OPPOSITION AS A SORT OF INTIMACY

When I first started to write about “oppositional defiance disorder” I was surprised as the amount of response I got.  But then everyone insisted that it was an attribute of childhood and there was no such thing in adulthood.

But there is.  Except that it gets different names.  And here we are with a president who illustrates it every day.  He is usually belligerent, has always been a bully, and if he is advised not to do something, with the consequences clearly explained, he goes right for it.  It’s a compulsion, an obsession, much more than narcissism, possibly a death wish.

People who write about this have ideas about what causes it (DNA, childhood experience, role-models?), no one has much of an idea what to do to end it, and we can all recognize it around us, more and more.  It seems to have something to do with bullying, something about lonesomeness (which is pretty sad), and yet a need to be a player, to even be in charge — to control or, more than that, dominate.  Internet behavior.

It’s a behavior we admire in movies — the big alpha male who takes charge and saves everyone.  The guy who gets obsessed with finding the killer of his wife.  The pilot who refuses to give up on a airplane bound to crash.  “Against all odds.”  John Wayne, right?  Some people only take this attitude in emergencies and DO try to save everyone.  But someone like Trump is stuck, can’t leave it.  The morality, the pride, the dedication to a larger cause, are all missing.  

Somehow this is a behavior that is rooted deep, way below control by the prefrontal cortex, any moderating or “thinking.”  Something maybe part of the first hominins — or maybe clear down in the ape brain.  Maybe not.  I don’t think it goes below that, because it seems to have a strong connection to the idea of family, generations inheriting over time as a way of preserving identity and wealth, staying on the throne, keeping the farm, being better than everyone else.

We have a strong tendency to think of behavior in terms of extremes because they are colorful and attract attention.  But there is also a less noticeable motive for conflict-seeking behavior that is familiar to classroom teachers.  It seems to be a need to stay connected to others, to keep others from leaving but at the same time to prevent being controlled or influenced by them.  One might describe it as not trusting boundaries, being so amorphous that the edge has to be defined by pushing up against something else.  On the national level that would be like Russia and North Korea always having to be pushing against the rest of the world.

Dementia just means that the machinery is stuck.  The resulting content might be anything, but is likely to be what it always was from the beginning, just out of control.  Maybe not quite psychotic, which is what psychiatrists treat, but more familiar to psychologists, who might frame the criteria as follows, things that lay folks could recognize.

https://psychcentral.com/disorders/oppositional-defiant-disorder-symptoms/

Specific Symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder

▪ A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:

▪ often loses temper

▪ often argues with adults

▪ often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules

▪ often deliberately annoys people

▪ often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

▪ is often touchy or easily annoyed by others

▪ is often angry and resentful

▪ is often spiteful or vindictive

▪ Note: Consider a criterion met only if the behavior occurs more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level.

▪ The disturbance in behavior causes clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.

▪ The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a psychotic or mood disorder (such as depression).

▪ Criteria are not met for conduct disorder, and, if the individual is age 18 years or older, criteria are not met for antisocial personality disorder.

Symptoms of Antisocial Personality Disorder

Antisocial personality disorder is diagnosed when a person’s pattern of antisocial behavior has occurred since age 15 (although only adults 18 years or older can be diagnosed with this disorder) and consists of the majority of these symptoms:

▪ Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest

▪ Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure

▪ Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead

▪ Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults

▪ Reckless disregard for safety of self or others

▪ Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations

▪ Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another

In a world where boundaries are increasingly recognized as constantly interacting and some are more like overlapping Venn diagrams than separated circles, a person or nation who defines itself by depending on authority figures to oppose it, must be overwhelmingly anxious in the times of “liberation” when everything is changing and freedom is the watchword.  Now we have the means to see the most minute constituents of being itself.  The patterns can get lost.  We find out there’s no such thing as race and white supremacists often carry African genes.  Not everyone is open to the ideas of fractals or algorithms — let alone a planet that is constantly transforming itself, which is not so hard to believe when the hurricanes hit.

The alternative to boundaries for people and nations is the idea of a central axis mundi that acts by attraction, that magnetically pulls people in and is rewarding enough to keep them in relationship.  We haven’t been very good at that for a while.  Our old center poles have fallen before the new ones have had a chance to rise up out of the ground immanentally, which is what the best ones do  — without force.  Often with a song.  I say this to oppose the centripetal forces of fear and despair that pull us apart.  I speak of “pole-dancing” to make you laugh.  Think May Poles.

