Recovery Institution Shuts Down Critical Thinking

[trenton]

I visited the PIER recovery center and looked into some of the groups I was allowed to join. One of the groups was a parenting group in which I was hoping to learn something valuable. When I attended the group, I watched how it all played out and everybody seemed disengaged while a woman read off of a paper seemingly on autopilot. Along the way I started asking questions and she didn't seem to appreciate that.

I started asking things like "what would it look like if those ideas were applied in practice, and can you give an example scenario in which to apply these principles?" She seemed to be covering something very broadly, but not very concretely. She didn't seem to have any confident answers for me. As I asked questions like these and gave example scenarios, I noticed that the other people in the room started lighting up and rethinking how they did parenting. They started questioning their past decisions and wondered if they could have done something better based on what I was describing.

Some of the parents started saying that I should be the one teaching the class because they felt that they were learning a lot. One of the men started opening up. He told me that he beat the shit out of his son when he started talking back and cussing him out. However, he didn't do the same to his daughter and he just laughed at her. This turned into a discussion of gender bias in parenting in which it is common to make assumptions about a person's character based on their gender, leading to unfair treatment. I along with others recounted times in which they noticed gender bias which included when I sited court outcomes with men receiving longer sentences than women despite committing similar crimes. Therefore, gender bias is common even in the criminal justice system due to the stereotype of men being cold and deserving of harsher treatment which applies to parenting just as well in the cases we described.

Sometimes I started asking questions like "what does it mean to be a good parent, and what kind of moral philosophy should we apply to different situations?" I noticed how little was actually being taught in these classes and how little it would be improving our actual parenting skills. The questions I raised seemed to actually get people to think about it, but for some reason the institution didn't like it. Eventually, I was forbidden from going to such meetings. Apparently, they are required to read on autopilot with no questions asked. I started questioning further about the outcomes of the program because judging from what I witnessed it didn't seem very promising for producing better parents. When I went into that class I was expecting something very different like a discussion of moral philosophy combined with specific scenarios to put principles into practice. The way the court document was written, it sounded like it incentivized coercive control such as getting your child to do what you want them to do without clear limits on what means could be used to do that. If spanking is still legal, then that raises further questions about what is legally considered a good parent given the psychological studies on such practices.

I discovered that the anger management groups were also run by the courts. The instructor took the position that anger management problems cause involvement with the criminal justice system. I suggested a counter example, arguing that causation is reversed with criminal justice involvement causing anger. A simple example would be being falsely accused of crimes you didn't commit due to identity theft and being jailed anyway. Such situations would understandably cause anger and I have witnessed this happen. It is a typical pattern of "anger damns the innocent" which is well known in legal philosophy. Anger is commonly interpreted as proof of guilt rather than a reasonable reaction to a false accusation. Coerced plea deals might be another example in which a person's financial situation is weaponized against them to secure a conviction they can't overturn. Apparently, these courses were not designed for things like homicidal rage linked to sexual abuse, which would definitely cause criminal justice involvement as a result of extreme anger. An example might be if someone raped your daughter.

I spoke with some of the managers and they seemed kind of nervous when I asked these questions. I used the logic of the courts against them when they insisted on evidence based treatment while their evidence was poor. From what I have witnessed, the evidence courts use is often faulty and their investigations heavily biased with an apparent agenda to prioritize procedure over outcome. These dynamics seem to extend to recovery classes that are run by the government with an apparent indifference to parental and emotional outcomes.

Of course, I know there are a lot of problems with the justice system, and this just adds to the list of problems with the justice system. They probably sensed that I was distrusting of courts with the implicit frame being that I'm not supposed to present information that challenges authority. This also happened in the medical system in which I noticed similar dynamics when I presented evidence that psychiatrists were systematically involved in malpractice and largely ignorant of the epistemic limitations of the narrow studies they sited with prescribing medicine due to context stripping making antidepressants seem more effective than they actually are. The advertisements are extremely misleading and do not correspond to practical reality. In the case of the court system, I didn't even tell them that there were corrupt police officers involved in gang activities like drug and child sex trafficking while using corrupt police informants to frame their victims for crimes they didn't commit. Local law enforcement commonly is compromised in the event of widespread gang activity and trafficking cases because gangs often bribe police officers or use the local stations as cover for their crimes. The disturbing reality is that if you encounter a police officer, you have no way of knowing if this person is also a gang member. They might even use their badge to legitimize the murders they commit with limited consequences. This is well known in ICE especially as some of their members are former gang members, child predators, and murders who face little to no consequences for their actions.

In any case, if I want to learn about parenting, I would be better off sticking to my own research and self-reflection. In the case of anger management, I might have to find another way to manage the desire to cause harm to others who have harmed me. It seems that the most effective approach is to meet the anger with warmth and compassion acknowledging that I was treated unfairly and I didn't deserve the attacks. My desire to harm others does not make me a bad person who should be ashamed of himself, but it is information linked to underlying unresolved wounds that seem to improve with connection to people who see this pain in a nonjudgmental manner. Sometimes there is a sense of warmth that breaks through even if it is brief and tied to a specific comment like "you were not a bad kid" or something similar.

Edit: for clarification, I am not involved with courts presently. These voluntary programs are linked to the legal system. I don't know if my comments might create a paper trail that can be used against me due to my words being taken completely out of context and turned into something they are not.

Edited May 21 by trenton