OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE Part seven, on-going

Oppositional Defiance “disorder” is related to “oppositional culture”.  Wow, do I know about that!  It means deliberately defying attempts at “enculturation” or “education” in order to preserve one’s identity.  Like so many things, it originates as a formal concept with blacks and then appears among the Native Americans, who were already doing it anyway.  They recognized early that a subtle kind of conquering is “assimilation,” meaning that the invaded should become like the invaders.  This is often achieved through “education for success” like Pratt’s military-structured boarding school. 

For a while in the Seventies we turned to our uniqueness and the value of independence.  Now, of course, things have turned around again.  Preserving the identities of minorities is a diminishing value and we are insisting that the immigrants should become just like us -- though we were the former invaders.  In short, the strong and advantaged people still insist on conformity to their standards.  Ironically, the originally advantaged people -- land-owning white males -- are now the minority and a little desperate to defend their category.  They are losing because time is changing everything.

Those who are different, almost by their existence, engage in erosion of the mainstream.  So that today the old white rich men accurately feel embattled and undermined.  Both sides become enraged.  Neither side understands the other.  The old white rich men are hampered by their inability to see or understand anyone different from themselves, including their own children.  The young still can be diverted by the belief that being like an old white rich man with power is a pleasant phenomenon, something effective -- which it only is under certain circumstances that have a funny way of disappearing.

I gather from reading an entry someone composed for Wikipedia that the idea of naming resistance to conventional education an “oppositional culture” comes from blacks in the Seventies but turned out to be useful enough for it to persist.  The main theorist, a guy named Ogbu, seemed to think that the phenomenon of opposition should be opposed -- that people SHOULD try to be like the main and dominant culture, whatever it might be.  While sociologists were thinking about this, the oppositional attitude of the Seventies has now spread from race to gender stereotypes and sexual preference and has splintered into individual defiances.  Some are defying society to make them marry when they only want to live together, kids or not, at the same time that others are defying society to prevent them from marrying, whether they include a female or not.    

This is an agonistic society.  Our law and government, our stories and editorial pages are all based on two forces in conflict, while in the background for decades now we’ve been having workshops about “getting to yes,” and marches for peace.  The discussion and negotiation movement that once seemed so promising has been trampled underfoot by debate, one side against the other in the style of a trial.

Most of the information I’m finding on google addresses the defiance of parents by children.  I do not see much (so far) about stupid, inept, undependable, and destructive parents -- just children who are disobedient in disruptive ways.  The main responses advised, even by so eminent an authority as the Mayo Clinic, is either drugging or manipulation, including the use of the “ear bug” we see on cop movies, where someone sits behind a one-way mirror and second-guesses the parent, not the child.  Making a parent into a puppet does not solve the conflict.  So many of these ideas are based on the assumption that the parent’s desire to dominate the child is legitimate.  That’s because the parent is the one who picks up the tab.  Maybe there ought to be a trust fund for children who are unjustly dominated by parents trying to make their kids achieve as surrogates for themselves. 

A woman sends me a “comment” asking what books or treatments would help her because she’s pissing everyone off and they say it’s because she opposes them unreasonably.  That is, they don’t see why she should oppose them, which suggests some kind of negotiation or referee from outside is needed.   But maybe not.  Maybe she’s right.  Or maybe she really does have the knee jerk reaction of opposition to everything.  What causes the oppositional defiance attitude in adults that’s strong enough to make trouble?

Why does one kid need only a rebuke to quickly shape up and another one be like the boy whose mother demanded why he didn’t obey even after a vigorous licking.  He said, “It’s worth it, Mom.”  We’ve heard a lot about priests who take advantage of children sexually, but what about bishops who screw their priests metaphorically or psychologically -- or, more likely, nuns.  The ghost of the Roman Empire persists.  Is God’s other name Nero?

Nevertheless, there is something essential in a human’s physiological substructure that makes some people inclined to defiance.  In an earlier post I suggested addiction to the adrenaline of it all.  Many of our most intense military movies address the usefulness and the tragedy of individuals wanting combat, NEEDING combat, even though withdrawal imposes PTSD.  The rule of evolution is that anything that tends to survive will drive change, fitness is always defined in retrospect.  The defiant individual is a change agent, often destroyed in the effort, but sometimes saving a whole community of people who will persist into the future.  It is a case something like the stotting Tommy, the Thompson’s gazelle that goes leaping out from the main group, to be eaten by lions and by so doing saves the herd.  

People who are wired for defiance whether they are Irish or Arab, cannot be forced to conform by imposing obedience.  Anyway, once the dominant group has identified them as enemies, once the subordinate group has achieved solidarity enough to submerge their individuality in the alternative culture, a “cause”, there are few ways to get to yes except by separation.  This has not proven to be a useful strategy in the long run -- how long can you endure a “time out?”  Or a hunger strike?

What is most often identified as ODD in kids is lying, stealing, disobedience, cursing, and -- among the more alert -- passive aggression or secrecy.  But I’m not reading anything about WHY the contempt for authority, the identification with an outlier group.  I think it is a problem that will recur in any society hooked on dominance, even if they impose public flogging and draconian amputations.  It’s a little like our insistence on sex-obsession and then complaining about inappropriate sexual acts.

