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I found my former ignorant counselor Jack Duffy of Bellingham WA on several websites. He is the narrow minded argumentative therapist who denied our claims about overseas cultures and foreign women, even when I showed him plenty of hard evidence. He definitely was lacking in empathy, people skills and communication skills. He lost every debate we had, yet he turned away in denial each time. He is not objective or logical at all.
Apparently he is a Zen meditation teacher. My gosh. How can a Zen teacher be so closed minded and denialist? He is the mental health counselor I told you about in Bellingham, WA who denied that people are friendlier and more inclusive overseas, that foreign women are more approachable, and that Americans are anti-social. Even though I brought two huge photo albums with hundreds of photos of me and girls in Russia to prove my claims, he denied it all and looked at them with disgust. According to him, all immigrants he's met in America, including Europeans, consider America to be more open and friendly than in their home countries! How can a Zen teacher be so opinionated and dense?
Furthermore, he teaches self-blame (I think) by telling you to say "I feel Americans are anti-social" rather than "Americans are anti-social" and will argue with me about it if I don't use this "me language". I'm not sure what school of psychology that is based on, but I will email him and invite him to clarify himself here. I will also email him and ask him to explain all the testimonies, photos, videos and comparison charts on this site. If he responds (which he probably won't) I will let you know. lol
For now though, I will just post this with his name in the title thread for the search engines, so that if he ever Googles his own name, he will probably find this thread, and will probably be embarrassed/annoyed about it, since he can't debate truth and may be worried that his friends, acquaintances and students may find it and know the truth about his narrow mindedness. lol
Anyway, here are his photos and bios on various sites so that anyone Googling his name can see if they found the right Jack Duffy they are looking for.
Jack Duffy is a Zen teacher in Washington state practicing in the Harada-Yasutani lineage, a dharma heir of Robert Aitken-roshi. As a leader of the Zen Center of Spokane and the Three Treasures Sangha of the Pacific Northwest, Duffy first began practice with Aitken-roshi in 1981 and received permission to teach from him in 1992. Five years later, he was given the title Roshi and underwent Dharma transmission. Duffy has also studied with other masters, including Thich Nhat Hanh and Joan Riek. He brings his roles of spouse, father, and psychotherapist, as well as years of endangered species work and wilderness wanderings, to his teaching.
At home near Bellingham, Washington, Jack leads retreats in the Spokane area twice a year, as well as a week-long sesshin on the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle each April and November.
was given permission to teach by Robert Aitken, Roshi in January, 1992, and was given independent teaching status and the title of Roshi in the formal Transmission Ceremony 5 years later. Jack has been a student of Aitken Roshi since 1981 and has studied with other teachers, including Joan Rieck and Thich Nhat Hanh.
He brings his roles of spouse, father and psychotherapist as well as years of endangered species work and wilderness wanderings to his teaching.
Last edited by Winston on June 26th, 2013, 3:28 am, edited 5 times in total.
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"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
I detest mental health professionals, including psychologists and psychiatrists. The idea is to get you to say "I" and "me" in all your sentences because saying "you" is a typical way of avoiding responsibility (according to their theory). And if you say "I feel" instead of categorically making a statement, this is suppose to get you in touch with your feelings. However, it can also be used by a bullying psychologist to get you to doubt yourself and your ability to reason about social reality. I strongly recommend that men do not go to mental health professionals, and especially to talk about women and your isolation in the United States. They will take the mainstream position that society is just great, and you are the problem. This will make you feel even more lost and hopeless. And you can pay the jerk $100 a hour for the privilege of being further damaged. Do yourself a favor and invest the money in a good massage instead. As for Zen, an advanced mediator is suppose to develop a non-judgmental frame of mind, so if he looks with disgust at your photo albums, that doesn't say much about his level of spiritual development. Putting on a funny uniform and having credentials doesn't mean anything. Somewhere there is a guy flipping burgers at a McDonalds who could give you better spiritual advice.