STATISTICS, COMPLEXES, PRESCIPTIONS AND OTHER ATROCITIES

Dogs on average.

Though I’ve been trying to think about Obstinate Defiance Disorder, a bit of cruising around in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the psych community keeps making me more suspicious of the category altogether.  Years ago when I was thinking of being a clinical psychologist I had to take statistics, which put me right out of the notion.  The main thing I got out of the course (which I had to take three times in order to pass and even then only passed the first half) was the definition of a “standard deviation” though there’s a nice oxymoron for you.  I’m incorrigibly innumerate in the first place and in the second place more attracted to the idea of deviance than standardization.  

"You'll have to break this one early," said Old Lady Otto.

(I couldn't sit up alone yet.  She must have been waving a fetish at me.)

My encounters with female PA’s and some female MD's have given my innate ODD a lot of energy.  These women have learned to be straight A students by passing multiple choice tests, learning vocabulary, and following the pharm folks’ “likelihood” numbers.  They do not look at the person and ask them about their story.  They are not part of the traditional physician culture.  They want blood measurement scores and little charts that they follow across the dotted lines to the “right” prescription.  For instance, they demand to know when I wheeze.  But I DON’T wheeze.  They have seen that in the past I was prescribed a steroid inhaler which is often for wheezing, but this time was because of a summer pollen allergy.  When I tell them that, they flatly don’t believe me.  As far as they’re concerned, correlation is causal.  Real docs are scientific.

This makes me defiant and obstinate.

Now that further research is breaking up many of the assumed statistical correlations about fats, sugars, tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, high BP, and so on, the importance of looking at individuals and finding actual causal links -- esp. since many of the correlations were established only for white men of a certain age and economic level, all of which I am not -- those nice obedient ladies always try to do the right thing get more and more frustrated with me.  It’s a reciprocity, which is always reinforcing.  I mean, the more I fluster them, the better I like it.

But it’s one of my deep patterns anyway.  I ran across another “aggressive” syndrome based on children.  This one is called Reactive Attachment Disorder and is beginning to be connected to adults, now, rather like ODD.  There’s a description which is too long to copy and paste here.  http://lakesideconnect.com/trauma-and-trauma-informed-care/the-symptoms-of-rad-in-adults/   My fav symptom in this long hodge-podge is “darkness behind the eyes when angered.”  Is that the same thing as “seeing red”?  Is it from the point of view of the person with the eyes or the person looking at someone who is angered?  

A stormy petrel

Clearly this is a list meant to bring in clients and basically means “people whom you consider troubled and therefore troublesome.”  My supervising minister when I interned called such people “stormy petrels,” which is a high and far-flying sea bird thought to show up when there’s trouble due to storms -- some feel they are “causal,” that the birds actually bring the storm.  Think Heathcliffe out there on the Wuthering Heights.  It’s actually an attractive personality to a lot of people.  At least not boring.  (Notice that “compulsive caregiving” is on the list.  I could suggest that to a few female medical practitioners.  Resistance will get you labeled ODD.)  But birds don't control storms.

RAD as originally proposed was about a baby who fails to attach to the mother.  “Attachment” is a physiological reaction built into vertebrates that keeps the baby with the mother in the absence of a nest to protect infants too helpless to go anywhere.  It causes the babies to welcome the parent back to the nest, esp. if they’re bringing food.  But Harlow’s experiments with baby monkeys, publicized with heart-breaking photos in Life magazine that went right into the black space behind my eyes, taught us all that cuddling means more than milk, though having to make that terrible survival choice is soul-destroying.  Bowlby’s studies about attachment were a little less traumatic and Winnicott was the warmest interpreter of all.

You must survive however you can.

I attached, though my mother was having a bit of a struggle.  She was thirty, a career-woman, alone in a city because my father’s job was traveling -- my advent meant that she could no longer travel with him.  Her mother was dying and the family blamed her defiant marriage for causing cancer.  She'd just had all her teeth pulled.  She must have been depressed, but even if she’d had those life-endangering postnatal hormonal swings, she was also conscientious and we bonded, which I understand as mutual attachment, not just one-way like ducklings following their mother.