I did find a reference at this link that looks interesting: http://www.livesinthebalance.org/about-lives-in-the-balance-and-solving-problems-collaboratively   This “method” was recommended by a man who was aware that his grandfather, his father, himself and his son were all people who flared up and resisted.  The strategy is very sensible, sitting down to look at a problem from both sides in order to generate some options.  The trouble is that if things have gone very far, sitting down calmly will have become impossible.  Witness the United States Congress, an illustration of oppositional defiance if there ever was one, and as mainstream as it gets.  Maybe it’s because they’re all lawyers.  Maybe it’s because they all feel like losers.  At least the Republican side, which is pretty solidly white male property owners.

WARY OF AUTHORITY: OPPOSITION AND DEFIANCE

Mother's Day, 1951

Late in life I realize how much I have been really stupid about the uses of authority and how deeply embedded that is in my family.  Let me be clear that my family -- most of which is either dead or dispersed now -- was conservative, educated and thoughtful.  We didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, cheat or . . . a lot of other stuff.  But I clearly remember when I was taught to defy authorities.  It was the fire department.

My father was a paper hoarder. (I inherited that.)  We lived in a small house, much smaller than people think is basic now.  There was only one bathroom, two bedrooms.  Every room was lined with bookcases.  My father’s “office” was supposed to be the sun porch and he had a desk there, but his real office was in the basement which was mostly occupied by a big old coal and wood furnace.  Down there, supposedly while he waited for the wood fire to get hot enough to add the coal, he read the paper, sitting on an orange crate at a plywood desk.  There were a lot of projects waiting for him and they were stacked into orange crates on end to make shelves.  The whole basement was lined with them except for the woodpile and the coal chute.  I can’t remember the chimney of either the furnace or the fireplace in the front room EVER being cleaned.  It was a fire hazard.  We were cautioned NEVER to let the fire department come in to inspect for dangerous situations.

When my father died, my mother cleared out all the papers and most of the books.  Even before he died, when he went on a long photography trip to trace the route of Lewis and Clark, she replaced the furnace with an efficient electrical unit.  The house was never really warm nor dry again.

In middle-age my youngest brother sustained a head injury in a fall and came home.  He had a master’s degree in metal working, silversmithing, and had been teaching, which meant a certain collection of risky chemicals, and he wanted to take protective measures.  So he called the Bureau of Buildings to see what the restrictions on a separate storage shed might be.  What dimensions didn’t require a permit?  The result was a little structure that looked like a privy for a person who didn’t need to bend over.  When my mother asked for a back deck, he used the same strategy, so the deck was more like a porch, but she enjoyed it anyway.  Later I worked for the Bureau of Buildings as a clerk and saw that most of the plans examiners and inspectors, especially for such small matters, were easy-going and helpful.  Often they had good ideas about design or construction that saved money.  Why was my brother so determined to avoid them?

At a certain point in my life I had a young female relative who was in big trouble.  She was orphaned, living with a friend’s family. flunking out of school, drinking way too much, and constantly getting pregnant in spite of being on the pill.  She appealed to me for help when the first pregnancy was tubal -- life-threatening.  The young doctor was afraid to talk to me because he couldn’t understand my relationship to her.  (Not easy -- the former wife of a man with four wives who didn’t raise his daughter by his first wife, the mother of the girl.)  He evidently did not involve any social workers or her remaining biological relatives though she was underage.  We didn’t know anything about emancipation.

The second pregnancy was from a rape proudly performed by a classmate whose mother bragged about how many girls he had impregnated.  (These were working class families.)  I threatened to castrate him and then I took her for a D&C.  Neither the school, the biological family, the girl herself, nor I thought of turning the young man in to the law or getting counseling for the girl.  We just struggled through.  There were more pregnancies, all terminated, all connected to drinking, and then the girl herself was terminated in the last of a long series of car crashes.  By that time I was in seminary -- in fact, doing a hospital chaplaincy -- and had a long talk with a senior minister who had no real insight to offer.  He was too tactful to say what people here would say:  I should have chucked seminary and raised that girl and her babies.

The brother with brain damage had once dated a policewoman, whom he called fondly “Cop.”  He was friendly with the whole Eugene police force.  When he was in the Marines he had been an MP and was nearly called for crowd control in the Watts riots.  He was big, strong, and trained.  Our family home had gradually been engulfed in black ghetto and every morning he took his cup of coffee out and carried it along the curb to pick up cartridges from the shooting in the night, usually four or five of them.  One evening he and my mother saw that at the house across the street one man was beating up another with a 2X4.  “Call the police,” said my brother and went out to save the victim.  Just as he took the 2X4 away from the aggressor, the police arrived and assumed HE was the aggressor.  The two men, closing ranks, agreed with this idea.  

The cops decided to arrest my brother.  They drew their guns and advanced on my brother, who retreated into the house, this time saying to my mother, “Call the police commissioner!”  He had gone to high school with that official.  Inside the house he dropped and rolled in case the cops fired through the screen door.  In the end it was sorted out, but never again did anyone in that house call the police.  I knew my brother had brain damage, but didn’t think of doing research about it.  I didn’t know that one of the major experts on head trauma was in Portland.  He had asked among his friends who said there was nothing to be done and I accepted that.  They tended to be artists, free spirits, fatalists.  This was before computers -- no Google.

After my mother died, this brother used up his part of her estate and then lived with cousins on their ranch.  They tired of him, thought he was getting too paranoid to be safe, and demanded that he leave.  They did not contact any helping agencies. A sheriff’s deputy, the coyote trapper, came out and talked to him but made no intervention.  The brother was destitute, but when he asked welfare for help, he told them he was an undercover agent for the FBI and they threw him out.  