MrPeabody wrote:I detest mental health professionals, including psychologists and psychiatrists. The idea is to get you to say "I" and "me" in all your sentences because saying "you" is a typical way of avoiding responsibility (according to their theory). And if you say "I feel" instead of categorically making a statement, this is suppose to get you in touch with your feelings. However, it can also be used by a bullying psychologist to get you to doubt yourself and your ability to reason about social reality. I strongly recommend that men do not go to mental health professionals, and especially to talk about women and your isolation in the United States. They will take the mainstream position that society is just great, and you are the problem. This will make you feel even more lost and hopeless. And you can pay the jerk $100 a hour for the privilege of being further damaged. Do yourself a favor and invest the money in a good massage instead. As for Zen, an advanced mediator is suppose to develop a non-judgmental frame of mind, so if he looks with disgust at your photo albums, that doesn't say much about his level of spiritual development. Putting on a funny uniform and having credentials doesn't mean anything. Somewhere there is a guy flipping burgers at a McDonalds who could give you better spiritual advice.
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Have to agree with you on all counts. Psychiatry and psychology are inherently fraudulent. One the one hand, psychiatrists claim that most mental illnesses are due to 'chemical imbalances', but can't prove it; there simply aren't any blood tests to detect said imbalances. On the other, psychology cloaks itself in pseudoscientific language and holds itself out to be scientific. Both are little better than astrology or numerology. And I tend to look at shrinks as being, for the most part, modern-day shamen and witch-doctors, their rattles and bells replaced with prescription pads.
I once saw a shrink to try to find out why I was having such a hard time getting dates. Big mistake, since shrinks necessarily look at every problem through the lens of psychopathology, but I digress. The bottom line was that this particular shrink proved to be totally useless and unhelpful to boot. I've learned far more about why I have trouble getting dates from the anti-feminist and MRA movements than I could ever have learned from that shrink.
I know of one guy who went to see a shrink after he left his wife, and because his insurance plan at work only covered a limited number of visits, the shrink suggested he carry on with someone else - who happened to be a male shrink AND a feminist, if you can believe that! A classic case of blaming the victim for his plight!
MrPeabody wrote:I detest mental health professionals, including psychologists and psychiatrists. The idea is to get you to say "I" and "me" in all your sentences because saying "you" is a typical way of avoiding responsibility (according to their theory). And if you say "I feel" instead of categorically making a statement, this is suppose to get you in touch with your feelings. However, it can also be used by a bullying psychologist to get you to doubt yourself and your ability to reason about social reality. I strongly recommend that men do not go to mental health professionals, and especially to talk about women and your isolation in the United States. They will take the mainstream position that society is just great, and you are the problem. This will make you feel even more lost and hopeless. And you can pay the jerk $100 a hour for the privilege of being further damaged. Do yourself a favor and invest the money in a good massage instead. As for Zen, an advanced mediator is suppose to develop a non-judgmental frame of mind, so if he looks with disgust at your photo albums, that doesn't say much about his level of spiritual development. Putting on a funny uniform and having credentials doesn't mean anything. Somewhere there is a guy flipping burgers at a McDonalds who could give you better spiritual advice.
<snip>
Have to agree with you on all counts. Psychiatry and psychology are inherently fraudulent. One the one hand, psychiatrists claim that most mental illnesses are due to 'chemical imbalances', but can't prove it; there simply aren't any blood tests to detect said imbalances. On the other, psychology cloaks itself in pseudoscientific language and holds itself out to be scientific. Both are little better than astrology or numerology. And I tend to look at shrinks as being, for the most part, modern-day shamen and witch-doctors, their rattles and bells replaced with prescription pads.
I once saw a shrink to try to find out why I was having such a hard time getting dates. Big mistake, since shrinks necessarily look at every problem through the lens of psychopathology, but I digress. The bottom line was that this particular shrink proved to be totally useless and unhelpful to boot. I've learned far more about why I have trouble getting dates from the anti-feminist and MRA movements than I could ever have learned from that shrink.
I know of one guy who went to see a shrink after he left his wife, and because his insurance plan at work only covered a limited number of visits, the shrink suggested he carry on with someone else - who happened to be a male shrink AND a feminist, if you can believe that! A classic case of blaming the victim for his plight!
