Yesterday I posted painfully after much professional self deliberation on one segment about the evolving soap opera of “America’s Family,” the Duggars, the TLC channel tv family with “19 and Counting,” children. This show had been on for years and as it turned out was too good to be true. It emerged earlier this year that the eldest son who molested young girls outside the family and as a teen had incested reportedly two of his own sisters. The family concealed all this from the TLC folks and just about everyone else. They referred the lad for “treatment” {and truly I use that term very loosely and with the greatest of reservations] to a friend of the family, a law enforcement person who put him to work for three months, had no mental health experience and as far as is known this lad received no real counseling, and was not reported as sex offender which the media seems to have forgotten would have been the legally mandated duty of this officer. The family waited until the statute of limitations was expired for such a crime of an adolescent, then the story started to emerge when the son was the front man for a Christian morals advocacy organization and his escapes even as an adult were emerging.
Month: August 2015
Secret Closed System Families and the Duggers
I have held off posting on the sad evolving tragedy of the Duggars who until both intra-families INCESTUOUS molestation of youngers sisters and molestations reported by national media encompassing such predatory repetitious behaviors with girls outside the family for over a month now. I had wished to gather my thoughts and center my psychiatrist thoughts around a unifying them that added something more of value to the media circus that has gone, not helped to die down by the Duggars themselves.
The newest current article, entitled, “Duggarville’ Exposed: Jim Bob ‘Is Like a Dictator’; How He Controls His Clan ,with a Secret Codeword,” has furnished the theme to me. The link to the article in the current just out edition of People magazine is People magazine article on the Duggar Family, is a fairly well done piece but sort of misses an important point.
In the clinical arena of “family therapy” which is one of the more inclusive of different brands of mental health professionals, we call these families, “secretive families,” or my more favored descriptive phrase” closed family systems.” Those of us who trained in intensive family therapy, have long seen these families.Their family wife pathology is more often than not centered around, naturally enough a family secret, no surprise there I suppose but an issue that is still perhaps not as familiar to the public as it should.
Often it’s based on keeping something the family is deeply ashamed of, hiding and sheltering a chronically mentally ill relative. Some the classic great writers of Southern literature would have a literary character who was kept hidden away in the big multi-story home. Horror films has bastardized this notion with the over the top Hollywood theme of the crazy [forgive the crude term and vernacular that comes from these movies] who murders people anonymously and the family has varying notions some is badly wrong and resorts to keeping them locked up in the cupola tower of the home and all the other themes along these lines we have seen since the 1950’s or so.
More often the family secret is INCEST. Some adult who is supposed to be what I call the “true steward of the [parent-child usually] relationship, guard the child and one’s one boundaries with the child, violates this and it becomes the big secret.Time and again we have heard these humiliating secrets from persons who publicly come forth with their tales of incest publicly. For instance it is estimated that incest is far more common than realized. Some years ago the startling statistic emerged from confidential surveys incoming collegiate freshman women that one in four to at most, one of eight (!) had experienced at least one or more episodes of sexual assault by college, though of course not at all it within their families of origin.
Closed family systems have other characteristics too. They are secretive by nature. They are usually controlled by a dominant parent and threatened all their suffering lives at home to “keep the secret.” The above article emphasizes that the Duggar father, in essence, exerted dictatorial control over his children with a “code word” used I expect to shut them up when discussion with any outsider came too close to the secret. They are usually experts at presenting pervasive facades as I judge the Duggars to have done in their overdone Christian religiosity. They are unique as closed family systems take great pains constantly to be very isolative, closed off from the community but there are many such families that are exceptions to this trait of such families.
I have no doubt that the Duggars will continue to present themselves as the all-American wholesome family in some way or other. I fear that they may not deal the apparent and reported cancer of incest residing in their family by the evasive, delaying manner they handled son Josh’s unconscionable incest. In my clinical opinion, had this family come the attention and help of any responsive mental health provider of ANY discipline, DSS Child Protective Services would have been notified as well as the authorities and Josh Duggar would be a lifelong registered sex offender as he should be in my humble from the sidelines vantage point. The tragedies will not stop with the “corrective publicity,” and in years to come I would predict that other offspring in the Duggar clan will come forward with their own sad stories.
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The Other Side of Amazon
I am a very loyal Amazon.com customer. I mostly patronize it for the eKindle eReader ecosystem which I find the best, most convenient and one of the greatest boons to my learning and reading ever. I am so enamored of it that it has inspired me to take up the typing cudgel after many years again of pseudo-literary writings, some fiction, and one new genre for me, a review of books which I plan to expand from one useful genre pertinent to Kindle users, and some others on politics, and the history of medicine.
But I was dismayed to read this weekend’s not so flattering article about Amazon’s work conditions and culture as revealed in an article by the New York Times this weekend, entitled: “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big
Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, ” that changed my view of Amazon severely within the time it took to read this lengthy and scathing article.
I fear that this could be the new way as the activists would say, of technologically oppressing the modern worker. One of the first of cours portrayed by Charlie Chaplin a century ago was of pushing the worker to the limits of speed of performing tasks of simply repetitive tasks on the assembly line, speed the line up, force the worker to put together as many widgets as possible, or in his case in the movie, tightening two big lugs on machinery with both arms simultaneously. The funny but starkly satirical lesson-bit was that after work he was still automatically tightening the lugs for hours with no wrenches in his hands without being able to stop after his shift was over.
Are Mass Shootings Increasing?
In this post I am not going to string out the answer to the above question, tease the reader, or toy around with the question in some manipulative literary device to hold the readers’ attentions.
The answer is YES, the number of mass shootings have dramatically increased in at least my lifetime and my memory since childhood stretches back to the 50’s some dimly but certainly to the sixties when i was a precocious kid in college very young and taking in what was going on in those turbulent times. I attended a wonderful university which was, to give the setting for the reader, one of the centers for student radicals in those times through the Nixon administrations.
Pen and Psychiatrist 