He did not want to live with me in Montana, and my other brother would not accept him in that household, but did take him to the VA who wanted to do an MRI to establish disability.  He was way outside reality by this time and terrified of being confined for insanity.  Eventually he lived on the street until he died of a heart attack.  Then for the first time he accepted the help of authorities: EMT’s.  I wouldn’t have known except that his friends (a person has friends even on the street) remembered him talking about his brother and found him because the name was unusual.  (I had kept my married name.)  The nurse made my brother call me.  There was nothing to do.

Why were we so stupid about what help was out there, so reluctant to use it, so resistant to even let people know what was happening?  I don’t really know.  Temperament?  Pride?  Homesteader independence?  Household secrecy?  I’m still that way.  I still fear being trapped, accused, framed, stripped, seized -- and yet I carried a sheriff’s deputy badge for five years when I was an animal control officer.  I’m anything but meek.  I’m more compliant than most folks.  But I don’t want ANYONE telling what to do or to have control over me.  Is that arrogance?  American?  Western?  Or genetic?  Oppositional Defiance Disorder? 

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER: Part 5

RESPONSES TO OPPRESSION:  some of them good ideas and some of them contemptible or laughable.  Brainstorming rules:  anything goes.

1.  Join someone else’s fight, like someone blameless or much more powerful.

2.  Go so subversive that you don’t even know when you’re doing “oppositional unconscious defiance”.  On second thought maybe that’s the problem.

3.  Write.  Doesn’t matter what.

4.  Learn any form of art, including dance or martial arts or gymnastics.  Dazzle ‘em.

5.  Find a role model, maybe a shocking one.

6.  Invest in what the oppressor hates and fears:  sex, poverty, dirt, low status, “femaleness” or “maleness”, drunkenness, drugs, babies. 

7.  Become a psychologist and invent experiments about oppositional defiance disorder.

8.  Go live on a mountain top.  Rise above it all.

9.  Achieve enough to get respect from authorities, though maybe not the authorities respected by one’s oppressor.

10.  Find someone to truly love you for who you are.  (I hope you love them as well.)

11.  Develop a disease or trauma that will demand careful attention because you are a victim and therefore entitled to righteous indignation.

12.  Plunge into paralyzing depression to protect those around you from your rage.  

GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN ODD

1.  The oppressed mother whose son witnesses her helplessness in the face of abuse but cannot save her.  Two varieties.  

One: when the mother makes a little husband out of the son, showers him with love, supports him in his endeavors, and makes him into a superstar full of oppositional defiance of the father.  (Avoid the aspect of sex or you’ll get pulled into Freudian templates.)

Two: when no amount of effort is enough to get admiration and support from the mother, who is so in love (addicted? enabling?) to the alpha male in charge that she makes it clear the son is not enough.  She chooses the adult male.  (Where’s the Greek play for this?  When the King’s wife kills the son?  Is it Hamlet?)  Then the boy defies and opposes her rather than the father.

2.  Again two varieties:

One:  The dominant alpha male who wanted a son but who will not allow the boy enough room to grow into someone as strong as his father, and then blames the son for being weak or inadequate.  

Two:  Or the same man who has only a daughter and must either load her up with his expectations or use her as bait to attract a son-in-law, passing her over.  Both varieties of them can oppose their father.

NON-GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS

1.  Peers who bully.  Defy them by surviving.

2.  Joining peers who are beneath contempt, whom the society as a whole rejects.  Defend the group, defy the larger society.

3.  Peers in competition with each other to an unhealthy degree.  (What degree is that?)  Defy and oppose competition.  

4.  Sell-outs and tattletales.  Don’t even bother to notice.  They WANT defiance.

5.  Genuine “blood brothers” who provide resources, stand together, act as scouts.  Discover solidarity.  Dissolve defiant opposition.

6.  “Lord of the Flies.”  ‘Nuf said.

THE USES OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE

1.  To keep hope alive.

2.  To test how much one is valued or loved.  If they persist in the face of opposition, they must care.  But if one is in control of the level of opposition and keeps ratcheting it up, and the tested one finally fails -- then it’s still their fault.

3.  To avoid blame, esp. in the case of persons who secretly have accepted the blame.  Or in the case of people who have been blamed and punished so severely that they nearly died.  Blame arouses in them an uncontrollable terror which they will try to hide.

4.  There are many situations in which a group is pitted against an individual unjustly.  Oppositional defiance can be then an explicitly moral stance to take.

WHAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE?  I don’t mean what will make a person stop being defiant, I mean what will let a person continue to be defiant in a useful and skillful way?

1.  Empathy.

2.  Objectivity.

3.  A larger frame of reference: an awareness of a greater good, an awareness of the long trajectory of time in which today’s issues are turned upside down tomorrow.

4.  A voice: the ability to say things clearly and passionately so people will get it.

5.  Examples from real life.

6.  Backup and a place to rest.

7.  Experience, memories of success.  EVIDENCE of success.

WHAT ABOUT THE PHYSICAL SUBSTRATE?

1.  We know that some hormones (testosterone, adrenaline) and some tumors or trauma (in the forebrain) will make people aggressive, argumentative, violent.  There seems to be genetic substrate for this. 

