In Praise of Offensiveness

You might be surprised at the title of this blog…

I would hope that by the end you will understand why I so carefully chose it!

The worst thing my parents taught me?

Treat everyone the same and every situation equally.

This is rigidity and ignorance. It is not flexibility and Wisdom. 

I italicize the word Wisdom because I am really, really interested in Cultivating Wisdom. It is my primary tool for the management of reality. And I have created a model entitled Reality Centered Therapy. 

I invite you to take a look at your life and notice how your fantasies – the opposite of reality – create short term pleasure at the expense of long term adaptability, skill and fulfillment. 

Eating too much chocolate, drinking too much alcohol, making impulsive purchases and business decisions, leads to chaos and decay. Long term, big picture thinking helps us to manage reality effectively. If we can’t do this we lose!

As Adyashanti says: “Everyone fights reality and reality wins…but only every time.” 

My parents suggested that I be respectful, responsible, reliable, considerate…. To EVERYONE!

Really!!!???

Would you treat a hungry lion the same as you would treat an injured lion? Would you treat an injured feral cat the same as a hunting feral cat…a sleeping Labrador the same as a piranha? A rabbit the same as a hyena.

No.

So why do you treat people the same way?

Every situation in life, every person you meet requires different responses. To treat every person and situation differently is wisdom. My parents didn’t teach me wisdom. They taught me rigidity.

I’m not judging them. How would they know?

It took me 30 years to really understand what this is all about and I’m a psychologist!

People come in many forms and guises. They come softly and gently, with kindness and sensitivity and warmth and generosity.

Treat them with sensitivity and kindness.

They also come with anger, violence, malevolence, manipulation, exploiting and maneuvering, deceiving and brutality. To treat softness and malevolence, equally, is not wisdom.

Treat them with skillful toughness, callousness…be – what they might experience – as offensive.

This is interpersonal Power.

To treat everyone the same is unskillful.

More than that it will destroy you.

Your vitality and power and aliveness. It will deepen your anxiety.

By power, I don’t mean ‘over’ others, I mean having enough interpersonal power to manage those who want to ‘overpower’ you.

It is about having the appropriate energy to manage threatening and critical people, malignantly manipulative and unreasonable people, hostility, difficulties, adversity and problems.

I am deeply indebted to Dr John Demartini for teaching me to ask this question. Are you running your personality traits or are your personality traits running you?

One of my clients sent me one of those ‘inspiring quote’ pics the other day.

The intention behind it was lovely but it’s not remotely wisdom.

Here are some extracts.

            I know that to help heal others, I must first heal myself.

            I replace guilt with acceptance.

            I exchange fear for love.

            I know that in every situation, love and kindness is the answer.

This is way to ‘New Agey’ for me and neither Wise nor Skilfull. 

Putting it quite simply, love and kindness are not the answer in “every situation.”

I met an incredible Zen master named Soen Sa Niem many years ago.

There is a wonderful story in one of his books written by one of his students, where they describe how on one of his retreats there was an adolescent who was behaving really badly and disrupting the experience for everyone.

They tried all of the compassionate and kind and loving strategies they knew to help this kid to calm down and be more reasonable.

They failed.

Kindness and support were not the answer.

So they kicked him out.

It was tough and it was brutal and offensive, but it was the only way to get the required result, that was good for everyone else!

A few days after the kid was kicked out, everyone was having lunch and they saw him walking down the road toward the dining hall. They all froze, except Soen Sa Nim.

He got up quietly and in a very relaxed way, walked up the road toward the kid and without touching him, started yelling and screaming and doing karate kicks directly in the kids face. The kid panicked and fled. (From my work with SSN I know that he was just pretending to be angry, which I will talk about shortly.)

Soen Sa Nim came back, sat down and casually continued eating. Finally one of the students plucked up the courage to say to him, “Soen Sa Nim, surely a monk shouldn’t behave in such a manner?”

He smiled and said, “Sometimes demons only understand demons!”

The assumption that a monk – or anyone else for that matter – should always behave in a loving and kind and gentle way and that this is a good thing, is quite simply…crazy…unskillful…and ineffective.

This assumption is a disaster because it’s creating a false ideal.

Offensiveness, brutality and harshness can be very skillful, wise and self and ‘other’ protective.

In kicking out the anti-social adolescent, Soen Sa Nim was loving the other ‘retreatants!’

Offensiveness Without Aggression

What is really important here is that being offensive does not mean you have to be aggressive, in fact I am not recommending aggression at all, but I am not saying aggression is bad. 

Yes, excessive aggression can be a significant problem, but occasional aggression can be a wonderful release of energy.

Anger is not just a feeling.

Anger is also energy and unreleased anger is often a traumatic freeze response that creates anxiety and depression. It gets stuck in the body.

However, you can be offensive and brutal and very, very calm, without judgement, though doing so is not easy.

I decided at a very young age – that’s me at 4 years old in the pic – to be a nice guy. I spent decades thinking I needed to be nicer and realized that all I was doing was trying to be something I am not.

Of course I can be kind and gentle and empathic, but I also have a very strong tendency to be pedantic and pushy and driving. This isn’t a bad thing, but I was behaving as though it was.

Realizing this has enabled me to be more relaxed about being tough with people and because of this I can do it more skillfully, with less aggression.

To love your toughness, frees you up to protect yourself and get what you want, respectfully.

Of course there is a serious hidden danger in this last statement. You might think that if you don’t do it respectfully, that’s bad.

It isn’t.

We are human. We can’t expect to get it ‘right’ all the time.

The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo

There is a wonderful movie called The girl with the dragon tatoo. The hero comes up against this psychopath. He is visiting the home of the latter and he’s not there. The hero waits around until the psychopath comes home. He’s invited inside. When they are in the kitchen the psycho grabs a knife and leads the hero into his basement with the knife at his throat. He ties him to a chair and tortures him. He pauses during the torture and says this brilliant line. I have edited it: “You knew that I was a bad guy but you let me invite you inside. You people are all the same. You are more frightened of offending others than of being abused.””

This is utter genius. If you reject the trait of offensiveness you are inviting the ‘brutes’ of the world to overwhelm you.

To paraphrase Demartini again, “Traits such as offensiveness are still around on the planet because they are necessary for survival. If they weren’t, they would be extinct!

If you want to survive and fell energised and powerful and healthy, best you own these ‘positive’ traits and flourish.

I created the model Reality Centered Therapy. There are multiple levels to this model. One of them is: “Can you adapt your behaviour to meet the realities of life? This is Wisdom, Skill and Interpersonal Power. 

If you would like to meet face to face or via Skype to discuss any issues raised in this blog, drop me a mail at realmark@icon.co.za