John Friel Ph.D. - The Power and Grace Between Nasty or Nice: Replacing Entitlement, Narcissism, and Incivility with Knowledge, Caring, and Genuine Self-Esteem

Contents

PREFACE: Change and Balance

Chapter 1: The Fate of the Surprisingly Smart Neanderthals

Chapter 2: When Simple Is Complicated and Complicated Is Simple

Chapter 3: The Grace and Power Between Nasty and Nice

Chapter 4: The Rules

Chapter 5: Feelings

Chapter 6: Feelings in Action

Chapter 7: Paralyzing Polarities: Victim-Perpetrator Interaction Patterns

Chapter 8: Nasty-Nice in a Nutshell

Chapter 9: Biology Is Sometimes Destiny, Except When It Isnt

Chapter 10: Limbic Distortions, Painful Childhood Experiences, Cultural Denial, Double Binds, and the Battle Between the Sexes

Chapter 11: Patience, Self-Restraint, and Genuine Self-Esteem

Chapter 12: Care: Giving Us the Buoyancy to Handle Almost Anything

Chapter 13: Love, Power, and Graciousness

Chapter 14: Acting from Your Best Self

Chapter 16: Should I Simply End All Contact?

Chapter 18: The Consequences of Fear, Ignorance, and Greed

Chapter 19: Competence and Smart Planning: When It Works, It Works

Chapter 20: From The Rock of Gibraltar to Minnesota and Beyond

Life is an echo. What you send out comes back.

Chinese Proverb

D uring a recent consulting trip to Greenland, I was told that some of the hunters were shooting their sled dogs because they could no longer feed them. For several years the sea ice has not frozen solidly enough for the hunters to be able to take the dog sleds out to catch the fish and seals necessary to feed their starving dogs. And recently two polar bears came in to Nuuk, Greenlands capital city of 16,500 people. The bears were looking for food in an area considerably distant from where they normally live. They were unable to walk to the areas with plentiful seals because the sea ice is melting, and unable to swim the great distances they would need to swim to find food. They, too, were shot. The changing fragile ecology is rapidly altering the Greenlandic Inuit culture that has persisted for well over a thousand years. The promising search for gas and oil in the frigid, iceberg-filled waters that surround the western edge of Greenland, coupled with the recent mining of precious gems like rubies and diamonds, guarantee even more rapid change. Can a people that have survived mainly by fishing and hunting adapt sufficiently and quickly enough to benefit from these changes, or will they suffer the wholesale destruction of their culture as many of our first peoples did?

The possibilities for nasty or nice in a rapidly changing ecology only escalate as the ecological balance is lost. Virginia Satir, noted family therapist and systemic thinker, frequently talked about her belief that we are biologically wired for change and biologically wired for no change.

Affect dysregulation is now believed to be a fundamental mechanism of all psychiatric disorders. The etiology of affect dysregulation in adults is often linked to childhood abuseemotional, physical, or sexual. Nasty at its worst. When a childs primary attachment object, his or her parent, is both the source of connection and the source of terror, the childs brain must rebalance itself to accommodate to loving a dangerous parent. It appears to do so in one of two ways: fight or flight. When a child experiences the terror associated with abuse, his or her brain very quickly moves into a hyper arousal mode, scanning for danger and organizing itself for offense or defense. As Louis Cozolino noted, the brain becomes poised for battle, and all of the hard-wired regulatory systems organize for survival. As the abuse stops and the threat recedes, the brain reorganizes itself for attachment, pleasure, compassion, etc. If the child experiences persistent threats to his or her survival over a number of years, the brain reorganizes itself to always be poised for battle. The brain is doing its primary job, namely insuring survival of the organism. The brains state of mind has now become a trait of the childs personality structure as an accommodation to the childs context. The resulting patterns are typically nasty or nice, perpetrator or victim: the childs brain is poised for battle, and all systems are organized for offense (perpetrator) or defense (victim): overpowered and undercontrolled (perpetrator) or overcontrolled and underpowered (victim). The same process happens when adults experience threats to their survival on a daily basis, as in war.

Writing for the New York Times on March 10, 2012, Erica Goode described the transformation that occurred within Christopher B. Epps, Mississippis commissioner of corrections, and therefore the way that prisoners are now being treated at the states super-maximum-security prison. Prior to Mr. Epps changes, more than 1000 inmates were locked down in solitary confinement for as long as 23 hours each day: allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angrymade more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night.... Epps said he started out believing that difficult inmates should be locked down as tightly as possible, for as long as possible. By the end of the process, he saw things differently and ordered the changes. If you treat people like animals, thats exactly the way theyll behave, he now says. Eppslikes to say prison officials started out isolating inmates they were scared of but ended up adding many they were simply mad at.

What happened next was counterintuitive and politically incorrect: Instead of tightening restrictions further, prison officials loosened them. They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges. In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million.

Victimization, even of convicted perpetrators, breeds more perpetration. It is hard to imagine that many in the corrections industry still believe that brutally punishing inmates will teach them a lesson and cure them of their behavioral problems. It does teach them a lesson, but as Commissioner Epps discovered, the lesson is greater levels of perpetration built on their greater levels of victimization. It is interesting to note that prisons for Israeli citizens have as their primary mission to return inmates to their integrity.

My husband James Maddock and I have had the enormous pleasure of teaching helperspsychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, pedagoguesand consulting with health care organizationshospitals, clinics, private practice groupsin Denmark for the past thirty-two years. Over the decades our time there has totaled more than four full years, so we had the opportunity to learn about and experience the culture of the country and its people through our work and the decades-long friendships we have had the privilege to develop. There are good reasons why Denmark consistently polls as the happiest country on the planet. The platform for work groups is one of collaboration and cooperation rather than competition and conquest. People do not get ahead in their work environments by stepping on their fellow workers to get ahead, as is often the case here in the U.S. True, the Vikings were not a terribly civil group of marauders and conquerors, but the Danes of recent generations have become a model of compassion and generosity.