2.  We know that some animals are killers and there is no reason to think humans are different.

3.  It’s possible that oppositional defiance is the default position in all humans, but suppressed by later evolution and mutations or epigenomes or even proper gut bacteria or toxoplasmosis parasites (it works on rats).  If one of those mechanisms fails, the result might be unwanted aggression or paranoia.  Behaving in a more positive way may not be the result of progress towards the natural but evolutionarily improved attitudes of people.  Evil may be the result of loss of restraints, social or physical, the default.

4.  A person who barely survived the Dutch WWII starvation said to me that no one really knows what their breaking point is until they are living it.  She ended up collaborating for bread.  Then she had to accept shame or be defiant.  She chose the latter.

5.  Human beings’ bodies have never included so many strange and manmade chemicals at any point in history.  Manmade molecules and the use of psycho-affective drugs, legal or illegal, have entirely unknown cumulative effects without even considering interactions or means of ingestion.  We do know that some of them will throw people into unreasonable, unstoppable rage.  That’s NOT the same thing as oppositional defiance.

Resolving oppositional defiance is different in every situation.  It is a response, maybe an enlightened and brave one, but still a response, therefore unique.

STORIES, WITNESSES, TESTIMONY

Sometimes technology is a game-changer and this is true of the dimension of observing, either through imagination or through video depiction or through eye-witnesses.  Now, with smart phones in the hands of so many, satellite surveillance from far away, drones invading by surprise, GPS locators and ankle-monitors -- things are not just seen but also recorded.  So far I haven’t read in the papers an account of a kid who managed to nail an abusive parent with a “teddy bear camera,” but it’s probably already happened.  Gizmos make what was inconceivable completely incontrovertible.

Whether in terms of oppositional defiance in the name of justice for a stigmatized group or as oppositional defiance in an individual context where the defiant person is trying to understand whether they’re just being reflexive in resisting and questioning or trying to convince the other person that they SHOULD be opposed, it helps if you’ve got evidence.  (I’m not saying “truth.”  There are usually several truths.)

If all else fails, resort to laughter.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE PT 4

This post is dedicated to the prisoners at Guantanamo Prison:  uncharged, unheard, unrepresented, unconvicted -- the whole thing is unjustified.  Their lives are dependent on the ability of ordinary citizens OUTSIDE the prison to intervene.

Oppositional defiance -- that is, defiance of authority -- is something that I know from both sides, in marriage, teaching, law enforcement, politics.  If there’s another person involved, you’re bound to have an occasional need for them to do something or they will need YOU to do something.  What you do about it rather depends upon the cause, nature, and other details of both the opposition and the means of defiance.  Mostly what I can do at this point is generate questions.

1.  Is this demand something you really cannot do?

2.  Is it something you can do but just don’t want to?  Because maybe you’re the one who will take the consequences -- not the other guy.  Or your morality won’t allow it.

3.  Is the other guy just plain wrong?

4.  Is the opposition coming from outside you both?

5.  Is it a false opposition that might stop if it were reframed?

6.  Is there a competition going on?  Maybe for vital resources?

A recent opposition of mine was with a doctor.  He wanted me to be inert, compliant, quickly dealt with, not a trouble-maker.  I wanted time, focus, reassurance, and a report of what he found.  The defiance took the practical form of moving to a different doctor.   I evaded by being polite in the moment, then sending a letter.  There’s a political component to oppositional defiance, a need to demonstrate that one is right.  As it happens, the doc I left opposed the law permitting assisted suicide.  Plainly, he thinks the lives of patients belong to the doctor.   

But the hell with the fancy dynamics of it all -- change has to happen.  The revolution must be completed.  Why should a person have to defy and explain their defiance?  Why isn’t it self-evident that the one who is demanding something should have to justify that demand?  And if it’s a reasonable demand, why not comply?  Is it because it’s a demand instead of request, open to negotiation?

Why must some people be rapists in order to respond to sex?  Because it’s not really about sex, but about the addiction to force and control.  I’m watching “Damages” in which one plot thread is the teenaged son of the Glenn Close dominating and controlling character.  Their relationship is entirely controlled by strategy.  (I’m not recommending these, just listing them.)  I observe the following controlling strategies:

1.  Prepare options ahead of time so you have the advantage of surprise.  The boy is out of control so he is seized and sent to a prison-like “school.”  He pretends to comply.  He also expresses a desire for freedom.  His mother agrees to spring him from the “school” and gives him the papers for emancipation.  He doesn’t sign them, but returns home now that he’s escaped the school.  On the surface he is compliant.  We know better.  He is also very good at predicting his mother’s behavior.  But his mistake was being out of control.

2.  Use rule-based laws and consequences:  legalities, moving the individual from one category to another (emancipation, mental health diagnosis).  Society makes this easy by defining trouble-makers as either crazy or criminal.  Join your labor union; defend civil service.

3.  Hire muscle and confine the individual.  (arrest, boarding school, asylum, chemical restraint)  Some will go so far as murder, at least in the movies.  Prepare escape routes and stay alert.  Study maps.  Sit where you can see the door.

4.  Use behavior modification.  This one really makes me scream.  It only drives the defiance underground where it is far more dangerous.  Or it can break people so that they are dependent for the rest of their lives.  But it can work in both directions.

5.  Don’t involve people or things that could be hostages.  This one is hard.  One doesn’t want to be inhuman enough never to attach to others or even things, but it only makes sense to protect what you care about. I was careful not to have children.

