ATI Wisdom Booklets: Poisonous Counseling --Part One

I find most of the Wisdom Booklets produced by the Gothardite cult - also known as ATI/ATIA/IBLP or the Duggar Family cult - to be amusing. 

I'm horrified at the idea of people using these booklets as an educational course - but a lot of the crap that gets included is hilarious.

This one booklet is not funny.  It's not mildly harmful or slightly misleading. 

It's a load of toxic shit theology combined with basic brainwashing techniques that puts any person who is not the paterfamilias of a family in danger of abuse.

This booklet makes it much clearer to me why the Duggar Sisters never spoke about Josh's molestation of them - even to report it to their parents.  Jill and Jessa's defense of Josh makes a whole lot more sense as well.

This will be divided into two posts covering the four themes in the booklet.  This post covers "Take Up Your Complaint With Your Abuser", "Listening Like a Grown-Up" and "WTF? No, seriously. WTF?" 

Next week's ATI Wisdom Booklet post will cover "The Wronged Person is Clearly the Problem"

The introduction to this section starts out with a medically and theologically flawed premise: physical and mental illnesses are caused by sin.


Look, medical doctors ask about some sensitive issues when an illness or injury could be caused by something like an STD, smoking, alcohol use, or relational abuse.  That's very different from asking - or caring - about the morality of a choice.

Interestingly, the link between sin and illness or disability is specifically rejected in the Gospels.  A major theme of John 9 is that being born blind was not because of the sin of the blind man or his parents.  That shoots a whole lot of the theology in CP/QF land to hell.

Of the 20 steps listed in counseling, four steps can be summarized as "Take Your Complaint Up With Your Abuser." 

The "religious rationale" for this is that every person is under the authority of of a male spiritual leader - father, husband, religious leader - who protects them from Satan's wiles.  If a person who is under protection rebels against their authority figure, Satan will capture them because they have committed the sin of witchcraft.   They've even made a kitschy clipart diagram to help people remember:


This argument works if you read the partially quoted verses of the Bible only - and never read any of the rest of the Bible.

Here's a quick list of people who stepped outside of their authority figures and ended up absolutely fine.

• Rachel
• Jacob
• Joseph
• David
• Abigail
• Ruth
• Esther
• Mary
• Jesus

The Bible even gives a nice counter-example of how Job kept on the straight and narrow his whole life and still ended up being tortured by Satan.

The first step is "Determine who is spiritually responsible for him".  The author spends a few paragraphs giving a whole song-and-dance about the importance of keeping people under the correct authority, then uses a simple form of poisoning-the-well to guard against well-meaning counselors hearing abuse allegations:

The author does a nice job of sandwiching "I can't talk to my authority; he's the problem" between the two minor issues of "They didn't know the answer" and "Not Christians".  That's a classic way of diminishing the impact of a person's plea for help.

Once the concern has been diminished, the author reminds the counselor that problems can only be solved by talking to the authority figure.  

• That's not entirely true even for the normal issues that happen in families.  
• A teenager whose parent won't let them play death metal as loudly as the teen wants (true story :-) ) really doesn't need to have a deep heart-to heart with their parents on music volume expectations.  The teen was just looking to blow off steam - and chatting with a sympathetic teacher who pointed out that medicine isn't so good at treating hearing loss did the trick.
• On the flip side, a 17 year old student who is struggling because they are caring for 4  siblings aged 12 and under since their only custodial parent went to Idaho to live with their newest significant other 2 months ago is beyond the "talk to mom or dad" phase as well.  Some situations move directly to "involve governmental organizations".

Step Three is "Discern any symptom of rebellion".  Step Four is "See the problem from God's perspective" which means "look for any signs of rebellion".  Both sections begin by directly stating that harsh or unjust treatment is always due to inappropriate behavior by the person who is rebelling.

From Step Three:

This section is terrifying because it provides potential abusers with a script for victim-blaming. 

Even setting aside abusive situations for a moment, this script is completely useless for among adults because it falls apart under a trivial marital issue. Allow me to demonstrate:

Me: "My husband spends more time playing video games after work than he does interacting with me!"
ATI dingbat: "What did you do that caused him to prefer video games to you?"
Me: "*side-eyes person*  I don't have level-up rewards?  I don't have gold reward tokens that he can exchange for building materials to work on his village? You are kidding me, right?"

The last of the steps that fits in this category is "Guard against inappropriate emotional attachments".  While this is pretty solid advice for trained counselors, this section focuses entirely on extramarital affairs.  The section reinforces the false idea in CP/QF theology that women and men cannot interact on any level safely.

I find it deeply ironic that the adherents of CP/QF beliefs purport to hold themselves to a higher standard than the rest of us heathens while living in dread fear that they will be completely unable to control themselves if tempted by someone of the opposite gender.  For most people, attraction can be nipped in the bud by self-control applied early and often.  I've found myself attracted to men who were married before - and yet I've never had an emotional or physical affair.  When I became aware of my feelings of attraction,  I accepted that I felt that way, affirmed my desire not to be involved in an affair, and made sure my actions were restricted to the role I played in my job, volunteer work, schooling etc.

I find the paragraph about women setting out to seduce male pastors to be questionable in the extreme.  I can see where women would be attracted to the role of a safe, emotionally available spiritual leader - but that's much different than calmly setting out to seduce a pastor so that the woman will feel less guilty.  In fact, that's just a weird assumption about how any person would assuage their guilt.

The next theme is "Listening like a Grown-Up".  Many people attracted to high demand religious groups come from backgrounds where they dealt with adults who never modeled good communication skills so this theme is attractive since it teaches how to be a good listener.  Steps within this theme are innocuous enough like

• Step Seven: "Make Sure You Understand the Real Problem" - e.g., people will ask you about a relatively minor problem to judge your counseling skill before asking you about a major problem.
• Step Nine: "Refuse to Be Sworn to Secrecy Before Hearing the Problem" - excellent advice but strangely passive wording of the situation.
• Step Ten: "Handle Disabling Emotions before Working the Problem" - if the person is not in a fairly calm emotional state, help them settle down before dealing with the issues.
• Step Eleven: "Identify the Point of Greatest Resistance" - figure out what's keeping them from resolving the problem.
• Step Eight: "Learn to ask Perceptive Questions" - great tip; horrible Biblical examples.  Do not try and sound like Solomon or Jesus.......

The last clump consists of two absolutely insane pieces of advice. 

Step Fourteen is "Bind Satan Before Trying to Spoil his House".  Apparently, Satan can only be bound through using a three-step prayer constructed using ideas scattered throughout the Bible.  Allow me to point out my deep amusement at an extremely formulaic - and dare I say legalistic? - prayer from a group who routinely derides Catholics as being formulaic and legalistic.

Step Twenty is "Show how Past Failures Can Become a Positive Message".  Yup.  Everyone wants help in making sure they have the best testimonial out there!

The next post in this series will be outlining the problematic brainwashing techniques that Wisdom Booklets want counselors to learn to keep everyone in line.

(Blogger note: My posts may be a bit irregular on dates over the next few weeks.  My husband has a cold which means my son may get his first respiratory illness soon; we've in the middle of a full slate of assorted doctor/specialist/therapist visits and I managed to break a tooth badly enough that it needs to be extracted and replaced with an implant - but good news: the nerve is dead so the tooth doesn't hurt.  I was wondering why I felt more tired than usual -and then I read the last paragraph aloud.)