A highly informative article here giving case studies of a variety of now defunct groups. Lengthy and needs to be pondered.
But this small quotation is worth our attention:
Quote
....were formed when leaders deviated from an ethically based, fee-for-service, confidential relationship with clients and brought clients together to form cohesive, psychologically incestuous groups. Leaders were idolized rather than transferences studied and understood.
Instead of personal autonomy being encouraged, patients were led into submissive, obedient, dependent relationships with their therapists. Their thinking eventually resembled what Hoffer saw in the "True Believers" (1951) and what Lifton (1961) termed "totalistic."
That is, the clients were induced to accept uncritically their therapists' theories,
[
www.icsahome.com]
Finally, Wendy Plump published an essay in last Sunday's magazine supplement to the New York Times describing the effects of having an affair and of discovering ones spouse has had an affair. Ms Plump wrote, stating she had been on both sides of the situation.
Her insight is--people in affairs do indeed judge themselves. (Those who are not utterly and irredemably self centered)
Quote
You will hear yourself saying you cheated because your needs weren’t being met. The spark was gone. You were bored in your marriage. Your lover understands you better. One or another version of this excuse will cross your lips like some dark, knee-jerk Hallmark-card sentiment.
I’m not saying these feelings aren’t legitimate, just that they don’t legitimize what you’re doing. If you believed they did, your stomach wouldn’t drop on your way out the door to your lover’s. You wouldn’t feel the need to shower before climbing into the marital bed after a liaison. You wouldn’t feel like a train had struck you in the back when your son asked why you forgot his lacrosse game the other day.
When you miss a family function because of work, you get over it. When you miss a family function because you were in a hotel room with your lover, you feel breathless with misery.
The great sex, by the way, is a given. When you have an affair you already know you will have passionate sex — the urgency, newness and illicit nature of the affair practically guarantee that.
What you don’t know, or perhaps what you don’t allow yourself to think about, is that your life will become an unbearable mix of yearning and regret because of it. It will be difficult if not impossible to be in any one place with contentment.
This is no way for an adult to live. When you’re with your lover, you’ll be working on your alibi and feeling loathsome. When you’re with your spouse, you’ll be dying to return to your love nest.
Wendy Plump, New York Times, December 9, 2010
But here is another thing Wendy Plump tells us:
Quote
When you are at home, everything in your life will look just a little bit out of register — the furniture, the food in your refrigerator, your children, your dog — because you’ve detached yourself from your normal point of reference, and it now belongs to a reality you’ve abandoned.
Pay close attention to this. Sounds a bit like the disorientation many people report
when they've been through a trauma. Or when they have exposed themselves or been exposed to a very intrusive guru or workshop. These feelings of disorientation can be easily labeled as indications that you're breaking through bonds of conventional thinking and on the way to becoming more evolved or enlightened or liberated.
And if you are feeling guilty as hell for violating your own standards after having been conned to by a charismatic leader--its tempting to believe that old fashioned shame is a signal of enlightenment, not that youve done wrong and need to make amends.
Quote
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."
from 'The Group' by Daska Slater
[
www.culteducation.com]