General Interest > Thought Reform

DOUBLE BIND: Mind Control in the TTI

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Anne Bonney:
:bump:

 :nods:  :nods:  :notworthy:  :notworthy:

Anne Bonney:
This is some really good stuff!   God, it explains a lot.   :eek:



--- Quote from: "Awake" ---And the Double Bind is a control method for the TTI as well, inherently enmeshed in its makeup and function.  A ‘Troubled Teen’ program would contain all of the elements of a Double Bind.

•   a) The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions.
•    b) No metacommunication is possible
•   c) The victim cannot leave the communication field
•   d) Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished
•   e) an intense relationship, e.g., in family life, captivity, love, loyalty,

Innumerable Double binds emerge from the TTI framework. The first Double Bind is the one contained in the label ‘troubled teen’ and the result of that label being ‘therapy’.
The child is given the identification label ‘troubled’ simply by being placed in a program.  He is also in a therapeutic environment and is motivated (in various ways) to progress in therapy BECAUSE of the label. The paradoxical injunction is that therapy is by nature a choice to accept help in changing. The context in which the therapy is held presupposes the patient be open, honest, trust the therapist, and accept a social position in which he is to take direction and advice, and it necessarily would betray the rules within the context of therapy by making any assertions that the therapists is misguided, inaccurate, unethical, or give advice in any way.  The therapist is not the candidate for change in such a situation, the therapist has the inherent power, and to be challenged in those areas constitutes an interpretation of that communication as coming from the patients ‘false’ perception of reality. Any such challenge, or behavior, will be punished.

Upon being placed in this Double Bind their every action/interaction will be scrutinized and analyzed under the context of therapy. The teen may attempt to meta- communicate in order to remove the situation by saying, “I don’t deserve to be here, not troubled, I don’t have these problems, I don’t want your help” or attempt to deny the therapeutic atmosphere, but doing so will only work to further identify him as ‘troubled’ by construing his attempts with more labels like ‘closed off’, ‘isolating’, ‘resistant’ ‘defensive’or ‘in denial’. These labels will then be used as evidence that he needs therapy and he will be held accountable (suffer consequences, punishment) for his failure to make progress. Eventually the teen will conclude that the only way out of the situation is to ‘get well’, which consequently requires admitting they are in fact troubled. At this point they may lie about how they feel about their problems or lie about their problems all together.

At this point the Double Bind has forced the child into a situation where he must “play at not playing” the game of getting well. A citation that expounds on this from Watzlawick, in ‘Change. P.70’ :

“…The patient is considered unable to make the right decisions by himself- they have to be made for him and for his own good. If he fails to see this, his failure is yet another proof of his incapacity. This creates a terribly paradoxical situation requiring patients and staff to “play at not playing” the game of getting well. Sanity in the hospital is that conduct which is keeping with very definite norms; these norms should  be obeyed spontaneously and not because they are imposed; as long as they are imposed, the patient is considered sick.

This being so the old strategy for obtaining ones speedy release from a mental hospital is more than a joke:

(a) Develop a flamboyant symptom that has considerable nuisance value for the whole ward;
(b) Attatch yourself to a new doctor in need of his first success;
(c) let him cure you rapidly of your symptom; and
(d) make him thus into the most fervent advocate of your regained sanity.”

In the TTI, this ultimately becomes the function of the Double Bind that maintains the illusion of success. Another quote that describes this well,

““… whatever else these institutions do , one of their central effects is to sustain the self- conception of the professional staff employed there. Inmates and lower staff levels are involved in a vast supportive action- an elaborate dramatized tribute- that has the effect, if not the purpose, of affirming that medical- like service is in progress here and the psychiatric staff is providing it. Something about the weakness of this claim is suggested by the industry required to support it.