Another factor, is that therapists have to go through an educational process and take a difficult multiple choice exam, similar to a law exam, to get their license. This tends to filter out people that have genuine empathy and that can reason with their hearts. Most problems that motivate people to go to therapists are a result of having troubles correctly dealing with their emotions. But, the licensed therapists, who come from their heads, are least able and least capable of facilitating emotional healing. And the psychiatrists are even worse - they just prescribe anti depressants, and the drugs necessary to deal with the side effects of the anti depressants. The main technique of asking question after question was developed by Freud who was a cold, unempathetic man, who never cured anyone. You will get better results by having a spiritual practice. Even traditional religion is more holistic than psychology that just considers a man to be a sophisticated machine.
"I have browsed around your site quite a bit, actually, and had already run across your encounter with the Zen mental health professional (who looks like a real asshole). Let me say a few things about this man and his ilk, for there are therapists like him spread across the United States. As an interesting aside, Washington, D.C. has more therapists per capita than any other North American city and Buenos Aires, Argentina is reputed to have the most therapists per capita in the entire world.
Therapists, at least in America, have sort of become the modern day version of shaman, which almost every ancient society has had and they can still be found in more "primitive" societies around the world. Perhaps the difference between the average shaman and the average therapist is that the shaman probably had/have a MUCH higher success rate than the average mental health counselor.
As a former mental health counselor and someone who still possesses a license to practice, I am perhaps unique in your Happier Abroad community in that my critiques come from actual experience and knowledge about mental health issues, rather than just being the critiques offered by societal observers on your forum (some of whose critiques are quite apposite and ring true with me).
Just as you had some positive experiences with some therapists and some very negative experiences with people such as this Zen asshole, it is important to understand that when you use the term "mental health counselor" you are talking about a very broad spectrum of individuals, some with very different credentials, mind sets and training.
This variegation among mental health professionals was MUCH more pronounced in the 1960's, which was probably the heyday for mental health professionals in our society. When I say that therapy was in its heyday I mean that there were many methods of practice, many schools of therapy and a much freer environment for a person to practice in. Perhaps also reflecting the very changing and tumultuous times, much more emphasis was put on schools of therapy that were nonconformist in nature and also much emphasis was put on freedom of expression. Whether this "helped" anyone or not is debatable but arguably this freer environment of practice produced more empathic and creative mental health professionals than those you typically run across now.
Over the past 20 years or so there has been a radical change in the profession and concomitantly a great turning away from its "liberated" days so that these days a person entering the mental health profession is encouraged to practice mostly behavioral therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy. The premise of this therapy is very similar to the philosophers of the Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus and basically assert that most mental health problems (excepting major ones like Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder (formerly "Manic-Depression) and a few others) can be treated by short-term treatment of 1-6 sessions in which the "irrational" beliefs of the person are challenged and the person gains insight, ostensibly, and thus change is brought about very quickly.
There are actually MANY schools of therapy and not everyone responds well to this short-term attempt to restructure and revamp one's thinking, just as not everyone that studies philosophy will like the philosophies of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or agree about their efficacy as philosophical systems.
The reason that such short-term therapies are used and preached as the modern-day gospel have little to do with what actually works and EVERYTHING to do with the fact they are cost-effective and this is important because the mental health system has been taken over by the major insurance companies and by Medicare and Medicaid and quick results (thus costing less) are naturally preferred over more protracted treatments--so what you have is the tail wagging the dog, in other words, so that a drone who has no experience in mental health working for some insurance giant like United Health Care can decide on the treatment to be given. Much emphasis has also been put into ALL therapists of whatever training being licensed and "credentialed" and this has further eroded the system in the sense that much more emphasis is placed on the novice therapist passing the license test than whether he/she actually knows what the f**k he is doing, to the extent anyone knows what the f**k they are doing.
As our society (and others) have become more industrialized and impersonal, the "shaman" of the society has become the modern-day psychotherapist or psychiatrist whereas even one-hundred years ago a person might have gone to a village elder in their community or to their preacher for solace or some form of treatment for psychological ills.
