Sheila Koren, MFT
Psychotherapy, Supervision, Consultation
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The Psycho-Selling of Donald J. Trump

10/9/2020

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Few would argue with the fact that Donald Trump is not an intelligent man-- but he is a shrewd one.   He’s not well read or well spoken, but he is cunning and strategic.   While he may not have made the fortunes he claims, and certainly has not led an ethical life, he has managed to stay out of prison and still occupies the White House. While it increasingly looks like he may not have the actual cash to back up his luxurious lifestyle, he nevertheless lives the high life that few of his supporters will ever even get a glimpse of, let alone share.  As Howard Stern, Trump’s former friend (before Stern went to therapy and changed his tune) kept emphasizing on his recent book tour: “The oddity in all this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most.” He looks down on those they call his base, Stern says, would never want them at Mar-a-Lago.

     Forty-five years ago, I reviewed some books about advertising for a magazine I worked for called State and Mind. The magazine looked at the interaction of politics and psychology  The title of one book I reviewed was Snap, Crackle and Pop: The Illusion of Free Choice in America by Jeffrey Schrank.  The reason our magazine would review such a book was because advertising strategies can be powerful molders of consciousness and behavior. Despite the decades that have passed since I read and reviewed the book, one fascinating part of its content has remained fixed in memory.  And that is the idea that so many of the advertisements that most of us find silly, childish and demeaning, are created so on purpose, so as to make viewers feel superior to the ads they are watching.  Looking down on the ad, the psychology of such advertising goes, even or especially feeling disdain for it, makes us feel good about ourselves, smarter and more discerning than something we know cost fortunes to produce-- and that translates into a positive association with the product being advertised. So that then, when we’re shopping, and see the product on the grocery shelves, for example, that good feeling is elicited and we’re likely to buy the product, even
if—or, in strategic terms, precisely because—all the while we think it was badly advertised and that we probably could have done a better job than those who made it.  Although this strategy of emotional appeal and association with positivity has many permutations in advertising, this one is particularly powerful in Trumpian terms, where many of his supporters are vulnerable to not feeling particularly good about themselves.  After the 2016 election, I read books like Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash to try to better understand the people who, to me seemed puzzlingly to both like and vote for Trump but also be likely to be most hurt by his rich -folk favoring policies.

      The psycho-sell outlined above is a powerful dynamic at play in Donald Trump’s campaign.  Trump and his handlers have, in Schrank’s words, been able to “gauge values and hidden desires of the common person.”  There are probably very few Americans who would call prisoners-of-war ‘losers’ or mock someone with a neurological condition, brag about committing unwanted sexual aggression or even mispronounce Thailand.  Seeing and hearing Trump do those things makes many of us all feel superior to him and thus “smarter than the President.”  During a time of widespread sickness and unemployment, scarcity and fear, many of us questioning our choices and/or bemoaning our fates, it can feel good to know that the President is below us in knowledge and integrity, in both common decency and common sense.  For all we’ve lost or lack, at least we know better than to do or say THAT!  And we can translate such feelings of superiority into an association with Trump that is positive, just as the strategist “advertisers’ of his campaign would have us do.   It’s curious that so many of the mask-defying, confederate flag flying and gun toting folk who call Liberals “sheep,” are themselves, with due respect to the animals they malign, the ones headed passively to literal slaughter. According to the American Prospect, “Income, even more than age, race, or ethnicity might be the most significant driver of Covid-19 deaths.”  They are not even questioning, let alone resisting, the mind-controlling methods that have them buying a product that will cost them too much, make them sick and not even taste good in the process beyond that temporary false boost of positivity the ad men designed for them to feel.