….’ Mental patients can find themselves in a special bind. To get out of the hospital or ease their lives within it. They must show acceptance of the place accorded them, and the place accorded them is to support the occupational role of those who appear to force this bargain. This self alienating moral servitude, which perhaps helps to account for some inmates becoming mentally confused, is achieved by invoking the great tradition of the expert servicing  relation, especially its medical variety.’
--Double Bind: the foundation of the communicational approach to the family”

Within the framework of this Double Bind in a ‘troubled teen’ program, this first step of ‘playing at not playing’ the game of getting well, (or pretending to be serious about getting well), is the first step towards adding binds during the course of treatment to further control behavior and mold habits. There is no avoiding progressing to a point of admitting they have a problem. The very obvious distress due to being taken captive is expected to be shared openly in the context of therapy. The teen that tries to avoid playing into the therapy game in such a situation must hide their own distress with meticulous self control in order to not be observed in such a state. Otherwise they will have to give in to expressing their honest feelings with the knowledge that it will only work to strengthen the bind that they are in.

At this point the Double Bind confuses the ability of the child to perceive certain meanings. The concepts ‘help’ and ‘hurt’ become synonymous or take on their opposites when trying to interpret even simple interpersonal communications. The teen is approached with helpful, loving, benevolent attitudes but the transaction is one that disqualifies and hurts him. This could come from the statement, ‘You want to be here, you just don’t know it.’ Additionally he is supposed to pretend he is accepting of these transactions as help when they are really perceived as hurtful. If he shows that he perceives their ‘help’ as hurt he will be seen as sick and resisting. Eventually this can distort how he perceives the meanings contained in normal friendly interactions. The context containing loving, benevolent attitudes may cause him to act agreeable, open, and friendly as a defensive action against what he perceives to be threatening.

The Double Bind pattern in the TTI at this point is as follows:

The first double-bind is due to the expectation that programs place on teens that in order to progress in therapy they must admit they have problems. This with the knowledge that to accept that fact will only support the accusation that he is ‘troubled’ so deeply he cannot make decisions for himself.

The second double-bind is in implying to the child that all the actions being taken are entirely for his or her own good and should not be seen as punishment. It is presented as a result of this situation that encompasses the conflicting messages sent within the contexts of ‘force’ and ‘therapy’. That is, there is undeniably a utilization of force in a TTI program via the use of various reward/punishment motivators, yet the actions will be taken as a testament to their individual progress in therapy.  Therapy itself, within the context of force, is a punishment. The punishment ends up being one where the victim must pretend to believe he understands it as help and play the part of getting better. These conflicting messages are heard clearly, yet meta-communication is not possible as it is seen as a challenge to their authority. The messages ‘You will be punished for not making progress’ and ‘Take ownership of your work’ are in open conflict, yet to avoid being labeled ‘sick’ action must be taken that denies the reality that force is involved. This is done by challenging the victim to make statements that he is genuine, accountable, honest etc. essentially teaching him how to play the game of maintaining the illusion of therapy. If they progress it is due to accepting accountability while actions suggesting they don’t want to be there are cast off as ‘sick’ and therefore the focus of more ‘therapy’ or punishment .

The third double-bind is to view another as sick and damaged and then express love and compassion for them. The child must take messages that negate him, but gratefully as they are coming from the standpoint of love and care.

A fourth Double Bind Emerges out of the peer group framework in which teens graduate together in different stages. Individual growth in the TTI is dependent on a process of group growth. This brings about a core concept in the TTI which is that each child is there to support each others growth in therapy. It will be a requirement  for the child to progress individually by supporting positions and adopting attitudes in concert with the therapy when interacting with peers. This environment where the patients are acting as each other’s therapist means that it is implied that, just as each person is to enforce the rules, each person is to also act from the standpoint of care, love and help to overcome each others assumed maladjustment, just as the staff of the program are supposed to behave. This bind becomes important in a highly structured environment because a stated rule that says, ‘you must love and support each other, or you will be punished’ makes it impossible to know for sure whether caring communication is honest or just given under orders. In an environment that demands each person be seen as open, honest, and caring under threat of punishment, a simple casual moment between friends can lose its meaning and become ambiguous, undefined and lead to confusion. Even the most genuine attempts at friendly communication can be invalidated.

