Now putting it like this you might think, of course this is true and of course I want the truth and of course I’m going to express it in therapy, but it’s not that easy. In fact, expressing the truth can be a major problem for lots of different reasons. A lot of us where punished, for example, for expressing the truth. As children we’d point something out in the environment, or something that we saw in our parents, or some hypocrisy that was obvious and blatant and horrible, only to be slapped down for not presenting the consensus illusion that everything is OK. Similarly a lot of us have been hurt in other ways by the people we have expressed the truth to. We tell our family things, or our friends things, or some professional person some things, and they laugh at us or worse, use it against us in some fashion. We open up and tell “the truth” only to experience hurt, suppression, and manipulation. And it is true even in therapy. Therapists often misuse what we say to them either because they are incompetent, latently abusive themselves, or too caught up in their own pathologies to be able to see/understand what you are talking about. In situations like this it isn’t surprising that we clam up tighter than an oyster in hot water, but it is also not healthy, or functional, or particularly conducive to therapy. If you want to sit there and not be honest, if you want to hide things, or lie, or present a different picture of your reality than actually exists, you might as well not be wasting time or money in therapy because you won’t make any progress no way, no how.

So what are you going to do? Well, the first step in the process of healing is to find a therapist who you trust. This is very important. You will not open up and tell the truth to anybody that you don’t trust, or who you think might hurt you in some way. This is your number one criteria. If you don’t trust the therapist, leave the relationship and find somebody else.

And how do you find somebody you trust? Well, you can trust your gut if you want. If you feel a little sick and nauseous while the therapist is talking, that’s a good sign you should get out. If you don’t trust your gut, you can also look for knowledgeability, The big test for me here is whether or not the therapist seems to understand what is going on in your life. If the things they are talking about make sense to you, if they give you insight and help you explain the troubles that you experience, then this is probably someone you can trust. On the other hand if every time they open their mouth they make no sense, make you confused, or make you feel bad about things, then that’s a good indication that the therapist is neither trustworthy or knowledgeable. As always, caveat emptor.

Assuming you find a trustworthy therapist, what’s the next step. Well, the next step is for you to overcome whatever fears or blockages exist that make you withhold the truth. These blockages can be many and various and include things like fear of being shamed, fear of being manipulated, fear of losing control of the situation, fear of violent consequences (verbal violence, emotional violence), and so on. The way to overcome those fears is to first recognize they are there and then “walk through them.” If you trust your therapist simply remind yourself that you trust the therapist and you are confident they won’t do anything to hurt you.  If it helps, and it will, talk about your fears with your therapist. A competent therapist will address those fears directly and reassure you they are working on your side of the court, with your emotional, psychological, and life interests in mind.

And that’s all there is to it. It really is that simple. Getting started on an effective therapeutic path towards healing means first speaking the Truth about yourself and your reality. If, for whatever reason, you withhold (and FYI a competent therapist will recognize you are withholding), you won’t make effective progress. So find somebody you trust, power your way through the blockages and fears, and learn to speak the Truth. If you are serious about therapy, if you are serious about healing, it is the only way forward.

Mike and Gina

If you are a victim of abuse and you need help healing, contact us. We do in-person, email, and phone sessions and have had great success with eating disorders, OCD, depression, marital dysfunction, and other outcomes of toxic family, intimate partner, and social, abuses.

The group leader says it is for your own good and that it will teach you life skills, but for you it is an emotional horror show. I mean, can you imagine the emotions that you’d feel? Singled out in a group of twenty, publicly labelled as a loser too stupid to follow the rules, the subject of derisive and degrading attention, isolated, even terrorized by the psychological horror, you’d be traumatized for a long period of time. And this would be true even if the group you were in was relatively supportive. Even if they downplayed the social isolation and public shaming, you’d still feel it at a deep level. We are social beings after all and as the great Robert Merton said, we get our self image in part by the way others see us. And if we think others are seeing us as some stupid loser (which is actually the intent of socially isolating someone in this fashion) then that is how we are going to see ourselves. And that can’t help but have a negative, disturbing, impact on us.