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Tipping Over Advice

4/17/2020

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       Mental health tips about how to best emotionally cope with the COVID 19 Pandemic are as plentiful as toilet paper is rare these days. Most suggest that keeping to one’s regular schedule and routines is key to fending off psychological derailment.  Wake up at the time you usually do, they say, get dressed, put on your make-up, eat your regular breakfast, exercise, and, if you’re working from home, get as approximate a flow as you can to the workday you would have had at the office.  Similarly, if you have kids at home, have them replicate their school day as much as possible.
     Whether Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or from Advice Columnists, somehow all presume that replicating the very social structures that may have gotten us into this predicament in the first place, will also provide our solace from it.  
     Even the venerated trauma specialist, Dr. Bessel Van de Kolk suggests that returning as closely as possible to our pre-pandemic routines can be our way of taking control of something –what trauma survivors generally need--while around us uncertainty reigns supreme.  
       Coming from a background of progressive politics and alternative mental health paradigms, I wonder if a more liberating perspective might be to use this time for getting in better touch with our authentic selves, our natural rhythms, our creative inclinations and true desires. In doing so, might we then  be able to re-create the systems that are breaking down into ones that can better meet our interdependent needs in mutually sustaining ways for the health and betterment of all.  The radical psychology organization I was a part of in the 1970s (The Radical Therapist/ Rough Times/ State and Mind magazine)  had a slogan that went: Therapy Means Change Not Adjustment.
     For so many of us, work and school, are not just how we spend 6 or 8 ( now for many, 10 and 12 hours a day), but they are what we go to sleep to get up in time for, or shop on the weekends to be appropriately dressed for,  or exercise to be healthy enough to keep on doing.  As social animals, we try to fit in, are influenced by the cultures of the workplaces, often wind up spending social time  outside of work with our coworkers. Those aren’t necessarily all bad things, but they can limit the range of possible life choices we could make if not for having them be the center of our lives.
     Surely, there are those among us, so unsettled by the chaotic dangerousness of the times  in which we are living, who need some sense of structure to fend off the panic that might ensue without it. But there are also those among us, who have for far too long adjusted ourselves to the exigencies of institutions, workplaces and schools, that never had our well being in mind in the first place.  For those of us with a more creative bent and courageous streak, why not use the extra time many of us have now available to loosen the grip of the structures that bound us, and discover how we might better arrange our work and recreational lives to more healhtfully and happily suit us.
     The routines, to which many of us have become tethered, can be traced to the Industrial Revolution, when according to historian Alun Davies “coordination was essential to bring together supplies of raw materials, to organize workers, and distribute their output. No point in having workers turn up any old time, hoping that someone had brought the cotton or wool to be processed, or hoping that someone had cleared yesterday’s output.”
     Schools, in turn, aimed originally to turn out obedient workers, trained to respond to the ringing of the bell, to taking direction from authority, to producing acceptable output.
      Sure it might be unworkable to have everyone turn up at work according to their wants, but we are finding now that a lot was possible outside of the regular structure that we never would have imagined to be so.  Flex time is great for reducing traffic and lines at restaurants.  Ah,,, remember restaurants!
     So here we are, Sheltered In Place, most of us working or schooling at home, some out of work altogether, some having to work in essential service to the common good.  All around the planet Earth, life as we knew it has stopped. Business is not as usual. Just a couple of months ago, it looked like the US was too afraid to deliberately choose what many considered the earth shattering changes in health care and economics proposed by candidates like Bernie Sanders, Eliabeth Warren,  Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson.    But the earth got shattered anyway… probably by the karmic inevitabilities of doing business as usual.  And much of what then seemed unrealistic (i.e. healthcare for all) seems now a critical social necessity.
       There’s a cute meme going around that says something like we’re being asked to save the world by sitting on our couches. Don’t mess it up.
       Beyond that, maybe we can recreate a better world by not necessarily even trying to conduct business as usual in our now more circumscribed daily lives. What if we delved more deeply into ourselves and our creativity, whether by sleeping in or in different configurations of time, wearing what we please, moving in new ways as we see fit..  I went out to do what I’ll call street dancing one day, with my phone set to 1960s music, just moving as pleased me in the park, and realized that while it seems to be socially normal to run in a straight line with a pained look on your face, to be lightly jumping about willy nilly, with a smile, safely distant from others, was a weird thing to do….. Why?  Those are the kinds of endeavors I intend to pursue.  And I’ll tip my mental health practitioner hat to you trying your version of that too.