My mother and I in fusion.

Then came two brothers.  She unbounded -- or at least distanced -- just as I hit the Terrible Twos but it was the second brother who tipped the scales -- by then I was near kindergarten age and my mother got the idea that the solution to being overwhelmed was to enroll me in kindergarten.  She often told about how she took me into the principal’s office, set me on his knee, and told him the story of an ODD girl disrupting the necessary routine of baby boys.  It was only half-a-day but I was starting late and the class did not accept me.  I was now an isolate in a room of hostiles.  It has never changed since then.  Not down deep.

The interplay of ODD and RAD is not discussed any place I’ve found so far, so I can interpret it my own way.  There is a well-described dynamic about little kids whose dearly beloved parent is gone for some reason -- illness, travel, whatever -- and at first  the little one mourns and grieves, but then becomes resolute and when the parent returns will not respond.  They turn their face away.  “The hell with you.  I don’t know you.”  I can understand that in a family where parents quarrel and one disappears for days or weeks -- even years -- RAD is the only sensible response.  There’s no use being stubborn and defiant if the other is not even present.

Poor Soames as depicted by Damian Lewis

Bob Scriver, when he wanted to get rid of someone (employee, lover, wife or even child), never straightforwardly asked them to leave.  Instead, he escalated his demands.  I would master some impossible task, but he would just make the next one more difficult until I went ODD and finally RAD.  The truth was that he couldn’t stand taking blame -- he thought it would result in catastrophe -- so he managed to convert the situation into being all the other guy’s fault.  To him it was survival.  I think this is a very common pattern, which is why it’s worth reflection, and possibly a close literary account.  (I just watched “The Forsythe Saga,” which is a similar sequence, a rigid upper-class Brit set of standards so internalized that it destroys a man named Soames.  He becomes more and more demanding and it becomes more and more impossible.)

Many “syndromes” that people might try to address with therapy -- hoping to make the person stop being a pain in the butt -- can be a good fit and even a force for good.  My RAD makes it easy for me to sit here day after day.  I even interpret my obstinate defiance tendencies as helpful in resisting medical Prairie Princesses intent on making me conform to the bell curve they learned instead of the “long tail” that is where I live.  

The key to survival for both individual and group is NOT conformity but “fittingness.”  But people in the long tail must watch out for rocking chairs.

NAUGHTY or NICE? RADI or PIP? IDEALIST or TERRORIST? DOMESTIC or WILD?

Over the last few days I’ve been playing with categories in an almost careless way so as to break up some assumptions and maybe even invent some new ones.  This is what I’ve got laid out so far:  

1.  Genetically controlled behavior with “domesticated” creatures being now recognized as due in part to specific molecular mutations that made survival success contingent on relating to humans.  This exposes the animals to human cultural mutations that might not be helpful to the animals after all: either using animals like machines or making them play human emotional roles.  Central Park carriage horses or dogs in purses.  Horses with ODD are good for rodeo bucking events which is arguably an adaptation of human to animal.

2.  Clinically derived theories about two kinds of “aggression,” one based in the “hot”, “hard-wired” synapses that support freeze/flight/fight reactions to threats (RADI) and the other based on the learned conviction that in a hostile environment, one must use any means necessary -- including plotting and pre-empting -- in order to personally survive (PIP).

3.  Categories used for diagnosis in the elaborate medical-style codes of the psych people, including one of two “aggressive” syndromes that is called ODD for Obstinate Defiance Disorder.  Many of these categories are so close together that they’re hard to distinguish.  (Check out Reactive Attachment Disorder.)  There are many versions of these code systems, depending on the culture -- that is, the German system is not the same as the American system because “normal” is described in different world views in the first place.

4.  These definitions are related to the concept of survival (the basic drive of all animals) and must split the difference between what is important for the survival of the individual as opposed to the survival of the group.  Many dynamics and scenarios apply here.  One of intense concern right now is behavior related to Ebola: some individuals are willingly risking themselves while others flee; groups react similarly, some denying and some coping.  The overall context, which is expressed in economics, is being radically changed at the expense of individual, group, and planetary responses.  These will cause cultural shifts.

Long ago I read a teaching/managing book that was about “why people don’t learn.”  It reflected on different KINDS of causes.  I don’t have the book anymore but these elements are what I remember.

