To get a feel of what work I've done & why I've chosen to share it with you.... in my own personal journey thru recovery, long before dr. phil came up with a system similar to this, I realized that although I wasn't in the habit of casting blame on anyone for my poor mental health, I certainly had some "ideas" about why I've experienced what I did throughout my lifetime & why the state of my mental health was so poor.

As an adult, I've continued to have a relationship with my family, but have always lived at least 1500 miles away from them. There was some time, when my sister lived with my ex-husband & myself, but for the most part.... I've never had a family support system in my adult life to help me thru the difficulties I always seemed to encounter.

As my mind has become clearer (gaining clarity) as the result of my medications prescribed by my doctor at counseling, began to relieve the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, depression, as well as the continuation of my therapy sessions - I began to write down everything I could remember about my life.

What was amazing about this exercise was that when I remembered enough to write something down, another event would begin to emerge into my concious memory. It was almost as if someone was in the "attic of my memory warehouse" dusting cobwebs off my childhood memory files & sliding them towards me to grasp a hold of.

Traditional Family Values

"accurate."

We were told, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver & Ozzie & Harriet weren't just the way things were supposed to be, but the way things were.

Things were not that way.

It's probably good that life wasn't like the television shows in the '50s - we wouldn't have many women now. Take a look at the ratio of boys to girls on the most popular family shows.

• Ozzie & Harriet had 2 boys, 0 girls.

• Leave It to Beaver had 2 boys, 0 girls.

• Rifleman had 1 boy, 1 rifle, 0 girls.

• Lassie had 1 boy, one dog (supposedly a girl, but played by a boy) & 0 girls.

• My Three Sons had - well, that one's obvious.

• Bonanza had 3 grown-up boys.

• Although Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz in real life had 1 boy & 1 girl, on I Love Lucy they had 1 boy.

• The only shows with daughters were The Donna Reed Show (1 boy, 1 girl) & that lighthouse to womanhood despite its title....

• Father Knows Best (1 boy, 2 girls).

Grown to maturity, that's a late -1960's dating population of 15 men to 3 women.

• Almost all the households were mama-papa-kiddies: the nuclear family.

(The exceptions were My Three Sons & Bonanza: Steve Douglas [Fred MacMurray] & Ben Cartwright were widowers.)

• There were no prior marriages
• No children from prior relationships
• No threat or even thought of divorce
• The closest thing we saw to physical abuse was Ralph Kramden's, "One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . to the moon!"
• There were no infidelities
• No drinking problems
• No drugs

(not even prescription tranquilizers)

• no racism

(How could there be? With the exception of Hop Sing & Ricky Ricardo, there was only 1 race; even the Hispanic gardener on Father Knows Best was named Frank Smith)

• There was no dropping out of school
• No political discussion

(much less political differences)

• No unemployment

(except for Ozzie's early retirement)

• No severe economic problem

(except for a crop failure on Lassie, when they had to sell all the livestock, including Lassie; but just before being carted off, Lassie pawed the ground & struck oil & everything was okay again. Except for Lassie, who looked as though the Exxon Valdez had dumped its forward holding tanks on her)

• The father was the breadwinner
• The mother was the bread maker

(the only mother who came close to working was Lucy, becoming the spokeswoman for Vitavita-Vegimen or that afternoon at the candy factory)

• There was no fear of the bomb

(which is what we kids were terrified about in the '50's)

• No severe disobedience

(although white lies, mischief & misunderstandings were needed for laughs)

• Life was wholesome, wholesome, wholesome.[*FN]

As much as the religious right likes to point to 1950's sitcom wholesomeness as the Ideal American Family, these shows, in fact, had a remarkable lack of religion.

What religion were these people? They certainly weren't Jewish. And, other than possibly Ricky Ricardo, none of them was Catholic.

They were probably safely mainline Presbyterians.

But that was the name of the game: play it safe. In playing it safe, there was less mention of God & religion on these shows than actually took place in American families in the '50's.

That life doesn't exist anymore.

But then, it never did.

When I was a boy, my family took great care w/our snapshots. We really planned them. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren't ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it.

RICHARD AVEDON

In her book, The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz explains,  

"Pessimists argue that the family is collapsing; optimists counter that it's merely diversifying. Too often, both camps begin with an ahistorical, static notion of what "the" family was like before the contemporary period.  

Thus we have one set of best sellers urging us to reaffirm traditional family values in an era of "family collapse" & another promising to set us free from traditional family traps if we can only turn off "old tapes" & break out of old ruts. . . .  

The actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of an idealized image.

 Families have always been in flux & often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used to be."  

Here are some facts about "the good old days": 

•  In 1960, 1 in 3 children lived in poverty.

• Fewer than 1/2 the students who entered high school in the late 1940's ever finished.

• The US has had the highest homicide rate in the industrial world for almost 150 years.

• From 1950 to 1959, 257,455 cases of polio were reported, mostly in children; 11,957 died of it.

