yguy

LOL!

No, his position by implication is that molestation can be a positive experience. That's what I have a problem with.

Such an intent hasn't been clearly stated, but I think we may rest assured that pedophiles everywhere felt vindicated by his remarks.

Who's being a drama queen now, babe?

No and no. If someone provides me with evidence to the contrary, I'll have reason to reconsider. Until then I'm staying put.

If anyone has taken his quotes out of context, it would be Rind, et al.

You can subsitute any representative of any group you like. Pedophiles won't elect Bill Bennet head of NAMBLA, and the KKK won't let Barbara Streisand take the helm. The head of an organization is in great degree reflective of the people in it.

I don't guess you're the only one... but Dal, you're about the last person on this board I have any desire to make angry. As mean, rotten, ornery and sarcastic as you are, dammit, you try to be fair. However, I suggest you need to start to learn not to let people push your buttons as I evidently have. The angrier you are, the less clearly you can see the flaws in a person's argument - not that mine have any, of course.

Daleth

Now, see, I knew you'd take that well. Further evidence that you're not as bad as I'd like to imagine you to be.

I might respond to this directly on a CSA thread, but it's too out of place here. Then again, I might not; those threads are typically overrun by people I don't care to associate with. All I can say here is that by reading his thoughts in context I find that his belief is that children should be treated for the symptoms they present with and not be presumed to all have the same extent of damage. There was a context for his comments, and they weren't made at a NAMBLA meeting.

Let them feel as vindicated as they want in their cells.

Aw, I've seen you write people here off for as little. How about if I said porking farm animals wasn't immoral?

Well, the APA haven't changed their position on the harmfulness of CSA. Further, they did not embrace the findings of Rind, et al. but gave them the cold shoulder. That should say something. But I'm not going quote hunting.

More drama, strawman style. Come on, you know damned well that the KKK and NAMBLA are organizations whose goals are to promote specific social agendas and ideologies. The APA does not. It's a scientific community promoting research and treatment to benefit mental health. Their practices and beliefs change as research gives them new knowledge, unlike the KKK and NAMBLA who reject new knowledge.

I'm touched. And I'll own up to all those characterizations except "mean." You haven't pushed any of my buttons, at least not lately. But I take the things we're discussing seriously, and I consider most of your general positions dangerous to me and people I love. If I could get myself to notice nothing but those generalities (which make up 99% of your posts), I'd be able to respond to you as you've responded to Seligman and by extension the whole APA. But I haven't got it in me to boil you down to a single quote. It'd be easier and more fun, but dishonest.

HelenM

I read Seligman's book Learned Optimism a few years ago and I just read his latest book about positive psychology a few weeks ago.

They don't mention CSA (child sexual abuse) at all, that I recall. Your mention of his comments about it was the first I knew he'd been abused and he'd said anything publically about it.

What does this tell me? That Seligman doesn't have an agenda to reform attitudes about CSA by slipping it into every book. That his books aren't simply fronts for getting people to think that CSA is ok.

What you seem to miss is the huge distinction between someone who has commented on an issue and someone who has an agenda, that they are consistently pushing.

If Seligman had an agenda re: CSA then I might agree with you in questioning his appointment. But since as best I can tell, he doesn't, I don't see any reason not to appoint a man whose contributions to the field of psychology have been significant. Do you even know what those are or is all you know about him that one paragraph where he comments about his own abuse and not iagtrogenically victimizing children who have been abused. Which in fact - I can say this having read his books - is consistent with everything he teaches about psychology - it's one application of it, to view things accurately, which is what he's saying. Don't make an experience that has already happened (in other words he wasn't encouraging anyone to go out and abuse children but merely commenting on those who've already been abused, which no-one can change) worse than it actually is for the child by what you say to them about it.

I would question the judgment of the APA a lot more if I thought they would dismiss every contribution of Seligman's to psychology because of that one paragraph you pointed out - as you evidently do - than as things stand, in which they appear to have given it appropriate weighting, imo.

Helen

Daleth

Actually, we don't even have that, unless yguy or someone else can point us to the source... what we have is a third party commenting on what Seligman said or wrote. I don't imagine it's a lie, but reading what someone wrote beats reading what someone else says they wrote.

Interesting. Thanks for the comments on his books, Helen. I'll have to check those out. Creating problems where there were none is a gripe I've had at times with the mental health establishment.

Any road, this is an awful lot of posts trying to convince one guy of the validity of one source and the invalidity of ad homs. By now I've practically forgotten what this thread was about. Perhaps yguy or someone interested should start a Seligman thread, because he uses this exact quote routinely.

