Sex Addict Therapist Douglas Weiss Gets Divorced

Thanks for posting the video of Patrick Carnes, founder of CSAT. Ugh, Carnes. This is prompting me to update my spiel and heads up about using Carnes’ hijacked, mutated and monetized term “trauma bonding.” Unless you want to throw clicks, money and more unsuspecting chumps in Carnes’ direction, consider opting for the term “captor bonding” instead. Captor bonding is the original, far more helpful and more deeply researched clinical term that Carnes’ ripped off and defaced.

What’s in a word? A whole world of bullshit. First notice how Carnes’ mutant coinage removes any reference to perpetrator (captor) or implication of victim (captive) or crime (captive-taking) and instead evokes the idea of two or more people– none more guilty or innocent than the other and all equally “traumatized”– clinging together in a flood and pulling each other down. There’s no crime, just tragedy. No bad guys or good guys! Now stop to consider the fact that the term and concept of “captor bonding”– aka Stockholm syndrome– caused a revolution in victimology and legal response by illustrating how violence or coercion explained the behavior of victims of domestic violence as well as undermining the old, moldy theory that victims “stayed” because they secretly liked being abused, were drawn to abusers and provoked abuse. Why would anyone want to undo that progress and all the enormous changes that it brought like victim/witness protections and compensation, funding for programs and shelters, protective orders, stiffer penalties for abusers, more effective therapy for victims and children, improved public involvement in protecting victims, increased reporting and an untold number of lives saved?

I think of Carnes’ diagnostic term hijacking as akin to vandalizing a road sign for a hospital emergency department that points injured travelers to a fake back alley “clinic” where they’ll be beaten up and robbed instead of triaged and helped. Basically “travelers”– survivors of violence and coercion– were attempting to go to resources that would actually support and heal them but instead are pointed in the direction of resources that will blame them, exploit them, take their money and, furthermore, exonerate their abusers. And after seeing the video above, I think I’m a little clearer on why Carnes would do this. I used to think the term-vandalism was just cynical traffic piracy, a sort of corporate competitive strategy driven by a therapy model that coddles abusers for mostly pragmatic reasons– because, generally speaking, abusers won’t pay therapists who call a spade a spade, call abuse “abuse” and call abusers “abusers.” But now I suspect even creepier motives. I get the feeling that Carnes has some demented drive to tear down almost 50 years of progress in advocacy for victims of domestic violence because, deep in his heart, he’s on “team batterer.”

Of course I don’t know the guy personally but we’re talking about classic cues. Clinical research of batterers in prison settings suggests that batterers are extremely sensitive to public perceptions of their behavior as if they count on support from the “crowd” in order to destigmatize and rationalize their conduct. Serial abusers tend to collect “palliative comparisons” or evidence that society approves or at least forgives their behavior and will zealously fight against notions and perceptions that condemn them, including the idea that their own victims– or victims in general– are truthful, wholly innocent and undeserving of abuse. Like pedophiles, domestic abusers appear to have a drive to enter professions with “hero aura” which give them power over both prospective victims and sway over public perceptions. This suggests that, as domestic abusers form protection rackets in private to entrap victims, they also seem to be driven to do this in a wider, organized public sense. It would be in keeping with this twisted MO to form therapeutic traps to prevent victims from seeking help from actually helpful resources and instead to steer them back into a fold controlled by abusers.

Meanwhile, the original term “captor bonding” was coined in the 1970s by founding psychotraumatologist, veteran domestic violence survivor advocate and the original researcher who identified Stockholm syndrome, Dr. Frank M. Ochberg. Any search for the term or Ochberg’s name will, again, bring up over 40 years of hugely important victim resources, research on the effects of violent and coercive systematic brainwashing and all sorts of not-so-palliative comparisons to other forms of violent entrapment such as political hostage taking and torture, pedophilic grooming and serial killing. “Stockholm syndrome” was the name for the condition created by the press but, as Ochberg coined it, captor bonding would be considered proper “nosology” or disease-naming in the field of medicine because reference to cause (the “captor” or perpetrator) is built into it. When cause is known, it’s supposed to be included in the clinical name for a condition. The existence of victim (captive) and perpetrator (captor) and that a crime has been committed (taking captives) give the term sufficient gravity and it’s clinically accurate when applied to DV since leading DV researchers have repeatedly illustrated that the tactics used in political interrogation and hostage-taking are virtually indistinguishable from the tactics used by domestic abusers.

