You Are The Expert on Therapy, Rich. I Will Ponder Theories with You

• Responses to First Learning about Affect Theory by Jim Duffy a.k.a. J.C.D., 2/28/97
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    • Sympathy for the Devil by Rich Kuyper, 3/22/97
      
      

Rich, I am sorry to disappoint you after getting you intrigued, but regrettably I have little to say about treatment implications for compulsively abusive persons. I just wanted to note in my posting of sympathy that certain psychological afflictions, such as those that affect many abusive persons, render them sadly unlikely to find much sympathy insofar as sympathy requires a belief that the other is suffering, is conscious of the suffering, and is unable to choose not to. Insofar as the pathology of compulsive abusiveness is such that all three of these requirements for evoking sympathy appear to psychologically untutored observers to not be met, the abusive person is likely to receive precious little sympathy from anyone except those expertly informed about his/her underlying condition. Since I have no personal experience working with this population, I would not dare to presume to suggest to you , especially you, what is therapeutically useful for such clients. I have really admired your own discussions of this type of work because I thought you had a very good handle in the application of Affect Theory in being able to quickly and effectively reach a level of suffering (in helping clients identify shame) that made these clients feel more accessible to their own vulnerability and thus to others’ (e.g., your own) sympathy for them. And this is not a condescending, short-sighted, sentimental sympathy. I am learning more from you than I could ever teach you about the subject of treatment of disorders leading to DV.

Having established my warrant to comment on the broad topic of abuse and its treatment as subordinate to yours, I am willing to share some of my theoretical/hypothetical reflections with you but only in the spirit of a screw-up dialogue (i.e., I screw-up and you correct me). I think, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, that the conclusion that abusive clients lack empathy is usually misguided, for their empathy may be exceptionally keen, especially in being able to spot others’ areas of vulnerability and neediness. The first component of sympathy--an empathic attunement to others’ suffering--is intact if not overdeveloped. What appears to be lacking is the second component of sympathy--the urge to act to alleviate the other’s suffering. But this component may really be undeveloped or inhibited rather than lacking. Whatever keeps the compulsively abusive person from being able to act in a truly helpful way could be undeveloped or inhibited because of a thoroughly dark shame about one’s own need for help when distressed, making the abusing client threatened and intolerant of such a need when observed in another. When a need for helpful sympathy from others is as powerfully shamed as I imagine it to be in compulsively abusive persons, I tend to look for a “software” (a la Nathanson) defect due to early attachment trauma. I am looking forward to attending a workshop in April on the use of grief groups for prisoners with a violent history. As I understand this work (and I’ll soon see if I’m correct in my understanding), it is believed that trying to get chronically aggressively abusive persons to “feel more empathy for others” is irrelevant because these persons either already have such empathy or they cannot use it sympathetically until they first receive sympathetic caring or benevolent support in grieving their own heretofore unacknowledged early pain, loss, and abuse. Once they can feel their own extremely strong and badly frustrated need for other’s sympathy for their own suffering, they would then be able to better use their empathy for others’ suffering as a signal that others, too, now need sympathy rather than terrorizing to silence their distress. My belief that it is early attachment trauma that plays the key (software) role in damaging the sympathetic disposition of mammalian altruism (nature’s antagonist to destructive aggression) was given considerable bolstering from reading Felicity de Zulueta’s marvelous book “From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Violence.” I’m sure you have some reactions to my theorizing, and I look forward to your comments or critiques. I feel out on a limb here; so please be gentle if I’m either preaching to the choir or exposing my lack of experience with your area of expertise.

• Therapy for Abusers by Margaret Blakely, 3/23/97
  • Wow, Good Idea! by Jim Duffy, 3/23/97
• On Support for the Sinner by Rich Kuyper, 3/24/97