Of course the sad thing is, it is a lot worse then just your own personal feelings about it. The reality is most groups would not be supportive. A lot of psychological research in the sixties (look up Zimbardo’s prison experiments) show very clearly just how ugly it can get for people who are publicly separated and isolated. People, even close friends and family, turn on you when an authority figure labels, isolates, and rejects. There can be a snow ball effect. First you sit in the middle of the room and feel bad. Then the people around you start to treat you differently. They laugh and point fingers and find other ways to isolate and exclude you. They avoid you at coffee break, talk behind your back, titter and laugh and generally extend the boundaries created by the visual isolation. Pretty soon you become a bonafied social pariah, avoided by all and excluded by many. Of course from a social control perspective the whole things works very well because having experienced that kind of trauma once, you’ll never want to go through it again, and so fer sure you’ll jump into line and tap along with the tune provided. But of course once you’ve been labelled and humiliated, the emotional damage is done.

Talking about it now you can see, it just can’t be a good thing and as an adult experiencing something like that you’d probably (hopefully) recognize the abuse for what it was and leave the group. I’d certainly encourage it. Research (see below) shows that people who experience emotional abuse have problems with anger, attachment, bonding, emotional responsiveness, have problems applying even basic social skills. How damaging would that kind of public isolation and rejection be for you if you actually put up with it? So if you’re experiencing something like that, get up and walk away.

Now of course, saying it like this makes a solution to the problem seem relatively easy, just get up and walk away. But now imagine that the team leader has authority over you. Imagine that your group leader actually had the power to confine you to that “box” in front of twenty of your friends and colleagues. It would be bad enough to begin with, but it would be even worse under conditions of force and duress. Not only could you not get up and leave no matter how you were feeling, but all the negative emotions would be amplified to that point that even a tough, independent, adult might succumb to the damaging effects of the abuse. It is not even too much to say that a sensitive adult may experience post-traumatic stress. After all, being shamed in a public space is a traumatic event by any standards.

So, if you are following along with me now you are probably thinking that this form of bald faced abuse of power and authority is something that we, as a civilized modern society, should be able to do without. There’s lots of way to motivate people without resorting to either physical or emotional abuse. In fact, as anybody with a clue will tell you, physical and emotional abuse are horrible motivators leading to far more problems than they solve. So imagine now that we take this box thing and do it to children in school. Imagine you have a twelve year old daughter and imagine the teacher has threatened that child that if they don’t behave and live up to expectations, they are going to have to sit on the floor for a week. You remember what school is like, and how horrible children can be to each other. I imagine that a psychologically and emotionally defenseless child would be TERRORIZED by even the thought of that sort of public display and humiliation. You can imagine the damage done should the child actually be forced, by the teacher, to submit to the public humiliation. Self esteem would take a hit, their social network would probably crumble, and the effects would no doubt trickle out into the schoolyard in ways to innumerable to enumerate in this short article. Schools have a hard enough time dealing with bullying to begin with without teachers painting a target on a child’s back in this fashion.

[amazon_enhanced asin="0787943630" container="div" container_class="bookbox" price="All" background_color="FFFFFF" link_color="000000" text_color="0000FF" /]Now I know what you are saying, no school would ever do something like this. I mean, we now know that emotional abuse is bad, and we know that isolation, rejection, and public shaming is emotionally abusive, and we would never allow our teachers to engage in it. Shockingly however, emotional abuse is a problem in school. As a parent I have had to go to bat for my kids several times. For example, my son’s teacher put his name on a board and publicly humiliated him for not doing his work properly. When I told her that her public humiliation was making him feel bad all she should could say was that if he wanted to avoid the bad feelings, he’d have to perform to her expectations. I was shocked that she seemed so unconcerned about his feelings, and when I pointed this out to the principle, and when I said that as an adult post-secondary teacher it was against the law for me to even post student numbers in a public space because I was not allowed to violate their right to privacy and safety (in Alberta FOIP laws protect adults from this sort of public exposure, so why not children??), he said that the classroom was hardly a public space. Of course, it is a public space. Not only does everybody in the school get to see how my son is doing, but parents of the kids that go to the school can have a look as well, so I don’t know where he got his “not a public space” comment, ’cause clearly it is. And that’s not even the worst of it you know. Last week my daughter came home and said that her teacher told her that if she didn’t perform as expected, she might lose her desk “privileges” and have to sit on the floor for a week.

I’m not kidding.

