COMMMENTING ON RESPONSES TO “WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 10, 2012
We are unconscious sponges, especially in our most formative years, of the stimuli with which we are exposed, none more so than with our parents. Our unconscious minds are imitative minds. In the process, much as we might wish otherwise, we become our parents. This occurs, as our subconscious becomes the character of our personality.
We are far less in control of this character than we may choose to believe. Often the most disturbing aspects of our personality are mirror images of aspects of our parents that we most despised.
A middle age woman writes that she “hated” her mother in many ways for her whining and needy disposition only to discover one day she sounded just like her mother. She said she laughed about it, but I wonder if it was a happy or derisive laugh.
Another person writes he would like to take me to task for being “so bluntly honest” about something "still painfully real fifty years later." Pain is necessary to growth, and it is never too late to grow out of something that is imprisoning.
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Forty years ago, I conducted a public seminar titled, “Let Me Introduce You To Yourself.” In that seminar, I asked participants to describe positive and negative aspects of their parents. These were summarized on flipcharts and posted around the room as descriptions of themselves. If they could accept these as possible attributes of their personalities, they had a good chance of controlling their respective behaviors.
On another occasion, I conducted a retreat for top executives of a high tech company. The weeklong affair included one-hour personal interviews with each of the thirty-five in attendances in which they were asked to describe positive and negative aspects of their colleagues. I might add they did so with enthusiasm.
With the help of my staff, we created condensed portraits of these thirty-five men and women, placed them on tables, and asked them to pick up the profile that most nearly fit how they saw themselves. No one was successful in this identification.
These were people who made decisions for hundreds of others and yet were lacking in either self-knowing or self-acceptance in terms of how others saw them.
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It is impossible to be in control while controlling the actions of others if self-ignorance is dominant. Nothing is easier for manipulators than to exploit this ignorance to advantage. The person, whatever the title or function, is little more than a puppet on a string to their devises.
Perceptive children know this practically from birth using it to get what they want by crying, creating a fuss, or pestering until they get their way. Some people never rise above this strategy, as it is continued throughout their careers. I’ve described them in my writing as “pyramid climbers,” that is, when there was an organizational pyramid to climb.
Many of the young Turks of the offsite seminar cited above were manipulators par excellent, but just as self-ignorant as everyone else.
Self-awareness is predicated on self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is predicated on realizing the engine of one's soul is in developing one's essence (unique self) and controlling one's personality (acquired self). Otherwise, one is putty in the hands of others and never likely to realize traction to be all one could be. Freud recognized that most of what is real within ourselves is not conscious, and that most of what is conscious is not real. The exercise with the executives confirmed this.
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The parental paradigm is a useful touchstone. We are becoming an increasingly repressive society as higher forms of sophistication become incompatible with the familiar roots of the family. This has been going on at least since the Industrial Revolution. The concern is it appears to be leaving us detached from ourselves.
For those who see the family sacrosanct, my comments are considered just this side of sacrilegious, especially with reference to rebellion. Human history according to myth began with an act of disobedience of Adam and Eve. Disobedience was the first act of freedom, and the beginning of human history.
In the context described in this missive, disobedience is a necessary step to individual identity. My interest is not to offend, but to destroy the popular illusions that rebellion is not part of the rites of passage. Intelligent involvement, aside from the native faculty, is a function of independent thinking with the moral courage to do what makes sense, and not simply to go along to get along.
Loyalty is first to self with a commitment to others only in terms of what sponsors inner health and well being. If another person exploits that health, represses that well being, or destroys one’s sense of worth, then that person is to be avoided even if it is a mother or father, brother or sister, or partner.
Caving in to the demands of others is self-crippling. It often rises out of fear, neediness, or an inner deadness. The wisdom of inner security is founded on the recognition that there is no such thing as security. We live in a world of uncertainty and can deal best with it by the associative synergy of like-minded souls.
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Some wonder at my distaste of “electronic contraptions” (my expression) and contempt for the corporation that I describe as “corpocracy.” If that is how I am perceived, I apologize because that is not my intent.
On the other hand, these are contributory to the parental drift. Children were once taught to be seen but not heard, to follow parental instructions to the letter without complaint, and certainly never to speak until spoken to, especially at meals.