These Double binds form an invisible cage in which every action is just an attempt to win a zero sum game. This is how the messages would come across if the TTI were to simplify their paradoxical injunctions.

“You are sick for thinking we are forcing you to treatment for our own selfish reasons, we are only doing this for your own good. You are sick because you think you don’t want treatment. You are so sick you don’t know what you want. You are not yourself. You must believe that our treatment of you is an act of selflessness, sympathy, and compassion for the damaged individual you are. Your isolated and confrontational attitude is a measure of your level of sickness and inability to understand the generosity of the staff peers who care about you getting well. You must believe our claim that you are troubled and must take responsibility and be accountable for the fact that you are not in control of yourself. Then you can learn to get in control of yourself by learning to deny your perceptions of reality in favor of ours.”

What are the dangers of the Double Bind?

The Double bind, as stated, imposes a context in which one must deny certain aspects of reality.  In a sense it is a forced hypnosis that requires that a person repress, or cover up, their spontaneous feelings and reactions to their perceived reality and rely on re-representing them via imaginary constructs to successfully navigate their environment.  This means the person will be dissociated from themselves and reality. This dissociation of self is an inherent function of the Double Bind and, as the original theory suggests, dissociation is a focal point of a rich history in psychology that seeks to understand mental illness. An immense topic that comprises a huge portion of psychoanalysis, dissociation is presumed to account for a variety of mental illnesses along the spectrum Bi-polar, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Multiple Personality Disorder.

The dangers of TTI programs are that if a person that cannot escape or transcend the communicational field they can suffer serious psychological damage as a result. This is because as humans we must be able to handle communication involving multiple logical types that convey information on different levels of abstraction. When communicating we must identify signals that allude to the communicational mode being used. Examples of communicational modes:

Play, non-play, fantasy, metaphor, humor. We tend to rely on non-verbal communication to meta-communicate (communicate about our communication), like posture, tone of voice, gesturing, facial expressions etc.  In this way we frame and label messages, and as in humor we re-frame our messages perhaps communicating something literally at first and then reframing it metaphorically. Like when someone betrays another, and that other yells out in pain, turns his back and says, ‘take this knife out of my back.’

The correct logical typing of communicational modes is a learned skill that is necessary in order to feel stable in your social environment. In the TTI there will be much ambiguity due to a context that presumes that others are falsifying their mode-identifying signals whether it be a manipulative simulation of friendliness, artificial laugh, contrived emotions, the confidence trick. This context which interrupts successful meta-communication disrupts the ability to discriminate communicational modes between the self and others. Eventually this will lead to difficulty in assigning the correct communicational mode to his own messages, thoughts, sensations and perceptions. Maintained within a structured environment this falsification of signals can become habitual and unconscious as well as the falsification of the child’s understanding of another person’s mode identifying signals. He may mistake benevolence for contempt etc.  Eventually simple day to day social contact can constitute a threat to ones stable sense of self.

The TTI through clear lenses:  Coercion as treatment and results that defy logic.

The TTI itself capitalizes on their own errors in logical typing when communicating the meanings of the words ‘therapy, symptom, patient, treatment, cure, and results’. There are two errors of logical typing that redefine the meaning of these words within the TTI framework.

First is the one that identifies the symptom (problem) on the level of family, but treats an individual member. This family system is the original unit of analysis when identifying the disruption and the strategy to regain stability. Yet the identified symptom will then be treated as it applies to the individual with the result given in terms of ‘personal growth’. This process of treatment constitutes a breach in logical typing that says a class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class. (A class of pencils is not a pencil, a pencil is not a class of pencils.) In this way a class of individuals (family) can define a problem, but applying the solution to the individual (member) constitutes the error of logical typing that identifies the member as the class within which it belongs.