       


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The Green Hoarder,  Superhero of Savings

12/12/2014

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I just read Joan Acocella's piece in this week's New Yorker about hoarding, called Let It Go.   It's interesting, informative  worth reading and-- personally unsettling. Reading it brought out my defensiveness. For, although, I don't have newspapers piled to the ceiling and threatening my life (as did Langley Collyer who  she describes as having met his fate, being starved to death under the fall of same)  I do, however have a couple of foot high stacks of old New Yorker magazines waiting for either crafts projects or another reader to be passed on to. In fact, my New Yorkers come to me via my friend Steven who has a subscription and passes them on to me in a combined  sense  of communality and conservation, both good characteristics I'd like to pay forward.  And that's my problem. I don't save things out of a sense of selfishness and need to surround myself with stuff (Something JA left out of her article  was the theory (whose?) that those of us who hoard have grief issues: that is we save because we can't let go, can't say goodbye, can't grieve.

I save things, as least I like to think, because I'm part matchmaker, ever looking to connect the right person with the item s/he needs (clothing, craft supply, tool, book), and part conservationist (not wanting to throw things into the landfill). Little makes me happier than saving someone a trip to the mall because I have the perfect black sweater that I never wear, or boots that never felt quite right  but which I never returned (it being years between the need to wear them in drought-ridden California). When someone I know expresses interest in a book or magazine they see in my home or office (actually it's a home office), I generally give it to them with one caveat: Do not bring it back.  Still, the inflow of stuff I suspect I can find the perfect home for, tends to exceed the perfectly paired recipients, resulting in my having too much stuff.

We used to have a cartoon--probably from an abovementioned New Yorker- on our refridgerator door (well, maybe it's still there under all the subsequent cartoons, magnets,  notices and artwork) that depicted a cocktail party conversation in which the couple's spokesperson said "We love the uncluttered look, just don't have a space big enough in which to achieve it." My husband and I were both tickled by its sentiment and  thought it spoke well to our situation, despite having a 2500 square foot home with individual offices and a two car garage underneath that hasn't housed a car in twenty years).

I have a pretty diverse occupational, social and recreational schedule of events each week and it is not uncommom for me to carry around with me in my car batches of cookies, bags of lemons, or as was the case last week, vegetable chips brought into my home or some meeting by one party and rather than face them growing stale, moldy or being  thrown away by those who tend to throw away good stuff in the interest of "cleaning up," travel around with me until they find another group where they might be appreciated and actually used. Program particpants  with Developmental Disabilities at the Janet Pomeroy Center where I swim twice weekly happily made pizzas with the leftover French Bread from my book club last month.

And while, theoretically, I don't think anyone has a problem with my recycling vegetable chips, those who ride in the backseat of my car might sometimes feel encumbered by the assortment of oddities they find beneath their feet. I'm the kind of person who doesn't need a specially designed earthquake kit in my car, because there is always food and water, blankets, changes of clothing, and first aid parenphenalia there. I see my car as a mobile locker room, which makes perfect sense to me, but I can see is unusual when I have the occassion to ride clutter free in the vehicles of most others.  I tend to warn potential passengers that mine is a 'dog' car and therefore filled with stuff and smells, but the dog doesn't carry much, except the blame that I try and foist off on her.
 
Having been some form of play therapist, recreation program leader and activities counselor for-- dare I say-nearly 50 years now, starting in High School of course, as a volunteer at the Queens Society for the Protection of Cruelty to children (I still have the commendation letter given to me by its director--how could I throw that out?) so I've rarely had  occassion to actually toss out a game or toy. I've played Bingo with all ages of folk, Candy Land and Monopoly too (though I might not need all three boards I've somehow accummulated--in both my Monopoly and Scrabble sets but I keep thinking they could be used in an art project). Kids tend to love my playroom which is painted blue with beige carpeting to resemble a larger than life sized, in vivo  Jungian sand-tray. Adults, however, though usually kind, according to my Googling, generally prefer the uncluttered look in a therapist's office. Still, my practice is full (and spans all age groups) and I haven't lost any clients I know of because of the not uncluttered look, I prefer Shabby Chic and Artsy, but I am intent on paring down...however unsure if my lifespan can exceed the time it will take to make a significant difference.