1.  The capacity to perform the task is not there in the specific individual.  Men don’t get pregnant, no matter how hard you try to impregnate them.  

2.  Though the person could learn the skill with special help, that’s not present.  The runner must have legs and if he is an amputee, he will need prosthetics or wheels.

Beethoven, but is that a piano?

3.  Specific instrumentation is needed but not present.  What is Beethoven without a piano?  He can function after hearing loss -- if he has a good memory associating actions with synapses, but he needs a keyboard in order to play.

4.  Focused instruction must be supplied.  People play instruments by ear, but at some level will need exploration of possibilities and, if they are relating to an audience, education considering other people’s ears.

5.  Actions need to be received, understood, and supported with attention.  Human behavior is always a matter of reciprocity.  Disregard, misunderstanding, punishment rather than appreciation, will not end behavior if it reinforces contempt.  But “anything goes” doesn’t lead to successful actions either, except by chance or if the individual has his own code and feedback loops.  And it can also cause contempt, to say nothing of confusion.

So now, another way of asking why do people do bad things?

First, what’s considered bad and who defines it and why?  Defecating in public is accepted in India, they say.  (A problem just being addressed now.)  In this country defecating or urination by children is considered “harmless” by some people who will let a small child pee in, say, a parking lot.  Men urinate much more freely than women.  (There are not pissoirs in Paris for women, are there?)  Dogs go where they will, but try to use other people's places to keep their own yards clean.

This is bad for aesthetic reasons (it stinks) and for health reasons, but done anyway because it is more convenient, or because there are no proper facilities, or because of poverty that will keep street people out of indoor bathrooms, or because of pay toilets (I remember them and was impressed by the idea of pay toilets not based on entry, but on exit -- if you don’t feed the right coins into the mechanism, you’re trapped.) or because no one wants to clean public toilets.  It creates special “low” classes.

There’s another dimension which is based partly on the presumed privacy and separation of the sexes and partly on association of elimination with sexuality.  Both the product and the act can become sexualized.  Or the sequestration traditional for the act can become a conveniently secret place for illicit or violent behavior.

There’s a strange cultural shift now towards using baby words (poo) for the old Anglo-saxon offensive words (shit) and towards unisex bathrooms in spite of an opposite push towards gender-appropriate bathrooms and gender-appropriate proportions between the two kinds of bathroom because it takes a longer time for females to pee (a word my mother forbade) and lines can become so long for women that they desperately use male facilities.  Then there is the need for accommodations for people in wheelchairs and for children.  

Most confusing of all, there are now people who are changing genders so that they look one way, but need appliances that are another way, and might not fit the cultural assumption of who belongs.  I used to alarm other women when I wore my animal control deputy sheriff uniform into bathrooms because the assumption was that such a role was male.  At seminary there were never enough female bathrooms because the assumption was that the only female who would be on the premises would be the secretary.  

This discussion is helpful as an example because it involves gender differences and age differences, which are exceptionally likely to change in the way the culture looks at them and then prompt changes in the built environment or legal standards in order to respond to the needs.  Race is another issue.  A certain amount of Obstinacy, Defiance, and cold plotting goes into changing the situation, as well as episodes of emotional and possibly over-the-top behavior.  To some people this is sinful, breaking the rules, and to others it is evil, pointing to violence and sexual transgression.  

It's clear that the world is constantly shifting in many ways and that attempts to suppress and control -- either the shifts themselves or the response to the shifts -- are forces for stability in the best interpretation.  But if the response is disproportionate (an Obama word -- a concept he defends and a good description of the way some sections of our culture react to him) then it can become immoral and inhuman, like the black boy electrocuted for beating to death two white women though he was so small that in the electric chair he had to sit on a phone book
.

A person accused of Obstinate Defiance might be a terrorist (Is there anything more defiant than self-destruction?  I would say yes -- the forcible prevention of self-destruction.) or might be a child in a state of uproar because of abuse or because they are pressed to do something they can’t or because they are prevented from doing something they really NEED to do.  Some people look out at a world of boxes with labels and don’t see any place where they are named, much less fit into any system of pigeonholes, which is the basic premise of much bureaucracy.  A friend of mine was consulted by a teenager who trusted him and needed to know whether he were schizophrenic, because maybe he fit into that box.  Is such a box helpful or an anchor around his neck in a world that requires us to swim?

