Hello!
I’m new to this forum but have been quite active on www.ex-iwp.org which is the ex member/survivor site for the Social therapy Group cult whose leader is Fred Newman. They have many other incarnations which includes the New Alliance Party, the International Worker’s Party, the All Stars and the Castillo Theater in Manhattan. Their training center to train new therapists is called the “East Side Center for Group and Short Term (ha! that’s a laugh!) Therapy”, also in Manhattan. Before I go on I want to thank Rick Ross profusely for having so much information available here when I first “got out”. He was kind enough to email me back when I asked about Social Therapy and this site contains so much helpful information. I was directed to [u:3cde9e61ce]www.ex-iwp.org[/u:3cde9e61ce] via this site. I am eternally grateful.

Now that I am more stable and have a better grasp due to all of the support I have been so generously given, I feel very strongly about “paying it forward” as it were and to help others. I, of course, still need ongoing support myself but I find I help myself when I help others. Finding a new therapist who is not manipulative and part of a cult as well as specializing in my diagnosis is huge step, but because of what the Social Therapy Group did to me my trust is still shot. One wonderful thing about my new therapist is that she is actively researching, talking to other therapists with experience in cult survivors and Social Therapy survivors in particular in order to assist me. This is very validating because this is a whole new area of therapy for her to take on. I also find that reading and sharing experiences with those who really understand to be the greatest part of healing than I could have ever imagined. I thank everyone who I have now met personally and those who are only known to me as “anonymous" for being so supportive.

Anyway, I wanted to share here some information and things which helped me to understand and heal from my experience with Social Therapy. One article in particular was very, very helpful in many ways [u:3cde9e61ce]http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/Cults/Hazards%20of%20the%20Therepeutic%20Relationship.htm[/u:3cde9e61ce]
This article was helpful not only because it helped to define my experience but to also help identify the exact things which the Social therapist I saw seeing did and how I was manipulated. It is also a wonderful tool to assess whether or not a therapist exhibits abusive, controlling and cult-like behavior. It helped me so I could break each thing down and clarify things rather than feeling so mixed up and lost. And since amnesia is part of the reason why I sought therapy in the first place, this article helped me bring together bits and pieces which I had forgotten.

So maybe people here who have experienced therapist abuse – not even those who are officially in or part of a cult -- can use it to identify what their abusive therapists did and how it happened. It helped me so maybe it will help others.

Oh, and I thought I should mention right away that “Underdog” is based on the television cartoon character – a canine superman. I often get comments that this screen name is one of depression or defeat but it is just the opposite – it is one of strength and helping others.

OH! I forgot to mention that this article is also a wonderful tool to help you if you are considering or in the process of filing and official complaint against a therapist or any other profession. You can compare it to the APA Code of Ethics [u:6c33c06af1]http://www.apa.org/ethics/homepage.html[/u:6c33c06af1] piece by piece when writing a letter or filing a complaint [u:6c33c06af1]http://www.apa.org/ethics/rules.html#PV3.[/u:6c33c06af1] or any other professional guidelines and ethics committees.

Social Therapy, is that like Gestalt Therapy? I have been through something similar and I posted about it on the Choices Counseling Center blog.

hi underdog, you said in the title for you post about filing complaints, how does this fit into your experience?

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onlyme
hi underdog, you said in the title for you post about filing complaints, how does this fit into your experience?

My experience concerning filing complaints and getting help from therapists with no connection to Social Therapy has been extremely gratifying. To start, it was so validating to have such tremendous support and encouragement -- especially from my "new" therapist (seeing her for over 1 ½ years now) who has been helping me sort things out and put my life back together after Social Therapy. My ETHICAL therapist helped me to write the complaint, edited it, and went through all of the emails from that crazy cult therapist with me -- she found many more ethical and boundary violations that I didn’t even know were wrong – that’s how messed up I was! I didn’t even realize that my old cult therapist telling me she loved me was unethical; all I ever knew was that it made me feel bad but I thought it was just “me” because I was the patient, so something had to be wrong with me and it was my fault.

So simply being believed, being cared about and supported was worth it. The complaint process is not an easy one (no matter what the end result is) but I am so glad I did it! It is not an easy process but my experience was that it was very cathartic, validating and another way to work through the trauma and heal. And I also discovered that there are far nicer, caring people out there than I had realized before; I'm definitely much less jaded and mistrusting than one year ago. I was so worried that no one would believe me but just the opposite was the truth: every single person who I met and talked about my horrific experience with in Social Therapy (which there have been countless) completely believed me. And those people who helped me and listened to me who are therapists and psychiatrists have gone on to tell their colleagues about my experience so others who went through what I went through will be helped as well.


Underdog

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Underdog

Anyway, I wanted to share here some information and things which helped me to understand and heal from my experience with Social Therapy. One article in particular was very, very helpful in many ways [u:3cde9e61ce]http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/Cults/Hazards%20of%20the%20Therepeutic%20Relationship.htm[/u:3cde9e61ce]

Hi
Do you happen to know where I can find this article - the link is outdated.
Thanks.

This might be the article.

[www.google.com]

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This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1986, Volume 3, Number 2, pages 234-242 . Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.


Some Hazards of the Therapeutic Relationship*

Jane W. Temerlin, M. S. W.

Maurice K. Temerlin, Ph. D.