The second is the one that re-defines ‘therapy’ (or fails to) under the context of force. Under the context of the Double Bind individual, ‘personal growth’ cannot be evaluated, in fact it necessitates understanding that these results can’t be determined under such a heading.  The presupposition in such a situation is that the victim has no choice, and so individual achievements are an illusion and personal pride for such is to take accountability for the behavior changes that others forced on you. This is another error of logical typing that does not recognize the different levels of abstraction that occur in contexts requiring proper delineation of ‘self’ and ‘other’, at the consequence of misinterpreting ‘force’ and ‘free choice’.

Within such illogical thought processes the logical meanings of the words ‘ therapy, treatment, cure, patient’ come to mean ‘coercive persuasion, punishment, dominating, and victim.’

The lines of logic that we must follow is that to truly gain perspective on the results and effectiveness of the TTI we would have to be able analyze how the Double Bind effects those results. This would require a control experiment that reproduced a TTI model without Double Binds to compare the results. The simple fact of the matter is that the TTI would not be able to function. This being the case we can ONLY see the results as being a function of the Double Bind, and the TTI as a whole can only exists as the paradoxical result of its own pathological thinking.

There is also another dilemma that prevents us from being able to decipher the results of the TTI. This is the ethical problem that prevents us from conducting more conclusive investigations into the Double Bind. In order to replicate the Double Bind in the TTI, it could not be properly represented by using volunteers, as it is not a choice given to the teen. As well there is a violation of ethics, even in a voluntary circumstance, present in conducting an experiment where the theoretical result is to cause psychological harm. Adding to this:

“Let us put it his way: if one were intrigued by a sequence of events proposed to account for certain types of pathology in communication, and that sequence is formalized as a theoretical proposition about what happens when important basic relationships are chronically subjected to invalidation through paradoxical interaction, and it is further specified that an intense relationship, repeated experience, and inability to comment upon or escape the situation are all necessary components, would one do an experiment with college sophomores or VA volunteers? Probably not.
--Double Bind: the foundation of the communicational approach to the family”

And I would further this comment by saying, why would we experiment on teenagers against their will?

For those dedicated readers I’ll leave you with a final quote from R.D. Laing in his book ‘Knots’.

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing  I see the game.”
--- End quote ---

Awake:
Thx for the responses! It is nice to know I don’t feel alone here.  I’ve  written something here, just for fun, and specifically for Fornits, on this topic. …. :hug:  ... so here it is...


Alright, I am putting myself in the spotlight right now. I was going to respond to a post on another page and ended up writing this instead.  So just for fun I am posting these lyrics I wrote as a humorous take on the Double Bind, with particular focus on the ‘Be Spontaneous’ paradox as it applies to ‘personal growth’, human potential, LGAT’s, the Troubled Teen Industry and the like.  A little beer and Fornits, in this case, ended up in a little fun for me, so here it is for you Fornits, just for you.  I hope you like.

(BTW: I have been imagining this going with southern gospel, don’t know if that works for U.)


 BE SPONTANEOUS.   -Awake


Be spontaneous! Do it right now!
Be spontaneous! Don’t you want to be free!
Be spontaneous! But don’t try too hard.
Be spontaneous! Or don’t, if that’s how you want to be


Be spontaneous! Don’t keep yourself in a cage.
Be spontaneous! Just let yourself out.
Be spontaneous! Strip away your inhibitions
Be spontaneous! Isn’t that what it’s all about?


