Respect the person, not the belief

 

I am going to guess that all psychotherapy students – counselors, social workers, psy­chol­o­gists – have one or more mandatory “multicultural” courses in their curric­ulum. The idea is that the beneficent counselor will know about different ethnic and cultural groups’ traditions and mores; will ask, let’s say, conspicuous clients about their beliefs or will assume them, and will accept them with the deference of one tiptoeing on moody egg­shells. Respect for one’s elders. Avoidance of eye contact. Beliefs about bereavement and the dead, about smiling, about mental illness. And of course ableism, racism, religion, spirituality, tiger mothering.

I’m proposing that this is blind ignorance, that therapists should use the following defi­ni­tion of “cultural influence” in sessions: It is what your parents did and are doing to you.

Until the Collective Unconscious can be scientifically proven, we must see that people are indi­viduals not culture avatars and that they absorb injunctions and hypnoses from a per­son, one other person. The definition can be refined: Cultural osmosis will be what’s irrational or extra­neous to the mental health of a person. We would not, for example, call someone’s disdain for his abusive grandfather a cultural totem. But deferential acquiescence to the old man’s piss of a personality could very well be an inbred feature of one’s culture.

When for months I observe an Asian girl’s stoical silence and depression, formed in the pollu­tion of her mother’s imma­turity, solipsism and anger, I’m not looking at “culture.” I’m looking at abuse, and I address it as that. When I am trying to help a Filipino woman sever the sui­cid­ally toxic bond to her mother – she doesn’t need to live with you until you’re dead – I’m not chal­lenging a sacred tradition, I’m trying to eject an old woman who belongs in a nurs­ing home or in her own condo. When I’m helping a 35-year-old Cuban man find the strength to move out of his parents’ home and live with his girlfriend, I’m not fighting a cultural imperative. I’m try­ing to help him be a person not a symbiont.

I’m proposing an idea inspired by research showing psychiatry is the least reli­gious, most atheistic of the medical professions. We are not here to accept the assumptions in clients’ minds. Any of their assumptions. This includes their beliefs in sub­ser­vience, in the primacy of clan, in token respect, shibboleths, memes, religious doctrine. I don’t try to argue away a client’s God. But if in the course of therapy, it becomes clear that the Orthodoxy of his Judaism is, first in his father’s mind and now in his, of a piece with the callous materialism and lack of empathy that have nearly de­stroyed his marriage and made him an abusive parent, I will inquire into it without the blinders of reverence. Fellow Jews, steadfast as Ner Tamid, have appreciated the oppor­tunity to look at their legacy in a more pedestrian way. The Vietnamese college student, who moved away from her home, was good to cut the cord connecting her mother’s computer to the school’s grade data base. Therapists see this all the time: Belief in a narcissistic parent’s love is to hold onto a twig in quicksand. They cling to it and drown.

The matter of personhood and belief should be central to the meaning of psycho­ther­apy. Are we here to pacify the client, or to at least see if she wants to be different from what she is? In that spirit, I believe we should look at culture clearly: At worst it is introjected abuse; at best, defense.