Why doesn't a real mental health professional write a book called something like.

JUNK THERAPY.

Sort of like the Junk Science books, but applied to mental health?
He would not even have to name names and risk getting attacked, but just put together a way for the general public to sort facts of real therapy and self-help from these insane damaging sects, like Byron Katie.

The book could recommend therapies that work, and the evidence.
And show how the New Wage Quacks like Katie now own the asylum, with their millions.
And how people are getting hurt.

Maybe the book catches on, the therapist gets on TV, helps people, sells some books, and improves their practice and has a more interesting career.
the therapist wins, and so does the public.
The therapist can give keynote speeches on it.

There might be a big opportunity for some smart REAL therapists to make a mark.

Sorta like this book by Seligman, but readable and meant for the general public.

[www.amazon.com]
What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement Learning to Accept Who You Are (Fawcett Book) [Paperback]
Martin E. P. Seligman

There is just one book that comes close to filling the need articulated by The Anticult. Unfortunately, this book is written for practitioners and academics.

[books.google.com]

What is needed--Hello!!!!--would be something aimed at intelligent busy laypersons.

And the proposed book should list situations where you're at high risk of being targeted for recruitment into someone's exploitative cult and how to tell this is so and how to get away, and avoid being scooped into the net.

*Your boss brings in a 'consultant' or pressures you to attend mandatory attitude adjustment weekends where you have to sign release of liability paperwork (see below) and use a jargon ridden terminology.

*Anything where seats are jammed together and you are required to hand over your watch, your telephone, your laptop and cannot communicate with the outside world.

**MEGA warning if you are bussed to the event and have no ready way of leaving if you decide you dont like it.

*A friend comes home babbling that his or her life has been changed and bugs you to go off for a seminar and refuses to tell you what will be done to you

*You are told you are being negative if the alleged healer has no clinical credentials and you ask why that healer found the energy to advertise but didnt use that same energy to go to school and get state tested and licensed and pay liability insurance.

*The 'healer or group requires you sign away your right to sue or mediate for damages in event that they fuck you up. A real therapist never requires you to sign that kind of paperwork. (Thanks Anticult for telling us about this kind of release of liability paperwork)

*You are filmed or recorded and nothing was ever said about that, and nothing was done to offer paperwork promising your confidentiality would be respected. Nor are you offered a place to sit where you wont be captured on film or recorded

Places where recruitment can easily happen

If you are affluent and demonstrate an interest in soicial justice and or Eastern Spirituality.

Areas with a high proportion of potentially affluent and vulnerable people. Elderly people can be easily isolated and emotionally seduced. So can people newly divorced or bereaved. One thing many are not aware of is that crooks can search court records and identify persons who have are heirs of sizeable estates. Property values can be researched, especially if someone has real estate background. You can then be pressured to take out a loan against your own house after you join the group and never imagine that someone in the group researched you and found out you owned that house. People underestimate the extent to which they can be researched.

You are eager to break into art, acting, film. A tyrannical dance instructor or acting teacher or dancing coach may be a front for a cult. (Sharon Gans, Gurdjieff, etc)

You are a student therapist or young physician. You are a high value recruit by entities seeking derivative legitimatcy. Fact check anything and anyone who court you. Ditto if you are a successful owner of a yoga studio.

Soical venues that are anti science and where subjectivity 'Its my experience' reign supreme. The venues and events may not be cultic. But they are set ups where people let their guards down, are trusting and are a Petri dish for cult recruiters)

Yoga related events.

Bhakti events

Body work events. Many physical therapists are science based. They are living national treasures. But others follow modalities that overlap with a multitude of subjective cultic milieu wiernesses

*Retreat Centers and wilderness areas. We let our guard down when in nature. Watch out at fluffy fad ridden Buddhist centers where co founders are a little too eager to mush incompatible religions together or have buddies from their encounter group/Human Potential days

*Green events and 'sustainable' events. This stuff is chic and popular today. Cults go with fads.

Health food stores and magazines

*Recommendations from 12 step buddies. The material written by and for 12 step groups, especially AA and Alananon and Narcotics Anonymous (not the same as Narconon--thats a Scientology front)---thats OK. But I have seen a lot of people at 12 step meetings recommending Tolle and Byron Katie to their friends. Anyone who uses a 12 STep group to pimp these millionaires is violating the 12 Traditions. One isnt supposed to proslytize for a religion or political party when in 12 step. Call someone on it if they try to so this to you.

