Bpok Review: Responsible Living in an Age of Excuses

Title: Responsible Living in an Age of Excuses

Author: Kurt Bruner

Date: 1992

Publisher: Moody

ISBN: 0-8024-9097-2

Length: 184 pages of text

Quote: “It is important that we recognize the pain of life if we hope to recover from its scars and overcome its obstacles. Unfortunately, many have become so consumed with the process of recognition that recovery never occurs.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of seeking “talk therapy” for real psychiatric help had been replaced by the idea of “talk therapy” as part of education. After all, who couldn’t stand to feel happier, and what (apart from money) did anyone have to lose from talking to a professional listener who’d been sworn to secrecy? “Talk therapy” had to be formally banished from the public schools by right-wingers who claimed that all that self-exploration had a left-wing agenda.

Little evidence of any organized group efforts to use talk therapy to push any specific religious or political viewpoint has been found, but that doesn’t mean that individual teacher/therapists never prodded a conscientious student to “loosen up” or told quiet, self-contained students they had “very deep-rooted trust issues.” I never heard that sort of thing at my public school. I heard it at one of the conservative Protestant churches that opposed it in the public schools. Some emotional gropers had no qualms about telling people who didn’t leap to embrace the gropers’ agendas (or the gropers themselves) that such pathological distrustfulness was probably the product of sexual abuse in early childhood.

The payoff for letting oneself be manipulated by these people was that one acquired a prefabricated excuse for all sorts of things. Was the neighbor yelling because you’d parked in his space again? Maybe it felt good to say wisely, “I don’t think this is really about the parking space. I think you’re really angry about something in your past. You should get some counselling.” Or maybe it felt better to go ahead and punch him: “Well, I can’t help it, I just lose control when an old man with glasses yells at me, because my stepfather...”

The plots thickened in the 1980s as serotonin-boosting medication came onto the market. Side effects of the serotonin boosters included (1) painful, often disabling cramps, often in the pelvic area, and (2) loss of interest in sex, and (3) susceptibility to pseudomemories that might feel more vivid than the person’s actual memories, although they were often physically impossible. Suddenly people were blaming their behavior on the horrible things their stepfathers had done to them, amd they had never even had stepfathers. Lauren Slater, who used serotonin boosters with the understanding that they might give her pseudomemories, found that the drugs allowed her to remember an abusive childhood in a home and family she recognized as different from her real ones.

The social problems created by “Prozac Dementia” have yet to be addressed, but meanwhile Bruner, a subdirector of the “Focus on the Family” TV show, tried to offer common-sense advice to the excuse makers. “Child abuse, racial prejudice, religious excesses, financial difficulties,and a thousand other sources of resistance confront all who live in this world,” Bruner asserted, cheerfully overlooking the fact that these things are more substantial “sources of resistance” for some of us than they are for others.

By 1992 Americans were complaining of “compassion fatigue.” A popular song had the refrain, “Here’s a quarter: call someone who cares.” Bruner didn’t start the trend toward rudely discounting any and all emotional appeals coming from the people who’d formed the habit of “processing” their emotional “baggage” in public; he was simply caught up in it.

The “Age of Excuses” is over. It’s possible to say that Responsible Living has outlived its usefulness for many people. If you’re looking for documentation for an historical study of the Age of Excuses and the backlash against it, this book is for you.