Everyone needs a spouse.
There are a number of things that go wrong
that one can't blame on the government.
- Anonymous

How do psychologists teach children to misplace blame?

We are often misled by societal pressures to place blame on others for things that are done. There are cases in which adolescents for example are placed in protected housing environments or other such locations for various reasons. When during the course of their therapy, one of the first stages of their therapy is to ask them why they are there. Some of them are there because of problems in the family. Others are there because of their own inadequacies or their own psychological problems, having nothing to do with external forces and others are there because they followed peer pressure. Yet, it is all too common in these locations to ask the children to place blame on the causes which are really irrelevant to the factor at hand. Usually the factors that the institutions want to hear are pressures at home. They therefore guide the children in to answering accordingly. They do not say tell the children what to say. Rather, they often ask them leading questions and the child chooses from among the answers that are given. They might ask why did you leave why did you do this act or why did you leave home? In many cases the child will not respond. Instead, the representative or the psychologist from the institution then suggests various possibilities. Was it because your sister hated you? Was it because your father beat you? Was it because your mother did not understand you? And the like. The child then selects one of the possibilities from those which are given and says yes yes that is the reason why I did what I did. Unfortunately, this does not always represent the correct situation or the truth but the child selects what is convenient for the psychologist to say this happens in all too many cases in which the situation the psychological sessions do not go quickly enough for the convenience of the psychologist and the psychologist sees a need to just deal the situation in order prove that the case fits into the standard guidelines or framework of similar situations so that they can be dealt with. After all once we can pigeonhole the child and say this is the problem and it fits in with the problems faced by many other similar children then they can just put them into a group and give them the standard therapy and announce that they have done their job and the child is cured. How wrong this is of course. By helping the child choose an answer from among select answers and then by assigning the child the group therapy together with others the basic assumption is that the child fits into a sir dense category, a pigeonhole and that the problem is the same as that of others. How false this is! No longer is the child treated as an individual with individual problems. No longer indeed is it necessary to delve deeper into the problem to determine whether perhaps the diagnosis is not even correct but it was just a way for the child to give an answer to satisfy the therapist. Instead the child just gives a response. How sad it is that our psychology has led us into a situation which is worse than before we had the psychology.

How then should we involve psychology? Isn’t psychology correct?

That will be the basis for the next section.