The empty freedom in rebellion comes from that essential law of rebellion: "don't get caught." This phrase represents not a questioning and dismissal of the power of the family or societal meaning perspective but an acceptance and a dependant defiance of that meaning perspective. In that perspective, domination forms the structural force and purpose. When we say, simply, "No," to the exercise of that dominator perspective, we inherently acknowledge its power and certitude. Unless we can articulate a "Yes" to a new and highly conscious meaning perspective we may well never regain our freedom, our autonomy. Otherwise, we only disobey. The system may hate the disobedience and punish the disobedience, but it also accepts it as a part of the domination. Every dominator celebrates its outlaws because when they attack the system in small ways, the system shows its power by identifying them and crushing them at some point. This holds true only so long as the outlaw does not come to represent an alternative meaning perspective that promises an escape from the dominator. The dominator doesn't fear the typical rebellion which really only promises a trade of dominators. It fears a realization of some form of emancipation, of the ascension of the individual into conscious independence: freedom and choice.
Rebellion as practiced by children frustrated and repressed by the conformity of the dominator family depends on the dominator and its conformity in order to feel something to deny. Saying "No" becomes the rebel's motivating force, a constant proving over and over again that the rebellious individual rejects the one thing that the rebel actually needs and desires but can't get: the unconditional positive regard of the dominator, the parental figure. A child may well disobey and defy as a cry for that unconditional positive regard. They don't get that sort of regard, but they do get attention.
Students always had lots of examples of child rebellion. The stories came from their experience of their own acts and the acts of others. Each spoke about the pain and sense of rejection felt children, and eventual adults, felt, who wanted the unconditional positive regard of their parental figure but could not find a way to get anything but negative attention even though the attention came in increasing harsh and punitive forms.[33] For some children the majority of the attention, if not all of the attention, they received from their parental figure came in the form of the negative. In such cases, rebellion always worked because it increased negative attention.
The most touching and needy form of rebellion also feels like a most defiant form of behavior and needing of punishment. Many students remembered times when they heard a child say to a parental figure, or said themselves, at some moment of escalating tension, "Go ahead and hit me. You can't hurt me." We questioned how much hurt, how much rejection, how much sense of loss of unconditional positive regard would a child have felt to get to such a point. When children get to such a point, they also tell the parental figure that they feel there is no love between them, the rejection is complete, and they cannot feel anymore hurt because their constant sense of hurt, or pain, overwhelms any other affective possibility. The original parental dominator meaning perspective stays in place with an overlay of a belief in endless rejection from anyone else in their lives. Every figure that might offer some level of affection will elicit a feeling of rejection by such children even into their adulthood. These children can remain in a permanent state of rebellion and feel no freedom in their lives at all.