Engaging in transformative learning, a kind of learning that comes naturally when the opportunity arises, can lead us to the joyous answer to that question: "What would happen if you found out that every negative thought and feeling you ever had about yourself were unfounded, unfair, and untrue?" It can assist in getting us out of the dominator model and conformity. Transformative learning can assist us into individuation and a greater sense of community within and without.
Transformative learning engages us in the questioning of unquestioned meaning perspectives. Many situations can offer an impetus to enter into such a process. One seemingly unrelated activity can lead to another, and that can lead to the transformative. In our course about interviewing, we discovered an essential fear we generally held about the interview. In that in the interview, we serve as the subject of the interview, we found it reasonable to question the genesis and validity of that fear. If the interview is about us, and we fear the interview, of what are we afraid? What do we fear? What's wrong with us? Seeking an answer to that question brought us to seek a kind of self-awareness by defining the self and looking at how the self comes to be and continues into becoming. We discovered something of the nature of the becoming self and how that nature can find itself thwarted by the dominator model in our growing up, and in which we generally find ourselves afterward. We grow up inside an environment largely created by parental figures from whom we desire unconditional positive regard and from whom we often receive punishments that serve a supposedly higher purpose. This higher purpose denies us unconditional positive regard. Parental figures foisted that higher purpose on us, and they do not question or apprehend the meaning perspective from which this higher purpose arises: the maintenance of and our obedience to the dominator model itself. We find ourselves driven to conform to that model for our own good, a good defined by that meaning perspective and enacted through parental figures and others who do not question the motivating meaning perspective for their actions.
None of us in the interview class would have thought that such an occasion would bring us to this critical moment of questioning and reflection. It did. We had to choose to deal with the transformative possibilities of the moment, or use the moment to transfix ourselves all the more on the meaning perspectives that formed a good deal of how we lived our lives.
All of this can offer us an opportunity for anger and blame.
These two emotional responses, these choices may offer some immediate sense of gratification, but they also may interfere with our returning to the natural state of our becoming self. The paradox we find in anger and blame comes in that they thwart our movement toward liberation and autonomy. On one hand, they provide a sense of relief and even justification for our suffering. On the other hand, our anger and blame assign responsibility for our lives and who we are to others, largely to parental figures. When we assign responsibility to others for our lives in the past, we do so in the present as well. That attitude relates to the attitude and action of rebellion, a state wherein we say "No" to the dominator model we blame, but we establish no clear "Yes" by which we move forward. Without responsibility for our lives, without a "Yes," we find ourselves and feel ourselves powerless in our lives. We unwittingly surrender our own power when we assign responsibility for our choices and actions elsewhere. Real power and responsibility work inextricably together. Such powerlessness forms a substantial barrier to our becoming self, a barrier to the transformative, to liberation, and to autonomy—all part of our working definition of self.
We can engage with such a barrier through compassion for others and for ourselves rather than trying to destroy the barrier itself. Through compassion, we can come to an understanding of the reality of our parental figures and others, the reality that became the environment in which we came to be. In discovering and exploring their reality and our reality, we can avoid blaming and anger. We do not need to destroy the barrier. We do not need to engage in some metaphoric war against meaning perspectives and those who serve them and act out of them. Compassion becomes an integral part of the transformative. In that way, we lose nothing through metaphoric combat, and we can gain everything through compassion and acceptance no matter how sad and painful. It may not feel so at first. Thinking about it now, we may have created a meaning perspective about how blame and anger are our right and how such feelings help us. When we question that meaning perspective, we realize that we take no benefit at all in terms of our whole being, our becoming self, and the life we wish to choose to make for ourselves now.
The dominator model doesn’t operate in a way that encourages compassion. It may offer pity and even charity, but it does so on its own terms never in the terms of the person involved. The dominator model never concerns itself with individuals as an end in her/his self. It concerns itself only with the individual as a means to its own end, the end of maintaining itself through the highest levels of conformity possible. When we choose to ignore compassion and choose blame and anger instead, we align ourselves with the dominator model, the very position we wish to avoid and escape.