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No, therapy won't make incels stop hating women
The belief is rooted in myths about the roots of abuse
I’m glad there’s less stigma around seeking therapy for mental health issues, but I notice people increasingly suggest it for misogynist and abusive men. While this may be well-intentioned, it actually does more harm than good because it plays into the myth that abusive behavior patterns and beliefs are rooted in mental illness.
I often seen the “go to therapy!” recommendation on Twitter and even if it’s often said in jest, I think we should consider what’d it mean if someone took the advice seriously.
This post is an unrolled version of the thread that begins here for future reference.
Abusive men who go to therapy just learn new terminologies and tactics to manipulate people and hide from accountability.
— Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸 (@wagatwe)
3:49 AM • Feb 14, 2020
Therapy isn't the silver bullet we want it to be. My ex got worse when he started going to therapy. Turns out it's common among abusers. He just used it to say "I'm not treating you like shit. I went to therapy for you!"
Abuse isn't a mental health problem. It's a values and entitlement problem. And therapists are often manipulated and fooled by abusers, too, because most are not trained to look out for that.
Someone isn't going to end their abusive mindset just from 40-minute weekly sessions when the remaining 10,040 is full of abuse-enabling messages from media, people, environment.
Take what Lundy Bancroft—an expert on domestic violence with many years of experience working with abusers to stop their behavior—writes in Why Does He Do That? says, for example:
“If abusiveness were the product of childhood emotional injury, abusers could overcome their problem through psychotherapy. But it is virtually unheard of for an abusive man to make substantial and lasting changes in his pattern of abusiveness as a result of therapy. He may work through other emotional difficulties, he may gain insight into himself, but his behavior continues. In fact it typically gets worse, as he uses therapy to develop new excuses for his behavior, more sophisticated arguments to prove that his partner is mentally unstable, and more creative ways to make her feel responsible for his emotional distress.”
From section “The Abusive Man in Individual Therapy” (emphasis mine)
“The more psychotherapy a client of mine has participated in, the more impossible I usually find it is to work with him. The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight.”
“The fact is that if an abuser finds a particularly skilled therapist and if the therapy is especially successful, when he is finished he will be a happy, well-adjusted abuser—good news for him, perhaps, but not such good news for his partner. Psychotherapy can be very valuable for the issues it is devised to address, but partner abuse is not one of them; an abusive man needs to be in a specialized program, as we will see.”
Last year I wrote about the dangers of blaming mental illness on intimate violence. Yes, some incels may have mental illness, but it doesn't cause their misogynist values and abusive feelings of entitlement. Read it on Patreon.
Incel ideology is abusive ideology
I draw parallels between incels and abusive men because they both hold one important thing: entitlement. Incels feel entitled to have sex with women and hold a superior place in society that is threatend by feminist progress.
Bancroft explains that entitlement is one of the root causes of abusive behavior. He notes that an abuser’s “value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.” While abusive men in relationships have a partner and/or children to mistreat, incels will attack strangers online—and sometimes offline.
What is needed to change entitled, abusive men? Bancroft says “consequences, education, confrontation, and accountability.” There has to be a targeted, specialized plan to really address the root of the problem.
In short, don’t expect psychotherapy to stop misogynistic entitlement. Everyone deserves access to mental healthcare, but they also deserve to know what it actually can do. We need realistic expectations if we’re going to handle this wave of violent misogyny.
Futher Reading:
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