To the client activists:

The experience of the client is traumatic, stemming from both originary trauma and the induced trauma of treatment. While there are many responses to trauma, the response to trying to come to grips with the trauma tends to be rage. One metaphor for the clients’ way of being is ‘Bedlam’, the untrammelled expression of rage behavior as a spectacle. We find this to be an insulting stereotype but we cannot avoid the fact that the secondary rage of trauma response can be a severe problem in itself.

Within the provider community there is a method of ‘suppress and avoid’ for dealing with rage — behavior management. But there is also a more subtle version of this, which involves client buy-in, so-called ‘conflict resolution’. Rage reinforcement methods like conflict resolution operate by displacing the rage from immediate issues to deeper, more distant issues at the core of madness. The question of what to do with the ‘displaced rage’, displaced that is by direct control or buy-in, is at center stage because it is our ‘being real’, our authenticity that is at stake.

The more matured client response is what used to be called ‘taking responsibility’, that is, finding an honest and productive venue for the expression or displacement of the rage. When we started the Accountability Caucus (A.C.), we adopted the slogan, “Don’t diss, don’t rage.” What we were saying with this highly compressed phrase was that we should take the ego expression out of the rage and invest the energy unselfishly in advocacy for the values of the client culture. We should not displace it by ‘dissing’ others, especially other clients, that we should be ‘accountable’, and care.

In practice, taking one’s rage and investing it in a caring, productive place is quite a feat: Everything in (1) the practicum of ‘treatment’ and (2) the habit patterns of the ‘old tradition’ of the clients mitigates against this. In the A.C. we have as many different personal solutions to this as we have members. What we try to avoid is the displacement onto other clients, the brainwash and control process whose most extreme phase is captured in the metaphor of ‘Gulag’, thought reform by hurt and methods of torture. As we develop our disciplines in dealing with our rages, we find we have ‘ducked under’ the purview of the social stereotypes and that we have learned to be effective ‘client psychologists’.

In solidarity

Andrew Phelps