• In 1940, 1 American child in 10 didn't live with either birth parent. Today the figure is 1 in 25.

• More couples reported their marriage "happy" in 1977 than did in 1957.  (The "happy marriage" index dropped slightly by the late 1980's, but still remained higher than it was in 1957.)

• A woman over 35 has a better chance of marrying today than she did in the 1950's.

• In the mid-1950's, 25% of the population lived below the poverty line.

• In 1958, 60% of the population over 65 had incomes below $1,000.

• In the 1950's, 1/3 of the white, native-born families couldn't get by with the income of only 1 working parent.

• In the 1950's, racism was deeply institutionalized. 50% of black families lived below the poverty line; migrant workers suffered appalling working & living conditions; people of color weren't permitted to take part in the American dream.

• In 1952, there were 2,000,000 more wives working outside the home than there were at the peak of wartime production.

• Women who failed to conform to the June Cleaver / Margaret Anderson role of housewife & mother were severely criticized.

A 1947 bestselling book, The Modern Woman, called feminism a "deep illness," labeled the idea of an independent woman a "contradiction in terms" & explained that women who wanted equal pay & equal educational opportunities were engaged in a "ritualistic castration" of men.

• Women were often denied the right to serve on juries, convey property, make contracts (including leases on apartments) & establish credit in their own names (including mortgages & credit cards). 

•  Men who failed to marry were considered immature, selfish or homosexual. A man without a wife found it difficult finding work or getting promoted. 

• Unmarried men & women were routinely paid less than married men & women because, it was explained, their needs were less.

• The witch hunts against communists extended to homosexuals & other political & social "deviants."

• During the 1950's, 2,611 civil servants were fired as "security risks"; 4,315 resigned while being "investigated."

• In her book, Private Lives: Men & Women of the '50's, Benita Eisler quotes film producer Joel Schumacher: "No one told the truth. People pretended they weren't unfaithful. They pretended they weren't homosexual. They pretended they weren't horrible." The uniformity we sense about the '50's, with everyone happily "fitting in," was, in fact, a great number of frightened people pretending to fit in - & pretending to enjoy it.

• A "sure cure" for homosexuality for either men or women was marriage.

This myth was propagated not just by popular culture, but by psychologists & psychiatrists as well. When marriage failed to be the "cure," as it always did, having a child would surely take care of the problem. When that didn't work, a 2nd child was "prescribed." When that didn't work, well, the least you could do is pretend to be heterosexual & do your duty - for your children's sake.

• Congress discussed nearly 200 bills to deal with the problem of "juvenile delinquency" in 1955 - the year Rebel Without a Cause was released.

• Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America of 1958, revealed in 1991 that her wealthy, respectable father had sexually violated her from age 5 until 18.

• Alcoholism soared in the 1950's.

• Wife-beating wasn't really considered a crime. Many psychologists explained that battered wives were masochists who provoked their husbands into beating them.

• A husband raping his wife wasn't a crime at all, but a sign that the woman was deficient in fulfilling her marital obligations.

• 1/2 of the marriages that began in the 1950's ended in divorce.

• During the 1950's, more than 2,000,000 legally married people lived separately.

• Staying together "for the children" surpassed baseball as the national pastime.

• Far from Beaver & Wally telling Ward & June carefully edited versions of their daily adventures over the dinner table, more often the evening meal was a TV dinner on a TV tray in front of the TV.

• What the TV couldn't numb, tranquilizers could. A New Yorker cartoon illustrated a 1950's couple, floating down the river in a gondola, surrounded by beautiful flowers, singing birds & playful butterflies.

The husband asks the wife, "What was the name of that tranquilizer we took?" In 1958, 462,000 pounds of tranquilizers were consumed in the US. A year later, consumption had more than tripled to 1.5 million pounds.

• By the end of the 1950's, when Redbook asked readers to supply examples for an upcoming article, "Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped," they received 24,000 replies.

• The number of pregnant brides more than doubled in the 1950's.

• In 1957, there were more than twice as many births to girls aged 15 to 19 than in 1983. my birth year!

• The number of illegitimate babies put up for adoption rose 80% from 1944 to 1955.

Ms. Coontz concludes, "The historical record is clear on one point: Although there are many things to draw on in our past, there's no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption & no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world."

• Depending on whose statistics you read, today the traditional nuclear family represents anywhere from 6% to less than 50% of the American population. One can fiddle with the statistics endlessly.

• Should the household have only the male as the breadwinner?

• Should there be no one living in the household except the mother, father & children?

• Should the household be in a single-family house, or will an apartment do?

• Does a couple living alone without children count?

• However we look at it, the point is clear: even taking the most generous estimate, today more than 1/2 the country lives outside a nuclear family.

• You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives ...

"A man of low morality is a menace to the government, whatever he is & they are all tied up together."

Senator Wherry in New York Post, 1950

The most active period of social movement rhetoric in the 20th century was the 1960's. This period roughly begins w/a build-up from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court Decision of 1954.