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Veterans' Day

11/11/2014

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        it's been nearly 50 years since I began protesting against war as an often too early approached solution to conflict. Since I first held flower decorated signs on Fifth Avenue in NYC and on the Washington DC Mall in the mid to late 60s claiming that war was " not healthy for children and other living things,"  I've struggled peaceably to learn  and teach all manner of alternative conflict mediation and resolution strategies in an effort to-- beginning within myself and emanating outward--solve problems in a way that maximizes growth and healing for all concerned, while minimizing harm and destruction.
        So, as much as I want to honor and thank  miliitary veterans for their service-- as well as support  and ensure their needs and rights to adequate compensatory care afterwards, I find that in doing so, I am not comfortable without also acknowledging the many folk who bravely over the years have refused to participate in war, at great risk to their own safety and well-being, many imprisoned for doing so, others losing contact with their families and other loved ones in their relocations to other countries in order to avoid the draft or military retribution. Those who cannot or will not participate i current non-draft but ailing economic climate sacrifice the educational and financial benefits of playing what I think of as the Russian Roulette of military service: That is, if you survive, unbroken and with relatively little trauma, oftentimes military service results in improved social standing for many. Education, skill training, and medical benefits (once the ridiculously long waiting periods elapse) are available to those who enlist and serve in the military, but sadly not to many of those who choose alternative routes to making their way through this complicated  social world we inhabilt.
        Little acknowledged as heroes in my experience are the conscientious objectors, draft dodgers, deserters and others who stood up to power and refused to engage in practices they knew or learned once involved in them were unethical and/or likely to be ineffectual.Many of these folk work in the social services,  barely eking out of living, without adeqaute salaries and benefits, while ethically striving for the common good.
        Gulf War vet, Clarence Davis, who comitted suicide last year, had, as a teen, been advised to enlist by a judge as an alternative to jail time for a petty crime,  But, according to the War Resisters' League website,  he quickly became uncomfortable with what he experienced as a participant in war, and wrote in 1990: I can never support the same country that killed millions of Native Americans, Vietnamese, Japanese Americans (sic) Iraqis, Panamanians, etc....that does not include me in the the constitution that I supposedly enlisted to uphold and defend. I am not a Muslim, but another reason for my refusal to fight came from the immorality of killing a Muslim brother or sister."
        With respect to Mr. Davis, who paid dearly for his ethical concerns,  and others like him, I salute all our different, often difficult and  dangerous paths to service.



       





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Short Story

11/3/2014

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Short Story

     There’s an old English Folktale that I read as a child, told in a book by Paul Galdone. It’s called Teeny Tiny,  about a very small woman, who lives down a teeny tiny lane in a teeny tiny house with a teeny tiny cat, and  so on…. As I write this, I inhabit, for a few days, a very small cabin in the very small town of Dunsmuir, in Northern California.  And I am short.  The cabin’s owners take pride in the fact that it has maintained the essence with which it was built in the 1930s, probably then for a family of six. Today my dog and I get in each other’s way, and the refrigerator that’s been added since the cabin’s inception sits on its back porch. There’s an unfortunate lack of symmetry with the cabin’s back door, so that one must leave the small kitchen completely, go stand outside in the pouring rain (hallelujah—California’s water needs trump my convenience) and take out whatever small thing—a little milk, a little mustard--before reversing the process in order to return inside. Were I not also somewhat teeny tiny, this would be a bigger ordeal.

        In the story, a teeny tiny woman, leaves her  teeny tiny house with its teeny tiny furniture, walks down that  teeny tiny path, and winds up—after pages and pages of teeny tinies—spoiler alert-- having a big voice in the end.  At ever under five feet tall, and now, at near 65, shrinking to the point that I may never qualify again  for the scarier rides at amusement parks  (no loss there), I  identify more than ever with that story’s heroine, though I wish my voice—at least in terms of influence, were bigger.

        It’s not easy being a little old lady, emphasis on the little—though I don’t disagree with the adage that aging at any size is not an experience for the weak at heart. But as someone who, even in my 20s was routinely overlooked (literally) as tall, hurried, and besuited New Yorkers pushed their way over me into revolving doors, being 65 and short has become a grand slam ticket into obscurity. I can be –and often am—the most senior, most experienced, most articulate person in a professional meeting (so many of my peers are retired), and yet , no matter what hard-earned wisdom—and I am not long-winded—I have to share, I can see the glazed over look of my younger colleagues who, when they turn away from their smartphones at all, do not turn their eyes or ears in my direction.  Worse still,  if you will forgive my seemingly petty priorities,  is my experience of ordering food at any sort of lunch  or deli counter, especially true at taquerias, where I must tip-toe and often jump up and down  (not in anger, but  of necessity) just to be seen and heard, my orders almost always sacrificed somehow in the uncomfortable effort to negotiate the high counters. But like my teeny tiny predessesor, I won’t go quietly. My husband  suggests I’ve waited all my life to be a feisty  little old woman—I hate the word lady, which conjures for me  the white gloves and veiled hats of my mother’s generation--and maybe he’s right.  My mother was short-ish, my father too, and yet, my mother seemed ever annoyed with me as a teen that I did not grow tall and lean ( the latter  harder  to do when you’re short). Like many a Republican of today, she was no scientist.

