by Gerald James
Dr. Laura is a radio
personality whose call-in talk show began gaining popularity a few years
ago due to her quick, cut-to-the-chase, ‘psychotherapy’ sound-bite talks
with callers in which she
often scolds them for their lack or misuse of morals in the realm of
relationships and ethical dilemmas. After the excessive and, at times,
outrageously narcissistic mental health industry explosion in the past
few decades, Dr. Laura’s straightforward advice of commonsense and value
orientation was a hit. Her first book, Ten Stupid Things Women Do
To Mess Up Their Lives,
became a bestseller, and she began writing others in-between her radio
show and appearing on television talk shows. The morals that Dr.
Laura usually promote are drawn heavily from the 10 Commandments (which
are the subject of one of her most recent books), and other strict codes
of societal, marital, and parental conduct mainly in the patriarchal light
of Judaism (to which she converted in 1997). Her political position
is of the conservative Christian-right with strong views that include anti-abortion,
anti-feminism, anti-daycare centers, and anti-sex out of marriage.
Her favorite slogan is “I am my kid’s mom,” which attempts to raise the
extreme importance of parenting to the forefront of all things.
Her advice, or “opinion” as she often clarifies,
focuses on personal responsibility with high and ultimate regard for any
involved children. A typical caller may ask if she should stay engaged
to a boyfriend when he seems to always be yelling at both her and her children
(from a previous marriage), or his own children (he has never been married).
In the past, Dr. Laura’s dynamic response was to scold the caller for allowing
such a person anywhere around her children, for sleeping with a man out
of marriage, for teaching her children bad choice-making, and for focusing
her Mothering-energy on this guy instead of her kids who need it the most!
This was all done in a quick, almost surgical, precision of cutting through
the caller’s denials and justifications for her (or his) past behaviors.
The core issue was then revealed by Dr. Laura’s skillfully-guided insistence
on “what is your question for me?” Generally, Dr. Laura’s audience
has enjoyed the exposure of the callers’ true ‘issues’ and the dramatic
demand that she puts on them to act morally responsible for their actions.
The callers, in a not entirely un-masochistic way, seem to also love her
heavy-handed approach and often admit that they knew the right decision
all along but “just needed to hear it.”
However, the novelty of this approach slowly
waned over the years and Dr. Laura began increasing her aggressiveness
to the scale of “Jerry Springer”-style, confrontational excitement.
Her once refreshing admonishment of mental health industry ‘psycho-babble’
(a term Dr. Laura uses often to describe the reality of that industry’s
tendency to create its own users by forging ‘problems’ that ‘need treatment’)
also increased to militant levels that have begun border on conspiracy
theory.
This aggression of Dr. Laura’s seemed
to reveal itself markedly this past year when some shocking truths about
her surfaced. First, a truth that has hounded Dr. Laura ever since
she went on the air is that she is not a psychologist or a psychiatrist,
rather her doctorate is in physiology (an educated P.E. teacher).
She attempted to circumvent this problem by referring to her “postdoctoral
certificate in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling” (which she holds
in the state of California). However, modifying a MFCC certificate
with 'postdoctoral', when the two ascribe to unrelated fields, is misleading.
The majority of her audience believes her to be either a psychiatrist or
psychologist with professional education and training in psychotherapy;
and Dr. Laura is Clinton-esque in her wordplay attempts to keep their impression
of her credentials as such. The increased attention she has brought
herself via her aggression has also increased the exposure of this important
fact.
On top of that, with the release to the internet
of some embarrassing nude photos Dr. Laura had taken in the late 1970’s,
it was revealed that she had an affair with a man twice her age while still
married, but separated from her first husband. This man, Bill Balance,
was the one who helped her start her career in radio. She then met
her current husband, Lew Bishop, and had an affair with him while he was
still married. She lived with him for 9 years before they finally
tied the knot due to her becoming pregnant. The combination of sleeping-with-the-boss,
infidelity, ‘shacking-up’, and getting ‘knocked up’ all seemed strikingly
hypocritical to her active preaching of high moral behavior. She
didn’t apologize for her past to her audience but blamed it on the result
of following her “own moral authority,” and that she’s moved on to higher
ground.
In light of all this, why do I loathe Dr. Laura?
Well, I don’t use the word ‘hate’, first, because that word is part of
her problem. She has turned down a hostile road and I despise her
for her failure of compassion and her hypocrisy.
Compassion means ‘suffering together,’ especially
in a therapeutic relationship which is the realm in which she imposes herself.
It is not an apathetic word, but an active one. The therapist must
intimately know the suffering of his or her patient in order to help them
find their way out of it. Dr. Laura has distanced herself from this
as far as one can possibly get by speaking at her ‘clients’ over the phone
on a radio show, and more importantly, not allowing them to speak back!
She dismisses her caller’s viewpoints at the onset and quickly places their
problem in a predetermined category to which she responds with a ready-made,
rapid-fire answer. To push herself off as a psychiatrist with high-handed
opinions about the psychological field, and then to make a complete mockery
of it is inexcusable. But even more disconcerting is her increasingly
malicious attitude. Her zero-tolerance of others’ opinions is the
frightening stuff of cult leaders. Absolute standards dictated from
such people as Dr. Laura, who portray themselves as moral arbiters of good
and bad, sadly breed hate crimes by the dozen.
Her hypocrisy is nothing more than narcissism.
She consistently makes statements that are at odds with what she does and
purports to believe in order to bring attention to herself (or, at least,
to feed her hostility). A prime example are the statements she made
recently that “it is pseudo-religiosity to say you forgive (evil acts)”,
and “God may forgive their souls, but I hope not” (in reference to the
two teen-age Columbine killers). Shock-intended statements like these
are no different than what Howard Stern says on his radio show, just a
different venue. But many of these ‘opinions’ just seem based on
pure ignorance, like when she says “(there’s) no way I can make money off
of other people’s hardships” in response to someone doing the same thing.
Aren’t ‘people’s hardships’ the whole point of her radio show? As
to the hypocritical shadow of her sordid past behaviors, they are certainly
forgivable if Dr. Laura has changed and progressed, which she apparently
has. But what has she progressed to? What is the difference
between living a morally-corrupt life and living high on a narcissistic
pedestal? Even here she hides behind “tough love” just as she did
behind “my own moral authority”, which are both the very 'psycho babble'
that she criticizes.
Overall, Dr. Laura provokes hate and contempt.
Not only does she insult and disgrace her own adopted religion but also
every religion that believes in compassion. She coldly removes the
spirituality from religion and replaces it with useless dogma. Her
quick-fix, absolutist ‘opinions’ sound good to her callers at first, but
you can bet they learn little on how to help themselves. Any good
therapist will tell you that a patient needs an experience, not an explanation,
and certainly not a berating. Her callers only learn how to judge
themselves and others in a harsh light of good/bad. Does this remind
one of the Victorianism of the last century? If it does, Dr. Laura
would readily agree that this is a good thing (her most recent tirades
have been against the freedom of information, specifically “pornography”,
offered by America’s libraries). Regression to repression doesn’t
sound like a good thing to me.
Perhaps, in the end, her misguided dent in
moral and mental health may be beneficial. Dr. Laura’s irrational
example may help speed the process by which psychology reforms itself into
responsible behavioral medicine and by which religion reveals its meaning-rich
wonder through metaphor instead of dying in literalism. She may do
this by the striking bad example she poses against the rich, complex, and
unique creativeness that is our being. At any rate, the hate she
spills can gladly be done without.
This page written and maintained by G. James
beajerry@jaws.greatwhite.com