6.  Test for reality constantly.  Don’t be bluffed.

7.  Never trust flattery.  Accept it as a possibility and test it.  Same with threats.

8.  Frustrated or enraged or drunk etc. people can lash out without knowing their own strength or even intending to do it -- they surprise themselves.  Don’t you be surprised -- watch closely.  Practice on animals:  what signs does this cat make that it’s about to jump?  (Freeze, stare, lick nose, GO!)

9.  Counter-diagnosis:  what is making this person insist on domination?  Ego?  A higher boss? Maybe S/HE’s the defiant one.  Maybe s/he’s scared.  Address that.  Don’t get so wrapped up in yourself that you can’t see the other person.

10.  Is it coming from the social role: doc, cop, or whore?  Use that.  Students know exactly the constraints on teachers in public schools:  no contact, grades justified, protocol observed, no hint of sexuality -- those conditions force vulnerability on the teacher while trying to protect the vulnerability of students.

11.  Hoard your energy for the long haul.  Play the long game.

12.  Role play in advance so you have in mind some strategies.

The goal of the strategies below is to shift the frame of reference in the brains of these bossy people away from the side with checklists, protocols, indicators and categories, over to the side where they see you as a person like them.  Some will say this is from the left brain to the right brain.  My list below is kind of silly.  You can probably do better.  But sometimes being silly is disarming.

1.  “Please tell me your name.” (Surprising how many caregivers don’t do this when any waiter or even receptionist will do it.)

2.  Wink.

3.  “Would you hold my hand for a minute?”  

4.  “What were you like when you were my age?”

5.  “Would you give me ten minutes to tell you about myself?”  (You might need to carry a timer.)  If they say they don’t have ten minutes, ask for five or two.

6.   Write or draw something funny on your skin.  Something the OTHER guy will think is funny.

7.  “What’s your favorite . . .  “  color, TV show, etc.

8.  Give them a piece of candy or a poem.  (You don’t have to write it.)

If this backfires on one person, try it on the next.  Do a little adjusting and inventing.  Try to read body language.  Make this sort of thing a hobby.  Read Eric Berne’s “Games People Play,” and even better Claude Steiner’s “Games Alcoholics Play.”  (They’re often three-handed, which confuses oppositions.) You don’t have to learn any fancy theories to understand these books: just pay attention.

In any prison, the guards and the prisoners begin to get acquainted and to understand each other, even to like each other.  A culture grows up between them.  Someone didn’t like this at Guantanamo and replaced the former guards with much harsher new ones.  The biggest mistake the “government” has made is not understanding their prisoners.  

When the price is too high, the oppressor cannot win.  They cannot force people to live, as jailers on reservations know.  At Guantanamo no strategy, no intervention, will make a difference now.  It has become inhuman.  The place has become predatory while refusing to kill the prey.  This country is being run as though it were a kennel, an agribusiness, a corporation based on profit.  Guantanamo is another Abu Ghraib.  Those people in Washington DC are NOT the government -- they are a sideshow.  We should oppose and defy “them”  But we don’t know who the real authorities are.  We’re dealing with a “black” ops system that excludes our black president.

More to come that’s not so political.  Maybe.

"OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER" pt. 3

“Oppositional defiance disorder” gets more hits than anything else I write about, even religion or sex.  We clearly need more thinking about it.  This time I’m starting from the idea that defiance is not a “disorder” but rather an addiction.  It is at its core an arousal addiction, which means the substance doesn’t come from street drugs nor from prescribed pharmaceuticals, but rather from the person’s own body’s ability to create drugs.  Some of these are:

dopamine (pleasure)

adrenaline (anxiety, energy) 

oxytocin (love, jealousy, maternity) 

serotonin (mood stability)

endorphins (mild euphoria)

They can be triggered by thoughts, by events, by personal interactions, by art, by music and by risk.  They can also be triggered by violence, sex, thoughts of suicide, pain, cruelty, and urban roof-top parcours.   And defiance, which is courting danger.  I know the feeling.  The more powerful the person or force one is defying, the greater the high.  Remember when kids were daring each other to lie down on the yellow line on a busy street?  You know how many play chicken on the railroad?  Gambling, of course, is notoriously addictive.  Oh, the risk!  The rush!

Defiance is an addiction.  (The “oppositional” adjective is not needed.)  On the series “Homeland” the main spies, Carrie and Saul, both express addiction.  Carrie says she used to play chicken on the railroad and always won.  Neither will follow orders.  Neither will ever give up.

The basic process seems to be arousal, defined as heightened internal chemical states, which we generally interpret as emotions, that somehow crave repetition -- more, more, more.  I do not understand “cold blooded” emotionless risk, unless it is entirely driven by rational drive towards some advantage: money, status, control.  This discussion won’t touch that context.

The “problem” is that “this ‘addictive’ response is the underlying biological component that drives the dysfunctional behavior patterns of compulsive gamblers, shopaholics, sex addicts, and others who seek intensity as a means of self-soothing distraction.”  Like combat soldiers, surgeons, ballet dancers, artists, mountain climbers, etc.   That is, I’m saying that addiction in the sense of focused and constant preoccupation with a practice is what creates skill and mastery and is not a problem.  A person with a gambling addiction could become a helluva poker player and who would object?  It’s the dysfunctional behavior that either interferes with relationships or is illegal that creates the problem.  It may be that as we all live closer and closer together with more and more legal and regulation requirements, we are simply moving more behavior into the category of “dysfunctional.”

