A Note To Psychotherapists
A Note To Psychotherapists: Do Not Bother To Look At The Family. Look Instead At What Schools Have Done.
Over the last 50 years, mental health problems in this society, including suicide, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent crime, have all increased in direct proportion to the increase in education. Yet, mental health professionals have continued to look toward the family as the source of these psychological difficulties rather than to look at what is happening to people in schools. Most mental health professionals were themselves educated in the current system. We know from our research that current educational practices damage people in a way that causes them to be blinded to the damage and its source. So it is with mental health professionals. They are blinded to the harm which they themselves incurred in school and to the psychological trauma which was incurred in schools by the people who come to them seeking help. As a result, mental health professionals have spent the last 50 years looking in all the wrong places for the sources of people's psychological problems and their solutions.
Most mental health professionals believe that family life is the source of this society's mental health problems, and mental health professionals have absolutely refused to look at what schools have done. It is not that parents do not ruin children and do despicable things to children every day, because they do. But parents have been doing the same kinds of despicable things to children for centuries under a wide variety of social, economic and political conditions. Only since the increases in education over the last 50 years have mental health problems become a serious threat to large numbers of people in this society.
As former psychotherapists, we have come to realize that most people receive improper care during infancy and early childhood in one form or another depending on the unique qualities of each parent's personal care-giving system. We have also noticed that parenting practices in American society have become increasingly more negligent as people have become more educated. However, from what we can tell from our limited research, people can come to understand and in some cases be healed of despicable childrearing situations as long as they are not exposed to schools. But once people are exposed to current educational practices past the end of the second grade, their ability to recover from improper infancy and early childhood care has been completely destroyed. By the time most children reach the end of the second grade, they have already used up the majority of their resources trying to survive the mental violence and psychological strain of classroom life. As a result, educated people do not have the resources needed to recover from improper or negligent childrearing practices. Furthermore, the mental and emotional apparatus that would have been used to recover from negative parenting is completely destroyed by the premature separation from parents combined with the premature introduction of mental subjects which are forced into children against their will. For more detailed information about how schools destroy children, read "Great Education Moves," issues 1 through 4.
Under the conditions found in the classroom, all human beings must develop sophisticated, unnatural systems for coping with classroom life. These sophisticated systems are fixed, rigidified behavior patterns which by their nature preclude a person's ability to receive any real help. If psychotherapists want to help people find any relief at all, they must look at what happens to human beings when they are exposed for over 11,000 hours to the conditions found in schools. In our opinion, what happens to children in school is every bit as destructive as what happened to people who were exposed to the concentration camps of World War II. If you are a psychotherapist, you probably see traumatized people in your office every day. We believe that the trauma that you are seeing in people's faces was incurred in school and not at home. Again, it is not that parents do not do terrible things to their children, because they do. But what happens to human beings over the course of 11,000 hours or more of the extreme psychological duress found in the classroom causes severe mental and emotional trauma, and under the conditions found in the classroom the patterns of trauma become fixed in the consciousness.
All of the natural pathways in the human consciousness that would lead people to do the right things for themselves in their lives are systematically destroyed in schools.
Any psychotherapist who was faced with trying to help a concentration camp victim would know that what happened to that person in the concentration camp would have to be dealt with first before looking at anything else that occurred in that person's life. Schools are institutionalized, state and federally endorsed concentration camps where children are locked away against their wills, tortured with information that has no meaning to them and threatened constantly with public humiliation, a psychological technique well-known to the Nazis.
Psychotherapists who fail to acknowledge and deal with the psychological effects of current educational practices will always fail to be able to provide educated people with any form of real relief. This society is at a point where people desperately need this nation's mental health professionals to break free from existing "theories" and technologies, and to establish a new frame of reference for working with human beings, one that accounts for a natural, healthy, undamaged human consciousness. Most honest psychotherapists know that almost none of the existing "theories" of psychotherapy or new age technologies work in the ways that the "experts" claim. None of these theories or technologies produce effective, repeatable, predictable results by any research standard. The only psychological theory that has any basis in reality is behavior modification, in that all human beings do have a stimulus-response mechanism. Unfortunately, mental health professionals know so little about the human consciousness that they have been unable to use this information to help people improve their lives.
If psychotherapists want to help people find any relief at all, they must look at what happens to human beings when they are exposed for over 11,000 hours to the conditions found in schools.
