- How to survive (practically) anything — Psychology Today — An interview with psychiatrists Steven Wolin and Sybil Wolin on the belief that adults aren’t prisoners of troubled childhoods. This is pretty darn interesting. Don’t get caught up in the language used. Everyone has a different understanding of what the “recovery” movement is and it’s a highly problematic term at this point. Just as they say. The interview: — Steven: The Damage Model is a belief about the intergenerational transmission of disease. It basically says that if your family is having trouble, the chances that you are going to get it are very high. It derives from traditional psychiatric thinking, conventional wisdom, and popular psychology, which stress how children growing up in adverse circumstances suffer lasting emotional disturbances. I call this prediction, with its bias toward pathology, the Damage Model. It is prophecy of doom. — PT: And the “Challenge Model”? — Steven: I offer it: to give survivors of troubled families a more balanced perspective about their past. I also, hope to have an effect on my professional colleagues. — Sybil: We want to restore balance to the mental-health professions, which really are the mental-illness professions. — Steven: Both models start with the observation that the troubled family can inflict considerable harm on its children. In the Damage Model, children are seen as passive and without choices to help themselves. In the Challenge Model, the family is not only a destructive force but an opportunity. Survivors are challenged by the family’s troubles to experiment and to respond actively and creatively. Their preemptive responses to adversity, repeated over time, become incorporated into the self as lasting resiliencies.
- Holistic Recovery — The pitfalls of accepting your diagnosis and telling everyone — This is a response to the piece I posted yesterday about recovering from what is labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis. Gianna Kali has reposted a 2007 opinion piece today by Furious Seasons’ Phillip Dawdy where she takes eloquent issue with his opinion that accepting your diagnosis is mandatory on the road to recovery. This idea of accepting your diagnosis is widespread and the thinking is that you are delusional if you do not. Today, many people proudly proclaim that they are their diagnosis. Coincidentally, more and more people have that diagnosis. Wearing your diagnosis goes beyond what the Dawdy piece is saying, but it’s a slippery slope. Accepting can become defining.rest here