But if a person wants to change or is forced into counseling by the law, social workers and counselors likely use several strategies.  One is to form a group of peers who can support each other and discuss how to reach better control and why.  Another is to write out “boundary” contracts, voluntary agreement not to do whatever it is after negotiating with the counselor: basically operating off the morality of the counselor.  Maybe the least appealing treatment is prescribing drugs to counteract the “kick” from defiance.  The job of the social worker is to get compliance, to establish control, to be the one who knows.

“Oppositional Defiance Anonymous” programs do not exist as far as I know.  Defiance might be a conditioned reflex, might be self-protective, might be the product of fear, or might give the same chemical surges as other forbidden behavior.  The person who is defiant may not be doing it consciously at all.  Can one be addicted to defiance?  Why not?  But a written boundary contract as a remediation could not work because it would only present another opportunity to be defiant! 

There’s an old joke about a lecturer giving a talk at a women’s college.  He looked out and saw that some of the women were knitting.  He didn’t like that and quipped that knitting was a displacement of masturbation.  A woman looked up from her yarn and needles to say, “When I knit, I knit.  When I masturbate, I masturbate.”  In other words, she was not unconscious and knew the reasons for what she did.  In this case perhaps not wasting time while waiting for the lecturer to say something useful.  She was not susceptible to being shamed and knew what was appropriate, which the lecturer did not.  So which one was defiant?  Which one got the emotional surge?   

Can masturbation be displaced to knitting?  Can addictions be displaced?  To what would defiance be displaced?  Can a therapist join a client in a larger defiance, say against society’s misunderstanding?  What if the defiance were justified either in relationships where someone stood up against abuse -- the child refusing parental rape, the wife refusing to tolerate neglect, the colony refusing to accept imperial domination, the Chinese man standing in front of the invading tank?

Isn’t terrorism an oppositional defiance?

The most obvious first consideration when dealing with a defiant individual has got to address the reason for the defiance.  Otherwise we are only blaming the victim.  The point of the man who has turned informant in “Homeland” is that he sees good reasons to oppose his own country, like the use of bombs on schoolchildren.  The story turns the focus from his inner life -- which has been manipulated -- to larger patterns, in search of solidarity from the audience.  (Plot lines are always manipulations of the audience to generate emotional surges in them.)  

Justified defiance, allying with others in sympathy and solidarity, is an engine of historical evolution, like rebellion against empires.  Unjustified defiance with no outlet, no goal, no community, verges on evil, is certainly corrosive, and will probably cause the destruction of the defiant one.  Maybe a lot of people.

Must addictions escalate?  If the basic process is arousal, then it may find expression in  

intense fantasy, including conspiracy theories

urges, like rape or violence 

rituals, maybe shaped by religion like burning crosses 

and other behaviors 

as means of dissociating from or otherwise coping with internal and external life stressors, emotional pain, and uncomfortable feelings.  The nature of the behaviors defines the level of criminality and destruction. 

I’m reacting in part to a blog:  http://blogs.psychcentral.com/sex/2012/11/neurochemistry-escalation-and-the-process-addictions/  I don’t agree with everything Weiss says.  The issue I was looking for was escalation.  Is it inevitable?  Clearly it is common.  Often it is stopped only by repentance after doing grievous damage to someone valued.  One clear escalation would be moving from the internally triggered emotional substances to street drugs.  There is also a phenomenon of expansion and elaboration:  planning, anticipating, considering strategy, preparing materials, teasing and afterwards boasting, hinting.  Weiss calls this -- he says as the addicted do -- “being in the bubble.”  Clearly Tamerlane the Terrorist was “in the bubble” for quite a while.

Shame and guilt are also powerful generators of internal chemicals.  The problem is the same as that for trying to control someone defiant -- the attempt to cure through these emotions simply feeds the addiction.    Can appeal to reason make a difference?   Or can one begin to supply a new set of prompts to the defiant one, evoking a different set of chemicals?  The feelings of safety, being loved, being successful, accomplishing goals set by oneself, achieving “flow” -- all these things can be provided instead of punishment, confinement, stigmatizing, criminalizing.  When the person learns to find them for himself, there can be rejoicing, a classic high.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE SYNDROME Part 2

The 2011 post on this blog that still consistently gets the most hits is "ADULT OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER".  Today I got this comment: “My ex & daughter (now 25) who both have ODD. The ex mellowed in his mid-20's as far as the temper fits went but never got over the need to feel like he was rebelling against someone - and I became a substitute for a parent. That was really tough. Took me a while to understand the dynamic ; even after I stumbled on info about ODD, I couldn't live with it in the end. We've remained good friends; I have watched him struggle with close relationships. Now I'm watching my talented, super smart daughter have continual problems with jobs & bosses, relationships, etc. ODD is not just for kids, seems to easily subvert even the highest intellect; I don't think a person usually completely outgrows it.”

The rest of today’s post had been lingering on hold while I tried to decide whether some people would take it as a personal comment on our relationship -- probably half a dozen WOULD -- but maybe it’s worth it.  The comment made me decide to risk it.