I might interject here a couple of things. One, mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia are seen in almost all societies but people in various cultures have had very different reactions to these "illnesses." Two, In some Native cultures in the Americas, for example, the "crazy" person was seen as someone with greater insight and greater communication with the gods and was often left alone or accepted to a far greater level of acceptance than in our culture.
It seems to me that in their roles as modern-day "shaman," most psychotherapists and psychiatrists have failed miserably. Part of this failure is what you have experienced and it involves seeking help and succor from someone who completely fails to apprehend or understand your particular situation, such as the crisis counselor who you called in a time of despair who treated you like a cretin for disturbing him and offered you no help at all. Unfortunately, I have known many such counselors and they are the norm rather than the exception. As I see it, there are multitudinous reasons for the failure of the mental health system, including its attempt to present itself as a science rather than a mixture of science and art. The field of psychology is probably most to blame for it because it worked very hard to establish quantifiable scientific methodologies to gain legitimacy alongside more "real" sciences. The end result of this in psychiatry has been an ever-increasing reliance on prescription medications and much less emphasis on treating the problems of a person at the human level. Some of the psychiatric medicines do work and the principles behind them are based on scientifically verifiable facts. In the case of Prozac and other drugs in its class (Lexapro, Zoloft, Celexa, e.g.), it is what is known as an SSRI, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. The premise behind it working is that Serotonin is known as one of the "pleasure-causing" chemicals of the brain and so the more Serotonin being activated in the brain will lead to a happier state of mind.
Here I must add that one cannot separate a society's treatment of mental health or anything else from its prevailing belief systems. As you know, there is an expectation in our society that a person is SUPPOSED to be happy and something is wrong with him if he is not. One of the major problems with most therapists in America is that most are heavily enmeshed in the common cultural expectations of the society so that even though they have voluntarily chosen to work with many who are "different" either through a major mental illness or just in terms of thinking, their overarching goal is to get the individual to conform to the norms and mores of the society. In some cases this is not all bad. Men whose sexual enjoyment comes from f***ing four year old girls probably need both incarceration and treatment and very close scrutiny when they are "free" in society.
Another thing to keep in mind is that YOU were able to break free after many years of suffering--not everyone is capable of doing this! Not everyone has the intellectual ability to see a way out and get their needs met or the intellectual firepower to become a teacher of ESL like Ladislav and maneuver around the world. Many of these people are simply f***ed, though maybe ignorance is bliss.
Let me turn to your encounter with the "Zen" therapist. Types like this guy actually proliferate all over the country and most of them are hucksters of the first water and many of them are very successful hucksters because a great many people want to be told how to think and what the "truth" REALLY is. Andre Gide's famous quote comes to mind, "Believe those that seek the truth, doubt those that find it." It is clear from your description of this man that he had no understanding of you and little interest in attempting to understand you. Rather, he wanted you to "own" your feelings and I'm sure to his way of thinking that he felt your problem was your inability to "own" your problems. Resultantly, he spent more time chastising you for your phraseology than getting to understand what you were about. In other words, HE attempted to define your problem for you rather than to build a real relationship with you and determine how he could be of help.
A couple of points to make---
Since most of your readers are probably not well-read in the field of psychology they are probably unaware that the talking cures propounded by Jung and Freud and many of the other pioneers of what has become modern therapy were not focused on helping individuals lead happier lives except in so far as helping them ACCEPT the human condition, of the reality of human suffering which the Buddha and Schopenhauer declaimed as the basis of human existence. Maybe if Freud and Schopenhauer had visited the Philippines they would not have been so gloomy. But the idea that the human was supposed to be happy was not a notion held by the progenitors of psychoanalysis.
The famous Austrian iconoclast and journalist Karl Kraus once opined that "Psychiatry is the very mental illness which it purports to cure." lol. Part of its lack of respect comes from the fact that it has increasingly enfolded itself in a scientific, rational Western mind set yet lacks the reliability to uphold true scientific standards. This is why, for example, it is often exposed in the legal system as being a logical fallacy under the "appeal to authority" argument. You will often have one professional hired-gun psychiatrist saying that such and such serial murderer is a Paranoid Schizophrenic while the prosecution's psychiatrist will argue vehemently that the killer is totally sane. This happens so often that of all the appeals to authority, the field of psychiatry is considered the very weakest.
