"The Survivor's Voice"

A Newsletter for adult survivors of physical, emotional and sexual abuse and those who care about them.

A Conversation with: Kevin McCready, Ph.D. August, 1995, Director of San Joaquin Psychotherapy Center

 J.: How did you become involved with Healing For Survivors? What attracted you to that organization?

Dr. McC.: I can't remember specifically how I got to meet Jan and Ken Kister. I think some mutual friends may have introduced us. I know when she came here and told me about the work she was doing and the people she was working with I was obviously impressed by the need.

J.: The need for what?

Dr. McC.: The need for treatment for people who have been sexually abused. After spending a great deal of time in the mainstream mental health system and being overwhelmingly appalled by the attitudes in that system. I've always been on the lookout for alternatives; community centered alternatives.

J.: Do you feel like Healing For Survivors is a good alternative?

Dr. McC.: Yes. It's an excellent alternative because it is a matter of people within the community reaching out to others in the community without being compromised by a lot of the factors that have taken over the mental health system per se.

J.: What does that mean?

Dr. McC.: It's a little hard to articulate. There is a lot of power, politics and greed involved. The psychiatric institutions are really operating out of a sense of control over social deviants, control over their own fears of intimacy A lot of the treatment techniques, as such, have been contrived to protect the providers from the patients rather than trying to help the patients, so it's more a control system, instead of treating people in order to get them free.

J.: What do you see as the difference between group therapy and individual therapy? What differences do you see between traditional therapy and what we do at HFS?

Dr. McC.: You need to be very careful. You are not doing group therapy.

J.: Right, we are doing support groups.

Dr. McC.: There are a lot of things in the world that are therapeutic that are got therapy, and there have been lots of problems because even professional therapists don't understand what therapy is and what isn't. Support groups are very therapeutic for people. Their value is in reaching one dimension of helping people that professional therapists can't reach. Good therapy is not a matter of helping people feel better. Good therapy is a matter of working with someone in order to re-work the way they think about the world and about themselves. It is very difficult and painful work. It's not taking care of people and as I said, it is not making them feel better. It is in breaking through a lot of the problems people have about trust and violation. You cannot be a friend and a therapist. That is not to say there are not any elements of friendship and support in the therapeutic relationship. It is just that the main goal of therapy is not merely to be a friend. When you are a therapist you can't play the role of friend and supporter. You are limited because it would compromise the depth of the therapy. On the other hand support and empathy and sharing of experiences are very important and very therapeutic for people, especially people who have been victimized. That's what the support group at HF8 specialize in. A lot of times there is a problem because people think one thing substitutes for the other. This is one of the criticisms by the professionals, that people go to support groups and think they are getting therapy. On the other hand, a lot of times people will go to therapy and not understand they need support.

J.: They expect support from the therapist and that is not realistic?

Dr.McC.: Right,

J.: It sounds like what you are saying is that, ideally, everybody needs both therapy and a support group. What is the main thing that brings people to therapy?

Dr. McC.: Usually is it one of two things. Either they are feeling a great deal of pain or they have annoyed someone. Annoyed someone ... you artificially. Because if you are intimate with someone that means that you are vulnerable, that means that you can be hurt and everyone wants to be safe. But there is not such thing as safe. There is secure, there is trust, but safe means dead, means dehumanized. People that simply want to become safe from the pain or make it to go away or cover it up so it doesn't hurt them anymore lose their humanity. When you try to stop the pain, when that is the goal, then you are stopping the humanity, because you don't get to be selective. People think depression is about hurting. It is absolutely not. Depression is pathology. When people hurt they try to stop the hurt and the only way they can stop the hurt is by stopping feeling. Depression is the inability to feel ... even though people hurt a lot when they are depressed.

J.: If a person is depressed, then what can they do to change that?

Dr. McC.. It's not ultimately a matter of volition. It is not about the person's will, it is about trusting. People who have been violated or abused in some way have learned not to trust others whom they should have been able to trust by all degrees of our civilization. The consequences of not trusting others is that you don't trust yourself. You don't believe that if you let go of your control over your emotions ... or the suppression of them that you will not suffer harm or will not recover.

J.: What do you think about the so-called False Memory Syndrome?