What ecological/evolutionary forces link sex, violence and stigma in a self-reinforcing process -- always leading back in instead of out, which is the classic definition of insanity?  I myself can’t even figure out whether I was a victim of childhood abuse.  It certainly wasn’t considered that at the time.  (Nineteen-forties, mostly.)  After his head trauma, my father when irritated would jump up and spank any kid he could grab -- this was 1948, so we were 9, 7 and 5.   By the time I was more like 12, spanking began to become something sexual and my mother intervened.

So then my father went to “operant conditioning”, because he had to do SOMETHING when we took long cross-country trips by car in August.  No AC or backseat vids in those days.  He kept 3X5 cards on his sun visor and if we did something “good” he gave us a tally under “plus” and if we did something “bad” we got a “minus.”  At the end of the day he added them up.  The best score got a quarter (a lot of money in those days), then a dime and the lowest guy got a nickel.   Of course, what I did that was defined as “good” differed radically from the same behavior by my little brothers.  The result of this is that I am entirely impervious to operant conditioning.  I taught myself not to care.   

Many school principals and one husband found this out to their sorrow.  I can only remember a very few people of either gender or in any relationship who would simply request the behavior they wanted and -- if I felt I couldn’t or shouldn’t provide it -- would hear me out and adapt to what I told them.  When I was sosososo wanting to be compliant, and managed it up to a point, the shock of the requester when I reached limits -- either the limit of my ability or the limit of my willingness -- became a conviction that I was somehow withholding.  Punishable.  They evidently thought I was limitless: needed no sleep, needed no training, needed no equipment or space, needed no time to just be myself.

They seemed to believe that they had to somehow trick me or punish me into doing what they wanted.  This caused me to have emotions I didn’t want:  resentment, rage, defiance, despising them.  And I learned to be secretive and tricky myself, which I understand to be moral defects, so I was despising myself as well.  But none of this was very conscious.  As a child I hardly had the terminology to describe any of it to myself, much less someone else.  There were many kinds of powerlessness involved. 

Managers I’ve worked for over the years have not had many -- hell, ANY -- skills along the lines of these dynamics.  Maybe one, an old cop.  They knew they had to have control, they figured it was a matter of power, and they understood power in that blind operant conditioning sort of way.   As one woman said to me here in Valier,  “You stop making mistakes or I’ll beat your butt!”  The exception was when I believed in the task so completely that I needed no urging.  My major reward was praise, but only if it was not false flattery.  And idealism, so long as I wasn’t betrayed.

The best descriptions of these dynamics that I’ve come across so far have been those dealing with rape-and-violence-as-power.  It’s another of those spectrum things that starts with with small body language like a guiding hand on your back -- escalating until you ARE on your back, trying to fend off invasion.  What goes on with the other guy, the person who so needs control as to resort to violence and violation, so invested in rules and regulations as to hamstring and paralyze operations?  What makes a mom who works in a small town office threaten to beat a newcomer’s butt?

I propose reasons like the need for control, the failure of anyone to provide negative consequences or effective restraint, frustration with life in general, a history of being abused and controlled by others, failure to realize that they ARE being abusers, even unreasonable drive to achieve.  But there is also a small category of people -- the same as in other species -- who are just wired that way.  They lose it.  It’s what “berzerk” means.  Domestic animals are capable of the same raging lack of control: sudden, often lethal.  Normally, they are destroyed, but their aggressiveness means that their genes get passed on.  Among humans, forces of society that keep them unemployed, unloved, unconstrained, even unrecognized are never addressed or reversed, but we are reluctant to just kill them.

Partly these forces are denied.  Kept secret.  Why?  Sometimes to preserve jobs and economic respectability.  Sometimes because controllers seem powerful (they are not) and that will attract people who think they can wheedle and persuade and tolerate in order to bask in the warmth of power.  Not just women are co-dependent -- any more than just men are rapists and bar-fighters.  Sometimes, as with drugs, criminal dynamics are in play.  Sometimes, as with cops, only force will restore order.  It is the business of the street cop to keep order, not supply justice.  The same as for the Mafia.

I’m no innocent.  I can push too hard, invade.  If someone I care about says, “Back off,” I do.  Because I care.  But I never say “back off” to them, because too often it has proven to be an invitation to overpower me.  And because I don’t feel entitled to say it.  So I find other ways  -- you know the fairy tales:  throwing down the comb that becomes a forest, the mirror that becomes a lake.  Often I just hide.  The best way to hide is to invest all your riches in your mind, not in things.  Because in our culture not many people will recognize an education without a piece of paper and not many people will waste time on someone they consider poor.  It’s a stigma, but not a very strong one.  Just a faint whiff of victim, which can be a little dangerous.  But sometimes it’s worth it.  If you care.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE (Continued)

In terms of “most popular post”on this blog, the “old” winner (“Are Suspenders Sexy?”) has long been replaced by “Adult Oppositional Defiance Disorder.”  I speculate on why.  Instead of joking about suspenders, being suspended, or the nature of suspension, I’m approaching AODD ( Gotta have an acronym !!!) as a serious philosophical issue.

Forget the “Disorder” thing.  The shrinks are constantly trying to define, confine, publish, claim knowledge, and make categories.  Reality simply defies them.   Going to the other end of the phrase, forget the “Adult” thing.  There’s no such thing.  A human being is never “finished”, “mature,” or “adult.”   It’s a legal category, entirely negotiable.  Often used as a club:  “Will you grow up?”  “You don’t need help because you’re an adult.”  “You’re just immature.”  When society isn’t trying to push the age of maturity up past 21, they are trying to push the age of senility down past 65.  Why?  Because there’s control and money in it.  

