Our Vulnerability in Relation to Pseudoprofessionals and Cults

1) We are already under stress when we are looking for help. Often we will not have the know-how or energy to apply critical thinking. One person on this thread reports suffering ill health from a serious illness at the time she met her pseudoprofessional. When I crossed paths with my guy, I was in the grip of a study block and was scared shitless that I would flunk out of school and return home to my family in disgrace.

Our well being can intially improve when we meet and begin working with a pseudoprofessional who doesnt monitor boundaries, especially if that person is charismatic. This temporary but dramatic sense of relief has been termed \'transferance cure.\' It often kicks in after just a few weeks. Our gratitude to the therapist is tremendous. The disorientation we eventually experience from the boundary violations is much more subtle and takes a longer time to manifest--like radiation poisoning. And the pseudoprofessional will have had plenty of time to confuse us, and use our initial early gratitude against us.

Inspiration is not the same as genuine empowerment, just the way getting a high from cocaine not the same as genuine empowerment.

2) As lay-persons we often do not know the rules that therapists are supposed to play by. Even if we do know the rules, we are often under stress and forget.

So, even when we get gut feelings that something is wrong, we lack the intellectual knowledge needed to bring that gut insight to full, conscious awareness. In this article a former member of a psychotherapy group (now disguised as an art group called the Corda Foundation)

\'What each of them says to me now -- Max, Diane, Mary and the others that I interviewed -- is that by this time they had lost, or at least submerged, their ability to sort out what was acceptable and what wasn\'t. \"One of the things you have to remember is that this is not just a random group of people,\'\' Diane points out. \"Almost everyone got into it because they sought out counseling, and most of the people sought counseling because their families were dysfunctional. These were not people whose lives had been great and then suddenly they lost their job. The self-esteem has been eroded, belief systems were always a little bit shaky, norms are a little bit shaky. For me, I always had feelings of needing a family, wanting a family. So you find your way into counseling and what seems like a family, a wonderful family.\"

\"All of which makes people in therapeutic communities like this one particularly vulnerable to what the cult literature calls \"thought reform\" -- the subtle and gradual remaking of a group\'s understanding of the world.

\'John Winer, a lawyer who specializes in psychological malpractice, puts it this way:

\"If the patient is being encouraged to act like a child, they really are like a child -- a child with an abusive parent. Most of the patients that have been abused by therapists had been abused as children. They\'ve lost the ability to recognize abusive situations. They\'re sitting ducks.\"

http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general82.html

3) By the time we sense something is wrong, we\'ve usually become very dependant on the therapist--usually because that therapist has undermined what capacity for autonomy we started out with. We dont want to pay the price in pain needed to recognize that a) a trusted person like a therapist could be unworthy of our trust and b) the loneliness of having to leave a close relationship--one that may well have superseded other relationships we once had and then dropped.

4) Errant therapists may recruit persons who are particularly vulnerable--the way child molesters target children who are socially marginalized, from unhappy homes. I am convinced that many of these therapists are children disguised as adults. They lack the confidence to socialize and be intimate with persons who are fully adult (that means psychologically as well as in calendar years), so they try to get intimacy needs met from persons who are their clients, not their peers.

5) Very often we are referred to a pseudoprofessional therapist by someone we love and trust--a friend, a spouse, or a legitimate therapist who may be unaware that the person is going off the rails.

To have doubts about the pseudoprofessional means the risk of coming into conflict with the person who referred us. And, if the friend or loved one, or therapist who referred us happens, whether knowingly or unknowlingly to be a member of the cult centered on the pseudoprofessional, we may risk being rejected or shunned if we dare to question the pseudoprofessional and leave. If by this time, our whole social life revolves around the pseudoprofessional, we are in for a hell of a lot of trauma.

We may also have seen other people systematically shunned and ejected from the group (which totally violates professional ethics regarding termination--but this is pseudoprofessionalism in action)--so if we have witnessed this, we will be especially afraid to speak up.

We are learning as a society to feel concerned about child molesters who go after little kids. Molesters are stuck in childhood, yet in calendar years are adults.

But we have not yet as a culture come to understand that there is another kind of molester--a person who is adult in calendar years, but psychologically a child, and who targets other persons who are \'children disguised as adults.\' A lot of these errant therapists may fall into this catagory.

You can have an IQ that tests off the scale, be socially sophisticated, and be able to get all A\'s in medical school, graduate school, etc, yet emotionally still be stuck in childhood. That means you\'ll not be able to apply what you\'ve been taught in boundary ethics classes to your work as a therapist. The child in you may even resent the discipline of ethics and try to evade it. And all this can be quite unconscious.

If you want a sense of how these people develop charisma and compensate for their childish fixations, Len Oakes has written a brilliant study entitled Prophetic Charisma. He interviewed 20 charismatic leaders of various groups and found they were all narcisssistic, were incapable of intimacy in the full adult sense, and compensated for this lack by becoming avid students of social manipulation, and felt driven to become gurus and prophets.

Oakes was once enthralled by such a person but recovered. He is warmly sympathetic to how desperate these people are, but makes it clear that they compensate by becoming very manipulative and are unable to enjoy life in the moment. They\'re always in the rat race, following an agenda, even when apparently serene.