A human being has a life of a certain length, which is unpredictable.  Whatever tends towards survival should not destroy the quality of that life just for the sake of longevity.  Nor should it diminish the lives of others.  Those principles don’t need to be codified in laws -- they can guide us through our reflections.  As for the “mad dogs” among human animals, no code nor punishment nor classification will help.  But far more often they are on the authority end rather than the defiant end of the equation.  This is because power protects them from the winnowing of  time -- for a while.  Sooner or later Cheney's Obstinate Defiance will cut him down.

Cheney

This link is to a wise reflection by a judge in Calgary who has dealt with aboriginal people -- a different worldview -- for many years and has learned from it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq3a5CgBgqE

UNDERSTANDING OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE BROADLY

Oppositional Defiance Disorder, which was originally defined to describe kids who defy any kind of authority, is now being applied to adults who are being defiant.  Of course, that’s pejorative, implying that the disobedient are simply not yet adult, unreconciled to the kinds of compromises every adult must make.  And it also carries the diagnostic stigma that one is “crazy.”  

I have two cats, both female, womb-mates, now aging.  The yellow one is mellow, a cuddler, a sleeper, a treat-eater, rather stupid.  The tortoise shell is a living example of ODD.  When she was little, she ignored her own name unless I threw a slipper at her to get her attention.  I thought she was deaf.  I’m saying that ODD must have some kind of physical basis.  Maybe it is more of a failure to be domesticated than it is immaturity or psychosis.

Here’s a story about the genetic basis of domestication in cats.  http://allday.com/post/1458-how-the-cat-went-from-wild-beast-to-domestic-object-of-adoration

I’ll summarize:   Thirteen genes changed as cats became domestic.  They include changes in the genes controlling memory, fear-conditioning, and stimulus-reward (operant conditioning).  Five genes influence development by neural crest cells, which affect skull shape and coat color, but they also have impact on the whole body.  (A round head that fits into a human hand is appealing.  Temperament in cats is often related to coat color.  Also, the fourth-leg on the gender chromosome X carries a color which is why tri-colored cats are always female.)

Some genes were changed by diet, esp. an adaptation that dropped whatever it is that processes fats in hyper-carnivorous diets and maybe added lactose-tolerance to adult cats, parallel to the same adaptation in humans using dairy sources as food.  But also a dulling of sense of smell, in contrast to dogs.  It seems associated with the disinclination to hunt.  Why eat a mouse if you don't have to?

“Even though the smoking gun genome is found in the DNA of cats, scientists are also considering how it may apply to the domestication of a host of other mammals including dogs, cows, pigs and even humans. The reason for comparisons, particularly to humans, and their furry pets is that the structure of cat chromosomes more closely resembles that of homo sapiens — even more so than dog's DNA.” 

Crackers and Squibs

Having raised a series of bobcats, I can attest to both the similarities and the radical difference between wild and domesticated cats, especially after adolescence when the bobcats left if they could, looking for their own place in the world.  In general, the bobcat kits were far more ODD.   They just didn't care about humans that much.  But even the bobcats were not alike.  The littermates “Rufus” and “Gimpy” were as different from each other in temperament as my present Mellow Yellow and ODD Tortie domestics.

Colonel Przewalski's never-domesticated horses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/1318590/When-wild-horses-were-dragged-into-domesticity.html  is one among many recent articles exploring the genetic basis of domesticated horses.  Of course, you’ll remember that ALL American horses are feral, domestics gone wild, so their genome needs to be compared with those of Asian wild horses like Colonel Przewalski’s plus DNA from ancient bones.  This article suggests that feral and domestic horse genomes prove to have many sources as shown in matrilineal lines, but comparisons with early horse genes do turn up the evidence of change in the direction of domestic usefulness.

The race horse veterinarian, Sid Gustafson, points out that horses are pack animals, like wolves, but cats are not.  If an animal has the genes for participation in a society, a group, then they are more easily domesticated because they let the humans become their herd and are reciprocated by inclusion in the human “family.”  A pack trip integrates both horses and people.

