To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 12:23:41 -0700

Subject: Re: [s-acc] trust and trauma

 

Ttt:

I've spent the morning with a -2.0 low tide hanging out with those who have "behavior but no brains," the Echinodermata.

I believe you have not got to the depth of the matter here. We "have a dream." It's that our way(s) of being be viable socially. We need to understand behavioral management as a system that is out of hand and does not practice "creative maladjustment" support as M.L. King Jr. calls for.

Ttt wrote:

We all have a tendency to get hung up on words, particularly if they have been associated with something negative to us. This has nothing to do with "behavioral management" as it has been know in the past--someone else trying to manage our behavior.

Again, our movement in the 70s developed a critique of the "token economy" which was the direct inpatient experience of behavior management. Our politics has been to commit revolution and overthrow that system of control by denial and brainwash. We have not fully succeeded and the dominant forces in our movement have characteristic "bad habits" of insufficient response in their work styles. It is not "someone else trying to manage our behavior," or "us v. them." It's that society deals with madness by bigotry, by discrimination. See e.g. the work of Paula Caplan and Lisa Cosgrove, Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis.

This is teaching you techniques that you can use (if you want to) to regulate the affect of your emotions, particularly those emotions that cause you pain, anxiety, depression, etc. It puts you totally in control. If it works for you and you choose to use it, fine; but if you choose not too, still fine. It is not anything that someone else can force on you.

Have you considered, by analogy with the feminist movement, teaching women to have a "good humor" about having to do the vast majority of the housework? For the problem is ultimately not "being feminine" but exploitation of labor.

We are dealing with systematic behavior management by the society. SAMHSA organizes the discipline one way. NAMI organizes it another. Our problem with those behavior managements is a POLITICAL PROBLEM. That's why what Aaa says about relating to trauma cues with discipline is necessary.

Joining the Kiwanis movement is a practical choice for you, some others. It gives you some leverage. In the 1970s I joined the U.S-China People's Friendship Association. They were fighting for normalization of U.S.-China relations. I got some leverage there, at that time. It helped me personally combat those "somebody else" folks. But it was not an answer for our movement.

We need a work process that is an answer for our movement. Please listen, I know you will.

 

Andrew