- Image via Wikipedia
By Richard Reeve
It’s an interesting phenomenon that sprouts up in all sorts of disturbing ways both within and without of the therapeutic community. Clearly the difficult problems person X is having must be the fault of somebody, right?
It’s as if we still have trouble recognizing even within the professional community that psychopathology, or as we simply say in recovery the disease, is the cause of the difficulty.
A sad example of this is related by Dr. Jann Gumbiner in her post What Causes Addiction? In it she shares a story of a teen with a drinking problem whose therapist focused on the mother-child relationship and in effect blamed the mother for the substance abuse behavior.
“To Kevin’s therapist, it was his mother who over-protected him, indulged his id, and cause his excessive drinking. Several sessions later, Kevin still hadn’t stopped drinking, was still avoiding responsibility for his behavior but the rest of the family was blaming Mom and she felt very, very guilty.”
In recovery, many sponsors will guard against this very human tendency by saying “whenever you are pointing your finger at someone else, three of your fingers are pointing back at you.”
(addendum: this fascinating article Blaming Others is Contagious is more than a little relevant…)
Turning It Over
