To: MIT.EDU!WITCHHUNT Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:34:00 -0800 November 30, 1994 American Ass

From: romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu!megasystem.com!melody.gavigan (Melody Gavigan)
To:   MIT.EDU!WITCHHUNT
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:34:00 -0800

     November 30, 1994

American Association of Marriage & Family Therapists
1100 17 St. NW 10 Floor
Washington, D.C. 20036
FAX # (202) 223-2329

Re:  Continuing Education Credit Approval
     for John Bradshaw seminars

Dear Sir or Madam:

I believe that your organization has given approval for
Continuing Education Credits to therapists for the
following John Bradshaw seminars:

December 1-4   White Plains, New York
December 8-11  Boston, MA.

I am interested in finding out what your standards and
criteria for approval are. Are you aware, for instance,
that in John Bradshaw's brochure of upcoming events, it
is stated that his lectures cover the following topics:

"Reclaiming Your Infant Self: How unfulfilled infancy
needs can affect adult life" (Is it the Association's
position that it is possible to retrieve accurate
memories from infancy?) and,

"Supplying unmet childhood needs by choosing a new
"family of choice" (Isn't the goal of family therapy to
bring a family together, rather than to discard and
replace the family because of a few selfish unmet
"childhood needs"?)

The brochure also states that Mr. Bradshaw uses "group
exercises to help access childhood memories" for the goal
of "recovery, uncovery, and discovery." I have been to
several of Mr. Bradshaw's seminars and he utilizes
hypnosis in the form of guided imagery exercises, and
left-hand dominant writing to access "repressed memories"
of familial abuse. The American Medical Association has
issued a statement saying that such memory retrieval
methods are "fraught with potential misapplication." Mr.
Bradshaw does not offer a disclaimer that such exercises
are likely to produce imaginative scenes as well as real
memories, and I have had occasion to come into contact
with several women who have come away from his seminars
suddenly and erroneously believing that they had been
traumatically sexually abused by their father at an early
age and "repressed" the memory. This was usually
"validated" at the seminar by one of Bradshaw's roving
therapists. I consider this psychological abuse of the
worst kind.

My own experience with Mr. Bradshaw's books, tapes, and
seminars has been a similarly destructive one -
destructive to both my own mental health and to my
family. After my own California licensed Marriage and
Family Therapist exposed me to Bradshaw's writings and
speeches, I believed for a time that I came from a
sexually abusive and thoroughly "dysfunctional family"
and following his probably sincere but very misleading
advice, sought to discard and replace them with a "family
of choice." Would you have this be the goal of therapy
for your licensed Marriage and Family practitioners?

It seems that Mr. Bradshaw is doing many things to
alienate family members from each other, so why would
your organization approve continuing education for family
therapists who will go out and do the same thing?
Why are you approving educational credits for a "pop
psychologist" anyway, rather than helping to further
more scientific applications in the field? Why propagate
harmful therapy in the name of education?