Abstract (An abstract is a capsule summary of a longer article)

A hazard of long-term psychotherapy is the possible erosion of the boundaries of the therapist-client relationship. Previous work has shown how charismatic psychotherapists can so manipulate the therapeutic relationship that they produce groups which function much like destructive religious cults. This paper describes the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes which lead to a destructive erosion of therapeutic boundaries as observed in psychotherapy cults. Techniques used by cult therapists are grouped in four categories: those which a) increase dependence, b) increase isolation, c) reduce critical thinking capacity, and d) discourage termination of therapy.



Full text available through ICSA E-Library.

[webcache.googleusercontent.com]

The Temerlins did and wrote some of the finest research into cults and one of their articles was an examination of psychotherapy groups that were cultic.

If you go to the right hand button in the top of the window for the RI.com message board you can put 'all dates' (the message board will be 9 years old in a few months)
and put Temerlin in the keywords slot.


This article by the Temerlins is a must-read:

Temerlin, M., & Temerlin, J. (1982). Psychotherapy cults: An iatrogenic perversion. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 19, 131-141.

('Iatrogenic' means--(Iatros--healer) (genos/genetic--'created')produced by the healer/treatment. An iatrogenic illness is generated by what is supposed to heal not worsen a persons condition.)

And here is a new book
Power Games: Influence, Persuasion and Indoctrination in Psychotherapy Training

Edited by Richard Raubolt

New York, NY: Other Press, 2006. ISBN-10: 1-59051-173-5; ISBN-13: 978-1590511732 (paperback), $32.00. 320 pages
Reviewed by Steve K. D. Eichel, Ph.D., ABPP


[webcache.googleusercontent.com]

(excerpt)

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Richard Raubolt’s chapter 9 on “coerced discipleship” is entirely unlike Lariviere’s contribution.

Raubolt’s chapter is concise and to the point. He builds on the classic article on iatrogenic psychotherapy cults by Temerlin and Temerlin (1982). He characterizes indoctrination as occurring by “seduction or force” and as possessing five essential components (p. 171): (1) charismatic, authoritarian, and dominating leadership; (2) dichotomous and stereotypical thinking; (3) affiliation with an institution or group that fosters conflicting relationships; (4) cycling of trauma and retraumatization; and (5) theft of language. He provides several clear examples of each component, and his discussion of the different kinds of coercive leadership styles is especially illuminating

There is a discussion on an earlier thread about a different group. I supplied a capsule summary of the 1982 article by the Temerlins.

[forum.culteducation.com]

The dialogue in that section of the thread is worth a peek

I started volunteering for the All Stars in March 2004 (found 'em through VolunteerMatch, the slimy bastards) and left my Social Therapist, who left the Social Therapy Group but who continues to practice this scam, at the end of August, 2011. I felt the All Stars and the East Side Institute were, if not cults, close enough to a cult that I stopped volunteering there as soon as my ex-therapist left, but that Social Therapy had its merits and in and of itself, it was a good therapeutic model. That changed when I told my "therapist" I was leaving (which I decided to do because I couldn't get past our cultic beginnings, and her involvement in my life was feeling increasingly like interference) and she went totally ballistic on me, telling me that she was "offended" that I didn't involve her in the decision-making process and that my decision was "shaky" and "unhealthy" and "[I knew] how [I got] when [I was] alone" and on and on for 45 minutes. I went to group that night to say goodbye and when I asked her why she thought the decision was unhealthy, she snapped, "Why are you asking me that?" I said "Because I want to know" and she said "I don't think you really want to know what I think. If you did,you would have involved me in your decision-making process." There's growthfulness and development for ya!


It took me until just before Thanksgiving to feel mentally and physically fit enough to go to the Cult Clinic in NYC - I'd contacted them, but I was too scared to go, because I was still afraid they'd
find some loophole in my behavior that would justify these scammers' manipulative and verbally abusive treatment of me - but after only three sessions, I feel freer and happier than I have in YEARS. Simply by believing me and not judging my "tantrums" that I threw in the group (except to say, "Yeah, I'm not surprised!") and pointing out exactly what they do and how they do it, I've been able to conclude, along with a lot of supplemental reading and talking to some savvy friends and a few ex-IWP people, that the whole thing is a complete scam and that Social Therapy is rotten to the core, no matter who practices it, or where. It's nothing but a more mainstream, watered-down version of the Synanon Game. That these people do what they do in the name of helping inner city children and those with emotional and mental problems makes me sick, and slickness of their racket terrifies me. I still go back and peek at their websites to see if I still get "sucked in." And sadly, I still do. I'm much less susceptible than I was when I first left, but sometimes I'll catch myself thinking "Wow, that sounds cool!" and I will literally have to slap myself upside the head (not hard!) to remind myself that at best, these people are mostly full of hot gas.

I still have remaining psychosomatic symptoms, though. My new therapist told me that's normal and they will fade with time, but they're still extremely unpleasant. When I was in there, I kept having the physical sensation that the group had me pinned against the wall, with a cardboard box over my face and someone standing on my heart. I've always been a sensitive person who visibly flinches at certain people's voices and/or mannerisms, but I'd never experienced anything like that before. I haven't experienced it since speaking to my new therapist about it. Now I have to work with her on getting rid of the physical sensations of someone waving a hand over my eyes and feeling like I'm pressed up against a huge monolith...and second-guessing myself.

If you are in NYC, I highly recommend contacting the Cult Clinic at the Jewish Board of Child and Family Services. It's in the Resources section of this site, but I wanted to share it again.