So we’re left with Oppositional Defiance.  “OD.”  (“Oh, Dear.”)  It’s the same old individual-versus-group problem.  But there are many variations of strategy and no stable state where the dynamics are resolved -- this is a syndrome of dynamics.  That’s the definition: a process of defying.  The only way to reach resolution is not to care -- to withdraw.  That only seems like resolution.  Not all withdrawal signals a lack of caring.  It might be matter of self-preservation or it might be a way of protecting the opposition or it might be a temporary strategy.  Only time will tell.

In the public realm the shrinks want to connect OD to antisocial (criminalized) behavior and rage.   They represent themselves as able to use cold and scientific methods to confine or even extinguish hot, indignant, passionate OD. (They supply lots of statistics, like claiming ten percent of people have OD -- about the same as the percentage in every mammal species that is defined as “gay.”) This is justified by university degrees, professional certification, institutional affiliations and commercial viability that promise to control those who are outside the larger social group -- to either bring them IN to the group or banish them, maybe extinguish them.  These hot OC people are presumed to engage in terrorism, mass murders, abuse of many kinds.  Fear is always an effective justification.

In the private realm -- on the couch -- the shrinks will try to “resolve issues” so the OD person won’t care so much.  This is probably a doomed effort.  Even when a person falls in love (why?  how?) with someone so different as to guarantee constant conflict, the desired [sic] outcome is not to achieve flat affect, which might mean to shrug and walk off.  So what is the benefit of the domination/submission relationship that keeps it together?

A quote I read once decades ago has always stuck with me:  that two people who are “crazy” in ways that fit together like jigsaw pieces, can achieve far more intimacy that two “sane and mature” people.  Over the decades I’ve thought about this a lot.  Two concave/convex people are not necessarily in a consistently dom/sub relationship on all issues. They may eat the same way but sleep in opposite ways; housekeep in different styles; want sameness or want variety -- and so on.  C.S. Lewis said the ideal friend is one who has opposite opinions on all the same beloved subjects.  People who have no opinions are not worth struggling with.  (Of course, Churchill said a fanatic is someone who will neither change his mind nor change the subject.)

These forces -- centrifugal and centripetal -- are as biological as the developmental stage when a maturing cub leaves to find a new territory.  If it doesn’t, the mother forces it out.  The two forces persist in tandem because this is how evolution goes forward, how people go through life -- constantly being forced out of their comfort zone and then creating or finding a new one.  If they don’t do this, nothing changes and deterioration sets in.  Eutropification.  Luckily, the planet is so much bigger than humans that the terms of survival -- hurricanes and earthquakes, tsunamis and epidemics -- force change.  Humans never achieve homeostasis for long.  A couple of millennia (Ancient Egypt) is the limit.

Schools don’t like change.  Government doesn’t like change.  Institutions of all kinds do not like change.  They manage by channelling opposition -- building dams and moats like the one that protects Winnipeg from the Red River floods or sea walls like the ones in the Netherlands now proposed for Long Island -- the same idea that didn’t work in New Orleans.  There is an awakening in the Netherlands that may affect Long Island -- the idea that it’s better to adapt, to dance with change, to use culture to fit into nature instead of opposing it.  Similar reflection is questioning the way we handle criminal behavioral nonconformity:  putting everyone in prison doesn’t work.  So maybe we should change the definition of criminal.  What percentage of a population can be defined as criminal without them becoming a political entity forcing change? 

In personal relationships based on intimacy-across-difference there is a lot of pain even without breakups.  One hates to move on.  The factors of feeling inadequate or needing to blame the other or being jealous, all interfere with understanding -- even more with forgiving.  One begins to act badly, which has the effect of enforcing distance.  It is both better and worse to have a “cause” to address together, so the rage can be focused outward, rage used as constructive energy.  Oh, the possibilities for story!

The truth is that many people fear intimacy -- maybe defining it as capture -- and can only feel safe in a context of opposition.  So then the problem becomes one of management, tolerance, or benefits to the shared cause -- might be children or politics.  (Ask Hilary Clinton.)  It appears that having the genetic formula for a temperamentally “hot” style might cause a person to choose a “cool” partner -- a sheath for the sword.   This is a benefit to the individual if the cool person will be an enabler, a compensator; and it is a benefit to the larger society because persons who might otherwise start revolutions preoccupy themselves with kitchen wars.  Maybe fatal.

My choice to remain solitary is partly guided by not wanting energy I use for writing diverted to being on committees.  One of the most effective ways for society to handle Oppositional Defiance is to put people on committees so they fight each other, blind to any issues but the ones their teeth are sunk into.  The result is not insight but regulations.  I see at our local town council meetings that the “social challengers” -- who evidently have only phony issues to quarrel about --  merely drive the real business underground into secrecy.  (Council members agree among themselves before the meeting.)  The hours wasted listening to irate one-issue people are innumerable and, well, maddening.

Another “energy and anger sink” is social networking where people twitter steady streams of “Ain’t It Awful” and “Now I’ve Got You, You Sonofabitch,” those famous games described by Eric Berne.  Everyone sorts themselves into like-minded polities so they can go sit at a seminar table somewhere and produce papers to put on their resumés.  It beats spraying people with bullets, but does not promote innovation and progress.  Evolution will seek its growing edge somewhere else.  Maybe among the solitary nonconformists.