I feel that the article relates in that the OP appears to be biased against and has taken sides in this marriage. It also appears that the OP is pathologizing the relationship. From the Original Posters post: …my next door neighbor is in a "relationship" (and I use that term loosely here) with a complete bonehead who not only has a substance abuse problem, but a self-support deficit… Notice that this is the first thing she brought up in the discussion. It appears to me that she is biased against people who have a disease. The last time I looked into this, the DSM IV claims that any kind of drug or alcohol addiction is a disease and social workers especially should not allow themselves to “look down upon” sick people. The man is sick and needs treatment. If he is having trouble supporting himself then he needs help, treatment, deserves to not be looked down upon as a downcast “bonehead” member of the human race. I suggest that one of the reasons why he is diseased is because people critice him and tear his self esteem down rather than assuming benevolence. Being called a bonehead means that the man was being called “stupid” or an idiot. It is terreibly disenheartening for anyone, especially a mental health professional to be calling a sick person stupid. It's very demeaning. Would you suggest to a wife that she should divorce her husband because he has cancer? I see alcoholism or drug abuse as being no different than any other disease and the NIMH and the APA and just about every mental health organization in the US has clearly come out with a stance that drug and alcohol addictions are diseases, and that sick people should not be locked up for their diseases, not be called names, not have their marriages or relationships sabotaged, but treated and helped. For a social worker to call an addicted person a bonehead to me seems disingenuous. It would be like a MD blaming a person for having a heart attack and attempting to prevent the patient from having heart surgery at a hospital where he works, because he thinks that because the man smoked cigarettes all his life he does not deserve help at his place of work. Notice how the very first thing she brings up is that she has taken sides – on the side of one neighbor and against the other. I believe this to be insidious especially since she has not entered into any kind of a confidentiality agreement with the neighbor and interjected herself into the situation without either partners permission. I also have doubts as to her assertion that she is concerned about violence because she did not call 911 when her neighbor was supposedly in danger, she waited until she herself was supposedly in danger. Were it me, I would have called 911 first and them (maybe) got physically involved but even that would be questionable. The social worker herself does admit that they are both upset with her for getting involved in the situation. I also do not buy into the idea that because her neighbors are not her clients, then she is completely not responsible for the ethics here because she is still getting involved in their marriage and marital therapy situation at her place of work despite the fact that she has no informed consent contract to treat either partner or spouse and also despite the fact that both partners in this relationship have told her that they are upset with her for getting involved in their private situation. I don’t believe that social workers, psychologists or psychiatrists should be allowed to have it both ways. Either they are or are not a couples therapist or they are. There should be no in betweens or blurred boundaries and it appears to me that the social worker has confused the boundaries here. Social workers are getting far too intrusive in marriages and I believe that many of them have a sense of entitlement to get involved in marriages, whether or not they are invited to assist couples. I suggest you read the article if you still do not understand or agree. I believe that these quotes in particular reflect the issues that the OP has in relation to this couple and for some reason, maybe because of her childhood or a recent adult situation or maybe both, that she is reactive about troubled marriages or couples who are having problems and I believe her to be projecting her reactive feelings onto this couple - …working with couples inherently involves value judgments in ways that treating depression or anxiety do not. Not to have a moral framework is to have an unacknowledged one, and in mainstream American culture, that will probably be individualistic rather than relational or communitarian. Many therapists, especially in the context of the treatment of individuals, moved beyond neutrality, seeing themselves as "liberationists" who help people out of unhappy marriages and other commitments in their lives. "If you describe your marriage as painful for you, the therapist wants to liberate you from this toxic influence." If the client raises concern about the fate of their children, such therapists will say the kids will do fine if their parents do what they need to do for themselves. in clinical consultations, talk shows and self-help books -- were saying such things as, "The marriage wasn't working anymore." The implication: If it's not working, get another one. Therapists undermine marital commitment in four ways, he writes: by incompetence, by being "neutral," by anthologizing the partner or the relationship, and by overtly undermining the union. Therapists who can't handle the hot conflict of couples therapy assume that there is a lot of individual pathology going on. "So they turf the spouses off to their individual therapist colleague, or keep one of the spouses in individual therapy and send the other to a colleague. I have seen a lot of unnecessary divorces because of this scenario," Doherty writes. Doherty considers pathologizing by therapists to be particularly insidious. A client in individual therapy who complains about a spouse may be told he or she is married to someone with a narcissistic personality disorder. This leads to hopelessness. "Sometimes the therapist pathologizes the reasons you got married. For almost any marriage, we therapists can figure out what pathology fed its inception." An individual or a couple can be made to feel that theirs is a sick relationship and anyone who would stay in it is in questionable mental health. "Let's say you see an individual therapist after your spouse has an affair, and you're thinking of taking your spouse back. You may be pathologized for your very commitment to keep trying." "Like attorneys who automatically fight their client's opponents, some therapists encourage clients to rid themselves of currently toxic spouses, rather than work hard to see what can be salvaged and restored. This approach may be wrongheaded, even when it comes to individual well-being.
a couple of quotes from it:
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…The second danger is therapists, whether competent or not, whose individualistic value system leads them to undermine marital commitment when the marriage causes distress for the individual.
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