Lastly, on this topic, as I said previously, the mental health field is a vast one with many belief systems and in my area of training, i.e., social work, we do tend to view the person in his environment and place much emphasis on how that environment can be responsible for many of the person's ills. Not all therapists place such emphasis totally on the individual, as Mr. Peabody asserts, though he is correct in saying that most do.
lol, I have rambled and I apologize. I will need a long rest after this tome."
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"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
It's pretty simple really, if someone dresses up like Obi Wan Kenobi and talks like he's a Japanese man when he's really a middle aged white man then chances are good he's a f***ing fraud of the highest order.
Repatriate wrote:It's pretty simple really, if someone dresses up like Obi Wan Kenobi and talks like he's a Japanese man when he's really a middle aged white man then chances are good he's a f***ing fraud of the highest order.
Well Jack Duffy dressed up in those robes cause it was part of his Zen group to dress up that way when you are a teacher. I don't recall him pretending to be Japanese. I'm not sure I'd call him a fraud. But he was very argumentative, narrow, not empathetic, and very lacking in people skills and communication skills. When I showed him two HUGE photo albums of me with girls in Russia to PROVE without a doubt that Russian girls were a lot more approachable, engaging and easier to meet, he looked disgusted and didn't even acknowledge it. A rational person would have at least admitted that I had a good point backed up by plenty of undeniable evidence.
Simply put, this man is totally illogical and denialist for no valid reason. I rated him on several health provider websites and included the link to this thread in them.
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"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
Repatriate wrote:It's pretty simple really, if someone dresses up like Obi Wan Kenobi and talks like he's a Japanese man when he's really a middle aged white man then chances are good he's a f***ing fraud of the highest order.
Well Jack Duffy dressed up in those robes cause it was part of his Zen group to dress up that way when you are a teacher. I don't recall him pretending to be Japanese. I'm not sure I'd call him a fraud. But he was very argumentative, narrow, not empathetic, and very lacking in people skills and communication skills.
There's an interesting book you should read Winston, it's called Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer he goes in depth into the mentality of religious gurus and the foundation of belief. His book is more about Mormon splinter groups and their cultish behavior but his observations apply to any sort of spiritual or religious "movement" that contains supposed gurus or higher order leaders. The costumes, pageantry, and lexicon adopted by men like this are designed to mind f**k followers. It's all a smoke and mirrors trick that is used to fleece the unwary and to some extent these men really believe they are gifted with some higher knowledge of humanity. They are narcissists and have some amount of disdain for what they see as "unenlightened" people by their own particular standards which no one else but they can fulfill.
But all religions have leaders wearing some kind of outfit, including Buddhist monks. I'd say that most Buddhist monks are sincere though. It doesn't make them a fraud. You gotta weigh in other factors too.
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"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
Unfortunately, one area of expertise does not always give one insight into others, despite what people might want to think. Some devout meditators and spiritual cultivators can be quite skilled in regards to concentrating and seeing through their own internal psyche, but are just as dense and brainwashed as anyone else with it comes to external cultural assumptions.
Here is what my former mental health counselor friend had to say about Jack Duffy:
"Let me turn to your encounter with the "Zen" therapist. Types like this guy actually proliferate all over the country and most of them are hucksters of the first water and many of them are very successful hucksters because a great many people want to be told how to think and what the "truth" REALLY is. Andre Gide's famous quote comes to mind, "Believe those that seek the truth, doubt those that find it." It is clear from your description of this man that he had no understanding of you and little interest in attempting to understand you. Rather, he wanted you to "own" your feelings and I'm sure to his way of thinking that he felt your problem was your inability to "own" your problems. Resultantly, he spent more time chastising you for your phraseology than getting to understand what you were about. In other words, HE attempted to define your problem for you rather than to build a real relationship with you and determine how he could be of help."
I wonder if that's true, since I never understood what Duffy was trying to accomplish.
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"It takes far less effort to find and move to the society that has what you want than it does to try to reconstruct an existing society to match your standards." - Harry Browne