      Sure there are advantages to being old and small. Gallant young men now offer to carry my bags wherever I go,  hoping to please, one recently admitted, the spirit of his mother, though to me, he seemed no younger than I am.. My dear friend Connie Cutter taught me long ago, (she’s a few steps ahead of me on this aging voyage ) that the acuity our eyesight dimisinshes  in timely association with the appearance of wrinkles, so that what we see in the mirror is more youthful than is actually the case. That  explains why the person I see each morning, while not a child or even young woman, couldn’t possibly be of similar age range  to the mother of a near 50 year old client as the latter suggested recently. As a psychotherapist, I’m supposed to have been focusing on her needs of the moment, not calculating as I was—only for a few seconds, I swear, I’m good at math--,the earliest possible age her mother could have produced her to make the comparison fall  even somewhat in my ballpark of comfort.  I guess a question that might tie things back to height would be: Would I seem so old if not also small. It is not tall, elegant, older women, who are proverbially helped across the street.

         I have to admit I enjoyed the attention last week, en route to a  rally in Oakland –well, after some paradigm shift that reminded me I was no longer seen as  young  a student/hippie/radical type headed on Bart to another protest---when another passenger commented on my right to a double seat, given my age and the paraphernalia I was carrying, to attend to a demonstration concerning Mass Incarceration, Police Terror and the Criminalization of a generation. Once I got there, however, my shot stature prevented me from both seeing and hearing the words articulated by the speakers involved, though the screeches via megaphone came through loud enough to irritate well. 

         I know Randy Newman said it all in his song of 1977, called Short People, its most repeated line being: Short people got no reason to live.  Nearly 40 years later, despite the gains made by other marginalized groups of people, we short folk have made little progress, well maybe Little People have, with their own TV shows and such, and clearly they have it harder in the main than the merely short.  But, complainer of luxury problems that I am, I wonder how many little people get talked to like I  often am with comments like “Oh, I forgot how short you are!”  I mean, would you say to an African-American friend, I forgot how black you are?” or to a heavy friend “how fat you are?”  Like people with what are called invisible disabilities, we short people may not have all the apparent inconveniences of those with more obvious limitations, but neither do we get any ADA benefits  or slack when it comes to language or comedy.  Short shrift, short end of the stick, short circuit, short changed and one that I heard for the first time recently—moral midget—all suggest a lesser than quality to those of us with limited stature, even though I maintain, we are, in the main, more fuel efficient, fit more compactly into challenging spaces (I rode to the Washington DC demos of the late 1960s in the backspace of my friend Alan’s VW bug)  and according  to my Googling, are less in danger of being hit by lightning.         Compare that, though, to making less money per inch ($789  accroding to a study that controlled for gender, weight and age),  it’s called the “height premium,”  that we are seen as less  authoritative (name a short President) , less intelligent, productive and and not surprisingly, after all that,  we have less self-esteem. It’s probably harder too on short men than on short women, but little old men are not as much the butt of jokes or social scorn, perhaps because there are fewer of them.  “Today, there remains one group that has made no progress in the face of rampant discrimination,” a spokesman for the the National Organization of Short Statured Adults.

      Maybe you’re thinking that I should stop complaining about this in the face of real problems like the mass incarceration named above, Ebola, starvation, climate change, etc. People don’t get killed for being short. And that’s true enough.  But without a  reason to live, it’s hard to make good use of that fact..

