Yup, Chuck Spezzano actually said it. The entire quote was:
"You can't have health problems unless you feel guilty about something, and then at an even deeper level you can't have a health problem unless you're getting revenge on someone."
It came from his 2010 Youtube (produced with the help of Spar Street) entitled Self-Health but was deleted from public view more than two years ago from the account of Spezzano's Healing Metaphors A-Z co-author Janie Ticehurst.
Chuck Spezzano without the cosmetics. This man feels free to lecture you on self-health
In my view that quote qualifies as one of the most evil statements ever given by any Psychology of Vision representative, and what compounds the damage is that a lot of the POV foundation rests on this kind of sick shaming.
Here's a nice opinion piece from The Guardian Mar. 26, 2016, Don't tell cancer patients what they could be doing to cure themselves / Steven W. Thrasher.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/26/do-not-tell-cancer-patients-cures-they-could-be-doing?CMP=share_btn_tw
The following passage especially reminded me of the Spezzanos, Psychology of Vision, and the Healing Metaphors A-Z:
"Finally, giving advice to people with cancer blames the sick person for your discomfort with their reality and shifts any accountability you feel back on to them. As the authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Sarah Schulman have shown, we have ethical responsibilities to the vulnerable in our communities – and we find excuses to avoid them. Having cancer or caring for someone with it understandably causes fear, anxiety and depression. Expecting someone to have a Positive Attitude™ when they are facing mortality, or telling them they’ve missed a simplistic way they could have avoided their fate, further isolates and shuns them.
As anthropologist S. Lochlain Jain wrote in Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us, 'the huge and punishing self-help industry preys on fear and adds guilt to the mix. As one woman with metastatic colon cancer said on a retreat I attended, ‘Maybe I haven’t laughed enough.’' Talking at someone with cancer about what they should do, rather than being with them in a morass with no easy answers, is not you helping them. It is you unfairly shaming them for having failed at self-help, which isn’t even a thing."
Thrasher's mention of further isolating the person with cancer is exactly what a for-profit cult group like POV wants to promote so they can become your new surrogate family and drain your bank account. Makes ya think, don't it?
Lency and Chuck Spezzano
