Many students reported incidents they recognized or knew from personal experience which illustrated the stunningly arbitrary nature of punishment. When students told these stories, they did so with vehemence and emotion. The vividness of their informal presentations felt informed by the present nature of the past experience. The past lived each day even if below any level of direct awareness. The following illustrates the kind of common experiences they reported.
A young child stands in the living room of her home. Stella quietly bounces a ball as if she has just learned how to do that with any ability at all. She feels a real pride of accomplishment in being able to handle the ball so well. She feels like an expert and would like some recognition for her efforts and her success. As with most of us, our own pride in accomplishment matters, but we would still like to hear someone else offer us recognition. We want to be seen—as a success worthy of praise.
The door opens, and in comes her parental figure. His day has gone well. Perhaps he has done something well and been recognized for his accomplishment. Whatever the causes, he feels very good, and he feels even better when he sees Stella in the living room waiting for him, or so it would appear. She bounces the ball to show off her skill, and out of his good feeling from the day, he feels real delight at what he sees: his loving child doing a very cute thing for him at his arrival. "Look at me bounce the ball, Daddy," she might say with hope and expectation. With all that good feeling slopping around, he can act very effusively about her presence and her newly acquired expertise in ball handling. He comes over and hugs her and tells her that she is wonderful, he loves her, and he feels very happy at her ability to handle a ball. They both feel wonderful as he continues on into the kitchen.
The next day comes, and Stella stands in the same spot bouncing the same ball for all the same reasons as the day before. This time, of course she has even higher expectations than she did the day before. After all, the day before, her daddy expressed his feelings, and she felt recognition and love for her presence in the living room and her newly minted ability. However, each day brings its own burden. Things did not go very well for the parental figure, the daddy. Something is stuck in his craw, and he drank a few beers on the way home to see if could get the thing swallowed, but it still stuck. The irritation of the thing in his craw speaks very loudly and demands energy and attention. Anger always makes such demands. He opens the door, and he sees Stella bouncing her ball. He says, "What the hell are you doing here? Don't you know you shouldn't play ball in the house? What's wrong with you? Now, get out of here," and leaves the child to figure out the difference from one day to another. Yesterday, she felt recognition and praise for herself and her efforts. Today, she feels rejection and anger toward herself and for her ball bouncing efforts. One day she feels loved, the next she feels punished, and she has no idea why either of them happened at all. She does, however, feel fear and a deep seated sense of insecurity about life and relationships. Unconditional positive regard seems to have nothing do with anything. And if positive regard is conditional, she has no idea how to fulfill the conditions in question.
My students and I arrived at the idea of punishment as a way of adults painfully teaching children for some higher purpose, but after examining the actual process and consequences of punishment, we wondered what, in the greater scheme of things, we were actually teaching when we punished. Nothing we saw in the whole or its parts made any sense in terms of some lofty, higher purpose. If punishment had no footprint in the some higher purpose, where could we find its footprint? We understood that teaching always happens, especially in traumatic situations, and certainly teaching through fear using punishment definably worked in a traumatic moment. What did these parental figures teach even if those figures couldn't tell us the answer if asked?
Of course, we saw that fear through punishment meant to teach obedience.[24] Obedience, we also saw, demands certain behaviors defined by the parental figure. These behaviors need no motivation from the child-self. That child simply needs to obey, to behave. However, we also observed that the behaviors demanded by the parental figure through obedience could appear to be contradictory. In fact, they were contradictory and confusing because they seemed unrelated to the actions that precipitated the punishment. If all of the methods and structures of obedience and behavior training work in such a blur of confusion, it must teach something so obvious that we can't see it because it is in such plain sight.
Obedience teaches to create and continue the very idea of obedience. It teaches to initiate and substantiate the dominator model we had seen earlier when everything and everyone had to fit within the hierarchy of domination—to stay in line. Obedience and good behavior signal the conquest of the becoming self by a dominator model which desires to devour that self and make it a conforming part of that domination. Obedience exists to conform the becoming self and all selves to the model of the self produced by the dominant community meaning perspective. At its fullest extension, the dominator model doesn't simply want the halfhearted or resentful obedience and behavior we see in children and adults. It wants a complete and unconditional submission to the dominator model and all its immediate representations through media and the popular culture.
The dominator model demands from its adherents, its participants, its conformists ,a complete surrender of the becoming self, an abandonment of any hope of individuation of that self, and to submit totally, unquestioningly to the domination under which and within which that lost self will exist. The dominator not only wants obedience, it wants the dominated, once fully dominated, to offer up their unconditional positive regard to the dominator and its manifestations.[25] In return, the dominated feels an escape from the freedom of the becoming self and feels, paradoxically, somehow more alive in the deadness of conformity. They feel more of a self by the surrender of the self. All of this exists for each of us but on a level we never question, on the level of the meaning perspective. Such perspectives provide form for reality, the kind of the form that child with all those toy pieces she/he wanted so desperately to create or find. However, this form is imposed on the child and all of us as much if not more than it is imposed on reality.