Sid Gustafson family trip

Roy Rappaport defines survival as relating to the individual as well as being for the group, and the balance between the two -- individual versus group -- may sacrifice one or other.  Individuals die in wars for the sake of survival by groups.  Sometimes individuals may destroy whole groups, as Hitler attempted.  His justification for extinguishing a “race/religion” was supposedly genetic, but the real problem was that he himself didn’t belong.  He was a killer in search of ingratiation with the German people by inventing a common enemy and then eliminating it.  The old triangulation strategy.

So for an individual trying to solve a relationship that interferes with either the survival of themselves as individuals or the survival of the larger group, it is in a sense a problem of domestication, "who ya gonna throw in with."  Strategy by affiliation.  Mammals (so undoubtedly humans as well) have at least some basis in their genomes for belonging to a specific group which develops in response to a specific environment, but also is shaped by life history.

Then, given the nature of the particular infant, the success of maturation depends on the interface with the parents and larger culture.  Terry Brazelton, the pediatrician, has insights into this.  http://www.touchpointsbook.com/touchpoints.html  If baby and culture are a pretty good match and if people are sensible about adjusting strategies, things turn out very well.  But a quiet baby will have trouble with a hyperactive overachieving mother, and a vigorous, seeking baby will struggle with a passive or confining mother.

I propose that an oppositionally defiant child was probably misfitted as an infant -- forced to be on a schedule that wasn't in sync with the baby or ignored when needs were pressing.  (I don't just blame Mom.  She may have been as trapped by culture as the baby.)  The lesson such a baby may have learned is that you have to take care of yourself as you can, maybe by making a big fuss and maybe by hiding.  Sometimes everything was fine until there was a distressing change and since babies can’t really understand the causes, they can only do the freeze, flight, fight things that are hard-wired into mammals as a matter of survival.  But clumsily, since they are babies and without consciousness or memory.

At about age three or four, children try to help and comfort others, esp. their parents.  They try to be parents themselves and in cases where the parents are more like children than the children, they sometimes really do help.  I’ve never forgotten the woman who had passed out and whose toddler had brought her a blanket and a glass of water, then settled down beside her to keep vigil.  I’m sure it is a tableau that repeats.  Someone must have done that for the child.  But many people will try to parent their parents through their whole lives.  Of course, teenagers think their parents are incompetent anyway.  And humans try to parent their domestic animals.  Parenting per se is a spectrum of behavior, not one thing.

Being stubborn in defense of vulnerability is a moral sort of defiance.

There has been a lot of cultural fuss about the death of the Big Papa in the Sky, God.  In a good seminary or divinity school, equal attention is paid to the nature of human beings.  This is religious anthropology and it soon becomes obvious that human and “god” are reciprocal concepts.  It also becomes obvious that “god” concepts get captured into the service of hierarchical authorities who claim privilege in their relationship with this constructed idea.  One who is ODD is defined as an heretic and may even risk being burned at the stake.  

The commodified, internationally controlling corporations of our present society have made a religion of patriotism, product loyalty, and strategic ignorance as the price of survival.  Posing as parental, they grind up individuals.  Like tanks they threaten to crush the defiant for the good of the whole.  The man who stands in front of the tank is acting out moral ODD.  Most analysts of obstinacy neglect the moral dimension.

What practical things could a defiant person do to survive as an individual, perhaps in service to the survival of the group?  Here are some early ideas, pretty general.

1.  Find or create a niche where the individual is protected.  (Monasteries?)

2.  Assume a disguise.  (Guy Fawkes masks)

3.  Make yourself exceedingly valuable with a major skill.

4.  Go to an edge and live in solitude. (Me)

5.  Find a powerful protector.

6.  Make an enduring record that will survive. (Arts)

7,  Make common cause with many others.

8,  Protect the even more vulnerable -- maybe not human, maybe the planet.

9.  Good health.

10.  Know stuff, including skills.
11.  Focus.  
12.  Analyze yourself bravely but not mercilessly.

This is a confused post because I am still confused.  Why is ODD -- Oppositional Defiance considered "aggressive"?  If it is resistance to authority figures, why isn't it the authority figures who are the aggressors?  It seems the word "disorder" is a tip-off to authoritarian motivation, esp. cops, but it triggers something like "obsessive control syndrome" which justifies the use of suppressing violence even to the point of death.  THAT's aggressive.

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.