Reading THE FORGIVING SELF helped me realize I not only carry the pain, but it influences the way I feel about myself today.
What Robert Karen has achieved in his book is so important. In beautifully written prose, funny, charming and insightful, he helps us understand how to LET GO! To send the pain and hurt away for good. Or at least to come to terms with it. To accept that we had and have every right to be angry and hurt. But not to let it go on spoiling our life in the present.
Karen helps us understand that to forgive those who have hurt us, to forgive ourselves for the pain we've caused others, and to accept our humanity, warts and all, is the road to true freedom of the heart and mind. PEACE, it's wonderful!
GO FOR IT!
I'm reasonably sure I did not misunderstand this book; I am a reasonably well respected scholar on the history and ethics of mental health care, a very experienced psychotherapist, and an expert in health care policy who consults with and writes for some major players in health care reform.
Why does it matter that Dr. Karen has brought moral issues into the therapy room? The issue is really quite obvious and fairly simple:
Historically mental health professionals have insisted that moral improvement is beside the point of mental health--that disease, not lack of moral strength or the practice of any virtue, is the cause of the problems they address. Removing the stigma of mental illness has always been understood to depend on denying any connection between illness and virtue. If it is true, as Karen insists, that sometimes health requires that we acquire a specific virtue, several things follow.
First, if Karen is right, much of the ideology of the mental health professions must simply be false. It cannot be the case that mental problems do not reflect moral deficiencies, if it is the case that at least sometimes they reflect failures of attaining appropriate virtue--in this case, the ablity to forgive. That is a tautology, hence cannot possibly be false.
Second, mental health professionals practice on licenses that depend on the idea that they have mastered a specific science. Neither their training nor any licensure exams require that they have training in helping their patients toward moral improvement. Thus, when mental health professionals urge their patients to cultivate and practice a certain virtue--in this case, forgiveness--they are using their professional licenses to urge on patients beliefs that their training and licensure do not warrant, in the most literal sense of "warrant."
Third, if at least some mental problems reflect deficiencies of character, i.e., the inability to forgive when it is needful to do so, then there is indeed good reason for attaching stigma to mental health patients. Since at least some patients' problems reflect their moral failings, and since (for reasons of patient confidentiality) we cannot know which patients those are, we are justified in wondering of any patient whether his are the sorts of problems caused by failing to attain some virtue.
Finally, if one admits moral counsel into mental health care, one puts the entire edifice into question. From the first licensing laws to recent gaurantees of parity with physical illness, mental health care has trested its case for legal protections on the model of illness, not moral immaturity. Does anyone really believe that such protections, essential to the functioning of the mental health system,would continue if lawmakers saw therapists setting themselves up as moralists?
Why does it matter if a mental helth professional breaks the rules? The entire point of licensing mental health workers is to insure that they practice within the bounds of "the rules."
While patients rarely sue over the issue--since, after all, they don't even known when it's happening--professionals can be (and often are) censured by professional examination boards for such things.
Fortunately, the sort of loosy-goosy reasoning contained in this book, along with tolerance of psychiatrists sitting around making up stuff without scientific basis or public accountability, is coming to an end. One upshot of mental health parity is that insurers are beginning to offer well-validated treatments and to exclude others. Insurerers do not care to pay for flaky, speculative moral counsel, and--note this carefully--the laws that created the professions do not require them to. The legal rights of mental health professionals rest entirely on their claim to science, not morals.
People who don't like science, or who don't want their care based on the anti-moralistic traditions that created the mental health disciplines, may of course continue to pay out of pocket for whatever snake oil they enjoy. Practitioners purveying notions inconsistent with the legal protections and responsibilities of the professions will depend on such people for their survival--because the professions are rapidly extruding them.