The reason that existing theories and technologies are so inferior is that these ideas were born out of the damaged mental systems of people who were educated in the current system. These theories and technologies are based on a frame of reference of what psychologists and psychiatrists have defined as a "normal" human being. However, this definition of a "normal" human being, developed over the last 50 years, reflects what psychologists and psychiatrists were able to perceive as "normal" after a person has been ravaged by the educational system. Current educational practices systematically destroy the natural needs, interests, instincts, feelings, thoughts, skills, goals, hopes and dreams of everyone exposed to this system past the end of the second grade. There is nothing natural or healthy left in adult human beings educated in this society. Psychologists and psychiatrists who have themselves been ravaged by this educational system and stripped of all their natural ways, needs, feelings and thoughts are unable to establish a frame of reference for working with people that is based on a natural, healthy, undamaged human being. What psychologists and psychiatrists have been unable to see is that what they have established as a "normal" human being today (someone who has survived being ravaged by the educational system) is very different from what would have been established as a "normal" human being 150 years ago before the introduction of current educational practices. While human beings of 150 years ago had psychological problems, they had their natural systems for living in the world still intact. People of 150 years ago were more able to follow their natural inclinations and instincts. People who liked carpentry actually became carpenters and people who enjoyed working on the land actually spent their lives farming. Under the influence of modern education, people who love carpentry are becoming lawyers and corporate executives, and people who want to design houses are becoming hairdressers. All of the natural pathways in the human consciousness that would lead people to do the right things for themselves in their lives are systematically destroyed in schools.
What today's mental health professionals have called theories are nothing more than hypothetical conjectures. In reality, a theory about anything is only established after considerable evidence to support that idea or set of principles has been gathered. If anything, all of the existing data suggests that none of these existing theories are correct and that psychologists and psychiatrists have been unable to establish an effective system for restoring human beings to psychological health and well-being.
Over the last 50 years, mental health problems in this society, including suicide, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and violent crime, have all increased in direct proportion to the increase in education.
Under the influence of modern education, psychologists and psychiatrists, like the rest of us, have been damaged in a way that severely limits their ability to perceive human behavior. Mental health professionals have no understanding or knowledge of the inner workings of the human consciousness. Their ideas about how human beings work would be comical if they were not so inherently destructive. When a psychologist or psychiatrist looks at a person, their ideas about what is going on with that person are limited to what they can see and observe. And from those limited observations of human behavior, psychologists and psychiatrists attempt to help people find relief from mental and emotional distress. Imagine that you were having a problem with your car. Let's say that the engine was making unusual noises and your car was stalling every time you had to come to a stop. You would probably take you; car to an auto mechanic to be repaired. Imagine now that your auto mechanic listens to your engine, describes the unusual noises to you and gives you a detailed account of the exterior of your car. He (or she) tells that in addition to the fact that your engine is making unusual noises, your car is red, has four white-wall tires and two doors on either side. Without ever looking at the inner workings of your car, he thanks you for your business and hands you a bill.
This is what goes on in the offices of mental health professionals every day in this country. Psychologists and psychiatrists, using their limited psychological "theories" and new age technologies, cannot see the inner workings of the human consciousness. Mental health professionals can describe only that which is observable, and even then these descriptions are severely limited because of the damage to the mental systems which they incurred in school. Any preschool child whose mental and emotional apparatus is still intact could probably do a more accurate and complete job of describing patients' observable behaviors than an educated, sophisticated psychotherapist could do.
We know that it is difficult for mental health professionals to extricate themselves from established ideas about human beings that are not based in reality. We know because we ourselves have come from mental health backgrounds and we have had great difficulty extricating ourselves from these ideas. We also know that the extent and degree of mental and emotional destruction that Americans have incurred as a result of current educational practices is so severe, that an enormous effort will be necessary if people in this society are ever to recover from what has happened to them in school. We realize, too, that most mental health professionals were themselves successful within the current educational structure. As formerly successful students, they have been brainwashed into believing that they must be successful psychotherapists who make a name for themselves and who earn a large salary doing so. However, this society needs mental health professionals to sacrifice making a "name" for themselves and to sacrifice their "big buck" practices in order to help this nation recover from the psychological destruction that the majority of educated people have incurred.
Psychologists and psychiatrists need to break free from all the established systems and ideas, because unless they do so they will never begin to unravel the real mysteries of the human consciousness. We ask mental health professionals who insist on using existing psychological "theories" on people who have been ravaged by schools to consider the following paradigm.
Every day, children are forced to sit silently and passively in hard wooden chairs for hours at a time. They are forced to memorize large quantities of information which is of no interest to them personally and is in no way related to their everyday lives. Children are forced to do these things under conditions of severe psychological duress, where they are threatened, punished and publicly humiliated for the slightest infractions. Then, after subjecting children to these torturous conditions, teachers say, "Now, Class, how are we all doing today?" And the children, whose primary and single most unifying thoughts are about being free of school, respond to the teacher in unison, "We are fine, Mrs. Smith." And Mrs. Smith carries on with the torture.