When industrial society took hold, a new formula was adopted that ended in the “organization man.” He was like that nineteenth century child only now in the twentieth century. It was not the family but the corporation that now was his home, and he expected everything from it that he once felt entitled to in the family as a child. What' more, the corporation was willing to give this to him as long as he behaved as that obedient child, that is, until it could no longer afford to be so magnanimous.
The twentieth century was an unconscious century, especially in the last half century, in which it felt no restraints, and was far better at describing problems than defining and solving them.
Like in the family, workers were without conscience convictions, cogs in a giant machine. They were not paid to think but to do, not to ask questions, but to behave, not to think critically, but to take orders, and not to have passionate interests because that might impede the machine.
The problem is that man is not made to be a cog in a machine, not created to be managed, manipulated, mobilized and then dispatched when found redundant as if an inanimate thing.
Social engineers used reengineering, job enrichment, empowerment and other cosmetic interventions to disguise the fact that the role of complacent passive workers no longer existed. The corporation failed to inform these workers, and thus was born corpocracy, the secretive and deceptive scheme to put profits before workers, while giving workers the impression it was their fault when never party to the process.
Corpocracy is spelled out in a number of my books. Its unintended consequences were to make leadership a subset of management. The result is that people are treated as things to be managed rather than individuals to be led.
With regard to my concern about “electronic contraptions,” my problem is not with them. It is with their unintended consequences. Fifty years ago, Erich Fromm wrote in “Beyond the Chains of Illusion” (1962):
“The modern individual is even more isolated and lonely than his grandfather was. He goes to an analyst, to somebody else to listen to him. He has the satisfaction of somebody who listens sympathetically and without accusing him. This is important in a society where hardly anybody listens to anybody. While people talk to ach other, they do not listen to each other, except for a superficial and polite hearing of what the other says”
Fast forward to today, and we see this problem has increased exponentially.
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My missive, as one person suggests, is not a war on parents. If it were, it would be a very old war, a war I have had little to do with its perpetuation.
The idea a half-century ago of the perplexity of parenting was organized around “transactional analysis.” It looked at the individual in terms of that person’s “adult” and “parent” and “child” in the personality. A plethora of books followed among them “Games People Play” (1964) and “Egograms” (1977).
In Eric Berne’s “Games,” he demonstrated how the parent or child could come to dominate the adult personality with disastrous results. The “parent” is described as the morality principle, or the judgmental part of our personality, the “adult” the reality principle, or things as they are, and the “child” as the pleasure principle, or impulsive side of our nature. Berne’s claimed we have all three dispositions actively working in us.
John Dusay’s “Egograms” differentiated further seeing a “critical parent” and a “nurturing parent,” the same “adult” as with Berne’s, and a “free child” and an “adapted child.”
The “critical parent” has to always be right, the “nurturing parent” cares about the feelings of others, the “free child” is interested in sexual trysts, drugs and a carefree lifestyle without boundaries, and the “adapted child” is part of the cog in the machine, the safe hire that causes no trouble, who learns a job in a year and coasts for the next forty years.
Dusay's “free child” is a rebel but in a self-destructive manner. On the other hand, the “adapted child” is close to my description of the thirty to fifty-year old worker with the working mentality of an obedient twelve-year-old suspended in terminal adolescence on the job.
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The blue-collar working stiff is fast disappearing being replaced by factory level working professionals. Likewise, corporate glasshouse skyscrapers are being replaced by ground level garage, basement and storefront operations at one-thousandth of the overhead as the new business model. Meanwhile, the nature of work, workers and the workplace is changing
Finally, of the many responses I have received, and I value them all, none displays the adult more than this one, a person who had to leave a brilliant career at the height of professional achievement because of an incurable disease, an illness that she does not allow to slow her down. I close with her words that embody the essence of “We don’t’ choose our parents”:
Thank you! This missive is so very true. We all do have a choice to not be our parents. I do not know why some of us are able to step out of that mold while others follow blindly after, but I am thankful I am one of those who chose to be different (but then, I was always a maverick and the "black sheep" of the family). I was still a maverick in my profession, going against some of the established "rules" or " regulations" of my profession in order to better serve our citizens. That was a great article.
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To the request to list my books, note the following:
Sales Training & Technical Development (1968)
Confident Selling (1970)
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990)
Confident Selling for the 90s (1992)
The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995)
The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996)
Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998)
Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (2000)
In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003)
A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007)
A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid (due 2012)
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