If my twelve year old daughter can’t “make the rent” in her classroom, her teacher is going to identify, isolate, ridicule, and publicly humiliate her by taking away her desk and forcing her to sit on the floor in the midst of thirty of her school age peers. And while her teacher says that it probably won’t be a problem for my daughter, I am horrified nonetheless that even the threat has been issued. I mean, this same teacher, and this school principle, would never ever in a million years think they could pull a stunt like this with adults (can you imagine how upset the teaching staff of the school would be if I put their names and pictures here, put them in a box in public, and held them up for public shaming and ridicule? Furious they’ll be. I’m sure it will be bad enough that I’ve just pointed at them in this fashion), so why are the feelings of our children so irrelevant that they do not even register on their radar? Frankly I feel sorry for the three kids she’s done it to in the past. I mean, I’ve read the research, I am counselor by trade, I am aware of how profoundly damaging something like this can be, and frankly I am shocked that professional teachers seem unaware of basic psychological research. I hate being such a boisterous critic but this is important. The research shows this kind of thing undermines creativity, damages productivity, and causes social problems. As a society we’re always looking for ways to save money so if these practices undermine our global competitiveness and cost us in terms of damaged creativity, lower productivity, and the cash dollars it takes to deal with social problems, then on those grounds alone we should be up in arms over this kind of nonsense. If you ask me though, protecting our kids from emotional harm is reason enough.

Bottom line?

If our education system is turning out teachers and principles who don’t think twice about emotionally abusing our children, and if as parents we can’t see that abuse, and don’t stand up to stop it, then we as a society, got a problem.

Sources and References

Brendgen, Mara, Wanner, Brigitte, & Vitaro, Frank (2006). Verbal Abuse by the Teacher and Child Adjustment from Kindergarten Through Grad e6. Pediatrics, 117: 5.

Hyman, Irwin & Snook, Pamela (1999). [amazon_link id="0787943630" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Dangerous Schools. What we can do about the physical and emotional abuse of our children[/amazon_link].

Krugmen, Richard D. & Krugman, Mary K (1984). Emotional Abuse in the Classroom: The Pediatrician’s Role in Diagnosis and Treatment. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. 128: 284-286.

Moeller, James R. (2002). The Combined Effects of Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Abuse During Childhood: Long-term Health Consequences for Women. Child Abuse and Neglect, 17(5): 623-40.

• http://kalimunro.com/wp/articles-info/sexual-emotional-abuse/emotional-abuse-the-most-common-form-of-abuse
• http://www.findcounseling.com/journal/child-abuse/emotional-abuse.html
• Zimbardo Documentary

And why is that?

Why do we try so hard?

Why do we not just give up go with casual, meaningless sex?

Because we all want human contact, we all want deep intimacy, and we all want committed loyalty. We all want somebody who has our back, puts us first, takes our feelings into account, and hangs with is. It is like we are hard wired for intimate partnerships and while a few cynics may scoff and sputter, certainly we’ve never met anybody who wants to be alone.  Most people it seems thrive only in intimate, loving relationships. Still, and despite our sometimes desperate need for intimate partner relationships, we just can’t seem to get it right.

And why is that?

Well, for so many reasons Gina and I just don’t know where to start.  Chances are, your parents weren’t good models for you, your average romantic comedy doesn’t provide good advice, Disney’s notions are ridiculously stereotyped at best, and your friends, well, how many successful, long term relationships have they had? And this is just the base cultural soil we plant our relationship seed in (not very good as you can see). It doesn’t even begin to include a consideration of the damage violent and abusing parenting , or bad past relationships, can do to our ability to trust and attach. And don’t even get us started on so called “professional” guidance. The majority of psychologists we’ve met work ridiculous hours, focusing the majority of their energy and attention on career, get their emotional, psychological (and sometimes even physical) needs met outside the relationship, and thereby neglect their spouse and their children at home. If you are interested in getting your own relationship house in order then you have to ask the hard question here, how can a counselor who needs guidance themselves provide anybody with solid advice on relationships at all?  Spend your hard earns dollars in that direction if you want, but don’t be surprised if it isn’t money well spent.

In any case, the topic is big and the problem legion, but that is no reason not to tackle it and that is what we propose to do. Over the next few months we’ll write about the modern intimate relationships, explore the “soil” from which they sprout, the cultural bed in which they are nurtured, and all the interferences, obstacles, and nonsense that get in the way of attaining the holy grail of intimate partner relationships, happiness. We’ll draw from our own two decade struggle to “get it right,” from what we see going on around us, and also from our private practice where we’ve seen all our clients struggle with intimate partner happiness. Our goal here isn’t to be the final word on intimate partner relationships and how to have them, but simply to give you some ideas to consider. If you’re happy the way you are, if your intimate relationship(s) is satisfying at an emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual level, then great. If not, then read along. You never know, you might find something in this series that will help you improve your ability to trust, connect, and be intimate with the person that you’ve chosen to live your life with.

Mike and Gina

Next article, starting with the basics.