Be spontaneous! Let it come out naturally
Be spontaneous! Show everyone who you are
Be spontaneous! I think your holding back a little
Be spontaneous! Or maybe tryin too hard


Be spontaneous! It’s not hard to be you
Be spontaneous! Just relax and let go
Be spontaneous! You understand what I’m saying
Be spontaneous! So just do what your told

Be spontaneous! Cuz you can’t really do it
Be spontaneous! But you can try to anyway
Be spontaneous! But if you do do something
Be spontaneous! You’re just doin what I say


Be spontaneous! Don’t be spontaneous then
Be spontaneous! Don’t do what you’re told
Be spontaneous! Don’t even blink spontaneously
Be spontaneous! You’re the one in control


Be spontaneous! Spontaneously listen to me tell you to be spontaneous
Be spontaneous! You’re not breathing spontaneously, I can tell
Be spontaneous! Because it’s not spontaneous on your part if I’m telling you to do it.
Be spontaneous! Get in control of yourself


Be spontaneous! You can blink randomly or on purpose
Be spontaneous! You can blink any way you choose
Be spontaneous! You don’t have to do it my way
Be spontaneous! But I would really like you to


Be spontaneous! Ok some of you are being really compliant
Be spontaneous! You are blinking and breathing naturally
Be spontaneous! But some of you are just being defiant
Be spontaneous! Forcing your breathing and blinking too consciously


Be spontaneous! That’s right im talkin to you
Be spontaneous! Stop resisting in any way
Be spontaneous! Just relax and be yourself
Be spontaneous! Like the rest of my slaves


Be spontaneous! Relax and let go
Be spontaneous! Your under control
Be spontaneous! Relax and let go
Be spontaneous! Your under control


.


Be spontaneous! Now you’re just acting crazy
Be spontaneous! What the hell is your problem
Be spontaneous! You’re startin to scare me a little
Be spontaneous! Well fine you ain’t any fun


Be spontaneous! Relax and let go
Be spontaneous! Your under control
Be spontaneous! Relax and let go
Be spontaneous! Your under control[/i]


.

Paul St. John:
Whoa.  You have some understanding of this shit, Awake. I honestly, think that if the average person read that enough times, it would fuck with their heads a bit. I hope Danny doesn t read it, and I am not even kidding.  I could see the hypnotic nature of it being suggestive to him.

I think the core idea with all this shit, is that the person is fundamentally flawed, and in need of being fixed, but the double bind, as I see it, or at least, a double bind, would be that it requires abandonment of the self, and without the self there can be no growth.  There can be no anything really. It's like trust yourself but don't. Everything about you is wrong, so be right, but how do you be right, if you re fundamentally wrong.  The only way, you could attempt it, after accepting those premises, would be to give yourself completely over to an authority .. but then the authority says, "be yourself", and now here we are again, at the double bind.

very cool.. thanks.. a bit scary, but cool.. lol

Paul

Awake:

--- Quote from: "Paul St. John" ---Whoa.  You have some understanding of this shit, Awake. I honestly, think that if the average person read that enough times, it would fuck with their heads a bit. I hope Danny doesn t read it, and I am not even kidding.  I could see the hypnotic nature of it being suggestive to him.

I think the core idea with all this shit, is that the person is fundamentally flawed, and in need of being fixed, but the double bind, as I see it, or at least, a double bind, would be that it requires abandonment of the self, and without the self there can be no growth.  There can be no anything really. It's like trust yourself but don't. Everything about you is wrong, so be right, but how do you be right, if you re fundamentally wrong.  The only way, you could attempt it, after accepting those premises, would be to give yourself completely over to an authority .. but then the authority says, "be yourself", and now here we are again, at the double bind.

very cool.. thanks.. a bit scary, but cool.. lol

Paul
--- End quote ---


Paul, a response like that leaves me overjoyed. One thing about the double bind in important relationships is that it requires one to dissociate from themselves to act within the environment. It is also related to the schizophrenics' attempts to 'not communicate' (impossibly) within the social setting that demands an answer to a paradoxical question.  This attempt on the part of the schizophrenic to 'not communicate' are a realistic approach to protecting his level of Ontological Security. We all accept this as fact that anyone is striving to acheive a position of safety within their environment, and when the environment is controlled by a social body (As with Maslow's heirarchy of human needs for example) that person is subject to their control as well.  I'm glad you liked it.


Fun is fun, but real is real. I'm glad to know you feel that.


.

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