Individuals and Families

– [Murray] This one into the early formulation One was going to be found in families and I went into great detail on that, and I wrote it out before research ever started. What was gonna be found every step along the way, and then when somebody, either a therapist or a researcher, found something that wasn’t predicted, then why wasn’t it predicted? Where was the error? The error was that we had forgotten something and it should have been there all the time, or it was wrong. So most of the time, we’ve forgotten it. So it could be brought up today. Most of the time any person has not understood theory and what goes into it. As soon as they understood theory then the difference was no longer there. So that was head up as one safeguard. You know, there was another one that got into that. In other words, if there is an error, how do you fix it? Give the errors in the therapist and they’ll learn more theory. If the error is in the theory, you gotta change the damn theory, so what do you do with that? And that is a safeguard. There was another one, and how do you make predictions on families? We know what happens in the here and now between the parents, grandparents, and the family, how you gonna make a prediction for 200 years from now? What we did was to set up blinds studies on that. I had a group of people, we collected as much information as we could on what has happened in the year out, and then that was fed to people who knew the theory. And they were asked to make predictions. This would be fed information collected 150 years ago to make prediction on what’s happening here and now. And you know these people were amazingly accurate and it is possible to take information collected 150, 200 years ago and use that as a basis for what’s gonna happen in the here and now. So I’ll tell you, this is a lot of fun, if you wanna do it. You’ll be surprised how accurate you are, but that was one way that we’ve been able to make predictions. If the theory’s right, you’re prediction is right as well. If the theory’s based on feelings, there’s no accuracy to it. You see, people can survive early years with no self, no sweat, they’re living at home. And you can be completely in sync with the family. You live at home. The breakdown occurs when the kid attempts to live away from the family. The breakdown occurs at adolescence, and one time they had a study at NIH called the College Project, and this was made up of people who became psychotic when they went away to college. Which is okay, but that assumes that these were a different kind of people. I think not. I think they were just people that had low levels of self and they couldn’t exist away from family. We have the same thing that goes in society and right now we’re calling these homeless. Everybody who’s homeless at one time had a family, they still got one. Probably, there are a few people without families, but most people got ’em. They got ’em and can’t stand them. Now, do we treat these people as if what they say is accurate? Good God, I’d have trouble with my family since day one. It’s hard to go back and deal with family but isn’t there a way to deal with that without cutting off from them? The United States was first established with people from Europe and we got into this business of immigration and emigration. The federal government, as you see, works as if they’re interchangeable. Immigration is going to and emigration is going from, it’s not the same. People emigrated from Europe because of a sad truth. They couldn’t stand their families. They immigrated to the United States because that part of the family that they liked was already in the United States. They are going to. So that is to do with the problems of moving from one country to another. In the United States, that is to do with moving from one state to another, that is to do with our society always on the move. And the assumption being that it’s determined more by their relationships with their families than by some difference. Now there’re a few things. There are people connected with the State Department who are just arbitrarily moved every so many years. So there are people connected with jobs like that. There are jobs connected with clergy, you know. They are moved to a new station. So the people moved to follow the job. Armed forces. But most moves are determined by the way people relate to their families, and when people are turned off about their families, boy, you better believe it. These are low-level people who would rather take any consequence than going back and saying hello to their families. And it is part of the extended family business. To say hello to that part of the family you hate. There’s big benefits in it for you if you wanna do it. You have a choice, go to an individual therapy, individual therapist and treat it that way. They don’t have to know or they can go home at that point. As far as I’m concerned, you’re much better off to deal with the main problem than to deal with it as if it doesn’t exist. So that is a bias, that is a bias that’s built into me. ‘Course I get interested in why they make a screwy decision like that, I spend a long time on that. And most people go on to see their extended family but when the therapist goes along with this, without communicating to the family, I think he’s being hypocritical. I think he’d want, if the therapist is a hypocrite, let’s just say its a lousy role model quote unquote For the family. So I think the therapist has to do it. But there’s an awful lot of society. The number of kids who run away from home, you hear about it all the time. The number of kids who end up in shelters, homes of some kind, and most of these shelters pretend to go through some kind of something to make contact with the family. But they act as if a substitute family is as good as the original family. The degree of feeling that gets into them, one’s own relationship with the family can be so great that kids want to kill because of it. There were a number of kids that go through the process of killing their parents, which I think is a high price to pay. They can do it if they want to but what I’m trying to do is to get at what is the attitude of society that lets kids make this kind of decision? That kid is a product of that family and they can either recognize it or not recognize it, but if you go along with not recognizing it then you are saying that the problem, your family were sick bastards. Nobody can relate to them. I don’t believe it. I think it’s easier to fix that than it is to go along with a belief. The same belief that they have, I think we’ve gone too far with that in society. Then you get into the big one, of course. Say you can’t, that would be low-level people. You cannot do a contact with a new person until you’ve cut off with the old. So there’re all kinds of people. How immediately do you have contact with a new person, how immediately, and you do a cut off with the old one? Society’s filled with these. You can get in, you can do a, this would be one that I spent a lot of time on back in the early days. See, adolescence is supposed to be a time of great stress for all of us. That is a period when we are moving out from the past and into the future. I would say, for the average, well-put together person, this is a period of challenge. Kids are challenged by this and doing the best they can do for themselves. They can do some surprising things if you hold yourself out and let them go. So anytime you put yourself in a position of, these poor dears cannot relate to it, well you don’t know what kinda jerks have been in their families. You need to talk to their families about it. But, anyway, what I’m trying to say about this, is people let’s recognize the family as an entity and let’s don’t buy what they bought.