What is the difference between a double-bind and a paradox?

It is an important question for anyone in psychotherapy and it is the same as the difference between psychological abuse and therapy. It is the difference between the mystification that results in 'mental illness' and the honesty and curiosity that fosters growth. For trauma survivors, it can also be the difference between life and death.

THE DOUBLE-BIND: A double-bind is two distinctly different sets of instructions given by the same source, such that to obey one set of instructions is to disobey the other. It is the classic no-win situation. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. This doesn't just happen to people when they are children in abusive households, it often happens to them again in therapy when they grow up and look for help.

example: 1) A therapist tells a person that they need to fully accept their feelings and then they send the client to a psychiatrist to be drugged. If the client fully accepts her feelings and those feelings are distressing, then she is wrong because she has been instructed to NOT be so distressed, as evidenced by being sent off to be drugged. If the client accepts the drugs to get relief from her feelings, then she knows she has been encouraged to do so because her feelings are not really acceptable and are something she should fear and so she cannot dare to fully accept them. 2) A therapist cultivates a positive attitude for human interdependence and instructs a client to ask for support when in crisis. The client later calls the therapist when in crisis and she is told to take a bath and store her feelings (the ones she has been coached to 'accept') somewhere in the background, such as in a 'box' or a 'file cabinet'. She might be encouraged to be 'strong' to facilitate this dissociation. Sometimes these methods are even written out for the client in advance right after being told to accept her real feelings and ask for support from others. If she stores her real feelings and puts on her 'strong mask' to end the crisis, then she is not accepting her feelings nor is she being interdependent by asking for support. If she does ask for support, then she is not self-sufficient and she is not strong.



THE PARADOX: Anyone who has ever read a time travel novel probably understands what a paradox is. Can a man travel back in time to meet his grandfather if his presence in the past might result in the grandfather's premature death, thus rendering himself unable to ever be born? And if the man traveled back in time and his presence in the past actually DID result in such, then he would have never been born to travel back in time and alter the path of his grandfather's life in the first place. A paradox can make a person think and stretch their abilities to use both logic and imagination. Another popular example of a paradox: If someone says, “I am lying,” and we assume that his statement is true, then it must be false. The paradox is that the statement “I am lying” is false if it is true.

When does the paradox become a double-bind? When there is not an equal balance of power and a trusted person says to one in crisis, "I am lying."