A book for citizens should cover these high risk recruitment venues

Other red flags you are in cultic milieu territory and risk recruitment.

The cultic milieu is a smoke filled room.

Getting into a cult is inhaling enough smoke that your lungs get damaged and you forget what its like to have full lung capacity and function.

In the subjective cultic milieu you're in a social situation that is going to be disempowering for you in the long run , no matter how good the situation makes you feel in the short run.

Kind of like cigarettes. You feel good in the short term but long term cigarettes take away more than they ever give you. They cost you money, too, along with your health. Cigarettes are a lot like cults. The venues where cigarette use is advertised and normalized could be considered cultic milieu.

Risk Factors

*The head and intellect are considered impediments and the heart and subjective emotions are priviliged

*Ethics and guidelines are belittled. This means that there are no stable guidelines you can resort to if things go wrong later on.

*Any attempt to discuss power, use of power, power imbalances and the responsiblity of powerholders is considered 'negative'

*You hear versions of 'there are no victims'.

*You hear various renditions of 'You make your own reality' --which often elides into 'there are no victims'.

* Experience is treated as proof. You will be asked or demanded, 'Well have you experienced it?' if you mention that you dont want to do X. Saying No isnt enough.

(Experience can be misleading or can be manipulated. These experience groups are a swamp of subjectivity)

Science is considered oppressive and kills wonder. (The hilarious thing is many of the types who allege this would not be alive or ambulatory had they or their parents not benefitted from science based medicine.)


I have to warn that if you are a student therapist, it is imperative that you decide whether you want to be a professional therapist.

One check whether the school is accredited by the American Psychological Association. Some will say they are 'accredited' but only if you read the fine print and the APA list will you see that the school is accredited to some other program. Give it a pass.

Two, your school should not only be APA accredited, it should be accredited for 4 to 7 years and NOT be APA accredited but 'on probation'.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Next check the training program. You want to get a sense of its culture and social norms. (Do this when auditioning your therapists, too. There is a big difference between someone who got trained at Washington University at Saint Louis vs someone at Homer's Hot Tub Spa of Transpersonal Evolutionary Radicalism Dharma)

Who shows up on their public events calendar? Google 'em. Put in 'cult' or 'allegations' in the search slot. And examine the adjunct faculty member list. Run a search there, too.

If a psychotherapy training program emphasizes a shamanic dimension or makes it seem a therapist is supposed to be an archon or guide on your spiritual journey and inculcates this as their pedagogical model, this is not good.

To be a professional therapist means accountablity to a conventional, consensual set of guidelines and a professional therapist is meant to maximize benefit to the patient and minimize risk.

Spiritual journeys and vision quests entail risk.

Thus, they are not under the purview of a professional therapist.

Finally only First Nation people with the right lineage and background can properly function as shamans. They do not charge money for that, either.

Yet another venue where a person may be exposed, unwillingly, to cultic garbage

Uprofessionally run groups and circles.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Some group work can be fine. But do background checks on moderators and team members. Some cross breed with gurus and LGATs mentioned elsewhere on this board.

Final note

If anyone wants to write this book, keep quiet, dont blog about it. Just do your research.

And please fact check anyone who tries to befriend you. A lot of vested interests will not want your book to appear and will try to recruit you into being against all other gurus and cults---but groom you to defend them or give them a free pass.

<<<Crickets chirping.>>>

"Please know that if you have never had healthy boundaries in your relationships, these groups won't seem strange"

This excellent statement was written by a member of the message board with the name 'the speakable truth' and placed this on a thread in the LGATs section dealing Family of Women--FOW being a subset of the Sterling Institute.

Please know that if you have never had healthy boundaries in your relationships, these groups won't seem strange, but isn't that strange when you never had healthy relationships before? Why when looking for help would you want to repeat the same things? Well, it is human nature to gravitate towards the familiar. (I am speaking as a lay person not a credited socioligist or psychologist).

I urge anyone in the groups to leave them, acknowledge the positive, because there always is some, but then leave and quickly seek licensed professional help to understand your issues. Do not allow your vulnerable friends to talk you into trusting this sick man "Sterling" to fix your life. Research and ask questions!