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Seasonal Concerns

9/25/2014

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    With the cooling off of summer heat focused on the death of Michael Brown by police misconduct in Ferguson, Missouri, a fall court case is transpiring in Oakland concerning the shooting to death by police officers of a young, mixed-race man in SF's Park Merced apartment complex eight years ago. Asa Sullivan was a member of my extended family who I never met, but whose death by unnecessary police armed fire brings the reality of how widespread are such matters and often more dangerously close to home than one realizes.  I've come to know Asa's  immediate family better since his death and to learn the story of his  life's tragic end from one of his immediate survivors: his mother Kat Espinosa, the biological aunt of my adopted, now adult children.
      Like  many others who wind up dead by police gunfire, Asa was not a complete innocent, legally. In fact, he was either squatting, visiting squatters  or involved somehow in the use or purchase of  drugs, or companionship to those doing so,  in the vacant apartment where police were called to investigate on 6/6/06. But like other young men killed in the act of either petty crime or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Asa still deserved to grow up and hopefully out of his youthful, mischievious  behavior. Clearly 13 year old Santa Rosan Andy Lopez should have had an orange tip on his toy gun when police say they mistook it for the real thing and killed Andy on his way to the park, but death is a pretty extreme consequence for non-violent, youthful indiscretion.
       I've been to the courtroom where Asa's mother's civil case against the SFPD is transpiring a couple of times these past weeks, to support Kat and to observe the questioning of witnesses in the case. It  didn't take long to learn that Asa was a scared young man hiding from the police in an attic like crawl space above the apartment's bathroom, and that he was trying to avoid a parole violation related to a marijuana charge on his record. According to his mother, he'd been generally getting his life on a more constructive track since becoming a parent the  year before. It was also clear that the police who arrived at the call of a neighbor concerned, not about violence but about 'activity' in what was supposed to be a vacant apartment, went way overboard every step along the way, from how they entered the premises (without a key they could easily have obtained from management), to shooting Asa as he tried to exit the attic/crawlspace unarmed and without belligerence.
       The police officers involved in these cases always say they felt threatened. Though Asa had no weapon, he did have an eyeglass case in his hand or pocket, that police say they suspected was a possible gun.
As a therapist, I'm deeply concerned that more and more, police officers will feel threatened when in the presence of black youth, because they can reasonably suspect, based on past and pervasive police misconduct, that such youth are genuinely --and understandably--hostile to them.  More and more such  situations snowball, and the police escalate their violence in response to their perception of threat, based not on the behavior of the suspect, but rather  on their collective guilt about all the horrific, unnecessary killings their colleagues have perpetrated.
      On Facebook yesterday, I saw a video of a police officer shooting at a young man outside his car in a gas station,  simply because the "accused" had turned back toward the car to look for his wallet when the cop asked him for his  ID. It didn't sound like that act resulted in death, but the young man was hurt and the officer, while calling for an ambulance, was clearly not apologetic or remorseful. In face, he seemed annoyed at the victim for being in pain from his bullet wounds.
         No amount of money that Kat might collect, should the jury (with not one African American among them!)  agree that the police were unjustified to shoot at Asa 6 times, can replace the son she lost that day.
But a verdict in her favor (and she's in this with Asa's former partner and son), might help to send the message to all the police officers out there that it is encumbent upon them (and their superiors, their trainers) to learn how to deal with their feeling of fear and confusion, their guilt, their triggers, and to stop shooting prematurely, killing so many  boys  and young men, and making all our lives less safe as a result. 
        I wanted to write this to be a part of all the recordings, visual, auditory and in print, that will hopefully help spring us all to take action to encourage the police to live up to their mandate to protect and serve us all.
      