HelenM

His more recent book, about Positive Psychology, is much more about that than Learned Optimism, which is basically his particular way of explaining the cognitive therapy approach (which is, to be careful what we think and tell ourselves, because our feelings are very influenced by our self-talk and evaluation of our experiences). I got the Positive Psychology book out the library because it was mentioned in What Happy People Know by Dan Baker, that I got out first, which I personally would recommend over Seligman's book as being a more enjoyable read. It was in Baker's book that I first heard about Positive Psychology as an identified field which the author and Seligman see as a better approach than much of traditional psychology. Positive Psychology looks at a person and says "let's talk about your strengths and positive memories; let's talk about the best moments in your life" - the person is probably already feeling a little better - and then aims to adjust the person's current life so that the person is using the strengths that they enjoyed using, again, and having the experiences they enjoyed, as far as possible. Or that's how it seem to me, anyway . Whereas traditional psychology takes more of an approach: let's focus on what's going wrong (to try to fix it, admittedly, but focusing on what has worked before is an approach that Seligman and Baker have found very effective in turning peoples' lives around - evidently).

Baker's book is the kind of book that on one level seems intuitively obvious; but then on another, I think we need reassuring that what seems intuitively obvious really works, because professionals have so confused the issue and tried to say "ah but we know best"...but if they do, why do they keep changing their minds? and so on...

(I will say I've benefitted personally from the training that counselors/therapists receive and in a society where you can't count on many people to be consistent supportive and rarely insensitive, they have an important role...so what I wrote is not intended to say that professionals are always at best useless and at worst harmful)

Helen

brighid

I would personally say that I agree with Siegelman about treating what appears and not making CSA into something worse for an individual child (especially as a childhood survivor of SA.)

Fortunately, I don't feel I am screwed up like many other childhood survivors of CSA and I would damned pissed if some shrink started telling me that I should be totally messed up for all that I have suffered through. I wouldn't call any of my experiences positive, but different people handle situations differently and by and large I have dealt with my past abuse and moved on. I am not repressed, I don't have wierd hang ups, I don't have problems with intimacy, etc., etc.

I have seen how children have been destroyed by the mental health community on this subject and it is deeply, deeply troubling. CSA is not a good thing. I don't see anywhere, in any literature I have read that anyone at the APA thinks differently, including Siegelman.

So, let's see a quote and from what context it was used. It's seems we have wasted enough bandwidth discussing some alleged comment, very likely taken out of context and twisted for those truly with an agenda ... like the Christian Reich and some conservative groups who have regularly demonstrated they aren't interested in the truth (watch any conservative pundit on Fox!)

However, in this forum and in this discussion we are interested in facts because I, for one, am interested in coming to conclusions based on evidence, not heresay.

Brighid

HelenM

Evidently Seligman wrote something in his 1993 self-improvement book "What you can change and what you can't" about his childhood experience and that's what the comments yguy quoted are based upon. I'm going to see what Seligman actually wrote in there when I can get hold of the book.

Anyway, one further thought I wanted to add was that it wouldn't surprise me if people with an agenda picked up on anything by a well-known psychologist which appeared to remotely favor their agenda. That doesn't mean that the psychologist has the same agenda.

My guess is that if you asked Seligman "In view of you having derived some positive benefits from the relationship you had with an adult, involving sexual abuse, would you put your own children in situations where they may be sexually abused" (he does have children, fwiw) he'd be very unlikely to say "sure, why not?" To say "my experience was not wholly negative" and "let's be careful lest our our attempts to help abused children traumatize them more than the original experience" is a far cry from saying "I recommend that children are put in situations where they might be sexually abused, because they may also derive a positive benefit from the experience".

Helen

HelenM

My guess is that that's exactly what Seligman was saying.

The flipside of that is, don't minimize how traumatized children are, either. I think that's the mistake that people with an agenda make - they claim that all children who are traumatized by abuse are so only because some adult told them they are supposed to be. I highly doubt Seligman would agree with them on that.

Helen

brighid

I would agree. Each child should be evaluated individually as there are a whole range of reactions and effects any given child/person could have to any form of abuse.

I handled things differently then others I know, but this doesn't make their abuse any less painful because I don't suffer in the same ways they continue to. The sorts of minimalist claims are wrong and rather insensitive to what is very often a very traumatizing experience.

Brighid

Daleth

Helen, Thanks for the book commentaries. This board does more for my reading list than any other I've been on. They both sound very interesting. Agreed with your comment on mental health professionals. I also don't mean to cut them down, but as in anything there's room for improvement.

brighid, Thanks for the perspective of someone who's been there. It's important to me to know I'm not arguing a position that seems completely mad to anyone who's faced it personally. I haven't, but I did grow up surrounded by people with numbers tattooed on their arms, including one of Mengele's twins. It's my experience that even in a case that extreme, individual's reactions vary a great deal.

The twin... her sister died and she herself was to be disposed just when the allies arrived... says that if a single scientific or medical advance had come of the experiments they went through, she'd be able to forgive the entire thing... which in no way implies that she wouldn't still be damaged or that she'd condone medical experimentation on live children. (In her place, I think I'd be a murderer, a suicide or both. Truly people react differently.)

Sorry for the grimness and the even-more-off-topic swing. The holocaust deniers' thread has had this story running through my head on repeat. On topic, she was a working mother, her son was one of the nicest teenaged boys I've ever known, and he was extremely proud of his mum.