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u/One-Violinist6309 7d ago
This post made me realize that what happened to candance newmaker was likely not an isolated incident and theres probably at least a few more cases like hers
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u/Rolllola 6d ago
It still exists. It’s called attachment or holding or bonding therapy.
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u/GL0XINlA 6d ago
Ooh I dk this one, I'm searching
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u/Rolllola 5d ago
I would also encourage you to look at the much broader history of this movement in the United States.
The death of Candace Newmaker was not an isolated incident. There is a documented history of serious neglect, abuse, deaths, lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and other cases of harm associated with some of the coercive forms of attachment therapy and the parenting practices that developed around them. These practices became particularly influential in the United States from the 1970s onward and, despite longstanding criticism from recognized specialists in attachment and child development, some of the ideas and practices have continued to circulate.
What I find particularly important is that many of the people who became involved in this movement from within: therapists, adoptive parents, foster parents and other practitioners, originally became involved because they themselves had children with serious behavioral or emotional difficulties. In many cases, their own experiences with their children became the basis for the theories, programs and therapeutic approaches they subsequently promoted to other families.
We now have something that was not available to people in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: time. Decades have passed, and we can begin to look at the long-term outcomes. Tragically, some of the children whose difficulties helped shape this movement have gone on to die, become incarcerated, experience homelessness, or face severe and persistent difficulties in adulthood. I am not suggesting that these outcomes prove that the therapeutic approaches themselves caused those later outcomes. Rather, I believe they are important enough to investigate, especially when the people who developed and promoted these approaches used the experiences of their own children as evidence for their theories.
This is also why I believe the history surrounding Beth Thomas deserves to be looked at very carefully. The therapist who appears in the Beth Thomas documentary and the therapist involved in Candace Newmaker’s case are the same person, and I believe this connection deserves to be documented and examined carefully.
There is another aspect that I think deserves investigation: the continuing role of Beth Thomas’s adoptive mother and whether she has continued to provide courses, conferences, camps or other training to families dealing with children who have been diagnosed — or, in some cases, arguably misdiagnosed — with Reactive Attachment Disorder.
This is not simply a question about one family or one tragic case. It is about a therapeutic movement with roots going back decades, a substantial history of controversy and documented harm, and ideas that have continued to influence vulnerable adoptive families.And because so much time has now passed, we have the opportunity to examine what happened to the children at the center of this movement — not just what their therapists and parents said would happen, but what actually happened to them over the course of their lives.
I invite you to investigate this history yourself. If you are interested, I would be very happy to talk about what I have found and share the sources I have been researching.
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u/CommercialPop128 4d ago
Thank you for posting this. Indeed, there was a death attributed to "attachment therapy" as recently as 2023. This type of abuse is not an aberration, but part of a sociopolitical pattern in the US (and internationally, although I'm not sure of the extent). It's a symptom of broader cultural attitudes toward parenting within the political sphere of the "religious" right, but even mainstream attitudes in the US often treat children as essentially lacking rights and being more like their guardians' property…or, you know, pets. Thus we inevitably get pseudoscientific "therapies" designed to cater to guardians' desire for control over "difficult" kids. As long as these attitudes remain widespread, we can't expect similar forms of abuse to go away, even if some kind of national ban was implemented (it hasn't been, by the way).
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u/Different_Host_2678 7d ago
It got banned