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In defense of AA

6/23/2014

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     Psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes, while promoting a book and program he's developed as an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, has been denegrading 12 step programs unfairly. Sure, he's entitiled to his opinion, and  to advertise his undoubtedly quite costly alternative treatment for addiction. And certainly, AA doesn't work for  everyone. But Dr. Dodes' criticisms, widely circulated now among the learned folk of National Public Radio, deserve a rebuttal, because, as both a psychotherapist and person in recovery myself, I experience AA and the 12 step world as such a useful  and accessible resource, replete with such wisdom of the ages that I often feel it informs the helpfulness of my practice as much as and sometimes more than has my professional training.  And, especially since AA meetings are so many and so available for no cost whatsoever (save  for a requested voluntary donation of a dollar or two from those who can spare it), I hate to think of people in need being put off  from being embraced by the care available in AA's rooms by Dodes' arguments.
      For example, Dr. Dodes claims that AA sees relapses as failures and asks for the return of  its celebratory chips commemorating  recovery time  (30 days, one year, etc.) when relapses occur.  He said on All things Considered that, in his view, to have gone six months without drinking, even if one has a beer at the end of said time, is applaudable and certainly a better  course of action than having had a beer every day during those six months.  Well, not only is everything that happens in AA voluntary, including who gets a chip and for what, and never, in my near 30 years of involvement have I seen a chip returned or anyone asked to do so, but, if AA members express concern about relapse, it's because, in our collective experience, rarely, dare I say never, have we seen anyone have that one beer every six months and go on to incorporate into  a happy, balanced, normal life such a manner of  drinking. For an alcoholic or addict, one drink typically leads to another, and just as typically leads back into a life of active and destructive use and abuse. It most often begins a slide back into the depths from which most of us in AA don't want to return. It happened to me once, after 6 years of sobriety and not enough traction in the AA program, that I tried having a single glass of wine at a dinner with a cousin who was visiting from out of town and who I did not want to know I was self-defining as alcoholic. I can hardly imagine now why I cared.  It took some months before I didn't refuse a neighbor pouring me a holiday drink into a silver goblet and a few more before I poured myself a glass to have with a sandwich at lunch by myself.  Before long I was both drinking and smoking pot daily, using pain pills (instead of the more effective swimming and yoga) for my back problems, and getting beta blockers prescribed for for those difficult moments of professional test taking and public speaking. And it didn't take long before before the trials of daily life became my tests, and socializing at parties a form of public speaking. The fact is, as the majority of us who attend  AA meetings can attest--and good/lucky for you if this doesn't apply--we can't have a single beer without disasterous -in the long term --results.
       Dr. Dodes is correct when he says that statistics proving AA success are not available. That's precisely because AA is an association of the anonymous and is not professionally led or affilliated. Still, the sheer volume of AA meetings worldwide and the large regular attendance at so many of them, says something important about AA effectiveness and popularity. Of course, AA is not effective for everyone. The "God" thing has kept many away. I did me for a long time. Of course, AA makes clear that God can be defined however one feels comfortable doing so, and there is an active and growing segment of AA for Agnostics and Freethinkers of which I am a enthusiastic participant and supporter.  The first international Agnostic and Freethinker convention is set to take place in Santa Monica this coming November (2014).
         In another criticism, Dr. Dodes complains  that AA unjustifiably blames the alcoholic when its program doesn't work for someone. And while my experience is that compassion is far more prevalent in AA than is blame, we do come to be wary when someone stops going to meetings, or stops meeting with or being a sponsor, or stops in whatever individualized  way s/he has been  working the 12 steps, because, this is often the beginning of a slide back into active addiction.  Similarly, any health practitioner  would be concerned if a patient stopped taking prescribed medications, or went off a recommended diet or refused the physical therapy that was needed for a specific condition. That concern, too, could be called blaming the patient for his or her return to active disease, but there is only so much a practitioner, or a program can do without the active involvement  of the person using it.  How many doctor's would say to a treatment refusing patient, "perhaps you should seek out another doctor who might not suggest the things I have promoted as integral to your health and well-being."  Besides, being non professional and anonymous, there really isn't anyone in AA to give that kind of advice. Therapists and rehab counselors do that. I do that.  I have seem lots of clients who I hoped could/would benefit from AA, but when some won't or can't deal with their addictions that way, I recommend other ways, never losing hope that they might find their way back in to the rooms where, in my anecdotal experience, the most effective results take place.
         The late humorist George Carlin often joked that the best answer to the problem of substance abuse would be a better reality.  And while alcoholism, being a condition of both genetic and social origins is not necessarily created by adverse life circumstances, it strikes me that a lot of what is so useful about AA is that it does change reality for its members.  Where once most alcoholics felt isolated, in AA they/we have supportive accepting and compassionatecommunity, where many felt morally bankrupt, in AA they/we  find  purpose and an ethical compass. And this is something no new program, developed  by an individual fee-charging doctor can offer.


       


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