This desegregation decision began the Civil Rights movement. By 1960, multiple movements are gathering steam in the US.

After 1970 & the Kent State killings, social movements began to decline & by the fall of Saigon that ended the Vietnam War in 1975 the most active period was over.

Of course, movements continue to our day just as there have always been some active reform movements in America. But the most active period was over.

The 1960's were the richest era of social movements since the 1830's. There were many significant movements active in the decade that dramatically changed many aspects of American life & altered the direction of American political activity.

Members often were members of multiple movements, but there were also intense followers of particular causes.

Among the significant movements were:

Movements for African American identity & power. In 2 basic movements, one for identity & one for integrative power, African Americans sought public voice.

The Black Power Movement was a search for a distinctive identity as Black Americans & creating the place for socializing the common experience of oppression.

The Civil Rights Movement sought to provide access to the ballot box & the economic world that were the sources of power in established American power.

Peace Movements. In the midst of the Cold War, with the advent of nuclear weapons & the stark reality of body bags returning from Vietnam, a cluster of movements sought to oppose the use of institutional violence by political power.

This cluster began with the "Ban the Bomb" movement of the 1950's & with the increased American involvement in Vietnam gained massive power in opposition to the war.

Women's Movements. Most dominantly, feminism, this cluster of movements moved women ought of the privacy of the home as their domain & into public life.

The commonality of women's expreriences became the basis of an identity movement. The unsuccessful Equal Rights Amendment movement became an integrative movement for women's access to the economy & to government.

Lifestyle Movements. A loosely controlled movement based in music & lifestyle liberalized the rigidity of American culture, created multiple new forms of expression & changed many of the ways Americans lived their lives from living arrangements to clothing styles.

Many of these movements were about the rules by which communication could be transacted in the culture. But basic issues of what sort of deviant cultural practices would be tolerated were also at stake.

Institutional Reform Movements. From churches to the system of higher education, the 60's were marked by many movements that sought fundamental change in the power relationships in institutions beyond politics.

A traditional source of such movements in the past, labor, was left out, but change swept thru most of the other major institutions of American life.

Many of these changes were egalitarian, opening the power structure of the institutions to broader participation.

Movements for Voice. In the atmosphere of the decade, the attraction of a crowd & the power of a bullhorn transformed common experiences of all types into new identities.

So strong was the pattern of the social movement that by the 1980's, even those who had opposed the social movements of the 1960's, such as the fundamentalist church, embraced the form & sought to enhance their own power & identity by declaring themselves movements.

Sixties' Movements used diverse media

Music. The relatively cheap production of phonograph records & later tapes & the potential for gathering people at a concert, meant that music was a important media for this movement.

Songs such as Bob Dylan's "The Times they are a'changin'" were key rhetorical artifacts supporting 60s movement activities. The joint performance of music was a powerful ritual uniting members of a movement.

Mass Rallies. Diverse arrays of speakers appeared at mass rallies. Voices enhanced by bullhorns & public address systems diffused the words. Chants of slogans, singing of songs & call-response (audience reaction to speeches) provided communicative experiences that united the movement, developed pride in its power & celebrated the rhetoric that energized its members.

Institutional Sites. Two institutional sites were particularly important to diffusion of the rhetoric of movements in the 1960's.

The Black churches of the South provided an institutional home for the civil rights movement & to a lesser extent the Black Power movement. These churches provided both a public space where meetings & rallies could be held & a leadership structure that could maximize the power of the movement to organize energies of its members.

The college campuses were a second institutional site. This site was important because it provided a concentration of movement activists, maintained an idealistic commitment to free speech & novelty of ideas & a focus for resistance. Unlike the Black churches, the leaders of colleges & universities resisted the movements of the 60's & in many cases were targets of the movements.

But the geographical & institutional campus wasn't easily controlled & movements, even those attacking their administrations, thrived in the atmosphere.

The mass media of minor importance. Sixties movements didn't generally use the mass media to diffuse their messages. American mass media were controlled by institutional powers & didn't provide access to leaders of the movements.

Even mass media that tried to provide such voice often selected their own leaders to present to the public at large & these leaders often had no authority w/in the movement. Where the media were important in movements, was television's ability to disseminate stark visual images that expanded the limits of "direct" experience that rhetors for the movement could talk about as a common experience for their members.

For example, a famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese child running down a road in Vietnam w/the flames from an American napalm bomb burning her flesh was stark image of American use of military power. Such images, seen by everyone, became a part of common experience & the stuff of rhetorical proof.

In the 1960s, millions of young people across America rejected the norms of the time for a lifestyle based on radical political & social views.

Many of their philosophies centered around the ideas of peace & love making the world a better place.

The people of this movement had different ideas about drugs, sexual relations & even fashion. They were known as "hippies" & their revolution has left a lasting effect on our country & the world today.

"The times, they are a-changing..."