Also built into the term “captor bonding” is an understanding that the victim was held hostage in some way under coercive circumstances and had their agency robbed from them, therefore discouragement of victim-blaming is built into the term as well. This is no accident and reflects Ochberg’s general non-blaming philosophy of victimology and non-coddling view of perpetrators. It’s also no accident that following the term “captor bonding” down the rabbit hole of the web or expert resources leads to a rich supply of other victim advocacy resources because the good faith operators in the field tend to hang out with each other and work together. In the bible of PTSD therapy that Ochberg edited (which is listed on the resource page of this blog), “Post-Traumatic Therapy and the Victims of Violence” is a chapter by pioneers of DV survivor advocacy and the international shelter movement, Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft. What’s more, the chapter is a direct attack on the same clinical and legal victim-blaming approaches to victims of domestic violence that Carnes and his acolytes now aim at survivors of a form of domestic abuse involving sexual control and betrayal.

Just as a side note, since– in my experience– virtually all batterers cheat, I don’t see much difference between DV and cheating other than broken bones. It’s as if Carnes and his acolytes have fished out and focused on one particular abuse tactic used by abusers to the exclusion of all others. This would be equivalent to, say, only treating abusers for their tendency to hit victims with toasters on the theory that victims, say, burned the toast one too many times and ignoring assaults with any implement unrelated to burned toast. Aside from being dangerously blaming, the approach is sort of loony reductionism.

The reductionist view of domestic abuse is probably the only thing novel about Carnes’ approach. Otherwise Ochberg’s book is more than 20 years old and the chapter on DV clearly illustrates that that Carnes’ approach is nothing new. It’s just the same “takes two to tango,” split-blame approach that battering victims were once routinely subjected to. The fact that the approach has weeds growing on it makes the adoption of it by Carnes et al. appear to be a type of “therapeutic instrumentalism.” In the sense that I mean it, this is instrumentalism as in “using something just because you happen to have it lying around,” sort of like how Laos was bombed during Vietnam because there were a bunch of unused jets and bombs lying around. In other words, Carnes et al. have repurposed a dormant therapeutic approach for a supposedly different application. As Stark and Flitcraft conclude in the chapter on DV, this approach tends to end very badly for victims, their children and for society in general.

And here’s the kicker: Evan Stark is now spearheading a global campaign to include “coercive control”– or “sub-violent” forms of domestic abuse, control and coercion– in domestic violence statutes. As defined by criminal law in the UK and civil law in the US, coercive control includes many of the behavior patterns that typically accompany sexual infidelity such as gaslighting, psychological bullying, financial abuse, etc. In other words, while banning the act of cheating itself wouldn’t be legislatable, coercive control statutes would make make many of the behaviors used to facilitate cheating unlawful and either punishable with prison terms (UK) or could help victims get orders of protection (Connecticut) and full custody of children (Hawaii and California).

Why would those who defend abusers and euphemize abuse want victims to find resources and sources like Ochberg, Flitcraft and Stark, etc., that not only directly contravene defenders’ claims and approaches but are also actively campaigning to criminalize what the defenders defend and condemn the defenders?

I know that, in the past few years, some well-meaning self-help resources have adopted Carnes’ term “trauma bonding” simply because it’s been so heavily pushed by Carnes and company to the point of becoming viral. But survivors in serious straits have to ask themselves how helpful a self-help resource or therapist could be if they don’t know anything about the history of the terms “trauma bonding” vs. “captor bonding.” No one deeply versed in trauma psychology could be unaware of that history and it’s a safer bet to find someone who does.

Anyway, I’d like to urge people to use the term “captor bonding” rather than the term “trauma bonding” and to share the history of Carnes’ term vandalism when they see “trauma bonding” mentioned as an act of insurrection against the forces of bs. Vive la revolution.