The Words of the Poor Family

Opposition to Psychology

Ed Poor
June 4, 1999

I have thought a lot about psychology. Here are some of my thoughts.

1. Leaders are afraid that members will leave the church. Vashon Island started out perfectly fine, with members getting permission to go there for therapy. Later on, the therapists reportedly began counseling people to give up their faith in True Parents and/or the Principle. Remember, therapists have their own models of restoration, and these models can come into opposition to DP. Which leads right into...

2. A great deal of therapy is selfish. That is, the therapist helps the client to become comfortable with whatever weaknesses and character defects they have. Oh, people, don't like it when you're pushy? Here are some pills, here's an attitude (to hell with those nay-sayers) to adopt. Your self-actualization has to be the main thing. This sounds close enough to spiritual growth that a lot of people might buy it. On second thought, they do buy it, quite literally: at $90 an hour.

3. Therapy is almost exclusively atheistic. From Sigmund Freud, on down to the present, psychotherapists have almost universally denied the existence of God and been hostile to religion. Remember all those conservatorships which provided a legal pretext for parents to kidnap their adult children and hand them over to professional faith-breakers (the soi-disant "deprogrammers")?

4. Hard Work as panacea. People who grew up in economically devastated South Korea mustered incredible will-power and determination to pull their lives together after the Korean War. Not too many Americans know this, but when a Korean departs from a place where another Korean is working, he will say (literally), "Work hard!" -- roughly equivalent to our American expression, "Keep up the good work!" Note carefully that this is not from boss to subordinate, but just plain folks to one another. Americans would rarely say this; we usually say, "Take it easy!" The thought of some member sitting around in a comfortable chair talking about their feelings could easily be seen as a supreme act of self-indulgence, at best a way of shirking work. To Americans, this response evokes Binkie's boss (in the Life Is Hell comic strip) saying, "Get back to work, you!"

5. The jealousy factor. How come these Americans won't listen to Father's tradition from me? Why do they have to go to some disreputable outsider?

6. The minimization fallacy. This is related to the panacea bit in #4 above. Whatever character defects or lingering emotional scars are holding a member back, the leader doesn't consider it a big deal. Just make conditions, shut up, and continue your work. I think this is the worst one of all, and it reveals a shocking ignorance of the concept of Indemnity. Whatever has been lost must be restored by reversing the process through which it was lost. If someone's Heart has been damaged by poor upbringing, circumstances, and events, how is fundraising 14 hours a day going to cure that?

7. The Wacky Theories problem. There are so many psychological models and therapeutic systems. How can we choose correctly from them? Psychoanalysts have an approach that is supposed to take years. Rational-emotive therapists claim to work in period of weeks or months. There's Reiki, Orgone Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, 12 Steps, Transactional Analysis, Scientology (oops! that's a whole other religion -- or is it?), Astrology, yoga, the Teachings 40 Generations Later, Past Lives Regression, and many more.

Just a few thoughts. 

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