Whenever any of us live through a traumatic experience, any experience that involves fear and a sense of rejection and powerlessness, we can respond by forming a meaning perspective or meaning perspectives derived from that experience. Fear and powerlessness can make a demand on us to make sense or form out of the chaos those feelings make of the world around us. We feel we must find a cause for this disruption of our lives. This happens most especially in children. In a fearful and powerless moment, a child might feel that that the fault for the situation belongs with her/him. That explains things without blaming a beloved parental figure. She/he can come to believe that she/he has little value as a self and only finds personal value in following the will, the domination of others. In this way, the child hopes for some level of approval, at least something akin to unconditional positive regard even if highly conditional. The same child could also follow demands but do so with an uneasy feeling of resentment and denial of the self she/he would like to feel valued but does not when dominated.
Both responses stem from the same source and both show the same inner turmoil although the external behavior may differ. Both responses feel like a lessening of their sense of their becoming self. It may be that the becoming self finds limitations inherent in a meaning perspective that speaks of personal failure and/or general incompetence. The child in question may not know such words, but that child can certainly feel those feelings and feel them as deeply and globally as only a child can. Doubting ourselves in our first steps in our immediate community of personhood, feeling any sense of failure will exacerbate any other negative situation that child faces as that child grows older. She/he may feel the blame always belongs to her/him. She/he can feel essentially failed and even more fearful of exposure to others. This was not something my students thought wise to bring to an interview or to life in general.
As our interview class discussed the possible consequences of punishment, a withdrawal of unconditional positive regard, our class realized that whatever we desire from an action, however powerfully we want that outcome, we could not control the consequences. The less we understood about why and how we acted, the less and less influence we had on consequences. Most of us recognized that we punished out of a meaning perspective we were taught. We learned it from our parental figures.
Most of my students can remember a time in her/his life when their parental figure loomed over them to perform some familial version of punishment. No one who remembered enjoyed remembering. They all felt really bad about that moment, and it had stayed with them all. Often, they asserted, they didn’t really know what caused them to get punished. All they knew, remembered knowing, was their parental figure, the person they most trusted, showed anger at them and dislike for them.
In that spirit of rejection and pain, they all decided that when they grew up, they would never do such a thing to the child or children that came into their life. Everyone meant it down to the ground and back up again. They meant it until, they confessed, they were the parental figure facing the child in a breach of conduct. All of a sudden, they became their mother, or father, or caregiver. They disliked the child. They punished the child, and the child felt as they had felt—rejected, disliked, and bereft of unconditional positive regard. All these children felt the loss of love. The students asked each other and me why they did what they did to that child. Why did they betray their own promise, their own memory of injustice and hurt? We discovered the answer. They found themselves in a situation with a child where they felt a powerful responsibility to act like an adult, a parental figure. Each felt the need to act, to do something. Each looked into themselves for the response to that need to act, and they found—mother, father, caregiver. Every parent feels the need to do something at such times. In lieu of anything else to do, they acted as they had learned to act. Each had said, "I will not do the thing done to me." The problem came in trying to "not do" something when we feel we must do something. So when the time came, they felt that had to act, and they took the only action they knew. They became the punishing parent, and it felt terrible.
That feeling could serve as a critical moment of cognitive dissonance. All of a sudden, we realize that we feel and believe one way and act another. Sometimes we recognize at such a moment, that we hold one belief, "I want to give my child unconditional love," and at the same time, feel and believe, "I must punish this child for what she/he did," and at the same time think, "I hate to do this. I feel terrible at the way my child reacts to this." Out of such conflict, we might even get angrier at the child making the spiral of dissonance go up on notch. When we recognize this cognitive dissonance as a signal for critical reflection, we can question the act in which we have engaged. That leads us to the meaning perspective behind that act, and we get to question that meaning perspective for the first time. Once we understand the nature of that perspective, we can form a conscious perspective of our own. We can make a new choice about how we feel, how we respond, and how we act. This empowers us to see any situation from a new perspective, and that perspective leads us to feel the power of our ability to choose how we respond to this or any situation.
When we make a choice about our action, we will also find ourselves operating in the way we saw and defined a self operating.
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
Once we critically reflect on that meaning perspective, we can invent a new choice to the situation and practice that as a mental event until it actually occurs. Instead of trying not to respond and act in some habitual way, we will have chosen to use a new a conscious way to respond and act. We may not get it completely right when the event actually happens, but we will then experience the freedom of our choice and action and will feel empowered to make a new choice and invent a new action depending on the result of our freely chosen action and our learning from it. Actions from meaning perspectives offer no choice and always repeat.
When we free ourselves from a meaning perspective, we learn from the first choice we make and act to make that choice better the next time. Actions from free choice can always be improved. Actions from meaning perspectives never change unless they get worse.
Acting out of a parental meaning perspective disallows any real sense of the consequence of our actions. As a meaning perspective, punishment breeds many consequences, unwanted like the so-called side effects of medicine and drugs. These consequences happen and do damage.