adult child of someone who was sexually abused by an alcoholic - I just drink too much.

Aha, I have it! I am addicted to acidity. I am a recovering cynic, ascerbically dependant, a sarcaholic. I thought I was simply being witty and perceptive, but I was in denial. Now I think about it, I can even trace it back to a traumatic childhood event: my primary teacher called me "precocious". My inner child was scarred. Of course at that time, my inner child was pretty much the same person as my outer child, but ... See, I'm doing it again, covering my hurt with a patina of glib observations. I'm probably doing it because I feel that if I'm not eloquent, people won't love me.

I feel so much better now that I've testified. I think I'll go and write a self-help book ...

Comments

[harpersromo.livejournal.com]

This may very well be my favorite post of yours.
I'm eternally grateful that we crossed paths & I put you on my Friends list. You're an incredibly sharp guy, and I wish I had one-tenth of your wit.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Stop it! Stop it! You're feeding my addiction! How can I ever recover if people keep saying things like that? If you really cared about me, you'd hold my hand and tell me it was OK to be boring.

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

I can't believe you typed this post! Are you okay?

Maybe keeping a journal will help you on your road to recovery from low self-esteem.

[solri.livejournal.com]

But it's so hard! When I try to get out of denial and write something that expresses my true feelings, my inner child wants to go out and play on the swings.

[thewasteland.livejournal.com]

haha I adore you.

[and the book sounds fabulous also]

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

If you lived in America, you probably would have at least a couple of people consider you to be an alcoholic. I came in hungover a couple of times to work when I was 21 and my boss gave me literature on the company's substance abuse recovery programs!

[oblomova.livejournal.com]

I read excerpts of Kaminer's book when it first came out and I recall enjoying her.

Also, I've always wanted to organize a self-help seminar on "Aborting the Child Within." Or, for the more erudite crowd, "Finding the Inner Child, Piercing Its Ankles, and Abandoning It On a Mountaintop."

A more serious look at the same topic is Jeffrey Masson's "Against Therapy." Masson is the guy who was head of the Freud Archives until he turned apostate and blew the whistle on the "Seduction Theory," positing that Freud knew very well that there were men in fin de siecle Vienna who were fucking their daughters and it wasn't just a figment of the hysterical female imagination. Masson extrapolates from this that therapy is in itself an unequal and potentially abusive relationship, in that only the therapist is "empowered" to decide what the patient's experiences "mean." And if a patient rejects the therapist's interpretation, they are either "in denial" or "acting out." (Masson was later involved with Catherine MacKinnon, which probably costs him some credibility points, but the book still has some interesting insights about the hierarchical nature of the therapeutic establishment and its potential to cause at least as much harm as good.)

That said -- I had a bad patch a few years ago and a good therapist and some antidepressants helped tremendously. But I was lucky to have a therapist who saw her job as helping me be my own therapist -- to help me recognize why I was feeling like crap, figure out what could be fixed and what just had to be endured -- and then move on.

Cynthia Heimel, the American humorist, has a line in one of her essays about therapy (paraphrase to follow). "At some point, your therapist will finally turn to you and say 'I think you are mistaking your boyfriend for your father.' Unless your therapist is a strict Freudian, in which case he or she will simply wait for you to figure this out for yourself. This is why strict Freudians have such lovely summer homes."

[solri.livejournal.com]

My answer to that would probably have been "Are you just flirting, or is this codependancy?"

[solri.livejournal.com]

One semester we experimented with having first-year students do a kind of thesis defence for their term papers (it was a nice idea, we abandoned it for practical reasons). I was interviewing a girl who had done her term paper on the Elektra complex. The conversation went like this:

"So what do you think is the most important thing you have learnt as a result of writing this paper?
"I've learnt that I don't want to have sex with my father."
"Hmm ... that's good."

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

Embrace your mediocrity, Robin.

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

Hey you know, now that I think of it, I probably could have had him charged with sexual harrassment since his handing me the recovery information was surely a come-on. Granted, he was gay, but that's beside the point!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Gay men should have the same rights to be sued for sexual harrassment as straight men. To say that he can only sexually harrass you if he's sexually attracted to you is heterosexist.

Okay, what then?

[(Anonymous)]

So, where do you go for help when there is something in your life you need to change? And willing to be different doesn't work?

Re: Okay, what then?

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't claiming that all therapists or self-help groups are bad, just a hell of a lot of them. The tricky part, if you need help, is finding one that isn't. If you suspect there is something physically wrong with your brain, then you need to see a good, medically-oriented psychiatrist who will do a load of physical tests before making a diagnosis. If you just need psychotherapy, then some variety of cognitive therapy or usually works pretty well.

If you are lucky to live in the UK, then the fact that someone works for the NHS usually means that they're not completely loopy.

Nice post

[profacero.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I'm late to the post, and late to discover the Kaminer book, had to figure all this out myself, but still have to say hello!

Re: Nice post

[solri.livejournal.com]

Hello!