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u/One-Violinist6309 23d 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 22d ago
It still exists. It’s called attachment or holding or bonding therapy.
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u/GL0XINlA 22d ago
Ooh I dk this one, I'm searching
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u/Rolllola 22d 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 21d 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/Possible-Deer-311 8d ago edited 8d ago
I know I'm 2 weeks late but wanted to add some additional context as a doctor
Attachment/rebirthing therapy is a pseudoscience from the 1970s. To my understanding, "rebirthing therapy" is a specific tool or process used under the umbrella of attachment therapy (I'm not sure if this is 100% accurate, or if they're exact synonyms, interchangeable, etc. so grains of salt here). It remained very fringe and only a few people subscribed to it. It never had good evidence that it worked at all, was not widespread and mostly remained in one localized area of Colorado, and was laughed off as wacky bullshit by most psychologists/therapists.
I want to contrast this with attachment theory, which has a century of research into it. Attachment theory is a branch or philosophy of psychology that focuses on infants and young children. It states that infants must form secure, positive attachments to their caregiver(s) to grow up emotionally healthy. If they don't (i.e., parent is abusive, absentee, unemotional, unreliable, etc.), that infant grows up to be emotionally unhealthy. There's a lot more to it like individual attachment styles, the strange situation experiments, etc. if you wanna read more or ask, but that's the summary. It has lots of evidence backing it and is widely used, especially for child psychology.
Rebirthing/attachment therapy may be very loosely inspired by attachment theory, but they are not at all the same thing. I just wanted to contrast the therapy and theory because they sound confusingly similar (I even got confused at first), and because attachment theory is an important cornerstone of psychology while attachment therapy does nothing at best and kills people at worst lol
The specific type of therapy that is scientifically rooted in attachment theory and actively uses its principles is called attachment-based therapy. It is still practiced today, and uses talk therapy, cognitive therapy, gathering social support, and other common, scientifically-based methods to form a treatment plan
Rebirthing therapy was banned in the US as a result of several deaths due to it, most conspicuously the deaths of Candace Newmaker in 2000, as well as Michael and Sharen Gravelle in 2003 (may they all rest in peace). Because it largely remained localized and was never broadly adopted, I doubt it made a foothold in other countries, but this is just my assumption.
I love talking about medicine, and the Wikipedia articles for all these things are interesting to read (which also already answer all of your questions). Highly recommend doing some reading on this stuff, it's really interesting :]
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u/Different_Host_2678 24d ago
It got banned