(As an illustration of this, my mother bullied me and a live in buddy of my dad's used to make sarcastic comments to me. I was forbidden to speak back and defend myself.

When I began to go to school, zap. I became a bully magnet. Mom would get nasty to me and demand to know why I did not set limits on the kids who bullied me. Well, I was used to being bullied by the adults whom I had to live with because they were Mom and Dad and Dad's wierd live in male companion.

So my being bullied at home was normalized and I didnt learn anything about self respect. So, I went to school and the pattern repeated itself. This is how we get pre-formatted to accept the unacceptable if our upbringing consists of regular boundary infractions and violations from one's family-Corboy)

Anyone who says that people 'ask to be abused' or 'make their own reality' are part of a culture that supports re-enactment of abuse and protects perpetrators.

Bumping this up. Perhaps other true professionals will comment on Katie and others.

The Anticult published material on this discussion thread that is very informative
about Neuro Linguistic Programming and TAC discussed NLP in relation to Byron Katie.

Here is an article about NLP - and the influence of Bandler and Grinder's work.


Revisiting the Book That Inspired Pickup Artists, Cult Leaders--and Was Linked to a Murder

[jezebel.com]

Here is an informative quote:

Quote

The aim of that modeling is to manipulate human behavior. The first-hand clinical examples Bandler and Grinder give are spectacularly awful: for example, visiting a psychiatric institution and stomping on a catatonic woman’s foot in order to get a reaction. They speak, admiringly, of another therapist “willing to do anything to get contact and rapport,” who began gradually pulling hairs out of a catatonic woman’s leg, going higher and higher with each, until she purportedly yelled, “Get your hands off me!” They recall witnessing a therapist implanting false, disturbing childhood memories into the mind of a suicidal patient to cure her. They speak of, essentially, hypnotizing a man experiencing unwanted attraction to men, purportedly leading him from gay to straight (this kind of “conversion” or “reparative” therapy has been shown to be traumatic and abusive, not to mention ineffective).

Given these disturbing examples, it was no great shock when I came across the first instance of a PUA (Pick Up Artist) term adopted from their work: reframing.

They define reframing as “a specific way of contacting the portion or part—for lack of a better word—of the person that is causing a certain behavior to occur, or that is preventing a certain other behavior from occurring.” In The Game, reframing is defined as a way “to alter the context through which someone sees an idea or situation; to change the meaning a person attributes to an idea or situation.” As Strauss writes, “Whoever’s frame—or subjective reality—is the strongest tends to dominate and interaction,” and that, of course, is the pickup artist’s aim.

During the workshop, Bandler and Grinder detail the process of reframing before concluding: “You continue cycling through this process until you have integrated all objections.” It is impossible to read those words and not think of the PUA concept of “last-minute resistance,” when a woman suddenly decides against a physical interaction that was just about underway. “Back up one or two steps, then continue,” writes Strauss. “Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s not real. It’s just ASD—anti-slut defense. She doesn’t want you to think she’s easy.” PUAs frame this as helping women to overcome societal restrictions on sexual behavior. Bandler and Grinder speak of “helping [people] find new choices in behavior.”

Another quote:

Quote

One of the scenes in Frogs Into Princes that most foreshadows NLP’s later application comes when a woman in the audience offers an interjection. Bandler and Grinder had been speaking of their concept of “uptime,” in which “we’re completely in sensory experience and have no consciousness at all” and “keep changing our behavior until you respond the way we want you to.” The woman says: “OK. I can see how that would work in therapy, being a therapist. But in an intimate relationship it seems like being in uptime wouldn’t be as intimate.” Bandler and Grinder respond: “Oh, I disagree. I think it would be much more intimate that way.” They add that intimacy is created by eliciting exact responses: “If I’m in uptime when I’m interacting with somebody, then I’m going to be able to elicit responses from them which are pleasurable, and intimate, and anything else I want.”

For Bandler and Grinder, human connection is mechanized, operationalized, and calculated. Intimacy is subject to one person’s will and successfully executed through another. The “magic” (a word favored by Bandler and Grinder) isn’t in the unknown and uncertain terrain of honest, vulnerable human exchange, but rather elaborate puppetry.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2020 02:50AM by corboy.