The Limits of Therapy

            Recently, I’ve been seeing ads for the Michael Jackson movie everywhere and it’s making me angry. I’d noticed his songs making their way back into public spaces over the past few years, but this is another level of normalization. I don’t know if, as a society, we’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if he was a pedophile or not, or if we’ve decided that we don’t believe the victims who came forward, or if we specifically can’t tolerate knowing that boys are just as vulnerable as girls when there’s a predator around. The only argument I’ve heard, over and over again, is that the gifts of this or that famous man or woman are worth more to society than the lives they ruined. We do this a lot, this convenient forgetting. We go through a huge reckoning – after the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, MeToo – and then we get tired of having to be so aware all the time and our hard-won wisdom disappears. The problem is that, for the victims of the abuse, there is no forgetting. And there’s just so much abuse victims can do to heal without the support of society at large, by, at the very least, not celebrating, or electing, known abusers.

I hear too many people espousing therapy as THE answer – meaning, it’s your job, as the victim, to heal yourself; no one else needs to be involved or feel responsible or be inconvenienced by what happened to you. The mental health industry has contributed to this magical thinking even further by espousing short-term manualized therapies: 16 weeks to recover from childhood abuse, six weeks to fix your OCD symptoms, 4 weeks to overcome your addiction to heroin. Done. We even make jokes about people who remain in psychotherapy, or worse, psychoanalysis, for years, as if we believe that still being in therapy after a few years means you are a lost cause or just wasting time. I can promise you that I have worked very hard in therapy, for thirty years or so, and could spend the rest of my life working hard in therapy without fully healing. That’s just how it is. The damage human beings can do to other human beings is deep and lasting and people don’t just “get over it” through willpower or positive thinking or trauma-informed Yoga (sorry Bessel Van Der Kolk). Add to that how hard the work actually is, and how much it can cost, and how difficult it can be to find a good therapist in the first place, and how much shame can be thrown at survivors by the people around them for daring to keep “harping on the past.”

            As a society, we don’t have the patience to tolerate lifelong recovery, and yet we are unwilling to recognize the role those unresolved traumas have on our society on a daily basis. We even have a tendency to excuse abusers because they were abused as children, even though most abuse victims would never hurt anyone the way they’ve been hurt, on pain of death. The mantra “Hurt people hurt people” is incomplete and therefore wildly misleading, and yet I’ve heard it parroted by psychologists and social workers and doctors and activists, because people like pithy statements that can fit on a sign. Being hurt as a child is, yes, a necessary precursor to becoming abusive as an adult (and no, I don’t believe that some people are born evil despite having had a perfect childhood), but childhood abuse isn’t enough to create an abuser. More often than not, abuse survivors continue to suffer the effects of the abuse for the rest of their lives, refusing to take it out on anyone else around them, believing they deserve to suffer in silence, and society judges them for their failure to thrive.

            In the age of social media, we have become, if possible, even more simplistic in our thinking. We want to believe that Superman is good and Lex Luthor is bad and that’s the whole story, because we don’t want to be bothered with parsing each personality trait and recognize that sometimes the bad guy wins us over by being charming and convincing, and sometimes the good guy gets ignored because he’s boring, or gets some things wrong. We crave certainty. I think this is how we ended up with Donald Trump. When a politician is uncertain or willing to question their own assumptions, we tend to dismiss them in favor of someone who thinks they know everything. No questions. No doubts. We, as a society, are acting like trauma survivors who want to forget the past because it was too painful, but the cost of forgetting is that the abuser continues to create chaos. It’s a culture-wide dissociative disorder that we can’t seem to recognize, let alone heal. But that leaves the actual victims of the abuse to try to heal while their abusers are actively being brought back into the fold. Woody Allen’s daughter had to change her name in order to get some peace, Michael Jackson’s victims have been forgotten again, and even Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have had to fight to be heard over all of the noise about his crimes, as if what was done to them isn’t at the heart of the story.

            When it comes to cases like Michael Jackson or Woody Allen or Donald Trump, we have the chance, as a society, to send a message to every victim that we will support and protect them, and that what happened to them could not have happened in the light of day. But when we elect and laud serial abusers and pedophiles and rapists, we are telling their victims, and everyone else, that no one gives a shit about their pain and they are out there on their own.

             My latest YouTube deep dive led me into the history of One Direction, the boy band from the UK that took over the world for a while in the 2010’s. I wasn’t paying attention to any of the craziness at the time, not even when Liam Payne died from a fall from a hotel balcony at age 31, overloaded with cocaine, alcohol and antidepressants. I remember hearing about his death in passing, but I didn’t really know who he was or who else was in the band and I just accepted the story that this was inevitable and unpreventable. So, during my deep dive, I was surprised to find out that Liam, in particular, had been really open about how and why he was struggling in the aftermath of his years in the group, and yet no one seemed to know how to help. He spoke eloquently, years before his death, about how he thought young people in the entertainment industry needed to be taken better care of, both protected from predators and offered psychological and emotional supports to help them navigate the bizarre world they’re in. We’ve actually seen a number of documentaries over the past few years about the damage done to young stars, kids who ended up relying on drugs and alcohol to get though their days while adults made millions of dollars off of them. What I haven’t heard, though, is any resulting plan to reckon with these situations and make sure they don’t happen again. No, instead we hear about cases like Liam Payne’s, of young people who had it all and then crashed and burned, as if no one was responsible for the damage except for him. If this is happening to famous kids, right in front of our eyes, just imagine what’s going on in the lives of children who are not famous and don’t have the media following their every move. Why is this okay with us? Why are we still unwilling to know what we know and make societal change to protect children and young adults from the predators around them?

            I haven’t seen the Michael Jackson movie, or the Broadway show that’s been in the works for a while now, but I’m sure they both dwell heavily on the abuse he suffered as a child and refuse to hold him responsible for the abuse he perpetrated as an adult. This is how the cycle of abuse gets perpetuated: first we don’t protect the child, then, because we feel guilty for what we didn’t do back then, we allow the abuse to be re-enacted on the next generation, and fail to protect the child victims once again.

            Why can’t we do better than this?

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?