Dr. McC.: It is not the therapist's job to play detective. Regardless of the objectivity of the memories the therapist must focus on meaning not events. The way to understand a person's report of abusive memories is that the person is saying I feel so violated, as if I had been molested." And it does not matter whether there has been an actual molest or not. That is the place where the therapist needs to work. Not to undo it, not to find a person to blame, because the blame does not take it away. That does not heal people ... that is an entirely independent issue. I worked with a person who had been molested himself and knew of the statistical probability that he would molest others. He had a child and told me about changing the child's diapers. As he cleaned her, he backed away because he was afraid of touching her genitals. He was being a great father, he was a good man ... he was so afraid. The problem is that the child is going to grow up thinking of her genitals as being some thing that causes fear and guilt. I don't think this is going to be a problem because of the work we did together, but if that persisted, if every time the man saw his baby girl's genitals he became frightened, the girl is not going to know that that is his fear. All she knows is that genitals cause fear and they are something to be ashamed of. And there has been no molestation here.

J.: Which brings us to an excellent point that first and foremost you have to take care of yourself. You cannot parent or be a therapist. You cannot interact with other people in a safe way unless you have taken care of your issue.

Dr. McC.: Correct.

J.: So , I guess all the individual can do is to try to start with his or her own life and make changes and then hope that ripples out.

Dr. McC.: Absolutely. mean gotten in trouble?

Dr. McC.: Right.

J.: Do You think the majority of people come because they have been abused as children or because they had some kind of specific type of trauma or injury in childhood?

Dr. McC.: Actually, no. People come to therapy ultimately because we have an abusive society, one in which we are human and struggling, and we are all afraid. The community can either work together to raise each other up or else they can step on each other in a desperate attempt to survive. Very often we have a problem in our society where the notion is to succeed ... that is primarily in a material sense. That does not always mean financially, it can also be a matter of power and status, which is often achieved by taking away from others. There are people who are specifically victimized by specific events of abuse or mistreatment, clearly but there are also people where you cannot point to any one event. There are also people being told that their problems have nothing to do with pain or suffering or unmet needs in their childhood ... for that matter they are just being hammered with this notion that they have a chemical imbalance in their brain and that all their troubles can be fixed and they can feel happy and loved if only this contrived imbalance is restored. The entire psychiatric system is designed and growing more and more in this country simply to get people to stop complaining.

J.: I've been involved at the center for a little over two years and I hear people say, when is this going to end. When am I going to get well? When am I going to get to the place where I am OK, or I'm well, where I'm not hurting anymore? The way I look at it, that's never going to A lot of the time people say, I want the pain to go away.

Dr. McC.: Yes. I think you have the right idea in the sense that we cannot eliminate human suffering. A lot of people say, I want the pain to go away. I've even had people come in and ask me to hypnotize them to make them forget. Others will actually pray to forget about that part of their lives. Well, that is praying to forget who you are. if you have been scarred in some fashion, that is who you are. You cannot eliminate that. You can grow around it and it can add to the depth of you as a person, but humans are meant to struggle. We need to deal with the meaning of that struggle, not try to get rid of the pain. The goal is to become more and more human through the pain and any attempt to get rid of it is self defeating and dehumanizing of your very self. In a way, you end up doing to yourself exactly what someone else did to you trying to get rid of the bad stuff.

J.: I'm reading a book that talks about that ... you need the dark side of yourself. Your shadow has a lot to offer.

Dr. McC.: Right. The shadow gives you depth. It gives humanity and empathy. If you were to get rid of your pain and someone else comes up to you and says, I am suffering, I've been violated, my trust has been torn apart, and you have gotten rid of all your pain, what are you going to say to them other than :" take a Prozac and get over it."

J.: I see that as something that applies at the Center. People come and they are in so much pain that they're willing to work on their issues, then as soon as they get to feeling better, you never see them again. They feel like they are well, so they are out of there

Dr. McC.: Yes. Which is unfortunately, what happens to people who have been violated. They receive what is called narcissistic wounds, an impairment of their very self and humanity. So all they can think of is getting out of their immediate pain ... which is perfectly understandable. It doesn't mean that they aren't lovely, caring people, it's just that that's all they can focus on.